Born of Shadows- Complete Series

by J. R. Erickson

  Elda found Oliver in Lydie's dream room. He was draped across a fluffy mushroom-shaped pillow, a book open in his lap.

  "No Lydie?" Elda asked, scanning the room.

  "She went to raid the kitchen," Oliver told her. "She heard Bridget talking about making cupcakes earlier. It's a good sign, she's getting her appetite back."

  "Yes," Elda agreed. "She does seem to be improving."

  Oliver set the book aside, sensing that Elda wanted to talk.

  "What's up?"

  "Well Faustine and I were speaking with Julian and we wonder if you shouldn't go back to Abby and Sebastian's house, after all."

  Oliver stared at her, surprised. He had wanted to return to Abby's house, but feared that Elda and the other witches would be upset by the choice.

  "Why?"

  "Because we don't know how this curse works. I trust Abby, we all do, but she is a new witch and Sebastian is a new love. If something began to change, get weird, she might be too close to realize it was happening."

  "So, you want me to spy on them?" Oliver asked, not liking the idea at all.

  "Of course not," Elda replied, exasperated. "Oliver, I'm afraid for Abby. There is dormant power in Sebastian. Power that appeared in the cavern. It was..."

  "Insane," Oliver finished. "And you think it came from the Vepars?"

  Elda sighed and held up her palms.

  "I have no idea. None of us do, but it wasn't there before they got him underground. Julian agrees. It's possible that they did something down there. Why wasn't he tied up like the rest of you? Why weren't they siphoning from him? In some regard, why did any of you escape at all?"

  Oliver hated how much sense she made, but in truth, he'd had the same thoughts. Why would the Vepars have left them unprotected to escape? It had all been too easy.

  "Okay," he said, resigned. "But I don't want to hone in on their alone time. They just got engaged and bought their new house."

  "That's why you'll take Lydie."

  "What? How can you think that's a good idea?"

  "Because Lydie got kidnapped from here, she's still scared, and the truth is, she's pretending to be fine, but that's it, an act. She's miserable. I see it every time I look in her eyes. At Abby's house, she felt normal, safe."

  "But you want to send Lydie into a home where a Vepar may be rising?"

  Elda shook her head no, hard.

  "No, I want to send both of you and I want daily communication. I want reasons to drop by, any of us, at any time. I want eyes and ears on Sebastian and maybe on Abby too. There's something going on with her, and it scares me that she has access to this Kanti spirit. I'm afraid that both she and Sebastian are in the throes of something very powerful, and we need to be there to protect them if the need arises."

  Oliver stood up, mobilized by Elda's theories, and suddenly concerned for Abby.

  "I'll call her now and tell her Lydie is struggling to get adjusted. I'm sure that she'll welcome us back."

  "So am I."

  ****

  "Welcome," Sebastian called from the kitchen as Abby opened the front door and Victor and Kendra trudged through, kicking snow off their boots.

  "Wow, it's a winter wonderland up here," Kendra breathed. "I feel like we should have driven up in a sleigh."

  "We could have," Victor told her, winking at Abby and helping Kendra out of her heavy silver jacket.

  "Well I'm happy you made it," Abby declared, hugging them briefly and leading them toward the kitchen where Sebastian was preparing a giant breakfast of omelets, potatoes and cinnamon rolls.

  "Yum!" Kendra groaned. "It smells so good."

  "Two minutes," Sebastian told her, taking a quick break to hug them.

  Abby had already set the little table that occupied a light-filled alcove off the kitchen. It was surrounded by windows on three sides and looked out on the lake where snow continued to fall in heaps along the shoreline.

  "This is beautiful," Kendra said, staring out the windows. "Does it get lonely though? All alone out on this peninsula?"

  Kendra referred to the two hundred acres of woods that surrounded the huge house. Beyond their property, state forests stretched for miles. Their closest neighbor was located ten miles to the south. Kendra and Victor lived in a Chicago loft, surrounded twenty-four hours a day by hundreds of thousands of people; solitude was not their norm.

  "Not lonely, really," Abby responded, considering. "Not yet anyway. It doesn't get much more isolated than Ula."

  She wondered if Victor had told Kendra about her late-night scare, but the witch seemed merely curious.

  "Yeah, but you have all the other witches at Ula."

  "The good and the bad ones, apparently," Sebastian quipped, walking to the table with a huge tray of food. He slid the tray onto the table and returned for two French presses of coffee. Abby spooned food onto everyone's plates, feeling her own stomach growl with hunger.

  Victor winked at her, but didn't say anything. He had promised to keep her secret about the baby.

  "So, what are the guerrillas up to while you guys are gone?" Abby asked, referring to the other witches Victor and Kendra lived with in Chicago. They called themselves Guerrilla Witches due to their endless array of grassroots projects.

  "Ezra is working on a pretty elaborate self-defense school for women. She's calling it Fierce Femmes, and Dante and Marcus have been installing greenhouses all over the city. They talk about plants like they're their children."

  "Yeah," Kendra laughed. "Marcus refers to all of the sprouts as Herbie."

  ****

  "Hello, my love," Abby whispered to Sebastian, coming up behind him in the shed where he stood organizing his tools. He'd gone a bit haywire at the hardware store and bought three snow shovels, a snow blower, ten bags of salt, two generators and five survival suits–just in case.

  "Mmmm, nice surprise," he murmured when she kissed his neck. "But it's cold out here, you should be inside."

  He turned toward her and started to rub her arms vigorously through her heavy jacket.

  "I just got off the phone with Oliver," Abby told him. "He's coming back with Lydie."

  Sebastian cocked an eyebrow, genuinely surprised.

  "Really? Even after all the changes at Ula? That makes me feel bad for Helena."

  "It's not permanent," Abby continued, though she really didn't know. "Lydie is still pretty upset and Oliver said he's afraid they haven't given her enough time to recuperate."

  "She did seem happy here," Sebastian agreed. "Why Oliver, though? Shouldn't he be staying at Ula to help protect them?" He tried to hide his annoyance, but knew that Abby sensed it.

  "They've put a ton of new protection spells on Ula. Plus, it seems clear that the link between Dafne and Tobias is how the Vepars got in, so I'm sure they can spare Oliver."

  Sebastian shrugged, but didn't argue.

  Abby turned him to face her and pulled his head down to hers. His lips, hot, pushed hungrily against her. He felt her body start to respond to his touch. He slipped off his gloves and reached his hands inside her coat, pulling her hard into his body. He kissed her neck and collarbones, pulling at her layers.

  Outside they heard the crunching of snow underfoot. Sebastian pulled away, breathing heavily and feeling a bit like a wild animal.

  Abby giggled and kissed him again, lingering.

  "We'll finish that later," she whispered.

  He leaned his forehead against hers and sighed.

  "Will Lydie and Oliver come today? I could make a big dinner tonight."

  She laughed.

  "You know, I'm the pregnant one and you think about food about five times more than I do. But yes, they're coming this afternoon, and I'm sure Lydie will be thrilled at the idea of a big dinner. I think her favorite part of the whole house was your cooking."

  Sebastian grinned.

  "Don't tell Bridget that."

  "Our little secret."

  "I'll run into town to stock up," he said. "We're low on cream and I'm
thinking peanut butter curry for dinner."

  Abby made a face.

  "You'll love it, I swear."

  "Do you want me to join you?" she asked. "If not, I'll probably go with Victor. He's dropping off Kendra at the library in Trager and then checking out the Ebony Woods."

  Sebastian bit his tongue.

  He didn't want her to go, but he also didn't want to treat her like a weakling because she was pregnant. He would have preferred she stay home by the fire and read, but Abby was a witch and their life would never be one of tranquil domesticity.

  "No, go with Victor, it will be good for you."

  ****

  Abby and Victor left Kendra at the library and continued out of town to the woods. The forest looked different in the winter. Bare branches, piled with snow, hung heavy over the white, padded ground. Abby directed him to Sydney's house, still vacant. Abby stared at it for a moment with longing. She wondered if there would ever come a day when she could look at the house and not see Sydney. A thousand memories pricked at the backs of her eyes and she shook them away.

  Victor killed the engine and they walked to the woods by way of the beach. Both thick with coats, snow pants and winter boots, the walk was slow. Abby enjoyed the cold lake air filling her lungs and noticed how quickly her muscles grew warm and hard.

  She squatted a few times.

  "I feel like I could fly right now," she laughed, springing into the air.

  "Well we are surrounded by your element."

  Abby smiled; she hadn't made the connection.

  She looked at a snow-laden branch overhead and flicked her fingers. The branch broke, but did not fall and a heap of snow landed on Victor's head.

  "Hey," he laughed and shook his head back and forth like a dog. "Not fair play. The air in this cold feels impossible to manipulate."

  "Okay, no more, I promise," she said, holding up her hands.

  "How are you feeling?" he asked, pulling his scarf further up his chin.

  "Really good, actually. I was gravely injured four weeks ago, I'm pregnant, the Vepars have become skin-walkers that can turn into flying monsters, the last time I saw my mother she was in the full throes of a nervous breakdown, and yet I feel, strangely, at peace with everything."

  "Wow, just hearing all that made me anxious. Maybe it's part of the pregnancy? Happy hormones pumping through your witchy body?"

  She directed a fluff of snow to float into the air and fall lightly over them.

  "Possibly, though it's still so new. I'm barely five weeks along."

  "Doesn't change the chemistry experiment currently underway in there." He gestured at her belly.

  "Yeah, though I prefer to call her a divine experiment, thank you very much."

  "Her?" he asked, cocking his head to the side.

  Abby blushed and put a hand to her stomach.

  "Her. Believe it or not, I know it's a girl."

  "Believe it," he said.

  "What do you think Kanti wants?" Abby asked, changing the subject with reluctance. She preferred to stay in the happy imaginings of her unborn child, but she and Victor rarely had time alone. They each had a special connection to the Native American girl's spirit. Abby felt she could talk to Victor about Kanti in a way that she could not discuss her with the others.

  He stopped and kicked the snow, staring into the hard ground beneath. Not finding anything interesting, he moved on.

  "I think she wants to tell her story. I keep hoping that she wants to help us, you know? But the curse makes that seem pretty unlikely."

  Abby nodded.

  "I know what you're saying. I have this mixed sense of her, like I'm afraid of her and yet connected to her in some magnificent way. Even though the dreams are disturbing, I want to have them. When I'm in her experience, I'm living an entirely different life in a different time. It's terrible, what happened to her feels impossibly painful, and yet I savor the moments. Afterward I can feel the huge love that she shared with her tribe. I feel her connection to the earth, the water, the sky, the air in a way that I have never known as Abby."

  "And then she got stolen from it all," Victor said solemnly.

  "Yes, stolen, raped and I don't even know what else. She was angry, she is angry. I'm just not sure where she's directing it."

  "At everything, I think."

  ****

  Sebastian surpassed Trager City and drove the winding forest roads that led to the more secluded spaces beyond the town. During his childhood summers in Northern Michigan, he and his father had made a point of regularly getting lost in the woods. They hiked in with their camping gear and spent days tracking deer, eating fish they caught in the river and forgetting about life in the city. Sebastian's dad worked as a mortgage broker, but his passion was the forests. Sebastian's mother joked that he should have been a forest ranger. He took Sebastian and his sister Claire along for most of his journeys. They camped beneath the stars, only climbing into their tents if it rained.

  Sebastian turned down the ruddy dirt road that led him to the cabin where he had taken Abby less than five weeks before. It looked the same. Despite the remodel it had received in the years since he'd visited it with his father, he could still see it through his childhood mind. He remembered sitting on the porch, carefully assembling artificial flies with feathers they had found in the woods. His father was not much of a fly fisherman, or any kind of fisherman for that matter, but he loved it nevertheless. Anything that took him into nature, he delighted in. The weekends at the cabin were father-son trips only. Claire would stay home with their mother for girls' weekends.

  Sebastian walked to the cabin steps and shuddered at the memory of the night the Vepar took him. The thing, Tobias or Alva, had bitten him and its venom had rendered him mostly unconscious. However, he still recalled the sensation of being hauled through the door into the darkness of the night. In his drugged state, he knew that death had come for him and it would not be a peaceful transition out of the world. Though the real terror had come later when he awoke in the Vepar's lair. He thought of the bodies hanging from the walls, something within them getting siphoned through tubes, and clenched his jaw to keep from howling his rage.

  He sat down in an old rocking chair that squeaked and closed his eyes. He needed to return to a more peaceful place. His anger had led him for years and it had gotten him into trouble more than once. He took a deep breath and blew it out slowly. Opening his eyes, he scanned the snowy expanse before him. In the light of day, with drifts of snow sparkling, the cabin returned to the sanctuary that he remembered. He rubbed his hands together and blew a puff of warm air onto his fingers.

  Abby was pregnant. He wanted to jump for joy. He wanted to buy cigars for his friends and send out postcards with little storks on the front. He wanted to do all the foolish, conventional things that normal people did when they learned a baby was on the way.

  Most of all, he wanted to tell his mom. He wanted to see the looks on his parents' faces when he broke the news. He wanted to hear Claire's squeal of delight and watch her race to her bedroom to retrieve her favorite stuffed animal Lambert the Lion to give to the baby as a welcome gift.

  He coughed and tried to clear the sob that had started to form in his throat. He thought of them less and less. He obsessed over Claire's death less and less. Since Dafne had used his love for Claire and his desire for vengeance as an opening into his mind, he worked hard to block Claire from his thoughts. Not because he wanted to forget his baby sister. He loved her. He would never forget any of them. But he knew he lived in another world now, and the doorways that led to the deepest parts of him had to remain closed at all times. Only in solitude, and perhaps with Abby, could he safely venture there.

  He stood and left the porch, walking to the edge of the forest. Tall pines, heavy with snow, scented the crisp air. He walked to a tree and pressed his palm against the grooves of bark.

  He wondered how the Vepars had found them that night. When Sebastian came upon Abby near the stone cottages and
he witnessed the creature that attacked her, his conscious mind seemed to shut down and something primal took over. He had snatched a large rock from the dirt and fell upon the beast, intent on killing it and making the monster pay for all of the pain that had been visited upon him. Most of all he wanted to kill it for trying to take away Abby, the only person he had left in the world. When it flew away, he lifted Abby into his arms and raced back to her car, but he watched and he listened. He felt sure that the thing had fled, that it couldn't possibly have followed them. He was wrong.

  Sebastian snapped a branch off the tree and flung it into the woods. He searched the forest floor and found a larger branch and beat it against the ground. He needed to channel the anger, and more so the guilt, that flooded his brain. He wanted to grab the huge trunk of a tree and shake it until the roots tore free of the earth and he could fling it into the sky. He found a giant boulder and worked it free of the ground. He hefted it up and threw it. Rather than fumble heavily from his hands, it catapulted through the air like he'd merely thrown a pebble. It smashed into the earth with a spray of snow and dirt and rolled to a stop. He stared at it in wonder. He walked to it, lifted it again, threw it a second time. He hit another boulder, larger than the first, and it exploded.

  He felt the burn of lactic acid as his muscles stretched and flexed. He turned to a pine tree, and wrapped his arms around the base, and pulled. For a moment it stayed rooted, held tight to the earth and then gradually the earth began to split as the roots tore away. He groaned with the tree as it pulled free. Awkwardly, he threw it into the forest. Branches and bark ruptured over the forest floor. He grasped another one and then another until he stood in a clearing that he had created with his bare hands.

  He wanted to set fire to the trees. Instead of quelling his rage, the act of destruction had fueled it. He went to his car and found a lighter in the glove box. As he walked back toward the forest, he glanced at the cabin and stopped. For several minutes, he watched the cabin, blood pounding in his ears. He walked into the little cabin and gathered newspaper, logs and kindling. Carefully, he arranged every flammable item that he found throughout the cabin, and one by one he lit them on fire. It took time. He returned to the edge of the woods. He watched and waited. After an hour, he noticed the first snatches of fire catching the little white curtains. When the fire climbed to the roof, he got in his car and drove away.