by Lan Chan
This time I did choke.
“Sorry, pumpkin, but it’s true. I kept telling Giselle he’d be a problem, but she said she needed him to get to you. Now look where we are. I don’t suppose you’d consider slipping a knife into his ribs in his sleep?”
She was seriously out of her mind. I had to wonder if it was an affliction that affected all of the Sisterhood. Great. Now I had insanity to look forward to as well as death.
“Can we get back to you teaching me stuff?”
She blew out a breath. “Fine. But for the record, I don’t like this working on a Sunday thing.”
Now she was speaking my language.
26
“Show me your phasing,” Matilda said.
“Show me yours.”
She uncrossed her legs. “I take it you can’t do it at will then.”
Was I that obvious? “You do know how it’s done, don’t you?”
I felt like a monkey in her lab. She sighed and got up off the table again. “Get rid of this, will you?” She pointed to the blue strands. I waved my hand and the circles unwound and disappeared. “I suppose I should be grateful you know that much. Did Bethany teach you that?”
“More or less.”
“Shame we couldn’t find anything on her background. It would be interesting if we could dredge up any other girls with your abilities.”
I highly doubted that. The last thing we needed was other people who were somehow tied to Lucifer in this way.
“Let’s sit on the floor.”
I had a feeling I knew what was coming. “We’re going to meditate,” she said. Called it.
“While you breathe, I want you to take special care to try and listen to your heart beating.”
By now I was pretty good at getting my thoughts to clear. What I hadn’t counted on was this listening to your heart business. Because as much as I was straining to hear, all I could concentrate on were the sounds coming from outside the window. Especially the sound of the waves.
“You’re not present,” Matilda said. My eyes snapped open. I thought I would find her watching me but she had her eyes closed. After a beat she realised I’d lost my train of thought. “What’s the problem?”
I tugged on my sleeve. “I can’t seem to hear my heart beating.”
She grinned. “When I said ‘hear’ I meant in the metaphysical sense.”
“That means nothing to me.”
“What do they teach you in that school?”
“Mostly how to get my ass kicked by supernaturals.”
She was not amused. “Get up. You’re a hedge witch, aren’t you?”
“Yeah.”
We went outside into the cutting garden. There were so many scents vying for my attention that I didn’t know where to start. Every now and again I caught a whiff of cow dung. Even that didn’t dampen my happiness.
Matilda kicked off her shoes. I did the same. We sat down on the grass beside the gardenia bushes. “What kind of witch are you?” I asked her.
“The deadly kind.”
I narrowed my eyes at her. “I don’t have a power outside of the soul splitting. That’s why I’m so good at it. You on the other hand have so many conflicting ones. It’s no wonder you can’t get a grasp on any of them. It’s a shame you can’t bring your demon blade onto the grounds.”
“I could if somebody would let me have access.”
She shook her head. “Even if we wanted to, the soul gate wouldn’t allow it. It is the ultimate safe spot for us.”
That seemed kind of funny considering I didn’t feel all that safe here. Not with the ocean churning so close.
“I want you to open your third eye.”
“My what now?”
She swiped at a blade of grass. “What the supernaturals call the Ley dimension. I want you to access the lines of energy that make up everything in this earth. Use it to allow you to see your own heartbeat. Use it to see mine.”
The next time I closed my eyes, I did as she asked. It was easy enough to slip into the Ley dimension. It was far harder to pinpoint my own heartbeat. When I tried to be introspective, the glow of my power swirled between blue and shimmering black. Each pulse tried to drown out the other. It was like I had two heartbeats and they were fighting with each other for dominance. We did this for so long I heard the first bell for dinner out of nowhere.
My eyes peeled open. “That went quick.”
Matilda pushed up to standing position. “Speak for yourself. I thought you’d be a faster study than this. It only took Harlow two hours to get the hang of it and she’d been nine at the time.”
My jaw dropped. “Thanks for the vote of confidence. Maybe you should think about doing motivational speeches.”
She drew her hair back and wiped at her brow like she’d just been doing strenuous exercise rather than sitting on her ass insulting me. “I don’t know how much more motivating I can be but to tell you we’re in a bit of a shit situation at the moment. The supernaturals know their attempt to eradicate us failed. They have one of our best in their guarded city. How long before they decide they’ll try to exterminate us again?”
I thought about it all the way through dinner. When it came time for me to be dropped off at the teleport spot, I was really out of it. Samantha came to see me off. “I know it has been a difficult few days,” she said. “But I hope you’ll take it with a bit of perspective. We want to survive and this is our world.”
For a week it was all I thought about. Sophie and I were studying on one of those rare nights we were actually in the one spot at the same time. Actually, I was studying, she was trying to research the ingredients in Hilary’s diary.
“I can barely read some of this,” she said.
I stopped reading my Elemental Magic textbook. “Tell me about it! She’s written stuff over the top of other people’s writing.”
Sophie bit her lip. Something in the way her eyes kept tracking to her ingredients chest had me alert. “What?”
She rubbed her hands together. Not in an evil genius way but in a nervous, fearful way. “The only ingredient I can make heads or tails of is the dual blood,” she said. “It’s repeated a few times.”
I scratched at my head. “What does that mean?”
“I’m not sure. But the last time I saw something like that, it was in my great-grandfather’s diary.”
I pulled a face. Sophie’s great-grandfather was a mass murderer. “Maybe we shouldn’t be looking into that part of the diary,” I said.
“What if that’s how Hilary bound Gaia?”
I groaned and fell back onto my bed. What was with all these stupid spells and blood? Sophie promised to keep looking into it in between all her other activities. There was no change by the time I went back to Terran the week after.
I was changing into sweats so I could take Phoenix on a run when somebody knocked on the bedroom door. Frowning, I went to it. Rachel wouldn’t knock. I found the Evil Three on the other side. They didn’t have the courtesy of appearing contrite. Harlow’s hand was on her protruding hip.
I blinked slowly. “Whatever it is you’re selling, I’m not buying it.” She jammed her foot into the crevice when I tried to shut the door in their faces.
“Jeez,” she said. “We did a prank and it backfired. Get over it. Sam told us someone at Bloodline stabbed you. That’s much worse.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “I’m not on friendly terms with the person who stabbed me, thanks very much.” Her stilettos were made of steel or something because as much as I tried to push her out, she wasn’t budging.
“We’re sorry, okay!” Alison said. “How were we supposed to know you can’t swim? We live in Australia for goodness sake.”
As far as apologies went, it was completely lacking. Throwing my deficiencies in my face was definitely the way to get me to ease up.
“Fine,” I said. “You’ve said what you have to say. Can you get your foot out of the doorway?”
Having had enough of
my theatrics, Winnie pressed her palms to the wall. The aura around her shimmered. As many times as I had seen a phase, it didn’t stop my heart from leaping into my throat when the brunette walked through the wall and into my room. “Get out!”
“Relax!” Harlow said. “Hear us out.”
“Why should I?”
There was a beat of silence. Obviously they hadn’t thought this through. Clearly they had expected me to accept whatever they wanted. I remembered Rachel muttering under her breath about how the Evil Three were spoiled. I could see how that might happen. They were the last in a line of what was supposed to be humanity’s protectors. I thought of the new set of guards posted around Terran by the Council. How would the Evil Three cope against the supernaturals?
I eyed Harlow’s slight figure inside her skinny jeans and spaghetti-strap singlet. The outfit didn’t exactly scream demon slayer. All in all, I felt much safer with Rachel at my back despite her being a simple hedge witch.
It was the way Winnie stood with her back pressed against the wall she’d just phased through that snagged at my attention. Her hands were tucked behind her, the soft fluttering of her maxi skirt a foil to her wider hips and ample chest. She was looking at Rachel’s weapons cache with a mix of awe and…fear.
“What do you want?” I asked, releasing the door at last.
Harlow leaned her shoulder against the frame. “Sam told us you’re a bone witch. We’ve been trying to use a searching circle to find Gaia for months. We haven’t managed to connect with much. But you might be able to make a connection with a spirit from the underworld who might know where Gaia could be.”
Before she even finished her sentence, I knew what she wanted. At Bloodline, the practice of raising spirits of the dead was strictly forbidden. Opening those kinds of portals attracted demons by the bucketload.
“Are you joking?” I asked. “What if we make a mistake and a demon comes through from the Hell dimension.”
“That’s why you’ve got us as backup. We’ve tried everything. But we’ve never been able to make contact with your great-grandmother. It’s like her spirit is being sheltered or something.”
“You guys are nuts.”
Harlow threw her hands in the air. “Well, what choice do we have? Nothing else has worked. I’m so sick of hitting dead ends. Your great-grandmother did this. You need to fix it.”
I wanted to point out that I didn’t need to do anything. But behind her outburst, her eyes were becoming glassy. She balled her fists. Those nails would have hurt like a mother as they cut into her palms.
I glared at the three of them. “Do you have any idea what you’re doing?”
Alison glared back. “We’re been training to do this our entire lives.”
The starkness of her words startled me. It struck me then the amount of pressure they must have been under. I’d only experienced it for the past few months. To have been told incessantly that I was humanity’s last line of defence would have worn me down too. I covered my face with my hands and exhaled.
“Okay, fine. But I swear if something goes wrong, I’m going to throttle one of you.”
If my warning bells weren’t already chiming, they would have done so when Harlow suggested we needed to head out into the fern forest at nightfall to establish the ritual. Fool me once and all that.
She huffed. “We can tell an adult if you want.”
I did want. Though I didn’t really count Matilda as a responsible adult. More like a woman-child with a penchant for chaos. “This I’ve gotta see,” she said. And now she was tagging along with us. We piled into one of the cars. As the shortest, I had to sit squished between Alison and Winnie in the back seat. They drove towards the same fern forest where Kai usually dropped me off.
Evening was drawing a cloak over the forest. Rather than use flashlights that would disrupt the energy of the forest, each of the Evil Three drew small illumination circles around themselves. It occurred to me that I was walking into the murder scene of every B-grade outback horror movie. It didn’t help that Matilda was humming an ominous tune. Harlow stopped our procession when we hit a natural clearing. The scent of summer heat wafted off the dry earth. I inhaled the clean scent of dirt and greenery.
“You know how to draw a summoning circle, right?” Harlow asked me. I took it that I was going to be the one doing this then. She tossed her backpack at me. Inside I found a satchel of sea salt, five stubby, red taper candles, a small porcelain bowl with blue daisies on it, and a Swiss Army knife.
“For the record,” I said, “I’m not looking forward to any of this.”
“Speak for yourself,” Matilda said.
Professor Mortimer had taught us the rudimentary theory behind summoning circles. Ever since my initial run-in with Behemoth, the last thing I wanted was to open up a gateway to another dimension. But there was too much at stake for me to be squeamish about it.
“No time like the present,” I muttered. Using the salt, I poured a physical circle onto the ground whilst creating the same pattern in my head. When I was done with the perimeter circle, I drew dozens of corresponding central circles and then a five-pointed star intersecting all of the circles.
It was at that point that I got stuck. This kind of specific summoning circle required intimate knowledge of the shade you were hoping to make contact with. I knew nothing about Hilary Hastings.
“What was she like?” I asked Matilda.
She tapped her chin. “Take a look in a mirror.”
“I didn’t mean what she looked like!”
“I stand by my assessment. Hilary was…obstructive. There was no authority she didn’t rail against. No rule she didn’t question.” She locked eyes on me. “Even Gaia didn’t escape her wrath when she was convinced of her mission.”
“So, scary as hell?”
“You betcha.”
It didn’t give me a whole lot to work with. As I completed the last of the runes, I tried to imbue thoughts of my great-grandmother into the purpose of what I was doing. Unlike the supernaturals, I didn’t need to chant a dead language to strengthen the spell. The Evil Three did it for me in plain old English. Each one of them came to sit cross-legged at even intervals outside the circle. This circle was meant to keep the undead spirit trapped. It was why I sat outside it too. I blocked out their prayer to the spirits and called out to her.
Absolutely nothing else happened. “Ahh…is this normal?”
“Yep,” Harlow said. “We’ve done this hundreds of times. Sometimes other spirits show up. Sometimes we get nothing.”
We waited for what felt like forever. I started feeling drowsy. My attempts to call to Hilary using my hedge magic proved fruitless. “Okay. I guess it’s going to have to be blood.”
I blew out a breath and blooded my palm with the knife. The crimson of my blood was barely visible in the dying light. Until I pressed my bleeding hand against the salt circle. I hissed as salt scraped against my wound. At the same time, the circle blazed silvery black.
As a safety measure, I closed my eyes and slipped into the Ley dimension. I almost crapped my pants when my third eye opened to the sight of a cavernous hollow at the base of the circle. My magic encased it in a tower of light. Surrounding it were dimmer circles of magic corresponding to the Evil Three. I glanced into the centre of the hollow and something inside the core of me shuddered. It tugged at the swell of dark magic inside of me. Feeling vulnerable, I redirected some of the Ley lines to intersect the circle and act like a barrier in case something went amiss.
Having completed my paranoid precautions, I blinked open and joined the Evil Three in their incantation. “Darkest night in darkest light. Bestow on us the Earth’s sight.”
I wasn’t even finished the last word before a howling wind ripped through the clearing. The temperate dropped twenty degrees. My heart stuttered thinking this was going to be a repeat of the icy cavern. Every breath I took came out in a puffy mist. Goosebumps erupted all along my arms. I could hear the Evil Three shive
ring.
“What’s going–”
My words died in my throat as a figure materialised inside the circle. The essence of the woman’s body was semi-transparent, but I could clearly see her pleated slacks and three-quarter-length shirt. Her hair was a darker brown than mine. It sat atop her head in the same French curl as the one Samantha wore. When she turned to face me, everything stood still. While the rest of her body was washed of most of its colour, her eyes were two crystals of blue. Eyes that I had seen on my own face for the last seventeen years. I could be her in fifty years. Hilary Hastings.
27
Matilda swore. I would have done the same if my jaw weren’t hanging open. The shade of my great-grandmother attempted to speak. Her hand flew to her throat. A wet-eyed look of confusion washed over her features before they hardened into steely resolve.
Her head snapped up. She took a jerky step towards me. It would have been smart to ask whether spirits got pissed if you disturbed their eternal slumber. Her semi-transparent body almost hit the edge of the circle. She came to an abrupt halt, but it wasn’t from being trapped. It was because a new shadow had emerged inside the circle. This one appeared as a billow of grey smoke. It wasn’t transparent but dense. Tendrils of smoke lashed out and wrapped itself about my great-grandmother’s spirit. Before I had a chance to react, the smoke constricted and crushed Hilary’s spirit into dust.
The remaining cloud condensed into a humanoid form. The same beautiful woman who I’d heard beneath the waves. “Gaia!” Alison screamed.
Another one of the Evil Three shrieked. Rather than scamper away from the circle, Alison jumped towards it. I caught the back of her skirt and dragged her back. Something about the desperate look in Gaia’s eyes had my pulse racing. The drop in temperature made my limbs groan as Alison fought against me.
The being inside the circle phased between youth and decay. Her body began to increase in stature until I had to crane my next to look into her eyes. They were two obsidian orbs. She grew too big for the containment of the magic circle. When she touched the edges of it, the darkness inside me reacted instinctively. It didn’t distinguish friend from foe. All the magic understood was that I wanted the being inside the circle contained. It lashed out with a charge of sparkling black light that lit Gaia up from inside out.