Ten

I stood and followed her into the…it wasn't exactly a hallway, because a hallway suggests a long passageway. No, this was a small middle area between three rooms, two of which were most likely bedrooms.

When Miss Darlene opened the door to the "safe room," as she called it, something spilled out and surrounded me. It wasn't wind or a certain smell, but a feeling. The only thing I can compare it to is like feeling a light bulb that has just been turned off and feeling lingering energy and warmth. It didn't feel evil, nor did it feel good, but it was definitely something.

Magic, I thought.

I walked into the darkness, the energy that surrounded me giving me some sense of security. Whether it was a false sense of security or not, I did not know. With every step I felt it thicken like smoke around a burning fire. A lot of magic happened in this room, or so I was guessing. I closed my eyes for a brief moment, reveling in the feeling that hugged me and brushed my skin. When I closed my eyes, I could almost see a yellow cloud around us and where the cloud was absent. I could see where objects were—something large against the far wall in particular. A piano, maybe. I could see Darlene's shape in the smoke as well, like a shadow in the fog. There was something special about this room and her. And maybe I was special, too, if I could see what I was seeing in my mind's eye.

"Accendo!"she suddenly said, the strange word sounding like a command, and I opened my eyes.

Fire. Suddenly there was just fire in the darkness. The tiny angelic woman twirled around the room, waving one free hand, finger pointed. And as she waved her hand, flames ignited on candles. It happened so fast, like the dark room was suddenly dancing with candlelight, but I saw that she had lit them with only her one word and pointed finger. She looked at me, triumph in her eyes. She was making a believer out of me, and she knew it.

Now that I could see the room lit by fifty candles or more, I could see, rather than just feel, that this was an area they poured a lot of time and energy into. It was nothing like Lady Sage's chiropractor's office turned psychic den. No, this place looked and felt authentic. In a few seconds I took it all in. The windowless walls were painted dark green and a line of candles circled the entire room on one, endless shelf. The shiny wood floor had an expertly designed pentagram in darker wood in the middle of it. I could only imagine what the floor guys' faces might have looked like when they'd been asked for a pentagram. It looked too nice for Tansy and Darlene to have done it by themselves, but you never know—someone in their family could have been a carpenter, for all I knew.

An altar, not a piano, filled the wall opposite the door. It appeared to be a table, on top of a table, on top of another table, all covered with rich purple and gold fabric like a large satin cake. Ever tier was covered in candles, wine bottles with candles on them, small statues, crystals, a couple deer skulls, and dried flowers. Three green pillows with gold tassels lay on the floor in front of the altar so someone, or both of them and an extra person, could pray. Or spell cast? Either way, the sight was strangely beautiful. The room was pretty open; only one other corner was occupied with a large cast iron bowl that suspiciously looked like a witch's cauldron and a stack of books.

"How did you do that?" I asked, my voice coming out low and breathy.

I heard Tansy enter the room behind me. "She did her candle lighting thing?"

"Is it a trick?" I asked.

"No, not a trick. At least, not like a magician's trick," Darlene said as she started for the stack of books. "It's just a handy little invocation my mother passed to me and her mother before her. You don't come through a line of witches without learning a few things."

Tansy walked past me to stand near her mother. "I'm learning some things, slowly but surely," she said, and closed her thumb and forefinger around a candle's flame to squelch its light. "Accendo," she whispered while tapping the wick with one finger, and the flame returned. "But I'm not very good with invocation spells."

"It takes time," Darlene said as she picked up the top book on the stack. It was a huge, red leather book and she had to use both hands to lift it. She and Tansy both sat on the wood floor on the pentagram design, Tansy signaling me to sit with them by patting the floor next to her. I sat down as Darlene set the book before us. The front cover showed an obscene image of naked people and demons—or, um, shadows. It felt strange and kind of wrong somehow, sitting in a circle on a pentagram floor as we read a book of shadows. I could only imagine what my mother would say if she could see me now.

Darlene opened the book and the first page read, Book of Shadows. "You can see that she hand-wrote this," she said, lightly brushing the page with her fingers.

"No way," I said, leaning forward, not believing these expertly written words could have been hand written. The font was perfect, but as I looked very closely I could just barely see the dents the pen had made in the paper. "Wow."

"She had a very steady hand," Darlene said, and I thought that was a huge understatement. It was so beautifully written and the pages looked like a magical book from a fairy tale. They didn't match the very crude front cover. Though the book looked like it should be magical, I felt no magic behind it. Just a beautifully written, yet creepy journal.

"Are you sure Amaryllis won't mind us reading her book of shadows?" Tansy asked.

"Usually, I'd say yes, but in this case I don't think she'll mind."

"Why not?" Tansy and I chimed in unison, then gave each other half-hearted smiles at our timing.

"Because she's dead," Darlene said simply.

My breath hitched in my throat and Tansy gasped.

"Well, that's what I believe, anyway. She's been missing for about six years," Darlene added.

Tansy found her voice first. "How come you never told me?" she asked.

"I never thought it concerned you, and it wasn't like all of the sudden she disappeared out of our lives. I had stopped going to those coven meetings years prior to her disappearance. When one day I tried to contact her, I was told that she had been missing for awhile."

There was a moment of stunned silence. When Darlene decided that we weren't going to interrupt again, she continued, "When I met Amaryllis, we were both about thirty years old. She was a very talented and experienced white witch, but she confided in me that she hadn't always been white. Way before she was a part of our small coven, when she was a child, she grew up in a black magic practicing cult in a small Floridian town. They had done horrible things to her like raping her through adolescence, performing animal sacrifices, and the way she told me about it, I had the impression that they had done human sacrifices as well. When she was sixteen, she finally escaped them and eventually found herself here.

"The police investigated the cult when she disappeared, but came to a dead end when they learned that all of those people had either died or gone missing as well. Some of my old coven members believe that the cult fanatics caught up to Amaryllis and killed her. But I believe something much bigger and greater caught up to her—all of those black magic practitioners. By associating with black magic practice and sacrifices, I believe you make yourself susceptible to being snatched up by the darkest of the shadows."

A shiver ran down my spine and I stifled an urge to squirm.

"This also had to have happened to your friend, Liz," Darlene said, glancing at me.

I was so startled by Liz's name coming up that I froze. "What?" I asked, stupidly.

"Your friend, Liz," Darlene said again. "She's missing, isn't she?"

"Well, maybe not missing," I said, not wanting to truly believe it, even when it came from someone else's mouth. But how had she known about Liz in the first place? "Okay, maybe she is missing. I'm not sure. How do you know this?"

"She most certainly is missing," Darlene said, no hint of doubt on her face. "In my premonition, I learned that this is the tenth day that her soul has been missing. When someone's soul is missing, I would assume she were dead, but I know she's not. She's not dead, but she's not here either."

Not here? What did that even mean? I shook my head, not sure what to make of this. "How do you know this?" I asked again.

"Both Tansy and I know things sometimes,"Darlene said, meeting eyes with her daughter.

Tansy nodded at her mom. "I told her that the spirits sometimes speak to me—to us."

They looked at me and I didn't know what to say. This was crazy talk, wasn't it? Talking to spirits and Liz's soul being missing from this world? It sounded ridiculous! Then again, Darlene knew that Liz was missing and I hadn't told her that I'd even suspected it. I hadn't even told either of them that she existed! If Liz was missing, I had a good idea of who had taken her. I had thought it to myself, but hearing it come from someone else didn't make me feel any less crazy. It made me wonder if we were all crazy!

As absurd as this woman's ideas were, I couldn't dismiss some of the things I'd seen in the past month. Snippets of memory paraded through my mind: the look of horror on Lady Sage's face, those black and red unsettling eyes in the bar, and the ugly creature in the woods. As much as I wanted to forget them, these visions would haunt me, forever changing my outlook on the world.

"What do I need to do?" I asked, strangely feeling more confident in these strangers than I would have thought possible.

Darlene started flipping pages and I glimpsed perfectly hand-written text and dark-looking drawings.

"We are going to get you to where you need to go. Not tonight, but eventually. I think I've found a spell in here that'll get you into this alternate dimension, but I'm going to have to translate the elements and incantations into English. Amaryllis wrote most of her book of shadows in Latin, probably for safety reasons. I know a lot of Latin words, but she was fluent. I believe she called this other world Barathrum or Limbus, so I need to find that page."

"Barathrum," I whispered, trying to save the names to my memory. "Limbus."

"Ah, here is a page that interested me," she said, stopping at a page that read, "Warnings." She started to read the page aloud, "ONE. Do not drop or leave traces of blood behind. Blood will give the shadow the ability to curse you from a distance. It can give a shadow or any dark magic practitioner power over you and make you susceptible to possession. Any blood spilt should be burned."

I couldn't help but laugh aloud at my naivety. Tansy snorted simultaneously. Both of us knew I had unconsciously given Caymnaburus my blood a couple weeks before. As I thought about it, I realized that meant two demons probably had traces of my blood, if the demon in the woods had put curses over me.

"What?" Darlene piped.

Tansy answered before I could. "At least one already has her blood, probably two." Obviously she had come to the same realization, and I slumped, already feeling defeated.

Darlene pursed her lips as she looked at me. "Well, I guess we can't do anything about that, then. We just have to hope you won't come in contact with them when you're in Barathrum." She sighed and started flipping pages. "I guess we will skip over the warnings for now. After all, they didn't really save Amaryllis, and she wrote them."

That wasn't comforting, and I felt the beginnings of uneasiness. Was I about to make myself available to demons? Was I opening myself up to being another captured person with no way of getting home? Maybe I was already available to them, if they were casting curses on me, and I had no desire to make it worse.

Other questions came unbidden. How had I been able to see Caymnaburus's eye color like I had? How had my own eyes turned blue? How had I felt Tansy's circle fall when she hadn't? Who was that shadow in the woods, and why had he put curses on me?

"Could I be a half de—uh, shadow?" I asked, my voice coming out lower than I had intended it to.

Darlene touched my arm with her hand, trying to be comforting. "Oh, honey, why would you think that?"

I met Tansy's knowing eyes. "I'm allergic to silver, I'm just about allergic to sunlight, and my eyes are black."

"And isn't silver the metal that represents purity?" Tansy added. I had never heard that before, and I couldn't stop myself from feeling even more certain.

Darlene started. "That doesn't mean anything…" I didn't miss the uncertainty in her voice as she let the words hang.

I shook my head. "When Tansy lifted those curses from me, my whole life has changed. People see me differently—"

"That's true, she looks different," Tansy piped in.

"I sense things that I've never been able to sense before," I continued. "And last week, my eyes changed color."

"Your eyes changed color?" Tansy asked, leaning back and looking surprised. Darlene didn't move, but her expression made her look just as startled.

"Yes," I said, looking between both of their surprised faces. "I was angry at my sister and somehow we got on the subject of me basically being jealous of her appearance and when I yelled at her that I'd always wanted her eyes, they turned blue…they looked identical to hers."

"Mom, shadows can change their appearance, right?" Tansy added. I nodded, agreeing.

Darlene pursed her lips again for a moment, thinking it over. "Shadows are spiritual beings. They can't…" Her words trailed off.

"That thing in the woods seemed to be much more than just a spiritual being," Tansy said.

"If they can kidnap you, doesn't that mean they are not just ghostly beings, but real-life beings that can touch you and…" I didn't want to finish, pushing the thoughts of my mother with one of those creatures out of my mind. That's what they were, creatures. Was it possible for humans and demons to procreate, if the demon could change himself into a human form?

"I don't think it's possible, but…I just don't know."

"Doesn't she seem different than most people, Mom? Can't you sense something?" Tansy went on.

"I sense something different, but I just think that Cara has some gifts of her own, like maybe some psychic ability or some special intuitiveness."

"It's more than that, Mom," Tansy said.

Darlene evidently wanted to change the subject. "What I know is both of you have much to learn. Cara, if you want to know how to protect yourself from shadows and not live in fear of the night, we should start having meetings twice a week."

"Okay," I answered without a moment's hesitation.

She apparently thought I needed more convincing. "I believe that you are a strong, young girl, and you have the ability to save your friend and a lot of other trapped souls. I believe I was meant to prepare you and help you do this. Will you meet with us?"

I wasn't sure if I could do whatever she thought I was going to do in this premonition of hers, but I really wanted to know how to make protective circles. If I could better protect myself from Caymnaburus, or any shadows for that matter, I'd be resting a lot easier.

"Yes, I'll do it."

STOP!

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