Arch of Shadows

by C. L. Bush

  Clara banged on the windows harder and ran to the doors.

  “Clara, move away,” her grandmother warned. “She can’t hear you, and you might attract the attention of something far deadlier than nostalgia.”

  “Shut up. She’s just there. I can see her!” Clara went to the doors and the windows, and back. “Why won’t the windows break?”

  “It’s a protection spell; that’s how they work,” Helen explained impatiently. “I need you to move away from the house before I have to move you myself.”

  “Open the doors. I need to see her,” Clara yelled, her face glued to the window. “She’s right there!”

  “Clara, that isn’t-”

  “Shut up!” Clara yelled, mumbling the only spell she knew at the doors - in vain. “Shut up, shut up!”

  She dropped her backpack to the ground and landed on her knees, desperately going through the magical junk at her disposal. The cuff on her wrist warmed up, but she ignored it. She grabbed the dagger and, before Helen could reach her, carelessly cut her palm. Clara grabbed the doorknob with her bloody palm and the doors swung open, crashing and screeching.

  Sam descended the stairs, confused and scared. She was paler and thinner than Clara remembered. Her body was almost solid, as if Clara was seeing a memory made of sand that should could wave her hand through and it would disperse.

  “Sam, it’s me,” Clara yelled and rushed to the image of her best friend. But, as Sam took a step forward, her figure shivered and disappeared. “Sam, no!”

  Unable to hold back tears, Clara let them flow down her cheeks. Outside, at the doorstep, her grandmother waited.

  “I’m going upstairs,” Clara said, shivering. “What do these books look like?”

  “Leather-bound,” Helen described, almost compassionately. “They’re numbered with the Parker alder tree on the front.”

  Clara silently nodded and drug her feet upstairs. At the top, she hesitated and turned to her bedroom. It still waited, in the same disarray as it was left. Clara realized her mom had been preserving everything in a standstill. Her knees gave out, and she tumbled to the floor, sobbing. She placed her fingertips on the wood beneath her, piercing it with her fingernails. The cuff heated up yet again, gently humming as Clara trembled.

  “Clara, we have to leave!” her grandmother’s voice came from downstairs. “We have to leave now! Cl-”

  Her grandmother’s voice disappeared in a shout and a loud thump. Clara wiped her tears and listened carefully. Helen’s voice mixed with a thunder-like roar that froze Clara’s blood and paralyzed her entire body. A fight raged outside, she realized, unable to move. Latin slurs reached her bedroom, and Clara finally shook away her shock and rushed downstairs.

  As she descended the stairs, all she saw was Helen figure scrambling to her feet.

  “Stay back!” she demanded, but Clara was already behind her. “Go back, it’s a-”

  Before Helen could finish her sentence, Clara already had made her own conclusion. A human-like shape, red and skinless, avoided Helen’s spells with sickening skill. It twisted and turned its arms, sending invisible blows that disheveled Helen’s hair. Clara stepped back in horror.

  Finally, Helen yelled an indiscernible slur of words in a language infinitely far from Latin. The creature solidified and disappeared with a gust of wind.

  As the threat disintegrated, Helen dropped, barely conscious. Clara rushed to her side, grabbed her wrists and realized there was no pulse to check. Desperate, she shook her grandmother’s shoulders, and Helen barely opened her eyes.

  “We have to go back home,” Helen’s husky voice rasped. “Back to the mansion.”

  Clara wildly nodded, pulled Helen up to her feet and stepped away from her home with a struggle, onward to her sanctuary.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Late April

  SAM

  “I really can’t read one more word from Helen Parker,” JJ exclaimed, throwing papers aside and dropping on Sam’s bed. “I know it by heart by now, Sam. Can’t we just stop for one day?”

  “No,” Sam said firmly but somehow managed to sound pleasant. “Tonight is another coven meeting, and since we’re not there and our parents are, we might as well use it to go through these papers again.”

  “We’ve been doing it for a month now,” he retorted. “For now, all I got figured is that Clara’s grandmother was one unyielding lady, but I could’ve figured that one out on my own.”

  “How is that relevant?”

  “Exactly.” JJ laughed.

  Sam rolled her eyes. “Even if we don’t get anything from this, we can figure out what we need to find in other tomes. Just think outside of the text.”

  “Your pocket is on fire, sensei,” he said calmly.

  Sam jumped, patting her pocket and pulling a paper that wasn’t there a second ago out.

  “Damen?”

  “No, it’s Zoey,” Sam said as she read the message with a frown. At completion, she threw the note behind her and went back to papers spread on her fuzzy carpet. “Coven meeting is still going on. The ring stays on.”

  “They won’t give you your magic back anytime soon,” JJ agreed calmly. “They’re still pissed off because they think I got you out of the Smith’s house last month.”

  “That’s our curse, J. They assume we’re lying when we say the truth, and they know we’re lying when we lie,” Sam explained matter-of-factly.

  “Did she say anything else? What’s the course of action?”

  “Zoey won’t say, but I doubt there’s any,” Samantha said lifting the pages. “At least not an official one, not a proper one, but I’m more than sure Cathy has one. It’s a matter of time before they realize she’s right. All the decisions they made got them right here. The forest barrier? The Shadow-men? The Arch is holding by a thread and next time, something far deadlier than a shadow is going to come through it.”

  “Damen said they re-enforced the barrier. And Dad says they’ve sent messages to all covens on the continent.”

  “That’s just prolonging the inevitable. Instead of begging around for help, they should focus on figuring out what they’ve in front of their noses,” Samantha said scathingly. “If every single person in the Richmond coven took one of these tomes and studied it, we’d have a solution in two months.”

  “They’d never agree to do that. They’ll never agree to use blood magic. But I get your point.” JJ nodded and sighed. “Do you think they know we have these?” JJ pointed at the myriad spread around the floor.

  “You already asked me that,” Samantha answered impatiently. “And I already told you. We returned it before they even got out of the woods that night. There’s no way of Cathy knowing we borrowed it for an hour and scanned it. Besides, she would’ve mentioned something to either of us during previous weeks.”

  “Maybe,” JJ said doubtfully. “I just think there’s something up with her. She’s very distracted and anxious lately.”

  “Of course, she’s anxious. Her daughter’s stuck in an unknown plain of existence. Or maybe it’s because she’s planning on defying her coven,” Samantha said gleefully, picking up a paper and showing it to JJ. “I re-read this part last night. The one about how Parkers came to Richmond, and about the crossroads.”

  “Biuio Mundi.” JJ nodded, rubbing his eyes, ready to recite. “Yeah. The Crossroads of the Worlds, spread across the continents. Points where the reality is thinnest, and Pandemonium is the closest. Each town has a coven protector. The Parkers moved here centuries ago because of it.”

  “Exactly,” Samantha said. “So, Ian Parker tried to find a way to keep the Crossroads closed by creating a buffer between their world and ours. We know this, and we know he tried to mix elemental and blood magic from Zoey.”

  “We also know he failed,” JJ added.

  Samantha shook her head. “Not entirely. He was misguided, sure. I don’t know what his plan was exactly, but even though it was badly executed, he still managed to lower the number of super
natural deaths to less than ten for more than a decade. Maybe that’s successful enough.”

  “Don’t do that,” JJ interrupted her, strangely passionate. “Don’t glorify an overzealous teenager who managed to put our families in danger. Our friend’s dead and his own daughter is as good as...” He paused, unwilling to say the word, and Sam was thankful for that. “We have no idea what Ian Parker’s actual goal was. We have some scribbles from his mother, which isn’t the most reliable source. And we have hearsay from our parents and Zoey who are, obviously, the least reliable source. I really think we should’ve invited Damen tonight, Sam. He deserves to know all this and have a say in it.”

  “He has to be focused during his trainings. College recruiters come to watch him every third week,” Samantha explained, squinting her eyes at JJ. “You know, I think you’re right.”

  “I am?” he asked surprised. “I mean, you do?”

  “Yeah.” She nodded slowly before hurriedly collecting the papers. “We’ve been reading Helen Parker’s tome for a month now, and we’re never going to figure out what Ian’s plan actually was from here. The lady had no notion of what her son was planning.”

  “Exactly, exactly,” JJ agreed, collecting the pages on his end. “We should just go and tell Cathy everything, and she might fill in the blanks or even let us in on her plan.”

  “No. We have to go back to her house and get the other tomes. And we need to find Ian Parker’s tome, if it even exists,” Samantha explained matter-of-factly.

  JJ jaw dropped. “Are you insane?”

  “They’re still at the coven meeting. We’ll be in and out, the notes scanned and returned before they even leave home. Plus, they’re all at McDooley’s. It’ll take them fairly lot to arrive back.”

  “Sam, if they catch us, if they figure out what we did, they’ll limit my magic, too. And then we’re all screwed.” He seemed genuinely afraid.

  Samantha took the papers from his hand in silence, placed them in the back of her closet and whispered. Tenebris prodire.

  Once was enough. Shadows covered the arcane writing of Helen Parker. Sam closed the doors of her wardrobe and turned to JJ.

  “JJ, Clara’s counting on us. Cathy may or may not have a plan; she might have decided to include us or not. There’s no guarantee. What we can do is find out whatever we can from whichever sources we stumble upon,” she gently explained. “Besides, even if we can’t reach Clara, which you know we can, we’ll still be stuck with the Arch. You and me. Clara isn’t here, Xander is gone, and Damen’s only plan for the future is chasing after a ball for four years. It’s going to be up to you and me. You and I are now the coven protectors of Richmond.”

  JJ blinked in confusion before complying, and Samantha genuinely smiled.

  “You’re getting scary good at that,” he said as she packed her bag.

  “At what?”

  “Using the truth to get what you want from other people,” he explained without judgment.

  Samantha mischievously widened her grin. “I was always good at it; I just wasn’t aware of it,” she admitted, throwing the car keys to JJ. “Will it make you feel better if I send a message to Damen on our way there?”

  “To join us?”

  “No, to keep the coven occupied,” she explained as they left the house. She sat on the passenger seat, scribbling a short note on a post-it she carried in her pocket. Fire-messages were the only social network she currently needed, and they rarely failed. As JJ started the car, she focused.

  The previous month was better than most. Faced with her new reality and the limitations of it, she’d worked harder to dance around the limits than breaking them. It seemed to work. Zoey was happy to oblige Sam’s wish to find different ways to use the same spells she already knew, and Cathy was glad to share more lore. And Sam... well, Sam was learning how powerful symbolism actually was.

  Verba ignis. Sam said as she snapped her fingers, and the note she held disappeared in blue flames.

  JJ turned his gaze away from the road to her, surprised and confused. “How the hell did you do that?” he asked, frowning. “How did you do it without a candle? You shouldn’t be able to do that kind of representational magic with that ring on; it’s impossible.”

  “All magic is representational magic,” she said smugly. “Symbols have nothing to do with the amount of energy you use. The symbols don’t require a specific amount of energy. The spells do. And symbols are just there to properly channel the spell and energy.”

  “So, you’re saying,” JJ frowned, trying to understand, “what you did was channel the same energy but with better focus, by making your own symbol for a candle? Or better said - a fire source?”

  “Yep.” Sam nodded, now focusing on the raindrops covering the windshield as JJ turned his head.

  “That’s even worse, Samantha,” he said, impressed and intimidated. “I mean... What you’re talking about... that’s insanely difficult. Focusing your magic on a candle is easy because it’s basically a millennia-long symbol of light and fire. You used your thumb.”

  “It’s actually the snap that’s the cue for me,” she revealed.

  JJ eyes widened. “You made the sound your focus symbol?”

  “Mhm.” She lowered her shoulders. “Made sense. It sounds like electricity. Electricity – light. Light – fire. Fire... well, you know the rest.” She noted JJ’s bewilderment and sighed. “It didn’t just happen overnight. l practiced like crazy for three weeks just to get it right.”

  JJ laughed at the image of Sam snapping her fingers around the house. “What did your parents say to that?”

  “They don’t say much these days,” she answered, staring through the window. “It’s better that way.”

  “They’re just scared,” JJ explained.

  Samantha smiled without forgiveness. “They’re parents; they don’t get to be scared. You know, the Parker book got me thinking. We don’t actually know anything about blood magic. Bits and pieces of theory, but we were actually just fed our parents’ prejudice.”

  “I try not to think about it. It gives me a migraine, and I have enough of those.” JJ frowned at the rain before them.

  As JJ’s training progressed in the previous months, unlike Sam’s, his empathic abilities deepened. He was getting better at controlling the information he received, distinguishing his own emotions from other people’s. However, the amount of focus required on an average day would leave him with fierce headaches. Sam thought his troubles were worth the ability he had.

  Other than just sensing the emotions of those around him, he was now able to sense those he shared a connection with but were physically far away. Like Clara. The unexplainable sensation of Clara being alive was slowly fading. Now they were counting on JJ’s special kind of clairvoyance as assurance that Clara was still alive.

  “You know I’m right, JJ,” Sam said. “The only way of keeping that thing from imploding and taking us all with it is by using the same magic that brought it up.”

  “I know you believe it true, but the only blood spell I intend to do in my life is the coven-binding one,” JJ declared, ending the discussion the same way as before.

  He parked the car in front of the Smith’s house. It wouldn’t attract any attention from the neighbors, of course. It was Richmond, where everyone trusted everyone, and everyone knew everyone, or so it had once been. They entered the house with ease thanks to JJ’s unrestricted and booming abilities. Sam rushed to the attic, and he did his best to keep up.

  “Where is it?” Samantha asked, disappointment flooding her as she faced an empty corner. “Do a revealing spell, JJ. It was here. There was a full stack of them, hidden in the shadows.”

  JJ turned around, observing the attic as his shoulders shuddered.

  “What are you doing?” she asked him with a frown, but JJ just gestured her to be quiet. He gave each corner a piercing look before closing his eyes and taking a deep breath. “We don’t have time for this now, JJ.”

  �
�I think she was here,” he said, confused and hopeful at the same time. “I think... It’s like she was just here.”

  JJ turned away and left the attic. Annoyed and abandoned, Sam turned back to the boxes and corners. There was no sign of anything being moved, except the Parker books. The disarray was undisturbed, and she couldn’t sense any hiding spells. Which meant Clara’s mom knew she had gone through the books.

  Sam steadied her breathing. This was no time to panic. She disagreed with JJ. Even if Clara’s mom knew they found the books, she wouldn’t be able to do anything about it. She wasn’t supposed to have them either. There was no way to punish them without putting herself on the coven’s radar.

  Well, that was entirely true. She pulled the chain on the bulb and left the attic in darkness. Rushing down the stairs, she called for JJ, who stood frozen in Clara’s room.

  “We have to go,” she told him hurriedly.

  He turned to face her. “Sam, I think Clara was here,” he said slowly. “Not here here, but... I don’t know. She was really scared. And really angry.”

  “Okay, focus,” Sam said mildly. “When was she here?”

  “Recently,” he said too fast and regretted it immediately. “But not really recently.”

  “You’re not making any sense, JJ,” she said, her tone sharper.

  “I know it doesn’t make any sense,” he agreed, tangling shaky fingers into his hair. “It’s like... when someone passes the same hallway as you, just a minute before, and you know they did because you can sense their perfume.”

  “She must be stuck in the Arch,” Samantha concluded, her heart thumping like crazy. “How else can you explain the fact that you feel her presence in her room?”

  “I can’t say that for sure,” JJ said quickly. “I don’t know how any of this works yet. For all we know, it might have been her ghost.”

  “Ghosts don’t get scared,” Samantha said quickly, grabbing JJ’s hand and pulling him down the hallway. “We have to go, and figure this out along the way. If Clara’s mom finds us breaking into their house, she won’t listen.”