Crossroads

by Wendy Saunders

  ‘Come in, don’t stand in the doorway staring, you’re letting in a draught.’

  Olivia stepped further into the house and let the door close behind her. The wooden floor was worn and scrubbed ruthlessly to within an inch of its life. There was no glass in the windows, just wooden shutters which were open to let in the light. A small pot filled with wild flowers stood on the table. Although the cabin was crude by modern standards it was obvious that it was well taken care of.

  ‘Come take a seat love’ Bridget smiled, ‘you must be confused and tired, crossing over can be disorientating.’

  Olivia moved obediently over to the table and pulling off her backpack she lowered herself into one of the chairs, studying Bridget’s face intently.

  ‘You look so much like her,’ Olivia murmured thoughtlessly.

  ‘Do I?’ Bridget’s mouth curved in amusement.

  ‘Sorry’ Olivia shook her head, ‘that was stupid. Of course you look like each other, you’re twins.’

  ‘Must be very strange for you,’ she agreed.

  ‘It is, I have a portrait of Hester painted by her daughter.’

  Miriam?’ Bridget nodded, ‘she was such a sweet girl. She loved to paint, always experimenting with mixing herbs and flowers and oils, trying to find a way to make them into colors to paint with. It used to drive Hess to distraction that she would rather paint than concentrate on her lessons.’

  ‘Lessons?’

  ‘Aye,’ Bridget smiled, ‘the magic in our family has always been both a blessing and a curse but it was our duty to pass it on to those who came after us. Miriam would have been happy spending the rest of her life painting rather than learning our craft but eventually she followed the path, the same as all of us do in the end. It’s in our blood.’

  ‘Magic?’

  ‘That’s a part of it’ she nodded, ‘but not all. It’s a calling, a duty. What we were given came with great responsibility and heavy burdens.’

  ‘Was it a burden for you?’ Olivia asked softly.

  Bridget stopped bustling around the small kitchen for a moment, her eyes drowning in memories and judging from the fleeting emotion which passed over her face, they were painful ones.

  ‘We all have our burdens to bear,’ she shook her head and reached up to pull down a deep clay bowl.

  ‘She spoke of you’ Olivia told her softly, ‘in her journals, she worried about you.’

  ‘That was Hess,’ she took a long handled ladle and dished up thick scoops of stew into the bowl, from the pot simmering over the fire. ‘She always tried to take responsibility for everyone around her.’

  ‘Is that a bad thing?’

  ‘There comes a time when we all have to take responsibility for what we’ve done.’ She placed the bowl down on the table in front of Olivia and handed her a spoon. ‘Eat.’

  Her stomach growled loudly and her mouth began to water at the delicious scent wafting from the bowl. Not needing to be told twice she dug in and almost groaned in pleasure. The meat she couldn’t identify, it was something wild and gamey, not at all what she was used to. It was rich and buttery and seemed to almost melt on her tongue. The vegetables were cooked to perfection and seasoned with herbs she couldn’t even begin to name but all together it was quite possibly one of the best things she had ever tasted.

  ‘I didn’t know you could get hungry, or even eat in the spirit world,’ she mumbled through another mouthful.

  ‘You’ll find there are a lot of things possible here,’ Bridget reached for a loaf of brown bread and began to cut a thick slice. ‘It’s simply another plane of existence.’

  ‘Is Hester here?’

  ‘No,’ she sighed after a moment, ‘I haven’t seen her in such a long time.’

  ‘Where is she Bridget?’ Olivia asked curiously.

  ‘That I can’t tell you,’ she handed her the generously buttered slice, ‘I don’t know where she is.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘No buts,’ she sat down opposite Olivia, ‘that was the agreement we made that she would disappear so that no one could compel her soul to reveal the location of Infernum and I…’ she paused as her clear whiskey colored eyes met Olivia’s, ‘I would wait here for you.’

  ‘For me?’ Jolted by Bridget’s words, the spoon tumbled from her suddenly nerveless fingers, ‘but how…why?’

  ‘My sister saw a lot of things Olivia; she was an incredibly gifted seer but she was so much more than that. She could see people’s threads.’

  ‘Threads?’

  ‘Every living thing has threads attached to them, joining them to others. I’m told it’s like looking at the world through a spider web of different colored yarn. Every line has a different color, every color has a different meaning, love, loyalty, friendship, betrayal, pain, all of them binding souls to each other. It isn’t common but there are some gifted witches who can see the threads of life. Hester could not only see the threads binding everyone together but she could follow individual threads down through generation after generation. I don’t really know how she was able to do it; there has never been another witch like her, not before, not since.’

  ‘So she could see the future, not just any future but the future of specific individuals and their descendants?’

  ‘Something like that,’ Bridget smiled.

  ‘Wow,’ Olivia breathed heavily as she picked up her spoon once again, ‘I bet that was a hell of a headache.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Bridget shrugged, ‘if it did cause her distress she never showed it. Her magic for her was a gift, a celebration and she found so much joy in it.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘It was a nail in the coffins of all the people I loved.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Olivia murmured.

  ‘I made my choices,’ she shrugged, ‘But there is something you need to understand.’

  ‘And that is?’

  ‘That there is no such thing as white magic nor black, it is the witch who takes the power to a light or dark place and you are an extremely powerful witch, more so than you even realize. There is no good and evil only personal responsibility. I know what has happened to you Olivia and I know everything that has brought you to this point. I know why you are here.’

  Olivia’s defenses were immediately up.

  ‘You know nothing about my life,’ she said coolly

  ‘Yes I do,’ she breathed tiredly, ‘and I understand more than you think.’

  ‘Where are you going with this Bridget?’

  ‘A warning,’ she shrugged, ‘and also I’m here to help you. Everything you are holding inside bolted down so tightly, is eventually going to tear its way loose. All that pain and rage and betrayal will take your magic to a dark place and you along with it,’ her voice dropped low, ‘you must have felt the beginnings of it already.’

  Olivia gripped the spoon so tightly her knuckles turned white. The delicious food she’d wolfed down only moments earlier now sat like lead in her stomach and ash in her mouth. She had felt it. That moment she’d called down the Hell fire and felt it flood her body, vast, dark and seductive. Even now she could feel it coiled deep inside her, restless and all-consuming, waiting to unfurl like a dragon of raw flame and power. She’d felt its dark call the first time she’d killed one of the Hell Hounds. An intimate kill even in her injured, weakened state as she’d closed her hands around its throat and made it burn. She’d felt its panic, tasted its fear and pain and she’d reveled in it. Instead of pity she’d made the fire burn hotter because she could, because she’d liked it. Shame colored her cheeks as her memory flashed back to the moment she had stood out in the snow wearing nothing but Theo’s shirt, blood dripping from the wound at her thigh to stain the crisp white snow scarlet beneath her naked feet. She’d reached up into the sky and pulled down lightning bolts of pure silver flame. Like Zeus standing high above on the pinnacle of Mount Olympus as he rained down fire and lightning and retribution upon the Titans, she rode the whip
of power and gloried in it. In that moment she knew she could have burned everything surrounding her, but she hadn’t. She hadn’t… she reminded herself.

  She closed her eyes and drew in a shaky breath, her body trembling in remembrance, almost reliving the moment her body flooded with such an arousing ancient magic. Her hand involuntarily slipped beneath the table and squeezed the thigh which still bore the partially healed cut she had sustained that night. She winced at the slight pain and squeezed harder as if the pain could somehow keep her grounded.

  ‘There has never been anyone like you Olivia,’ Bridget whispered, ‘you are the mistress of fire. No one but a God has ever been able to control such a vast elemental power as the five ancient fires.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘There are five types of fire, the oldest and most unstable magic, Earth fire, Spirit fire, Hell fire, Witch fire and Demon fire and you can wield three of those already. That kind of power in the wrong hands… if you don’t reconcile your own demons Olivia the power will overwhelm you and it will take you down a road there is no coming back from. I know…’ her voice trembled as she fixed her penetrating gaze on Olivia, her eyes deeply troubled, ‘don’t walk the path I did.’

  ‘You’re trapped here aren’t you?’

  ‘In a way,’ she sighed, ‘I have my part to play in this, we all do. Our family Olivia,’ she shook her head, ‘our history it’s, well…it’s very complicated. Stained with blood and pride and betrayal. We have so much to atone for, each generation has added to this mess.’

  ‘I don’t understand?’ she frowned.

  ‘Did you ever stop to wonder how we came to be in possession of Infernum, the most powerful book in history or how Nathaniel came to walk the earth free and unfettered whilst his brother remained imprisoned by Hades? How he knew about our connection to the book?’

  ‘What are you saying?’ Olivia asked slowly, her stomach tying in knots.

  ‘Each generation has passed our history down daughter to daughter, colored by our own perceptions and our desperate desire to paint ourselves as the heroines, the warriors who were chosen to protect the most powerful and sought after artifact ever known.’

  ‘That’s not true is it?’

  ‘No’ her mouth hardened, ‘the truth is our family is vastly flawed, unstable and susceptible to the darkness we find so seductive and irresistible. Do you really think your mother was the first West to covet the book and its powers? Our hands are stained with generations of betrayal going all the way back to the first of our bloodline, her name was Carrigan and it was her fault Nathaniel escaped from the Underworld.’

  ‘What happened?’

  Bridget shook her head.

  ‘That’s a story for another time.’

  ‘But…’

  ‘What you need to understand is that with every retelling of our story it has become warped and changed. Ashamed of our past each generation has tried to rewrite our history,’ she let out a mocking laugh. ‘Our glorious history, how we came to be the powerful protectors of the book, such a sacred duty, a sacred trust, such an honor, but the simple ugly truth is that it was bestowed upon us as a punishment that our children and our children's children have been enduring for nearly two thousand years. That book has been a plague on our bloodline, a disease we have never been able to rid ourselves of.’

  ‘God,’ Olivia whispered painfully.

  ‘God had nothing to do with it, even the Goddess herself stood by and watched us suffer. Generation after generation of her daughters living out a never-ending punishment simply because of the blood that flows in our veins.’

  ‘She’s not like that,’ Olivia frowned.

  ‘Not with you’ Bridget murmured, ‘that’s how we knew you were different. Hess looked into our future and she saw you were the answer to the one question we’d never dared ask.’

  ‘What question?’ the color drained from her face.

  ‘It’s you Olivia, it’s always been you. We have been waiting such a long time for you to be born. That’s why you are different, that’s why you can wield Hell fire. You’re the one…the only one who can break this never ending cycle of blood and betrayal. You can set us all free.’

  ‘No,’ she shook her head in denial, ‘you’re wrong.’

  ‘We’re not wrong,’ Bridget replied calmly, ‘we have been trapped on this spinning wheel for so long. Round and round we go, that book has spilled more blood than all the wars there have ever been put together. The darkness won time and time again because we have never been strong enough to end it, but not this time, this time we have you.’

  ‘No you don’t have me,’ Olivia replied coldly, ‘I don’t want this. I didn’t sign up for this and it’s sure as hell not why I crossed over to the Otherworld. I’m here for one reason and one reason only…to find Theo. I don’t care about anything else.’

  ‘Yes you do,’ Bridget replied calmly. ‘You’re scared, I know you are but it’s time you faced up to your responsibilities.’

  ‘What like you did?’ she stood abruptly, the chair legs scraping loudly against the wooden floor, ‘because from where I’m standing you and your sister didn’t do such a great job yourselves and you have the nerve to sit there and lecture me about my responsibilities? How dare you, I’m not here to clean up your mess. I’m here to find Theo, that’s it.’

  ‘You’re right Olivia,’ she sighed tiredly, ‘my sister and I made a lot of mistakes and it isn’t right to ask you to shoulder such a burden. It isn’t right and it isn’t fair but there is no one else. It has to be you because it can be no other. I wish I could spare you the dark days ahead. I wish I could go back and undo all the mistakes our family has made but I can’t, because it’s not up to me. I am here to instruct you and to help you, I can’t change the way things are no matter how much I might want to.’

  ‘I don’t need any instruction and unless you are able to tell me where Theo is I don’t want a damn thing from you.’

  ‘I don’t know where Theo is, the Otherworld is different for each of us. I only knew where you’d be because Hess saw it. He’s here somewhere I can sense that much but it will be up to you to find him.’

  ‘Fine,’ Olivia snapped as she snatched up her backpack, ‘thanks for the meal.’

  ‘Olivia,’ Bridget rose from her chair, ‘you can’t ignore this or ignore me, I’m not going away. You need guidance; your power is raw and undisciplined as is your knowledge of our craft. It’s not your fault, you didn’t have those who came before you to guide you and nurture you through this but you cannot just walk away.

  ‘Just watch me.’

  She headed for the door.

  ‘Olivia,’ Bridget spoke quietly, causing her to pause and look back. ‘I’ll be here when you change your mind.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘We’ll just see about that,’ Bridget murmured as she watched the door close behind Olivia.

  Mac looked up at the tap on his door.

  ‘Jake,’ he nodded.

  ‘Have you got a moment?’

  ‘Sure,’ he closed the file that had been giving him a headache for the past 45 minutes and beckoned him in. ‘What’s on your mind.’

  ‘It’s about Olivia and Theo.’

  ‘Have you heard anything? Are they back?’

  ‘No,’ he shook his head, ‘but a couple of nights ago I helped Roni haul a load of Olivia’s books over to her apartment to sort through. She says it’s the most comprehensive collection of obscure occult and magic books she’s ever seen. She thought by going through them she might find something helpful on how to contact them on the other side. Or even better find a way to bring them back and seeing as Charles and the others have done a disappearing act I figured what harm could it do.’

  ‘So,’ he leaned back in his chair, ‘has she found anything?’

  ‘I don’t know yet,’ he frowned, ‘she called earlier and left me a message. She sounded quite excited about somethin
g but she didn’t want to talk about it on the phone. I’m going to swing by her place after I’m done here. I just thought you’d want to be kept in the loop.’

  ‘Thanks Jake, I appreciate it,’ he blew out the breath he’d been holding, ‘I have to admit I’m getting worried, it’s been weeks and nothing. No sign of them or Charles and when that man goes radio silent it makes me itch. He’s up to something and I can guarantee it’s something we wouldn’t approve of or he would have involved us.’

  ‘Are you so sure of that?’ Jake asked, ‘you seemed pretty steamed at him the night after the gateway was closed.’

  ‘That’s because he tried to cave my skull in with the butt of his gun,’ he frowned. ‘However that being said, looking back and knowing what I do of him, I can’t quite bring myself to believe he would abandon his daughter. He had her watched over and protected for years while he was incarcerated, but then again who really knows the man? I say we rely on ourselves this time around. Tell Roni whatever she needs we’ve got her back. Let’s bring Olivia and Theo home.’

  ‘You can’t do that,’ a soft voice spoke from the doorway.

  Mac looked up and his expression instantly hardened.

  ‘Mayor Burnett,’ Jake nodded.

  She glanced over at Mac’s chilly expression and silently sighed, it seemed he was still pretty mad about finding out her true identity but unfortunately that couldn’t be helped.

  ‘I don’t mean to intrude but what is happening now with Olivia and Theo is important. It has to happen which means that no matter how much you want to help them, you can’t interfere.’

  ‘You keep saying that but you’re not really giving us much to work with here,’ Jake frowned.