by Am Hudson
“What?” He grabbed my arm this time and made me look at him. “Ara? What is it?”
“Burn the witch,” I said excitedly. “Burn her bones. If Drake burns too, then they’re still linked. But if he doesn’t…”
His eyes moved onto Morgana across the way as my realisation set in to his mind too. “Then we can resurrect him.”
My lips angled out sharply in a beaming grin.
“Go get Falcon,” he said, pointing at our little party. “We’re leaving immediately.”
“But what about the party—and the cake?”
“Ara, stop thinking with your stomach—”
“Not my stomach, dummy.” I slapped his arm with the back of my hand. “It’s your brother’s first real birthday party. We have to stay for the cake—at least.”
“Fine.” He rescinded with a heavy breath. “But we leave as soon as Lora’s in bed tonight.”
“Perfect!”
***
“Explain it to me again, because I’m just not following…” Vicki looked at Jason, who also shrugged.
I served up another piece of cake for Falcon, and passed it across the picnic rug to Morgana to hand over to him. “Safia and Drake are linked. What happens to him happens to her, but not the other way around because her body had a spell on it, like my belly—”
“A Physical Protection spell,” Morgana said. “But she wouldn’t have had it on her face that day if she were drinking a potion to reverse ageing, which is why both she and Drake bled when Ara slapped her.”
“Right. So I don’t know if the witch will actually burn or not but, if we set her on fire and she does burn, but Drake, who was not set on fire doesn’t, then the linking spell—and all Safia’s magic—was broken with her death, and we can put Drake back together.”
Vicki nodded slowly, the information sinking in bit by bit until she finally understood. “So, you can bring your father back to life?”
“That’s the hope,” Morgana said, the certainty in her eyes putting me at ease. If she thought it was possible, knowing all she knows about magic, then there was a very strong hope. But I wondered why she hadn’t thought of it.
“Then why are you still here?” Jase asked, hugging his knees. “You should go now.”
I looked at Elora, then at Jason and the stack of gifts behind him from David and I that hadn’t yet been unwrapped. “It’s your birthday, Jase. I—”
“And for my birthday present, I want you to bring your dad back to life,” he said, sounding so much like the old Jason that even David looked up from playing with the baby. “Just go. Leave Elora here with us, and end this day on a really good note.”
I smiled at Jase, looking then to Morgana and David to see what they thought.
“I say we go.” Morgana stood up.
Falcon stood too. “I second that.”
“So do I, Ara,” David said, pulling both of Elora’s hands to sit her up.
“Elora will be fine with me,” Vicki said. “I’ll take your car home so I have her seat, and by the time she wakes up tomorrow, you two will hopefully be arriving home with good news—and maybe a dad in tow.”
“Come on.” Morgana offered her hand down to me. “Let’s go. I want my dad back. Our dad.”
Hesitantly I took her hand and stood up. As much as I wanted him back, too, I needed the hope that he might one day be resurrected, but if this failed, I would lose that hope and I would always know that I could never see him again.
“I’m scared, too.” Morg cupped my hand, looking deep into my eyes as if her concern might penetrate mine and ease it away. “But we have to take a chance. He’d want us to.”
“I don’t think he would,” I said. “I think he’d say it was foolish.”
“We’re not resurrecting him yet, Ara. We’re just going to set fire to the witch, maim her corpse a little.”
“And that,” David said, handing the baby to Vicki as he stood up, “is worth the trip out to Loslilian.”
***
No one ever told me where Drake had been buried. And I never asked. I felt as though it was safer if I didn’t know, and so did David, but our reasons differed. He was afraid someone may, at some point in the future, try to torture the information out of me, but I was afraid I might lose control of myself in the middle of a lonely night and go find him—bring him back. He’d left a hole as he passed—one that had always been there—but only once he filled it did I realise just how big it was. I longed for him now, like he was a part of my body somehow, and to be without him in this world left me a little incomplete.
Under the manor, through several winding tunnels, by the light of one swinging lantern, Morgana and David led me to a dead end. Miles of darkness lay behind us, and if there’d been no light flickering on the path ahead, I would never have known there was a wall in front of us.
“It’s an illusion,” Morgana said. She held the lantern up, as if I was supposed to somehow see what she saw.
“There’s a tomb beyond this wall—a place the old Queen would lay her dead, in the hopes of one day resurrecting them,” David said.
“In this tomb lies the bones of many great names in our peoples’ past,” Morgana said. “Peter, for one.”
“Peter?” I looked at the wall. “Lilith’s lover?”
Morgana nodded. “He was once thought lost—that his deal with our father had seen him permanently transformed into an animal, but when he presented himself before King Drake and offered to betray his love, he was secretly beheaded and his bones were brought to Lilith. We didn’t know it until we brought Drake and Safia’s corpses here, but Peter’s name is inscribed on one of the tombs—a headless skeleton laying within.”
“Wow.” I could almost smell the history leaking through the wall. I reached out and ran my hand down the rough stone; it was cool and slightly grainy and wet, like the wall of a cave. There was very little air down here and I was already feeling dizzy, but I knew that only meant the bones would be well preserved on the other side. But if this wall, as solid and as real as it felt, was an illusion, I just wasn’t seeing it. “So how do we get in?” I asked.
David slid his fingers under the handle of the lantern in Morgana’s hand and lifted it away, bringing it with him as he stood with his back to the wall of the tunnel, right beside the dead end, and slipped sideways into the shadows, disappearing.
“What the…?” I walked forward, almost completely blind in the new darkness, and from within the gap where David vanished there was a gentle glow of yellow light. With a straight hand I pushed it into what looked like a wall, realising only as I touched nothing that it was just an illusion—there was no wall there at all. The stone I touched before ended just short of the tunnel sides, with an identical wall a foot or so behind it, and a smaller one sitting between them, like interlaced fingers, hiding the entry to the tomb in the shadows of darkness and deception.
“You would never know it was there if no one showed you,” Morgana said.
“How did you know to bring Drake’s bones here then?” I asked, watching with wonder as my hand slipped back and forth into the gap of the three-wall maze.
David popped his head around and blinded me, shining the lantern suddenly in my eyes. “Falcon found it,” he said. “When we first employed him, he was doing some research on this place and it was referenced in some old text.”
“He is an amazing researcher,” Morgana said, with just a hint too much affection in her tone.
“He sure knows a lot,” I added. “Always got his head in a book.”
“I like that about him.”
“You like way too much about him, Morgana,” David said coldly, and the light disappeared.
“Come on.” I used my Cerulean Light to show the path. “Let’s go find our father.”
As we weaved through the interlaced walls and came into the open space, Morgana and I coughed, folding over. Under the ancient smell of rock and clay, the tiny particles of cold made it hard to breathe, the air further w
eighed down by the grainy scent of mildew. It wasn’t at all what I expected, or anything like I’d ever experienced in all my visits to underground tombs with my dad—with Greg Thompson.
“It’ll pass,” she managed to strain out. “Just give it a second.”
“There’s no air in here!” I wheezed.
“There is.” She took a few very shallow breaths to control her lungs. “It’s just a bit thicker.”
“Don’t know what the big deal is.” David shrugged, holding the lantern up to the room. “It doesn’t seem to bother me.”
“You don’t need to breathe, dummy,” Morg spat, and David just laughed. Which surprised me, since I half expected him to threaten her life for speaking to him that way.
Morgana stood tall again as the coughing settled, studying David with the same look I had. “What are you laughing at?”
He shone the light in our eyes again, becoming a shadow behind the glare. “You sounded like Ara when you said that.”
Morg and I both laughed softly, the sound echoing a little in the emptiness above us. I looked up, but the walls disappeared into darkness, hiding the height of the room and all its features. The dim light of the singular flame in the lantern revealed very little, aside from eerie hollows around David’s eyes and one stone coffin behind him.
“So?” he said, aiming the lantern forward. “Let’s get started.”
He led us down a wide passage of grey stone coffins, each one set apart at an almost exact distance from the next, feet facing the ends of the coffins across the pathway, all labelled with different words in a strange language. Some sat raised slightly above the others on sharply-carved stone steps, but were given no other distinguishing features that indicated they were of any greater importance.
After what seemed like forever, time taking us deeper and deeper into the musty old cave, we came to another dead end. Two stone coffins lay foot to foot, a wide space between them, shaped like ancient sarcophagi, the shoulders wider than the feet. Closer to the edge of the tomb wall, the heads seemed to disappear into shadow, giving the appearance that only half of the coffin was still intact.
David set the lantern down by the one on the right and clutched the edge of the lid, giving it a good strong push. My heart did flips knowing he was here—my father was buried right here—and I might be only hours away from seeing him again, telling him how sorry I was that I had to kill him.
“We only have Safia’s body here,” David said, his voice drowned out a little by the scrape of stone across stone, echoing off the walls. “And in the other coffin is Drake’s head.” He pointed to the one across from Safia’s. “If this works, we’ll need to take his head to his body.”
I looked from one coffin to the other, staying in the middle of the dirt pathway so as not to see the probably very stinky remains. “So where’s Safia’s head?”
“Only one person knows that,” Morgana said.
“Who?”
“Falcon.”
I nodded, knowing that meant the witch would remain eternally buried under a maze of secrets. I felt safer with this new information.
“Morgana,” David barked in that authoritative tone. “Move the stone off Drake’s head, and watch for signs of damage.”
“But…” She looked from Drake’s coffin to Safia’s. “If you burn her body, that won’t show up on his head. The spell doesn’t work like that. It’s body part for body part—”
“Which is precisely why, at nine sharp, Falcon will set fire to Safia’s head as well.” He looked at his watch, placing the lantern inside Safia’s coffin. “Open that tomb now, please.”
Morgana, despite probably being as powerful as David, moved quickly, her eyes wide as though his commanding voice still frightened her. It made me wonder exactly what he did to her before he cut off her head. But, for some reason, I didn’t want to know.
The great roar of stone scraping stone echoed down the tunnels again, and the putrid smell of rotting flesh leaked over the edges of Drake’s coffin, making it harder to breathe. And this time, even David was affected.
He covered his mouth as Morg and I did, looking from Drake’s tomb to Safia’s. “God, that’s awful.”
“Why does he smell but she doesn’t?” I asked.
“Maybe it’s a good sign,” Morgana offered from behind her hand. “Maybe the spell that links them is broken, but the spell that protects her skin isn’t.”
“If that’s the case, then setting fire to her won’t work. We need to set fire to Drake’s head and then call Falcon to see if there’s any damage to the witch’s,” I said.
“You scratched her face,” Morgana stated. “Remember?”
“Yes.”
“So her face will burn,” Morgana said, leaning into the tomb a little. “What time is it?”
“Nine-oh-three,” David said, looking at his watch.
“Look.” She pointed down at Drake’s head. “His face…”
David scooped up the lantern and ran over, leaning in to look. Then he looked up at me with a smile. “He’s not burning.”
“That’s a good start.”
“A good start? Ara, that’s our answer!” Morgana said. “If Falcon set fire to her head and they were still linked, Drake’s face would be burning right now.”
“But we never do things by halves,” David added, checking his watch as he moved back over to Safia’s tomb. He peered inside and waited. It felt like minutes passed, but by the almost inaudibly ticking hand on his wrist, I knew only seconds had. And then he smiled.
“Even with the spell to protect her skin still in place, if they were linked then, what happens to Drake’s body will happen to hers,” he said, looking up at me. “And I don’t see her flesh burning, do you?”
Morgana and I ran over and stepped up to the edge of the coffin, leaning over to study the headless corpse. Her beautiful black and gold dress still looked perfect, as if I could unzip and take it home as a costume for my next Halloween party, and her hands, laid across her waist, were still the colour of living flesh. I felt disconnected from the horrific sight of the missing head, though, as if I were seeing it on a TV screen. It didn’t really occur to me that it was real. But it did occur to me that, if David thought she should be burning, then that could only mean that someone had set fire to Drake’s body.
“Stop!” I said. “Make them stop burning him. If they burn him completely we can never put him—”
“It’s okay, Ara.” David reached across Safia and took my hand. “He only set fire to his hands. We’re not that stupid, my love.”
I exhaled with relief. “Then… so, this means it’s safe to bring him back to life?”
“As far as we can tell,” David said.
“I’d say it’s worth the risk. We’ve been given enough proof that Safia’s magic died with her,” Morgana added.
“But Falcon will need to transport Drake’s body to us, and it will take time for him to rise from the dead.” David purposefully moved around the coffin and turned me away from it, his hands firmly on my shoulders as he looked into my eyes. “You understand, Ara, that it may not be possible at all—”
“I know,” I said.
“Yeah, and it took me a few days to rise again,” Morgana said. “Just like it took David six weeks to heal after he was burned. So we just have to be patient.”
“And we need twenty-four-hour guards on Safia until we’re sure she will not rise again.”
I nodded, feeling slightly nauseous with the smell and the lack of air, but, under it all a hard kind of winded feeling compressed my lungs. I looked at Morgana as it all sunk in for her too, and we both let the wave of relief mix with the hope and the fear, bringing us to tears.
“Aw, come on,” David said, stepping in to wrap me up in his arms. “This place is scary enough without two girls crying.”
The entire dead, dark underground came alive with breathy joy then as Morgana and I laughed.
***
I wasn’t sure she would l
inger here in this place now that she’d been set free, but I took a chance that she might still be here, and headed into the forest to tell her about her son. And her grandson.
“Lilith?” I called softly, casting my eyes around the leafy trees, looking through the trunks and beyond to the pitch black of midnight. “Lilith, are you here?”
I felt the pink glow before I saw her, and heard my name in a soft voice as I turned around. She hovered there in the clearing by the Tree of Life, where the Stone of Truth once sat, smiling softly, like a goddess with a secret.
“It has been a long time,” she said.
“I’ve been busy—with Jason. You heard about what happened to him?”
“I did.” Her eyes reshaped with sadness. “I have also recently learned of my son—his passing and the tragic events that led to it.”
“I’m sorry.” I looked down at my feet.
“Do not apologise, Seeker.” Her finger appeared beneath my chin, tilting it back up. “He tried to kill his own granddaughter—”
“To save Sam. And countless other humans, apparently.”
“Yes.” She turned away, closing her eyes a moment and then looking into the tree line as she opened them. “But we are creatures with the gift of Sight, my son and me. We do not get to choose one life over the other simply because we have seen its end. He should not have attempted to alter the course of Fate, and I warned him of this.”
“Then you knew he would come for her?”
“You knew he would, too. Eventually.”
“Yeah, but I thought that was because he wanted to prevent Anandene being born.”
“He did. And you did not need to know the rest. Knowing what you know about Sam could put you all in danger,” she explained. “It is his fate. It is his story—he will die by the hand of Elora, and I have seen no alternative paths. All who try to turn the course of fate will meet their own untimely end.”
“Then you knew Vampirie would die?” I asked, saying his name the way she always did—not the modern way.
“A creature of his kind is never truly dead. One day, when time has passed and Samuel is long gone, we may resurrect my son,” she said, but I knew in my core that I would never let that happen.