by Angel Smits
The room spun and darkness caught him in its cold, lonely grip.
CLARISSA AWOKE to the sound of pounding. Belatedly, she realized it was her heartbeat in her ears.
She sat up and looked around. The small living room came slowly into focus. Quickly, too quickly for her aching head, she turned to search for the old woman.
She was nowhere in sight. Had she even been real? Had the roses? She looked down at her finger. The thorn had been real, as the tiny hole in her skin still stung.
The vision had taken her to a cavern, but she didn’t know of any around here. She noticed the roses then, on the table, dead and wilted . . . and the spell book was gone.
Unfortunately, she couldn’t remember if it had been here when she’d first woken this morning.
Had David or the woman taken it?
The woman had no reason to take it, did she? David did. She’d shown him the spell. He didn’t need her anymore.
Except he did. He just didn’t know it.
Her overwhelmed and sluggish mind filled with images and thoughts of the last few days, trying to piece all the odd parts of this broken puzzle together. She rubbed her eyes. She couldn’t think straight.
Had she been drugged? Was this even real? She groaned. She had to believe it was, as all her other visions had become violent quickly.
David was gone. That knowledge settled in the pit of her stomach. What had he said last night? No one was going to get hurt because of him. He was trying to protect her. She admired the sentiment but knew it was foolish.
Still, her thoughts returned to the pictures in the basement. She couldn’t believe she’d found them for no reason. She slowly stood. Wobbling. What was on those roses? She headed to the kitchen door, dreading the steps in her present condition. Her wooziness made them treacherous; still she knew she had to find what David couldn’t.
Why did people have a basement if all they were going to do with it was store old memories and junk in it? Then a thought occurred to her.
Did the mansion have a basement? She stopped. She didn’t need to look here.
This was the wrong basement.
Seventeen
THE ROAD TO the mansion seemed miles longer than it had when she and David had driven it only nights before. Had it really only been a few days? It felt like years.
Finally, the wrought iron gates, silhouetted against the afternoon shaded mountains, came into view. Clouds shrouded the farthest peaks and a roll of thunder broke the quiet. She braked to a stop.
David’s Mercedes sat in front of the house.
She climbed out of her car, staring up at the gates, asking for some divine guidance. Lord only knew she needed it—desperately at this point.
She walked the last few yards toward the foreboding house.
It looked no different, except for the eerie afternoon shadows that crept into crevices and leapt out again, and the odd dazzle of the late afternoon dew. If her heart hadn’t been pounding so loud in her ears and the adrenaline galloping like racehorses through her blood, she would have marveled at the beauty. As it was, she felt time running past her.
She hurried up the front steps, anxious to get inside. Out here she felt so vulnerable. The front door was unlocked, and only after she’d pushed it open did she worry about how easy it was to enter. Would it be as easy to leave again?
The afternoon shadows barely touched the interior of the house. Bright remnants of light glowed in the chandelier and prismed about the room in fascinating procession.
“David?” she called, hoping he’d hear her and step out from a doorway, laughing at the concern on her face. When only silence met her ears, she was disappointed but not surprised.
If she found him, what form would he be in? She prepared herself for anything, then tried to ignore the animals her overactive imagination conjured up.
The living room looked just as they had left it the other night. Proceeding on, she found the library. It looked as if it hadn’t been touched in years, which it probably hadn’t.
She checked the nursery upstairs, and then she turned back down the hall and walked down a corridor they hadn’t visited before. When she opened the door to a bedroom, memories rushed out to greet her—memories that were nothing more than the wispy fabric of the passionate dream they’d shared. An ache grew low in her chest and encompassed her heart until it nearly shattered in two. Would she ever know what was real and what was fantasy?
“Oh, David, where are you?” she said on a sigh. She felt like sinking to her knees and giving in to tears, but she didn’t. She returned back downstairs and went to the kitchen.
The basement door was most likely back here. She found a door, but it was the back door. It stood ajar. She peeked out and saw what had once been a beautiful garden. The rose bushes seemed to have been recently trimmed . . .
She quickly stepped back inside, closing the door. A cool draft reached out to her, and she fought the urge to turn and run. She knew this was the way. This was where David would be.
A panel door sat in the back wall. Gingerly, she stepped toward it and turned the handle. It opened easily and she peered inside.
The same cool damp she remembered in the small house greeted her. Somehow, she expected to find much more than pictures and old boxes this time.
Flickers of light came from below. She hesitated. “David?” Was he down there? What was he doing? She stepped over the threshold and made her way down the timeworn stone steps.
The faint light somewhere at the bottom provided enough illumination for her to see the steps and make out the rough gouges made in the earth during the creation of the passage.
Around and around, down deep into the earth she went. The temperature dropped and she shivered, hugging the rough walls. Then it grew warmer than would be normal for an underground room.
Finally, she reached the dirt floor at the bottom. Several old bare bulb lights lined the walls. Row after row of wooden racks held wine bottles covered in dust. She pulled a bottle from its holder and rubbed the dust off the label. She might not know wine, but she knew this one looked expensive. She put it back gingerly.
Dry, dank air filled her lungs and she coughed to expel the awful taste. Adrenaline rushed through her. She leaned back against the wall for a moment, forcing her mind and body to slow down so she could gather her thoughts.
“David, are you here?” She listened and thought she heard distant voices. At first she couldn’t tell if they were coming from upstairs or from deeper into the wine cellar.
She moved farther down the main aisle. The voices grew in intensity. She wondered if they were arguing and headed toward them. The claustrophobia that had been initiated in the elevator vision threatened to choke her. But she forced herself to ignore her fears and kept her feet moving.
The wine cellar had obviously been here for years, nearly eternity it seemed, from the layer of dust and cobwebs that covered everything. She heard distant thunder from the outdoors. The lights flickered and the room fell dark. Panic rose in her throat.
She yelped and stumbled. The wine rack behind her rattled with an eerie clinking as she bumped into it. Not a ray of light penetrated the thick musty air. Where was the door? Calming herself, she reached out, stepping slowly across the uneven floor until her hand touched the rough, cold rock wall.
Go right? Go left? She didn’t know. One way was escape—the other she had no way of knowing where it went. She took a few steps and realized she was going downhill. As a child she’d believed she could dig all the way to China. Now she wondered if she’d end up in hell instead.
A slight breeze passed her cheek from the left and tangled her hair across her eyes. She turned toward it. The breeze faded but she knew she’d felt it on her face.
Slowly, carefully, she followed the wall with her hands. Her fingertips soon b
urned from rubbing against the rough stone, and she slowed, having a more difficult time feeling her way.
She moved her feet slowly, afraid of stepping on or into something unknown. As it was, bits of sand and rock slipped between her toes and the leather bottoms of her sandals.
The temperature dropped. She heard the distant drip-drip of water and found her next footfall squishy. A trickle of cold slipped beneath her fingers. This was the wrong way.
The icy water dampened a portion of her skirt. Unbalanced, the fabric swung and snapped against her bare legs in a reminder of the unseen that lay everywhere.
“Stop!” a voice echoed around her and Clarissa faltered.
“Who’s there?” she whispered. No one answered her. Then she realized the mumble of voices was a distance away.
She moved a few inches then stopped again, unsure. Should she go on? Should she stop? Was it David or someone else?
She inched along the walls. The voices rose and fell, but she couldn’t make out their words with the echo in the basement. The high pitch suggested it was a woman. She waited for a deeper, masculine response, and when none came, she knew David wasn’t there. Disappointed it wasn’t him, and afraid of who it might be, she took a few steps back the way she thought she’d come. She needed to find the stairs. Surely if she kept going along the wall, she’d find them.
“Make it work,” a woman said into the quiet and Clarissa halted.
“I . . . I can’t,” another woman said. “I . . . I don’t know w . . . what you want.”
Where were the voices coming from? Clarissa tried to turn toward them, but they seemed to reverberate everywhere. Her ears slowly adjusted to the odd echoing sounds, and she listened carefully.
She inched forward and scraped her knuckles on something metal. Feeling around, she realized it was the hinge to a large wooden door. She ran her fingers along the rough wood. Where did it lead?
She fumbled around until she found the handle. The metal was cool and firm against her palm. She pulled hard, nearly stumbling backward when the door opened easily.
The light on the other side of the door was blinding and Clarissa raised her hand to shade her eyes. It took several minutes for her eyes to adjust, and even then she squinted.
Candles blazed everywhere. It must have taken hours to light all of them. She looked around in amazement. The rock walls of the room were smooth and the roof blackened from soot. The room wasn’t filled with smoke and she wondered how it escaped. It was as if the earth absorbed it.
An old woman stood hunched over something behind the tiers—the woman who had delivered the roses. Hastily, Clarissa backed up behind the doorframe.
“I’m not a witch,” the woman said to herself.
“Yes, you are.” The voice seemed to come out of the walls.
Clarissa looked around but couldn’t see anyone else.
“I saw you go into the deposit boxes to get the book.”
“This old book?” The woman lifted the grimoire—Granny’s grimoire. So the woman had taken it, not David. “I . . . I went to the bank to get my mother’s silver for m . . . my g . . . granddaughter’s wedding.”
“Liar,” the voice boomed, and Clarissa resisted the urge to cover her ears.
She knew the woman wasn’t lying.
“You put the book there. You’re the old woman who tricked me.”
“Tricked you?”
Clarissa watched the elderly woman. Even from the distance, she saw the fear in her eyes and the trembling of her body. The woman’s eyes darted from side to side as if searching for the person who was speaking.
Clarissa knew she wasn’t going to find the speaker.
“Don’t play innocent with me.”
Clarissa watched as the wisps of smoke gathered together and formed a shape. It was the woman who had pushed her down the stairs. It had to be Rachel.
The gray-haired woman screeched and backed away from the spirit until she nearly stepped into the candles. “I’m telling you the truth.” Color faded from her aged face. “I don’t know anything.”
“You lied before when you cast the spell. You said David would always be mine.”
Puzzle pieces started to fall together in Clarissa’s mind. Recent events made a strange sort of sense.
“Rachel?” Clarissa spoke, stepping out from her hiding place.
The old woman spun around and the book thumped to the dirt floor. “What are you doing here? The roses should have—”
Clarissa watched the confusion cross her face. She remembered pulling only one rose from the bundle. What had been on those roses? Poison?
“Damn you!” The voice vibrated around them.
The old woman’s eyes grew wide, and she trembled. “I’m going crazy, aren’t I?” Her voice was soft and pathetic.
“No, you’re not. You’re fine,” Clarissa soothed. She felt sympathy for this woman who was trapped in this mess. Now she understood David’s need to protect her and others. “It’s okay.” Clarissa took a few steps forward. “She can’t help you, Rachel. That book is mine.”
“No. It belongs to that treacherous crone.”
Clarissa swallowed hard. Granny had never been treacherous, but she had done some meddling with magic in her day. Had Rachel been one of her meddlings? Dread swamped her.
It was the only explanation.
“My grandmother left it to me when she died.”
“Get out! Leave us! We have work to do.”
“No, you don’t.” Clarissa moved closer, hoping to find a path through the maze of candles. None were wide enough for her to pass through. A single flame sputtered, its sound bringing her gaze back to the candles.
“That’s why you kept going to the bank—to find her,” Clarissa said softly, hoping to distract Rachel. “Those old women weren’t embezzling. That was just an excuse to get them into the bank. You were possessing them, using them to see if they knew where the book was.”
“You’re wrong.” Rachel’s incorporeal form spun toward Clarissa. “I knew where it was. I just needed to get it.”
“Why?”
“To fix the spell,” Rachel roared angrily, as if speaking to an over-inquisitive child.
“He wasn’t supposed to change into animals, was he?”
“Of course not!”
“What was supposed to happen?” Clarissa asked gently.
The silence was heavy and long. Clarissa edged closer to the old woman. Somehow she had to get her out of here.
She’d just made eye contact with the woman when Rachel finally said, “I wasn’t supposed to leave him behind. We were supposed to die together.”
Bits and pieces of the spell’s wording returned to Clarissa’s mind. What had given Rachel that idea? She remembered something about the cycle of life ruling both man and beast. “Maybe if you let me see the spell book, I can fix it.”
Rachel laughed, the sound echoing in the cavern. “I’m dead, not stupid. You want him for yourself.”
The flames blazed and Clarissa stepped back from the intense heat. Rachel knew her thoughts and emotions. Emotions she’d barely admitted to herself and remembered whispering to David last night. Had he heard? Would he ever know how she felt?
Realizing she couldn’t successfully lie about her feelings for him, she lifted her chin and faced Rachel. For an instant she wished Granny was here, though she wasn’t sure which she wanted most—her help or to throttle her for creating this mess.
She knew she couldn’t lie about David, but she had no qualms about telling stories.
“It’s my Grimoire now. I’m the witch attached to it. The spells won’t work for anyone else.” Her heart pounded. Was she convincing enough? She had no clue about real magic, and half expected some celestial retribution any second.
A sound that could almost be a sigh washed through the cavern. “You don’t want to help me. I can’t be with David unless he dies—and you keep saving him.” On the last two words Rachel’s voice roared and the flames flared.
Clarissa watched the spirit drift higher then settle just above their heads.
“You sent the kid to shoot him,” Clarissa stated.
“And you warned him. I’ve had it with your meddling.” A whoosh of hot air slammed into Clarissa and she stumbled backward. She bumped into the rough wall and a trickle of rocks tumbled down around her, burying her feet and filling the air with dust.
When the air cleared, Clarissa found herself staring not from outside the circle of candles but inside.
The old woman looked nearly as startled. She sat on the ground where Clarissa had fallen.
“Run!” Clarissa shouted. For a long minute the old woman sat there, unmoving. Then Clarissa’s words seemed to penetrate and she struggled to her feet.
She hurried to the door and Clarissa heard the click of her heels receding into the distance.
“I don’t need her. I’ve got you.” Rachel’s voice had turned to an evil whisper.
The smoky form faded, and Clarissa saw what she’d been hiding, what she hadn’t seen from across the cavern.
She saw the entire altar now. In the ocean of flame the raised piece of stone created a pyre.
And there lay David.
Eighteen
“TELL HIM GOOD-BYE.” The wicked voice echoed, and Clarissa looked around but found herself alone. The air felt different and she thought perhaps Rachel had left. But why—and was it a trick? She reined in her thoughts, not letting her fears of illusions distract her.
A loud roar broke through the air. Suddenly, dust filtered from overhead, black, sooty dust. The walls trembled. What was happening? Were they going to be buried alive? Something Rachel had said earlier came to mind. They could only be together if he died. Clarissa knew it didn’t matter if she died.
She didn’t have time to figure it out. She had to do something. She took a calming breath, fighting the panic that threatened to defeat her.