Spirit

by Shauna Granger

  He stared at me, slack jawed, for a long moment. When he recovered, he laughed as though I was trying to play some colossal joke on him. When I didn’t so much as smile and only stared back at him, the laugh died in his throat. Memories of Jensen’s disbelieving face swam into my mind, mingling with Steven’s hurt face when Anthony called him crazy.

  “How can you laugh?” I asked, my voice finally breaking as tears stung my eyes. After everything I had been through up until now, everything I watched Jodi and Steven go through, one more person not believing in me was too much to take. “You yourself believed in the Slaugh. I mean, here you are. How much more proof do you need? We were surrounded by elves, gremlins, goblins, and Redcaps for Chrissake!” I stomped and threw my hands up in the air.

  “No, I said my grandmother believed,” Jacob corrected me, putting one hand out to stop me. “I never believed, not before I got here anyway.”

  “Fine,” I huffed, closing my eyes for a moment. “Fine, but you’re here now, right? And you still can’t wrap your head around the fact that magic and all that it contains could possibly be real? Jacob, the damn moon doesn’t even move here!”

  He glanced away from me, looking at Balor, who had silently watched our exchange like a tennis match, swinging his head back and forth. The massive dog was like no species we had on Earth, with his massive height, his pure white coat bleeding to shocking red at his ears, and his ability to understand us when we spoke. Jacob turned his head toward Fearghus and Angus with a pinched look of pain. I imagined – if I could still feel other peoples’ emotions – a sharp pain would be blossoming behind my eyes right about now.

  “Shayna,” Jacob said with a sigh, slowly turning to face me again. When he met my hopeful gaze, he shook his head.

  “Really?” I demanded, throwing my hands up in the air. “Really?”

  “Okay, maybe magic is real here,” he said, and I couldn’t help the scoff that burst from me at the word “maybe.” “But,” he continued and I knew I didn’t want to hear it, “magic isn’t real at home. Home is just home.”

  My shoulders fell and my breath ran out of me in defeat. Maybe the sprite woman was right. Maybe hope was something deadly here, and everyone else just refused to let it infect them. Well, that was fine, but he wasn’t going to stop me, not anymore.

  “Fine.” I pushed my hands out in front of me, pushing this argument away as I realized I was banging my head against a brick wall that would never give. I shook my head as I went over to gather up my things.

  “Shayna,” Jacob said, but I ignored him. He walked over to me, tried to get in my way, but I sidestepped and moved around him.

  I checked my little crossbow to make sure the arrow was still secure and cocked and the others were still in the hip quiver. I tossed out the remaining tea from my cup and organized Fearghus’s saddle bags.

  “Shayna, stop,” Jacob said, reaching out to touch my shoulder, but I dodged around him, picking up anything else I might need. I almost grabbed Jacob’s jacket but stopped myself mid-motion, making my fingers close into a fist. I turned on my heel and walked back over to the horses. I heard Jacob make a noise of exasperation, but I was determined not to look at him.

  There wasn’t any food to split and he already had a weapon, so I was as ready as possible. I put my foot into the stirrup and swung myself up into the saddle.

  “Balor, to me,” I called out, and the magnificent white dog got to his feet and bounded over to me without hesitation. I gripped the reins and turned Fearghus around to face Jacob.

  “What are you doing?” he asked, almost reaching out to take Fearghus’s bridle, but the horse danced out of Jacob’s reach as if he had read my mind.

  “Thanks for trying,” I said, “but your disbelief is keeping me from escaping. I have to go home. Other people depend on me, and I can’t let them down. I hope you can find the others again.”

  I pulled on Fearghus’s reins again and got us turned around. Jacob tried to stop me, calling my name as I put my heels to Fearghus and urged him into a trot. Balor kept pace easily by our side. Jacob ran behind us now. Fearghus’s massive stride put distance between us quicker than an earthbound horse, so in less than half a minute, Jacob’s voice was almost too faint to hear over the hooves, paws, and running water.

  A small part of me twisted with guilt at leaving him behind to fend for himself, but he’d been holding me back. For all I knew, if I had struck out on my own, I would’ve figured out the magic of this place ages ago, found the edge, and be home already, figuring out how to help Steven and Jodi invoke my spirit so we could talk and find a way to bring me home. Staying with Jacob was just too risky, and I had taken far too many risks already, all of which had culminated with my death. I wasn’t about to do anything else that threatened Jodi and Steven’s lives.

  I scrubbed my face with the back of my hand, wiping the tears away, and pushed all thoughts of Jacob’s pained face out of my mind. I thought about Jodi and her swishing, yellow blond hair and Steven with his honey brown eyes, glowing with a banked fire. That was my home, where I needed to be, and that was where my thoughts should have been the entire time. For a moment, I thought I heard hooves pounding the ground behind us as Jacob and Angus tried to catch up, but I didn’t look back. I was never going to look back again.

  Chapter 15

  When I next stopped to water Fearghus and Balor, I took out the looking glass immediately, clutching it to my chest as I looked for a comfortable spot to sit for an indeterminate amount of time. My fingers had little red crescent moons and one long deep indent marred the meat of my palm. I flexed my hand, staring at the marks, only then realizing how desperately I had clung to the looking glass instead of the perfectly good silver handle.

  Balor threw himself down on the ground, rolled over on his back, and began to swish back and forth, getting an itch on his back. Fearghus let his head drop low, his big black eyes fluttering closed. For one fleeting moment, I thought about sending Balor off to hunt, the rumble in my stomach seconding the idea, but when I looked at him, all four paws up in the air with his tongue hanging out on one side, I couldn’t bring myself to disturb his moment of joy. I could deal with going without food for one night. Maybe after we woke, I’d take him hunting and we’d both find some food. Settling myself at the foot of a tree, leaning my back against it, I tucked the pistol-grip crossbow between me and the tree, making sure the handle was positioned in such a way that I could easily grab it.

  I didn’t bother to light a fire since there was no food to cook and because I was all alone. Since I was planning on watching the looking glass again to glean information about Jodi and Steven’s plans, I couldn’t watch the fire or for anything the fire might attract. I shook my head. I didn’t need to think about things like that; if I didn’t remain calm, I couldn’t focus on the looking glass. I closed my eyes and cleared my mind, keeping the images of Jodi and Steven in the front of my mind.

  Jodi and Steven were huddled in the tree house again. Jodi had a notebook open on her lap. The yellow highlighter in her hand pointed at a passage in one of the open books. There was a pen behind her ear, making her look like she was cramming for finals, but instead of Chemistry and Calculus books, spell books on invocations and magical properties surrounded her. Steven was in a corner under the larger window, a laptop in his lap. Lucky for him my dad had run electricity up there years ago at my request.

  Jodi’s phone buzzed on the floor beside her. After picking it up and viewing the message, she looked at Steven and said, “Sherry says they’ll bring the consecrated water and blessed dirt, but we need to bring the Air, Fire, and Spirit elements.”

  Steven nodded, reaching to make a note in the notebook beside him as he clicked through a website. “What color candle?”

  Jodi turned her phone sideways to make the keyboard longer and typed out a quick text. Less than a minute later, it buzzed again with their answer.

  “Black,” she said, “to symbolize the light emerging from the da
rk.”

  “Oh, right, duh,” he replied, rolling his eyes. He was right; he should have known that off the top of his head. What surprised me more was Jodi’s lack of comment; pointing out a slip up like that was almost a knee-jerk reaction for her.

  “I’m gonna bring a bird,” Jodi said as she set her phone on the floor by her knee again.

  “A real live bird?” Steven asked, finally picking his head up and tearing his eyes away from the screen.

  “Yep.” She nodded, making another note in the book.

  “Kinda creepy,” Steven said, earning a smirk from Jodi. I understood her reasoning though. She couldn’t depend on her breath being strong enough this time. Usually we would just use a feather to symbolize a bird, but with their diminishing abilities, she’d want something more concrete.

  “Ugh,” Jodi said after a few silent moments, throwing the highlighter at the far wall. “How the hell did Shay do this crap all the time?”

  “I know, right?” Steven said, rubbing the back of his neck one-handed. I couldn’t help the smile that curled on my lips. Because I was the one blessed with the affinity of spell writing, Jodi and Steven had just slowly stopped doing it, and I knew they had taken that for granted. Anyone could learn to write spells, but you had to practice and keep up with it, like any skill.

  “How did she know which spells were legit and which ones were bullshit?” Jodi asked, rubbing her right hand, working out a cramp from all her note taking.

  “I don’t know.” Steven slid the laptop off of his lap. “I don’t think she ever used anyone else’s spells; I think she made them up from scratch.”

  “But how?”

  “Intuition?” Steven shrugged. “Probably should’ve paid more attention.”

  “Probably,” I muttered. Steven was half-right. I tried not to use anyone else’s spells, but in the early days, I did just as much studying as they were doing now, seeing which elements were the common threads between authors, figuring out what were essential items, incantations, and symbols for whatever type of spell we were trying. Once I had that committed to memory, I could make up my own spells, writing them to work with our strengths. It was a lot like writing good poetry, not just poetry you thought was good, but poetry other people enjoyed too. It wasn’t easy.

  “Think it was because she was an Empath?” Jodi asked. She was trying to make herself feel better for not being able to do this as easily as they thought I did.

  “Maybe,” Steven said with a sigh. “But I think it was a lot of practice. Since you and I weren’t very good at it, we always left it up to her to figure it all out. I mean,” he said, “I think if we had worked with her to write spells, we wouldn’t be having this problem right now.”

  “You’re probably right,” Jodi said, but her tone let me know she wished he wasn’t right. We’d all had enough of realizing what horrible mistakes we had made over the years. “And there’s nothing in her grimoire!”

  “Not like what we’re looking for anyway; nothing that’ll make her manifest here,” Steven said.

  “Of course not,” Jodi said through clenched teeth.

  “Whatever,” Steven said, reaching for the laptop again, “let’s just try to focus. Shay always said to figure out what the common thread is for the similar spells and rituals and then work from there.”

  “That is probably why Shay did so much angel magic,” Jodi said as she crawled to retrieve her thrown highlighter.

  “What?”

  “Shay and the angel magic.” Jodi fell back into her original position, highlighter in hand. “Think about it, how much angel magic have we done over the last couple of years? A lot, right?”

  “Yeah.” Steven nodded, looking off into the distance as if he were watching a replay of our latest castings.

  “I bet she was coming into the whole angel thing long before any of us realized, and that’s why she used angel magic so much,” Jodi explained.

  “Okay, but so what?”

  “I bet that’s why her spells were coming so easy to her,” she said.

  “Her spells always came easy,” Steven said with a shake of his head.

  “Not like lately.” Jodi shook her head back at him. “Lately things were huge like special effects in movies.”

  “Fine, but what is your point?”

  “My point is,” she took a breath, “Shay played to her strengths. That’s what we’re forgetting. So, Shay tapped into angel magic for her angelic powers. We need to focus on elemental magic for our strengths.”

  “We don’t have much elemental magic anymore,” Steven said, dropping his eyes.

  “But we still have some.” Jodi shifted to her knees and turned toward Steven, reaching out to grip his arm. I saw the light sparkle in her eyes. She was really on to something. “I was able to call those birds to me, remember?”

  “Yeah,” Steven said slowly.

  “Look,” Jodi said, stopping him abruptly. “The first few angel spells Shay did were kinda small. I mean, remember how long it took her to get us to meet our guardian angels?” Steven glanced away again. I knew he was remembering that night on the beach so many years ago as we invited our guardian angels to join us. My throat swelled, and I had to force a swallow past the lump forming there as I remembered the tears in their eyes when we came out of the meditation.

  “True,” Steven said after a moment.

  “Okay, but then suddenly things just started happening faster and faster. Shay could send her spirit out of her body, angels always answered our calls; hell a whole host of angels pulled us out of the water and saved us from those nymphs.” Jodi’s voice rose like the chatter of chipmunks as she spoke, her excitement getting the better of her.

  “But that was because Shay finally got her wings,” Steven said.

  “Yes!” Jodi all but yelled, startling Steven. “Because she’d been working angel magic more and more! Shayna finally woke up, you know? She woke up and she found her true self, but the amount of angel magic accelerated that.”

  “All right,” Steven said, holding up a hand. “You don’t have to convince me. If you think we need to focus on elemental magic because that’s the key, that we have to just pick our strength and focus on it, then that’s fine.”

  “Not pick our strength,” Jodi said, “recognize it. Shay’s always been an angel, but she was earthbound, so she didn’t know it. I think that’s why she had empathetic abilities, and that’s probably why she had Earth elemental powers. She took eighteen years to recognize her true powers; let’s not make the same mistake.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, let’s put these angel books aside. They’re just weighing us down because we aren’t angels,” Jodi said, shoving a couple of books away for emphasis. “We are elementals; we need to work with that.”

  “But we’re summoning Shay, who is an angel, so shouldn’t we use angel magic?” Steven asked.

  “I don’t think so.” Jodi shook her head. “Our powers, our magics are going to make this work or not, so we need to use spells that speak to us, not her.”

  “You may be on to something,” Steven said. He pushed the laptop off of his lap and got to his feet. He turned toward the open window, placing his hands on the sill. Closing his eyes, he let the sunlight shine on his face and drank it in like a flower. The faintest flush of heat colored his cheeks, making him look more like himself than he had in days.

  “Steven?” Jodi whispered.

  “Yes?” he replied.

  “So we’re agreed?”

  “Agreed,” Steven said with a nod.

  The image in the looking glass began to fade. I imagined they moved to study elemental spells for invocations and summonings, but I didn’t need to watch. I cradled the looking glass in my lap, folding my hands over it. Balor was asleep near my feet. He must have moved closer to me and I was so focused on Jodi and Steven that I didn’t notice. Fearghus was dozing by the riverbed as usual. My stomach growled painfully, almost cramping, but I was out of food.
I thought about waking Balor to get him to go hunting with me, but I really didn’t want to move just yet. And really, the thought of killing an animal and cleaning it kind of stole my appetite anyway.

  I leaned my head back against the tree trunk and closed my eyes. Jodi and Steven were finally making progress and they actually had help. Any minute, they might rip me out of this reality and bring me home. I wondered, when I got back, if I would still an incorporeal ghost or if I would have my body back. A fluttering of hope formed in my chest, but I pushed that thought away; there was no point in getting my hopes up about that. As it was, they might not be strong enough to pull me back at all, let alone give me a body.

  I wished I knew how far in the past these images were. Part of me believed they were real time, but if I could be sure, then I could try to prepare myself. I opened my eyes and tilted my head to look at Balor. I wondered if I kept my hands on him when it happened, if I could drag him through with me. The thought of leaving him behind made me sick. I shut my eyes against that thought and tried to relax.

  When I opened my eyes again, it was impossible to tell how long I’d been asleep. I hadn’t meant to fall asleep, and the sound of a footfall somewhere behind me jarred me awake. For a moment, I thought Jacob had finally caught up to me, but when I didn’t hear another step, I knew it wasn’t him. He hadn’t managed to master the art of walking quietly through the forest.

  Balor rolled onto his stomach, putting all four feet under him, ready to launch at any moment. His blood red ears were straight up, and his eyes darted from side to side. When he glanced at me, I nodded to him, letting him know I knew we weren’t alone as well.

  Slowly, I reached behind me, gripped the handle of the crossbow, and pulled it from behind my back without a sound. I set the looking glass on the ground in the shadow of the tree, hoping it was well out of the way in case anything happened.

  As silently as possible, I pushed against the tree trunk to get to my feet. I felt better having the trunk against my back so that whoever, or whatever, was there couldn’t sneak up on me from behind. I adjusted my grip on the crossbow, switching hands so that I could wipe the sweat from my palm before gripping it again and holding it close to my chest. I held my breath, terrified the intruder could hear my breathing, hear my heart pounding in my chest. Balor pressed himself as close to the ground as possible, as if he could flatten his body and become invisible, so that he could spring into action, taking whoever was there by surprise.