Born of Shadows- Complete Series

by J. R. Erickson

  "Time to come clean," he sighed. He propped his legs on the coffee table in front of him and considered where to begin. "I dreamed of you before the Ball, Abby. I didn't know where you would come from, but I knew to look for Melusine and then there you were..."

  "You dreamed of me," Abby crinkled her forehead and tried to make sense of Victor's explanation.

  "But long before I dreamed of you, I dreamed of her." He pulled a neat leather notebook from his satchel and flipped it open to the first page and then the second and the third.

  Abby studied the same face again and again. At first, the rudimentary drawing revealed only the shadow of a woman. Her dark hair hid the contours of her face. Then Victor's pictures grew more elaborate. Wide brown eyes bore from the face of a young Native American woman, barely older than a child really, with sensuous lips and smooth honey skin. She looked angry and afraid.

  Abby recognized the woman from Sorciére. She saw that Victor had even captured her in the same costume she'd worn that night. Deerskin robes and thick rabbits-fur boots. Her hair hung in a single heavy braid over one shoulder and she clutched a child to her breast.

  "She guided me to you. I never questioned her, Abby."

  "But who is she?" Abby asked, not liking the way the drawing's eyes seemed to hold her own in their steely gaze.

  "Okay, wait," Oliver interrupted. "Your dreams don't explain this picture. Why are you sitting on Sydney's dock?

  "Stephen Kramer invited me there. I met him at a paranormal seminar in Chicago when I was twelve years old. Crazy, right? You know, I think one of my favorite parts of being a witch is synchronicity." He started to hop up, excited, and then winced in pain at his leg, still healing from the Vepar's lair. "It seriously blows my mind. I didn't even know of Abby until I dreamed of her and then after we met and she told me about Trager, I realized that I had met her Aunt Sydney."

  "Why did you lie about it?" Oliver challenged.

  "I didn't lie," Victor said slowly. "I refrained from talking about it because I was shocked myself and I wanted to understand what it all meant."

  "Why didn't you say more at Sorciére, though? I mean, you sought me out, Victor, and even after I agreed to meet you, you didn't say that you had dreamed of me."

  Abby could not stop staring at the picture of the Native American girl.

  "I'm sorry for that, sincerely. I can't give you a satisfying explanation," he paused. "If it helps, I haven't even told Kendra that I knew your aunt or that we went into the lair that night..."

  "I don't get it," Oliver chimed in. "You're recruiting Abby like you want her in your coven."

  "We're not a coven," Victor interrupted.

  "Okay, your housemate," Oliver said exasperated. "Still, why would you pursue her and not be completely honest about why you're interested in her to begin with?"

  Victor pointed to the drawing of the woman.

  "Because Kanti didn't want me to."

  Chapter 25

  "Rod. It's really good to see you, man," Sebastian told him when they finally had a few minutes alone.

  Their day had been a flurry of preparations to leave France and return to the United States. Now, as they sat waiting to board their flight, Sebastian gave Rod a hug and gestured to an empty seat.

  "You too, Sebastian. Really and truly, I'm so happy to have a friend around." Rod grinned and rolled his eyes toward Julian and Adora who stood talking quietly. "After they brought me to France, I started to think I might go flippin' crazy."

  "Yeah, I know the feeling. I've spent the last two weeks not having a clue what my own name was. You wanna talk crazy..."

  Rod patted him on the back and smiled, settling back into the stiff airport chair.

  "Sometimes I wish I could be so lucky," he murmured.

  "What happened?" Sebastian asked gently. "I mean, after you guys got back from the Cayman's? If it's sensitive, you don't have to talk about it."

  "Damn," Rod started, and then he pulled a pint of Jack Daniels from his carry-on bag and poured a hefty serving into his styrofoam cup of coffee. "Duty-free." He grinned. "Want some?"

  Sebastian held out his own cup and let Rod pour him a shot, more out of solidarity than any real desire to get drunk.

  "I need to talk about it, except that every time I say her name I feel like someone's squeezing me really hard. I'm beginning to wonder if my body is trying to let go, but my mind really wants to hang on."

  "As if there are hands on your throat and around your heart and reaching up inside of you and pulling out everything that ever mattered..." Sebastian trailed off. He knew that pain. He knew it almost as well as he'd known the love when his family was still alive.

  "Exactly," Rod sighed. "It's kind of blurry now and I guess that's because I didn't want to face it. For the first couple of weeks, I just got drunk a lot..."

  Through the wall of glass before them, an airplane taxied down the runway and took off into the cloudless sky.

  "We went back to Trager because Sydney had this horrible dream that Abby was dead. It was so vivid that she couldn't shake it and then she got online and looked at the Trager news and realized that a woman had been found murdered."

  "Devin."

  "Yeah, Devin, but her name hadn't been released and Sydney just panicked. She packed all of her bags and bailed. We couldn't get on the same flight because it was so last minute. She got back in the evening and I didn't get into town until the next morning. Of course, by the time I got there..."

  "She was already dead."

  Rod closed his eyes and shook his head in disbelief.

  "I still don't understand, Sebastian. Sydney knew things about witches. Maybe she even knew about Abby, but I never really questioned all of that. Part of me honestly felt like it was just a fantasy that her and these other people played at. Sometimes I wonder if this all happened because I didn't believe—like God cursed me for doubting."

  Sebastian hated how well he understood Rod's pain. He experienced similar thoughts after Claire's death and still wondered if he might have stopped it.

  "You couldn't have saved her, Rod, and no amount of belief could change that. How did she know though? I mean, who told her about witches?"

  Rod shrugged his shoulders and he looked exasperated. "Fuck if I know. She lived and breathed all of that when I first met her. I think she dove into the lore to escape her marriage with Harold. She tried to bring me in a few times, but I didn't really connect with it all. She claimed that these magical people existed, but I never saw any real proof. It was just her getting together with these other believers and stringing up all this evidence to make it true."

  "She was in a group?"

  "Yeah, I think they even referred to themselves as a secret society. I met most of them. They sat around and drank wine and wrote in journals by candlelight. I found it pretty sexy and mysterious, but that was about it. When I got home and went to the lake house, it was just a nightmare. Her pictures were smashed, half the yard was burned black and she...well, Adora got to her first and covered the body, but I know she went painfully. I just know it."

  Rod cried openly. He pulled a wad of toilet paper from his pocket and blew his nose.

  Sebastian smiled in spite of himself. As a child, he'd always imagined Sydney with a man like Rod—a tan, chiseled, marshmallow that would love her, no matter what. He never understood her marriage to Harold who seemed more interested in his tie collection than his beautiful eccentric wife.

  "She was lucky to have you, Rod. She loved you a lot."

  Rod smiled and shook his head. "Yeah, she was a real piece of work. I couldn't have loved her more though. I'm lucky that Adora beat me there. She practically threw me in her trunk and hauled me off to some safe house where they kept me pretty well drugged and boozed up for Lord knows how long. And then I met that old windbag, Julian." He laughed as he spoke and Sebastian appreciated his ability to bounce back.

  "So you've been in hiding ever since?"

  "Yeah, for a lot of reasons
from what Adora has said. For one, the Trager police more or less pinned Sydney's murder on me, which had me about ready to go into the precinct with a shotgun and give them a piece of my mind, but then she started to fill me in on the history of Trager and those evil fucks that killed my wife. Vepars she calls them. Since then I've taken my medicine like a good boy."

  Sebastian detected a note of resentment.

  "They're right. I know it's miserable feeling helpless—I get it, I really do—but the Vepars are...sick. Sick in the head, sick in the heart. I've been researching them for the past couple of months. I never used to believe in the devil, but I do now."

  ****

  Sebastian stared at the skyline of New York City.

  They had arrived that morning and checked into a tall faceless hotel that mirrored every other building in the city. They shared two connecting rooms, each equipped with overly firm double beds and paintings of the Statue of Liberty.

  "Rod, it's for your own protection. If the authorities recognize you, you'll be arrested."

  "I should be able to show my face in my own damn town. That's my home. My wife grew up there, for Christ sakes."

  Adora looked to Sebastian for help as she tried to make Rod stand still.

  "It's not permanent, man, it's just to make things easier for right now. Cool?"

  Rod looked irritated that Sebastian had sided with Adora.

  "Fine," he said.

  Adora had already died his blond hair black and now she intended to change the color of his eyes and modify the structure of his face, softening his chin and making his nose larger.

  Sebastian was struck by the bizarre scene before him. Rod stood with his eyes clenched closed, his chin shrinking back into his face as Adora, resplendent in a long magenta robe, crunched handfuls of herbs into a plastic cup inches from Rod's nose. Julian sat on the bed, his back pressed against the headboard and his legs neatly crossed as he flipped through an outdated issue of Mother Earth News.

  "I suddenly feel so unprepared," Sebastian said to no one in particular. "I feel like I'm ten all over again getting ready to jump off my roof with a rain jacket because I couldn't find my mom's umbrella."

  Julian chuckled and flipped the page.

  "There's no such thing as prepared," he said calmly.

  Little more than forty-eight hours since Adora and Rod had plucked him off the streets of France, Sebastian could hardly believe that his life was being returned to him. He felt giddy and alarmed and disoriented. Though his memory had returned intact, he couldn't shake the impression that his whole world had been flipped upside down.

  He paced into the room and studied himself in the mirror, a habit he'd developed after recovering his memory. He studied his blue eyes and tan face. He touched the black curls that were so long he had to tuck them behind his ears to keep them out of his eyes. He wore a rather ugly Hawaiian shirt of Rod's on top of a long-sleeved white t-shirt and a pair of tapered jeans. Claire would have called them 'pancake butt jeans'. He looked foolish, but that didn't bother him. What concerned him was how he kept seeing something wicked in his face. No, that wasn't quite it either. He kept seeing Tobias in the mirrored face staring back at him.

  Chapter 26

  "I dreamed of Miranda last night," Elda told Faustine, her eyes tired and aching from her tormented sleep. "I fear that..."

  Faustine held up a hand to silence her and nodded his head toward the door. Beyond, Elda could see the shadows of two small feet—Lydie.

  She whispered a muting incantation to block Lydie from hearing them.

  When he knew that Lydie would not hear him, he spoke. "I too have dreamed of Miranda, and the others as well. I wanted to believe that something else was giving life to these phantoms in slumber."

  It's been more than a century," Elda responded.

  "Yes, and did we not wonder a hundred years ago if that horror would cycle through again? We all sensed it, didn't we?"

  She nodded gravely and laid her hands on the table in front of them. Etched with symbols and words, the table was meant for spell casting, but even here in the coven's center, Elda felt the disrupted flow of energies.

  "It has already begun," she sighed.

  Elda closed her eyes tightly and when she exhaled, her shoulders slumped further. Faustine noticed, perhaps for the first time, how gaunt she had grown.

  We are aging, he thought, not with sadness or fear, but a small reluctance. He understood that the passage of time allowed the coven to slip into complacency. They still functioned, but only on the defense. They hadn't actively brought their energy into the world beyond the island in years. He had felt both Oliver and Lydie's frustration with the seemingly dulled world of Ula.

  The coven had once thrived. They moved in and out of the world like phantoms, or perhaps the term 'angels' was more appropriate. Helena and Elda were rarely found in the castle walls, too busy at the hospitals sneaking healing elixirs to the ill and remedying the faltering humanity of those who had lost hope. In those days, Faustine's long hours in the tower did not involve spying on his coven, but communicating danger, need and news to the witches who sometimes scattered across the whole of Gaia to do their bidding.

  The ruin of their coven happened in nineteen hundred and eight and they never referred to it as such. They called it many things in the midst of their fall—primarily the dark times, but later they abandoned words and, with it, they slowly abandoned the memories. They agreed that they must do more than release the energy of that time. They must eradicate the memory as if it had not happened at all. Faustine presented it as a powerful tool to rewrite the past and thus change the future, but even he, an ancient and powerful witch, underestimated the influence of that violence in all their lives and, perhaps more, in their hearts. He foolishly believed himself immune to the lasting effects of the tragedy that befell his coven. He thought that his witches could simply will it away. Instead, they buried it, and it rose from the dead, reminding them that those who forget their history are doomed to repeat it.

  He communicated his pain to Elda with a gentle touch on her wrist and he felt her great sadness.

  "We have already lost so much," she told him desperately, shaking her head from side to side. "Now we must face this evil again?"

  "We never faced it," he told her. "We tucked away and hid. We cast Julian out and he may have been the only one of us running towards the face of this thing."

  "Do you think that Julian lives?" Elda asked. The shadows at the door had disappeared.

  Faustine sighed and scratched his head.

  "I once believed that I would always know if one of my witches lived or died, that the threads between us would never fray, but now...now I cannot feel my own coven. You sit here next to me and I can barely feel you."

  Elda put her hand in Faustine's.

  "Should we go to the cave then?"

  "I think that we must."

  ****

  Sebastian closed the bathroom door and quickly shuffled through Rod's coat pockets. He found a money clip with nearly six hundred dollars in cash. Equipped with the fake passport and identification procured by Julian in France and Rod's money, Sebastian told Adora that he wanted to check out the pool and he left the hotel room.

  In the hallway, he began to run. He had known that the moment he landed in the States, he would try to break away from the group and find Abby. Every time he thought of her, a terrifying sense of doom washed over him. The frustration at not having a phone number to reach her, or a damned e-mail address even, so disturbed him that he wanted to punch every single person he passed on his race to the airport. He boarded the first flight to Trager City, which cost him nearly all of the cash he'd stolen from Rod. He didn't care. He would rob someone to get to Abby if it came to that.

  During his flight to Trager City, Sebastian furiously scribbled everything that Julian had told him about Dafne and the curse. He wanted to remember every detail and, after weeks of not even recalling his own name, he held a secret fear of s
omehow losing it all again.

  ****

  "There's something out here," Lydie squeaked, and Helena tightened her hold on the little girl's hand.

  When had she ever really thought of Lydie as a little girl? Not in a long time, but in that moment it rang true, as true as her tiny voice lost in the night wind and her fingers clenching Helena's so that her own grew sore.

  "It's okay, Lydie," Helena assured her, battling her own unease as the wind whistled in the trees. Helena suggested the night stroll because the castle felt too cold and empty with the other witches far off in their astral travel or just gone altogether. She had planned to walk Lydie to the enchanted garden where they would inhale the flower scents and spell cast under the nearly full moon. But, distracted, she had instead steered her towards the far northern tip of the island where few of the Ula witches ever wandered. The barren woods in that area knew a dark history and Helena halted when they came upon them.

  The full moon no longer cast them in its warm glow, but slid behind a gray cloud. The sky, clear when they departed the castle, now gave way to something marred with thick streams of cloud and an electric feel like rain.

  "Can we go back?" Lydie whimpered, her eyes darting into the trees.

  Helena inhaled and exhaled very slowly. She ground her feet into the earth and called silently to her power source, feeling it ignite briefly and then fizzle as if she did not stand in the open air, surrounded by her element.

  "Lydie, draw strength from your element," Helena told her, immediately regretting her strained tone.

  Lydie's fingers tightened in her hand.

  Lydie closed her eyes and Helena felt her reaching out. She knew that Lydie's fear worked against her, but so did the lack of sunlight. Neither Helena nor Lydie had the hunter's instincts. They were healers by nature and, without the other witches, a crippling vulnerability began to descend.