Crescent Marked: StarHaven Sanctuary Book One

by Tera Lyn Cortez

  I laughed. “Yes, Mom. I will lock the doors just in case the woodland animals have grown thumbs, somehow figured out how to work the doorknob and try planning an invasion. I saw a pair of chipmunks out back that looked positively threatening.”

  She swatted me on the butt as she walked by. “Smart ass. You never know who might try to creep up here and get nosy once the word of Aimee's death becomes common knowledge around town. Gossip travels like wildfire around here. People have always had an odd fascination with this place.”

  That made sense. And seeing as how I hadn't even considered that angle, I agreed wholeheartedly to keep the doors locked at all times.

  “Let's see if we can find Aimee's keys to the truck, just in case there is an emergency.”

  I walked toward the front door, memory prodding me. She had always hung her keys on the little hook by the entryway closet. Sure enough, they were right where I had expected them to be, as if she might walk through that front door at any minute to grab them.

  I picked them up, holding them in my hand for a second, before turning to show my mother. “Here they are, right where she always left them.”

  “Okay then. I feel better knowing you have a vehicle if you need it. I am going to head out and I'll see you tomorrow morning. Please, please, please, for the love of all that is holy, do not decide to go out walking in the woods while you are here all by yourself. Promise me that or I will never be able to sleep for the worry that will never leave my mind.”

  “Don't worry. I have no desire to go out walking in the woods while I'm here alone. Remember, Aunt Aimee drilled the dangers into my head from the very first visit I made up here. I could fall, hit my head, break a leg, get lost, or be eaten by a wolf or bear or whatever else is out there. I'll stay in the house or on the porch if I need some fresh air.”

  Still she hesitated, one hand on the doorknob.

  “I promise, Mom. Go, so you can get back.”

  Straightening her posture as if gathering her strength, she opened the door. “I'm going. See you tomorrow, Leah. I love you.”

  “I love you too, Mom.”

  I stood in the open doorway until she drove down the gravel drive, her taillights vanishing in the trees. Taking a deep breath, I inhaled the scents of the forest around me. The silence echoed in my ears. It felt strange acknowledging that I was the only human around for miles now. Only the animals that lived here would be my company, and I might never see most of them.

  Closing the door behind me, and throwing the deadbolt as promised, I began wandering my way back through the house, letting the memories take over. I stopped in the doorway of the library off the entry hall, smiling when I saw “my” shelf still intact, even after all these years. My aunt had always encouraged a love of books, and would let me read just about anything I could find that I showed an interest in.

  Each time I came a new book or books would be setting on my shelf, the topics running the gamut from true crime, to space exploration, to fairy tales. I walked over to them and ran my fingers along the spines. The memories brought a strange mixture of comfort and grief.

  Moving on I briefly touched on every room in the house allowing the recollections of my time here to wash over me. After my impromptu tour, I settled back in the library with a fresh cup of coffee. Seated at my aunt's desk, I closed my eyes, hoping for some sort of answers to come to me. When nothing did, I began opening her drawers to look for clues, feeling slightly guilty for intruding upon her privacy, even though she was no longer with us.

  In the top drawer lay a leather-bound journal. Hesitating at the intrusion, I opened it to find only a single entry, penned two days before.

  “I know now that I am no longer strong enough to contain her. I am going to have to ask for help, even though doing so will cause great pain and may ruin our relationship forever. I have no other choice. An evil of that magnitude can never be allowed to break free. No matter the cost, I will prevent the chaos from being unleashed upon the rest of the world.”

  I stared at the words in shock. What evil? And who did she plan to ask for help? I flipped through the rest of the book just to make sure I hadn't missed something, then came back to the handwritten message. She had known she was in danger. Why hadn't she called us?

  More tears slipped down my cheeks. I don't know how I would have been able to help, but I would have done anything in my power to be here with her, to assist her.

  Looking for more clues, I searched the rest of the drawers. Nobody began keeping a journal and only wrote a single entry. There had to be more of them somewhere. When the library turned up nothing, I began moving through the rest of the house, on the hunt for more of the tomes. Instinct told me they would be the key to beginning to understand what secrets the sanctuary hid.

  By late afternoon every room had been inspected, and I still didn't have any other journals to read. I stood in the kitchen with a snack, trying to decide whether to go upstairs to the attic or downstairs to the basement. Something indiscernible tugged me toward the attic, and I listened.

  The doorway to the uppermost section of the house sat at the end of the second-floor hallway. Locked. Returning for my aunt's keys, I worked my way through them until I found one that turned the tumbler. Pushing open the door was like stepping into another building entirely. Polished floors and sheet-rocked walls changed to weathered stair treads flanked by bare plywood.

  The light switch to the right of the doorway illuminated a single hanging bulb, barely chasing away enough of the gloom for me to see where I needed to step. The staircase itself was longer than most, and steeper too. I counted nineteen stairs instead of the usual thirteen. Odd.

  Reaching the top, I had to go through another door. While I saw no keyhole, it didn't seem to want to open. Gripping the handle tightly, I pushed against it with my shoulder. When it didn't give, I rested for a moment, trying to come up with a plan. My hand remained on the knob which began to warm and give off a dim glow. Staring at it in shock, I yanked my hand away. The light disappeared, and the door swung open of its own accord, giving me my first look of the attic in the manor of StarHaven Sanctuary.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The single fixture didn't give off much light, but I could see. It took a moment for me to orient myself in the large space. The expansive room covered what looked to be the entire footprint of the house, filled with trunks and crates, old wardrobes and boxes of all shapes and sizes. Aside from being clean, it looked as if it sat undisturbed for years. Where did I start? How would I know where to look for journals, or anything else that might help me gain the knowledge I desired?

  To take it all in, I turned in a slow circle, looking for the additions that appeared to be the most recent. The silence in the attic unnerved me a little, causing me to shiver in spite of it not being at all chilly. The pile nearest the door seemed like the most reasonable place to start, so I pulled the flaps of a box open and peeked inside. Old clothes. I lifted out a few items, mostly sweaters and scarves, obviously moved out of the way to make room for summer items. Returning them, I moved on to the next.

  I'd been at it for an hour before I ran across boxes that began to look promising. They were full of dozens of handwritten journals. Some of them were plain spiral bound notebooks like you would find in the school supplies section. Others...

  Excited, I lifted the one off the top of the pile, running my hands over the pebbled leather and tracing the outline of the moon embossed onto the center of the front cover. The darkly branded image called to me. Shifting to cross my legs and relieve some of the pressure on my knees, I settled the book in my lap and pulled the smooth ribbon keeping the covers closed.

  Unfamiliar handwriting covered the pages. For a moment my eyes ran over the clusters of symbols, their meaning escaping me. As I focused on the pages, the marks slowly began to make sense. Whatever language this book was written in made sense to my brain, even if I didn't realize it at first.

  I read the stories that had been penned upon
the pages with growing interest. Who had written them? Many of them seemed to be centered here at the sanctuary, and included the ruins, the stream and a mountain cave. The peninsula that the sanctuary sat on covered many acres of land, and the only mountain I knew of sat in the North-East corner. Near its peak cascaded the waterfall that served as the origin of the stream that ran the width of the peninsula, emptying into the sea at the other side.

  Interspersed among the stories were recipes, poetry, and what looked to be... spells? I set the first volume aside and began pulling out others. At the very bottom of the box lay an old, leather-bound volume. Its cover had no title or author, just an intricately ornate moon branded into the center. My fingers traced this one as well, noting the similarities and differences between the two symbols. It seemed most of the volumes had a moon somewhere.

  Careful not to break the almost three-inch spine, I inspected the first page. Reign Family Grimoire, it read. Reign was our last name. I had my mother's maiden name, as she and my father never married. His name didn't even appear on my birth certificate. Sometimes I wondered if she had even known it, or whether they came together in a single instance, never to make contact again.

  Every letter, or symbol, between the covers had been penned by hand. As I turned the pages, it became obvious that more than one person had contributed to the information on the old paper. The ink changed color, some pages faded but not difficult to read, as if preserved somehow. The size of penmanship varied, as did the slant of the letters.

  No matter the writing, whether symbol or alphabet, my eyes easily relayed the information to my brain, allowing me to comprehend the message. Coming to a section titled “Beginner Spells” I paused, tempted to try them out for myself. What could it hurt? Likely nothing would come of it, and I would be laughing at myself for believing in such nonsense momentarily.

  Settling on instructions to create “light to see by,” I read the words through top to bottom before attempting to repeat them. Extending my left hand, palm up, as the instructions said to, I recited the words from the page, pronouncing them as best I could. Nothing. I read over them once more and tried again. Still nothing.

  My hand dropped, slapping my palm onto my thigh, frustrated and a little disappointed in myself. I hadn't exactly expected anything to happen, but still. Once more I read the page through, in my mind, mouthing the words as I went along.

  Something clicked, and as I read I was able to hear the words in my head, just like I would if someone sat beside me teaching me the correct pronunciation. Ready to give it one last try, I extended my hand once more and recited the words. In the palm of my hand a tiny orb appeared, throwing off a soft white light that illuminated most of the attic space around me. I yanked my hand back, yelping as if I had touched something hot. The glowing ball continued to float there in midair, undaunted by my freak out.

  “Well, I'll be damned.”

  The brighter light illuminated much of the attic that hadn't been reached by the fixture hanging from the ceiling. As I scanned the room, I saw a reflection in a far corner. Perched on an eve in the attic sat a pair of chipmunks. They didn't move as we stared at each other. After a moment one of the two let out a string of chatter and they both turned and disappeared into one of the few shadows that remained in spite of the added light.

  The small orb in front of me once again became the focus of my attention. My hand trembled as I reached out with my pointer finger, attempting to touch the light, in spite of knowing there would be nothing physical there. Returning my gaze to the page, I spoke the single word out loud to extinguish the light, giggling as it winked out of existence. The spell worked, and I could do magic.

  I reignited my personal light source with a grin. My cheeks hurt from the width of the smile on my face. After flipping through the pages just to see what they contained, I started from the beginning and began attempting some of the other spells. Some I easily mastered, others never came to fruition. Thankful for my excellent recall ability, I committed as many of them to memory as possible, deciding it would be good to have them available, should I ever want to use them. I couldn't carry all these books with me everywhere I went.

  Oh, how I wished I'd been raised here. My aunt undoubtedly could have taught me much of this from the very beginning. By this point in my life, I could have mastered many of these skills instead of being in magical preschool with only myself as the teacher. Myself and a number of very thick textbooks.

  Hours passed as I began my self-taught journey into the world of magic. After attempting a difficult spell, fatigue crept into my brain. Before I could acknowledge that it might be time to take a break, my body decided for me and everything went black.

  My eyes protested as I opened them, and a tender spot throbbed at my temple where my skull made contact with the floor. The lack of windows gave me no way of knowing how many hours had passed until I heard my mom calling my name from below.

  “Leah? Leah! Where are you?”

  I clambered up from my spot on the floor, sending the room back into darkness as I headed for the stairs. My legs, numb and weak from being on the hard floor for so long, buckled under me, sending me sprawling across the wooden planks. A two-inch sliver embedded itself into my right forearm, just below the elbow.

  “Damn it.” That was going to take some finesse to get out without ripping a chunk of skin out with it.

  Getting back to my feet, albeit more carefully this time, I picked up the grimoire from where it had gone flying and called out as I headed down the stairs. “Up here, Mom. Be right down.”

  Hobbling on my aching legs, holding the book in my left arm to avoid bleeding on it, I traversed the stairs with my right hand skimming the wall for support and met my mother in the upstairs hallway. We came face to face as I closed the attic door behind me.

  “What on Earth?” Between her puckered brows and slack jaw, I gathered I must have been quite the sight.

  “Long story. Before we get into it, can you help me remove this splinter?” I held my arm up for her inspection.

  “You mean that twig in your arm? I certainly can, but it's not going to be a pleasant experience. I'm going to have to cut it out.”

  My shoulders sagged. “I was afraid you were going to say that.” Pain and I had never been the best of friends.

  She led me to the downstairs bathroom, rooting in the cupboards and drawers for first aid supplies. Hissing as the sting of peroxide washed over the injury, I tried to take my mind off it by telling her what I had found. By the time she had finished playing nurse to my injuries, I'd riled her up with all of my talk about magic and spells.

  “You are being ridiculous, Leah. There is no such thing as magic. You sound just like Aimee when she was younger. Always going on about spells and magic. No amount of sensible talk could convince her it didn't exist. Strange things might happen in this world, things we don't understand right away, but that doesn't mean there isn't a reasonable explanation for them.”

  Sighing, I thrust the book in her direction. “Okay, so what is all this written here on these pages?”

  She studied them for a moment. “I have no idea what language that is, so I couldn't even begin to guess.”

  “I can read them, Mom. They're spells. Some of them, at least. Some of them are stories, meant to teach lessons, I think.”

  Lips pursed, she eyed me with her eyebrows raised. “Seriously? Aren't you a little too old to be playing these games? How hard did you hit your head when you fell?” She focused on the scrape at my temple, reaching out with a new cotton ball soaked in more peroxide.

  My say-so would not be enough to convince her. She needed to see it with her own eyes.

  Flipping to the first spell that had worked for me, I asked her to shut off the light. She sighed, but did as requested. Left hand held out with my palm facing up, I double checked the spell before reading it once more.

  The little orb popped back into existence with no hesitation. My mother stared at it for a full minu
te, before reaching out and attempting to touch it, just as I had. She tried to pop it, as if she were popping a bubble, and let out a little hum when nothing happened. She tapped her finger against her lips, but said nothing.

  I spoke the word to turn it off. “Well? Do you believe me now?”

  “Aimee always was a little strange, and claimed to be able to do weird things, but she never once showed me any proof. This... This is something else.”

  She pursed her lips, seeming to be looking for the best way to articulate her feelings. Instead of filling the silence, I just let her think. While she appeared to be surprised, it didn't seem like the situation struck her as out of the realm of possibilities. That in itself made me wonder if she knew more than she let on so far.

  “I think,” she began slowly, as if testing the words, “that we need to get you away from the sanctuary and go home.”

  “What? No! That's not what we need to do at all, and I think you know it. Aunt Aimee was a witch of some sort, and I think we know now that I am too, or I could be at least. I need to learn more, not run away. Something isn't right about the way she died. We both know she didn't just walk all the way out to that temple for a morning stroll and drop dead of a heart attack.” I paused with a deep breath in. “I just don't understand why she never taught me any of this.”

  Mom met my question with silence, staring off into space. The muscle in her jaw clenched and relaxed as I watched, waiting for a response. When she finally began to speak I thought she might give me some answers.

  But all she said was, “I don't know.”

  Disappointment spread through me, but I decided to let it drop for now. We spent the rest of the day going through some of Aunt Aimee's things. Mom told stories about photos we came across from when the two of them were younger. Darkness fell, and Mom went to bed early, claiming fatigue.