I scurry after her with the others in tow. The shelves go on for a while, but instead of darker and gloomier, the wide corridor grows lighter. Grass sprouts from the soft earth, and one by one, small shrubs and neatly pruned trees pop up in sight. It happens so gradually that I can’t tell exactly when the shelves of ingredients give way to the greenery. And the torches on the walls are gone because, somehow, there is daylight underground.
We gasp at the orange light of the sunset happening above ground.
“How is this possible?” I gape in awe.
Charity grins and points to the roof, but as my gaze follows her gesture, I only frown in confusion.
“The ceiling is charmed with light transparency,” Charity explains. “It needs frequent stitching, but the result is awesome. The charm negates the shade the soil above it casts. From the outside, there’s no difference, but the roof lets sunlight reach through to the gardens.”
A mini explosion goes off inside my head as I try to make sense of this charm. Seff gapes, while Awan, for whom this doesn’t seem to be news, only beams at Charity. Even Vanessa can’t hide her wide-eyed admiration.
Charity doesn’t revel in our awe for too long, though. She leads us deeper into the gardens where the shrubbery gets denser. It gets harder to view the plants in isolation. They seem to have grown together, like intertwined hedges and jungle vines, leaving only a narrow path for us to walk in winding circles.
“Here.” Charity stops in front of the densest wall of vines—murky green and knotted so tightly that one would need to saw through them to get to the other side.
I hover behind Charity, then move around her to look closer. It’s hard to tell from the shade cast by the lush foliage all around us, but it seems like there’s something behind the wall of vines.
Gooseflesh covers my forearms, unbidden. The sun is setting, so even the charmed ceiling won’t help us see for long.
“Perhaps we should do this another time?” I propose sheepishly.
Charity clicks her tongue three times in quick succession. “This place is rarely empty. The night we reinforce the haze is our window. I assume you wouldn’t want to wait a month for the next one?”
I sigh, trying to chase away the sudden feeling of unease. “Okay, let’s do it quickly. But we’ll need more light.”
Twilight is already falling outside, making the breathtaking gardens turn ominous, like the twisted shadows of the giant plants are picking their moment to come alive. We pull out our phones, flashlights at the ready.
Charity fishes the vial of Fowler’s blood, which Jean passed on to her after she got her clue. She doesn’t fuss, but quickly dips a Q-tip into the vial and touches the bloodied tip to the center where the knotted vines are so tightly intertwined, grown together over the years. The effect is instantaneous.
The vines adjust, as if waking up, but they don’t sweep away to let her pass.
“Err... Is this supposed to happen?” Awan seems to be holding his breath when he asks.
Charity takes a step closer to the vines. “I think I know what it wants. I need to let it take me.”
Awan lets out a nervous laugh. “You forget, love, I’m supposed to be the funny one in our relationship.”
Charity whips her head back dramatically to look at him. “I’m not being funny. The room won’t hurt me. I’m a charmer. The test I need to pass is on the other side of the vines. Just stay here and keep calm. I’ll be right back with my box.”
With that brave statement, she turns her back on the wall of vines, takes a cleansing breath, like she’s about to enter the spa, and leans back into the plants. It looks like a trust fall. The vines snap to life, catching her and twisting around her.
For a moment, that makes us exhale with relief, but then the vines tighten around Charity, grasping her limbs, her torso, her head, her neck. Charity flinches, no longer so at ease, but still trying to remain calm. The rest of us stare, horrified that if we try to do something, this will turn even worse in a blink.
New vines swim up to the surface while the ones grasping Charity sink deeper into the darkness. We turn the flashlights on our phones at once, pointing the light into the mad tangle of vines, but it’s hard to spot anything more than the general outline of her body.
“Charity?” I can’t keep the note of panic from my voice.
She grunts. “It’s not letting up.”
“Don’t sstruggle.” Vanessa is better at masking over her worries than I am, but her eyes betray tension. “Isn’t that how it’s supposed to work?”
“It’s supposed to let me go!” Charity squeals from behind the wall of vines. “Let me go!”
“Something isn’t right.” I pant, trying to keep the wave of sinister panic flowing to me through my link to Charity.
“We need to chop it all off.” Seff points to the vines.
“Don’t even think about going in there,” Awan warns. “It’s only going to make things worse.”
“Ahm, guys...” Vanessa’s gaze travels up to the ceiling, following the twisted vines. “I think we have another problem.”
We point our phones up, but the slight crackling of wood already sets my expectations. The vines are growing in every direction, slipping out, reaching from wall to wall, from the floor to the ceiling. They extend steadily, as if trying to reach every other plant in the garden. And, eventually, us.
“Why isn’t this test working out as the rest?” I ask Charity as much as myself. There’s something we’ve missed. Something that makes the charmers different.
Different. Of course, they’re different. They come together easier than any of the other legacies. Their dodgeball team works as one. And they’re out there, stitching the haze in a well-coordinated joint effort. Whatever the test is, a single charmer could never pass it.
“We need more charmers...” I breathe as the terror of that realization grips me around the throat. “We need charmers on this side of the wall of vines to help the one inside.”
Charity groans from the center of the tangled mess of vines. “Of course. I’m so stupid. If the hidden legacies are dangerous, the charmers would make it as hard as possible for someone to free their powers. A single charmer could never get the clue. They’d all need to agree.”
“So, this is the room’s messed up way of checking whether all charmers agree to free the hidden legacies?” Seff points his light to the place where we see small patches of Charity’s clothing and hair in between the vines. “Can’t say I’m loving it.”
“We need to call the other charmers right now,” Awan unlocks his phone, ready to call them.
“No!” Charity squeals, but it’s hard to say how much of it is a reaction to his suggestion and how much is pain from the tightening vines around her. “There’s no time. You need to freeze the growth of the vines and reverse it.”
“Us?” Vanessa coughs out. “Ssorry, but I’m the opposite of a charmer, if you didn’t know...”
“I swear, Vanessa—” Charity’s voice morphs into a panicked yelp.
“Just tell us what to do.” Awan’s plea sounds crisp against the crackling of the moving vines.
“You’ll need edelweiss flowers, angelica and yarrow. Three parts yarrow and two parts angelica to each edelweiss. Make four bundles and prepare to burn them.”
We scramble on our way back to the shelves with herbs, stumbling over the vines that seem to reach for us slowly from the ground, as if knowing it’s only a matter of time before they wrap around us.
Searching the hundreds of shelves by the meager light of the candles on the walls and the dizzying, moving phone flashlights is not easy. We split up and yell whenever we manage to locate an ingredient, but even with a few of us on the task, it takes us a while to find all three plants on the unfamiliar shelves.
Trying not to think of the vines tightening their grip around Charity, we follow her instructions regarding the necessary proportions and bind four identical bundles. But the darkness makes it harder to find our
way back to Charity.
Seff leads us, relying on his sense of smell. Vanessa takes one of the candles from the wall to bring with us so we can light the herbs. I’m careful not to catch a glimpse of the flame, dreading what I might see in this very inopportune time.
“Charity?” Panic seeps into Awan’s voice when we’re back by the wall of vines.
“Here,” she pants.
If she can still speak, the vines aren’t trying to suffocate her. A little bit of good news.
“Now, you’ve got to position two of them at the bottom of the vines,” Charity says.
“Which vines?” Vanessa looks down at the vine roots in confusion.
I’m inclined to agree. The vines are a jumbled mess, which makes it impossible for us to trace their source.
“Right where I went in,” Charity rasps. “And you have to move the other two.”
“Move them how?” I glance from face to face to check if any of my friends might have an idea.
Out of impatience or confidence that he can do it, Awan steps up first. He lights the top of one bundle of herbs while Seff positions the first two at the foundation, careful to keep them upright so the grass doesn’t catch fire. The ground is muddy, so I don’t think that’s much of a risk, but we don’t want the smoke to die down because of the damp grass either.
Awan grasps his bundle, at the ready. “Describe the motions.”
Seff, Vanessa, and I look between ourselves.
“Don’t expect me to do it,” Vanessa says. “I might sspoil the whole thing with my viperness.”
Seff grabs the bundle of herbs before I can say anything back. “Let’s go, Charity. What do we do?”
“Awan, do you remember the whoosh okay move?”
He touches his thumb and index finger, then whips the bundle of herbs with his other hand and swipes the okay sign over it, cutting the smoke. Seff repeats the movement right after. Thanks to his wolf reflexes, he’s up to the task.
Charity explains the movements to them one by one, but I only hear the vines groan as they expand.
“It’s not working,” I call out to Charity.
“Agh,” sounds through her gritted teeth. “I need to do the chant.”
“But you can barely breathe,” Awan protests.
“Doesn’t matter,” Charity manages to say. “You’re not charmers. Even if you do all the movements correctly, it still wouldn’t work without a charmer.” She groans, trying to adjust in the tight grip around her. “Do the movements exactly as I explained, not too quickly or slowly. Now.”
Seff and Awan perform the movements, approximating what we’ve seen charmers do as best they can, while Charity starts the low hum of unintelligible words.
The charm works, well, like a charm.
The vines freeze, then slowly seem to shrink back. Vanessa and I point the flashlights of our phones to the walls and ceiling to watch the reversal, breathing a sigh of relief. But after a moment, we realize the reversal isn’t exact. The vines have retracted from the walls and ceiling, and they’ve let Charity go, but the tight wall of vines she leaned into is now separating her from us.
“Are you all right?” Awan asks.
“I’m fine.” Through the vines, I catch glimpses of Charity moving about freely and checking her body for scratches. “The box has got to be somewhere in here.”
My body tenses with a prickling sensation over my skin. Darkness has long fallen, so we only see by the light of our flashlights and the one candle we brought. We do our best to bring the light to Charity, but the thick vines, interwoven so tightly together, make that next to impossible. And she seems to wander farther away from us.
“Okay...” Charity says after a moment. “I’ve got some good news and some bad news. Good news is I found the box.”
We all know better than to cheer.
“Bad news is that there’s a giant Dracula’s Lily in front of it. The second I touch the flower to move the box, it will release a cloud of gas, which not only stinks obscenely, but also causes severe skin irritation. If the vines start moving again, I won’t be able to get out before the gas burns my skin raw.”
There’s a dead beat of silence, during which I curse the dreaded sense of helplessness. “So, what do we do?”
“You’ll need to get me the ingredients for a charm that will protect me against the gas. With my extended powers, I can absorb the charm as a surface shield protecting my body.”
“Got it,” Awan says. “What can we get you?”
“The issue is that the ingredients will have to be fresh, not dried for this one.” Charity pauses, hesitating, but since none of us challenges her, she continues, “I need eight chamomile blossoms, one common sundew flower, a black calla lily with the stem, and four marigold petals.”
“What about the anchor, if there will be no dried herbs?” I ask.
“You three go get the flowers,” is all Charity says. “Awan and I will figure out the anchor.”
It takes us a solid fifteen minutes to find all ingredients in the garden. The calla lily is easy enough to spot from a distance, but I end up wading through three overgrown shrubs to finally get a black one. Seff has sniffed out the chamomile and marigold, which leaves Vanessa to search for the common sundew flower. When we all meet up back in front of the wall of vines, she holds out her hand with an expression of utmost disgust.
“Eww... It’s ssticky.”
“That’s how it traps its prey.” Charity has come as close as she can to us, reaching a hand through a small opening between the vines.
“Prey?” Vanessa hands her the apparently yucky flower and hurries to wipe her hand on her jeans.
“Like bugs and worms,” Charity says. “You’ll be fine.”
Still, Vanessa keeps wiping her hand. We give the rest of the ingredients to Charity through the opening, then I glance at Awan.
“Can’t she do this with a representation doll? Bringing you as an anchor might piss off the room.”
“Not to worry,” Awan says with a smirk. “I’m not the anchor.”
His eyes flash bronze, glowing in the darkness. His skin sparkles for a second before the mountain lion protector jumps out of him. He hops in place, then plants his front paws against the vines, trying to get closer to Charity. Like a giant cat that wants to lick her hand.
With Seff’s assistance through the opening, Charity burns the flowers to dust, which she then sprinkles over the protector.
“It will work best when I bind myself to a source of light,” she explains. “The Dracula’s Lily hates light.”
Behind the wall of vines, a purple sheen settles over Charity. The charm has worked.
“Okay, guys,” she says. “I’m ready, but as soon as I get the box, the flower will gas up this place.”
“So?” Seff drags out.
I swear Charity is rolling her eyes, even though I can’t see her under the shade of the dense vines around her. “So, I’m going to be fine, but what are you waiting for? Get out of here.”
Chapter 9. Cami
Getting to the exit (and safety) is not easy in the near complete darkness. Even though we’re pointing our flashlights at our feet, the uneven terrain makes it hard to pay attention to every branch and outgrown root in our way. Behind us, the hissing sound of the Dracula’s Lily makes me anxious to hurry.
We spill out into the hallway and shut the door behind us in case the gas spreads out past the gardens. Hopefully, the plants there should help clear the air soon, and Charity will only need her shield long enough to snatch the box and get back to us.
Awan’s glowing eyes, as unnatural as they are in their appearance, make me relax because that means the protector is out there with Charity. With my super hearing, I’m the first to notice her footsteps and rest my back against the wall with relief.
Charity pops out of the room with Awan’s protector, who quickly jumps back into him.
“Are you all right?” Awan asks Charity, his eyes now dark brown.
&nb
sp; She wipes her temple with the corner of her sleeve as the charm flickers out with the disappearance of the protector.
“Wow, that was riveting,” she giggles, much unlike her usual self. “I’m fine, yes. Now, let’s see what we’ve got here.”
We go up to the ground floor and collapse on the couches in the common area. Charity doesn’t seem to have the strength to break the lock, so Seff helps her pop it open. There’s a sachet, similar to the ones in Vanessa’s and Seff’s boxes. Instead of salts or powder, the contents of it are tiny red and yellow blossoms I can’t identify.
“Scarlet milkweed?” Charity murmurs the question.
“You’re asking us?” Awan’s comical expression makes us all let out a string of post-tension, nervous giggles.
“It’s pretty rare,” Charity mumbles, the only one not to have chuckled. But that might be because she hasn’t taken in his jolly expression. Instead, her beetle-black eyes are studying a note that was tied to the herb.
“Let me guess,” I say with a sigh. “You can use this to break the joint spell?”
Charity nods gravely.
I clear my throat. “Someone give me a candle.”
I need to know if Charity will be in danger like the others, though my intuition is already screaming a loud yes at me.
Seff hands over a candle he took from the wall. I want to get this over with quickly, even though I know the vision will sour this temporary moment of relief. I gaze into the flame and brace myself.
Charity sits on the floor with her legs folded under her, grasping the ashen remains of what must be the burnt scarlet milkweed flowers. Her hands shake and redden under the ashes. Then, she looks up.
Two tears of blood leak from the inner corners of her eyes, smearing down identical red trails in their wake.
The image flickers, like the vision is skipping ahead. The next image of Charity sends terrifying chills through me. Bloody tears bathe her entire face until she starts choking, spewing blood and trying to stem it from flowing from her nose too.
I shiver and take myself out of the vision. The others know better than to ask me about it, but their questioning looks do that for them.
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