Christine
After Sophia and my dad bought the story of my powers returning between doses of the potion, we focused on taking care of Mom. With flower petals, oil, and a few whispered words that barely rhymed, Sophia fixed Mom’s labored breathing and washed the blood off of her skin.
She dressed her in a white nightgown that made her look like a dying angel, and Dad carried her to bed.
“Christine, I have to go,” she said, and snapped her fingers. “Breakfast is ready in the kitchen. Make sure that everyone eats.” As I stepped out of the bathroom, I spotted shredded cargo shorts on the floor, and I panicked. The stress of my mom’s attack must’ve made Nate shift.
“Nate?”
“He’s fine,” Sophia said. “I wanted him to go for a run, but something caught his interest in the closet. Here’s his phone. It rolled under the bed.”
My phone probably would’ve shattered on the hardwood, but a tank could’ve rolled over Nate’s ancient flip phone without damaging it. I dropped it into my pocket and peered through the slightly open closet door. He jerked his furry head up at me. It felt like it meant: Come here.
As I walked to the closet, Sophia said, “Call me if you need me, Christopher. I have my phone.”
She kissed his cheek, then mine, and vanished into thin air.
Nate growled softly in the closet, and I finally went in there. He pushed the compass to me with his nose, and it stopped at the tip of my shoe.
I didn’t have words.
I’d wanted validation for the sirens in my head and the feeling in my chest that something wasn’t right, but now that I had it, I wanted to give it right back. It burned to see the position of the arrow, like breathing the magically tainted air at my mom’s office.
From Nate’s phone, pretending to be him, I texted Pop and told him about the attack and the compass. To my shocking revelation, he replied: On it. Stay out of it. Tell Christine that, too.
Of course. That was what everyone wanted. Let my mom handle it, they’d said. And now she’d handled herself right into a coma in her bed.
“Is he okay?” Dad asked. “Why is he hiding?”
“He’s not. We’re coming out.” I hid the compass in my pocket and led Nate into the room. “We should eat.”
Mom made a soft noise, and for some reason, that prompted Dad to fluff her pillow. He sat in a chair next to the bed, bloody clothes and all. “You two go ahead. I’ll let you know when she wakes up.”
In the kitchen, I sat at the counter in front of a stack of pancakes, a pitcher of orange juice, and a glass of green slime that Sophia had left just for me.
I stacked three pancakes on a plate for Nate, but he didn’t shift back. He paced in front of the bloodstains that Mom had left on the tile and didn’t even look at me as I started to eat.
“Nate,” I said. “This isn’t healthy for you.” He kept pacing, and I opened the sliding door that led to the beach from my seat. “Go for a run.” He shook his head, still pacing. One of his paws landed dangerously close to the blood, and he scurried back. “Nate … go. I’m begging you.”
He hesitated at first, and then he darted out of the door. I watched him run, and for a few seconds, he was just a beautiful white dog scattering sand along the shore. Then I remembered to worry about him and everything else.
I left a crack in the door and turned around to finish my breakfast.
Something had changed about it. My fork hadn’t moved, nor had my pancakes or the pitcher of orange juice. Everything was in place, except for…
I gasped. Someone or something had moved the potion to the other end of the counter. It rocked and rocked on its own, tilting dangerously to its side, before toppling over. The potion spilled all over the counter and dripped onto the floor.
It was suddenly freezing cold.
****
I shivered and asked, “Who are you?”
Only silence answered me. Endless minutes of silence. I felt the spirit near me, but it didn’t want to talk. Or maybe it couldn’t. I remembered when my grandmother had given me my mother’s diary. I hadn’t heard her voice, but she’d found a way to speak to me.
“I need a laptop!”
I spotted one next to the toaster. My dad usually kept his in the kitchen, partly to have recipes handy and partly because he spent most of his time in this room. I held my hands open, and it flew to me.
I opened a blank document and said, “Who are you?”
The A key trembled, and I trembled with it as the spirit typed: A N N A.
“Anna?” I said.
YES.
“Why don’t you come when I call you?”
I’m afraid of your friends. The pretty one with the candles, and the dog. Not human. That meant that she was human. Or she used to be. Even in death, she was still afraid of magic.
It took Anna forever to start typing again. I asked her a few questions that she didn’t respond to, then she typed: He said you would see me. You can’t see me?
“No. I can’t. Who is he?”
A man told me to come here. He doesn’t want you to be weak. That drink makes you weak. He told me to stop you.
“Who?”
Vincent. All of the air in my lungs pushed out at once. My grandfather’s name was Vincent. Vincent Shaw.
He said a lot of things that I didn’t understand. Then he told me to tell you to come to him. He’s where I can’t go.
“Where?”
On the other side of the light. Before I could ask how the hell my grandfather expected me to get on the other side of the light, she typed: He said you could hear him. Think of death. Tired now. I must go.
“Wait. Anna!”
The temperature rose as Anna left me, and I slammed my fist into the counter. My day just kept getting better and better. First, the attack, and now a dead girl wanted me to call my grandfather as if it were as simple as picking up a phone.
A crazy person would’ve believed her, and an even crazier person would’ve followed her instructions to go beyond the light to find another spirit.
I walked upstairs to my room, but I had too much restless energy to keep still. From there, I went next door to my studio. I sat on a stool in front of a blank canvas and tried to focus on everything but those black candles, my bloody mother, and Anna’s words.
Before long, without admitting it to myself, I was doing it—being crazy and thinking about death in an attempt to make a call to my grandfather.
The sensation of someone dying was not something that I would ever forget. My powers had given me the displeasure of feeling it many times in Kamon’s prison when Nate had killed those hunters. One minute, there was life—warm blood and a beating heart—and in the next, there was no sound, or heat. It was like fire swiftly turning into ice.
The longer I sat, with death on my mind, the colder my studio became. It felt like someone had opened a window and had let in a gust of air with a bitter chill. I wrapped my arms around my stomach and shivered. The cold air carried an old and stale scent, like mothballs or the stuffy air in the basements at St. Catalina.
It was the scent of still, stagnant things.
The air also came with noise. What sounded like thousands of voices whispered in my ears. One voice rose above the collective murmur.
“Steven. His name is Steven Dominguez, and he lives in Carson City. If you could tell him…”
The voice faded before telling me what to say to Steven. Then another called out. A woman. “Tell my children that…”
She faded, too, and more voices called out to me. I wasn’t sure, but I thought I heard someone yell, “Get out!”
Then, another voice called to me. This one was calmer than the others. He spoke just above the noise.
“Christine.” My heart jumped to my throat at the sound of my name. “Hear me?”
“Do I hear you? Yes.”
“I’m Vincent. Your grandfather. Hi, dear.”
I shivered harder, frozen to my core. “How do I know that it’s you?”
“Your mother’s middle name is Marian. She met your father at a coffee shop. You live in the house that my wife bought them. Speaking of my wife, she wants me to tell you to dye your hair blonde because it would add more life to your face.” I laughed. I didn’t realize how much I’d missed my grandmother. It was like she’d faded into nothing after I’d left New Orleans. “Do you need more proof, little Cecilia?”
“No. Hi, grandpa. And tell CC that I’m not dying my hair.” It wasn’t like I was on the phone with him, so I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to wait for a response. When none of the voices said anything, I started again. “You sent Anna?”
“Yes. She died near your house years ago. I searched for her. She has more power than I do in your world.”
“Why don’t you want me to drink the potion?”
“See.” His voice lowered to an even softer whisper. I could barely hear him. “Danger. Bad things … happening.”
“What things?”
“War. You know that … it’s coming. Trust.” His voice cut out for a painful minute. “Yourself. No potion. They need you. Your mother … worried about you.”
“I’m worried about her. She was attacked today.”
The temperature dropped even lower, and my lips trembled. “Weaker,” he said. “She’s weaker. That’s dangerous. This always happens … when hunters fall. This is when they strike.”
“Who?”
He took an eternity to answer. My heart never slowed, and my breaths were fast and visible in the air. “Magic. Old magic. Find … coven.”
Coven?
My eyebrows yanked together as that word muddled my brain. It had been years since I’d heard it. The nuns hadn’t told us that witches and wizards had families with mothers and fathers and siblings. They’d said that they belonged to covens.
“A coven?” I said. “Is that the same as a magical family?”
“Coven,” he said again.
We’d established that, so I tried a new question. “Did a coven attack her? Will the war start because of them?”
“Find … you have to...”
Another voice barked at me. “Get out!”
Then another: “Talk to Steven Dominguez...”
I covered my ears as the voices screamed louder and begged me to deliver messages to their grieving loved ones.
My grandfather finally returned. “I’ll show you. Make you … have vision. Watch.”
I didn’t know how to watch something a spirit was showing me, and now that the other voices were screaming at me, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to. Even if it was coming from my grandfather.
A sudden rush of silence told me that I didn’t have a choice. I couldn’t even hear the birds chirping outside of my window anymore. As I stared at the canvas in front of me, the lights flickered on and off, on and off, and then … everything changed.
My canvas, the stool, the artwork on my walls … they’d all disappeared. My grandfather had taken me somewhere else.
The sunlight pouring through the stained-glass ceiling cast interesting colors and shapes around the dusty circular room that I was suddenly standing in. Pop had brought me to this vault at the Magical Council’s headquarters to help him weed through Kamon’s army for innocent people. Now, I stood here alone.
“This is so weird.”
My voice sounded strange in the large, open space. Like how it sounded played back on a video. Me, but not me.
I looked up at the ceiling and stared at it for longer than I had before. It was a work of art on glass. Winged creatures soared through the starry sky. Some of them held silver moons, and some of them had human limbs with lion heads.
Stars. Moons. Lions.
Those were three of the symbols that were on my grandfather’s rings, the same symbols I’d seen in this vault and on a book that had drawn me to it. There were eight of them. A star, a moon, a lion, a fox, a sword, a shield, a heart, and flames. There was something familiar about them, but I didn’t know what it was.
I ran to where I remembered seeing the book on a narrow and dusty aisle. The books in this section were so old that they looked like they could disintegrate into dust if touched. I scanned the shelves slowly while reading the titles of each book that I passed. They made me shiver.
Blood Magic.
The Power of the Dead.
The History of Black Magic.
And then … a burgundy book with gold symbols on the spine made my heart stop.
The same magnetic draw I’d felt before now pulled my hand to the shelf. Carefully, I slipped the book from its place. The eight symbols shimmered in the dark corner of the vault. Under them, the title shimmered, too.
Spells of the Night Star.
“Christine.”
My grandfather’s voice startled me. The book slipped out of my fingers and plummeted to the dusty floor with a loud thud. Puffs of black smoke seeped onto my aisle from the other side of the shelf and floated into my face. It smelled like death.
I stepped away from the shelf, and more smoke entered my aisle. It gathered on the floor and took the shape of the ends of a long black dress. It moved slowly as if the person it was attached to had turned the corner and the rest of the dress hadn’t caught up to them.
“Hello?”
“Christine.” His voice echoed as the smoky dress shuffled away. I peeked around the corner. The dress glided down another aisle, barely touching the dusty floor.
“Yes?” I said. “Are you there? Is this about the coven? Who are they?”
The lights dimmed in the vault, and soon, there was no light at all. The sound of the fabric rustling on the floor alerted me that the thing in the dress was still moving in the pitch-black room. It was the kind of darkness that made you feel cold and lonely, but all too aware that you weren’t alone.
The darkness managed to get even blacker, so black that I didn’t know when I was blinking or not, and phantom green and purple spots danced in front of my eyes as they tried to make something out of nothing.
“You see. Open … eyes. You know now,” my grandfather said, close enough for me to feel his breath on my cheek. At least, I thought it was his breath. It could’ve been the person in the dress.
I took one cautious step back, but everywhere I turned, there was darkness and no sign of the part of the vault that I’d come from. This vision or whatever it was started to feel horribly real.
“But it isn’t real,” I said. My voice echoed in the dark room, still sounding off and unfamiliar. “I’m in my room. I’m having a vision. This isn’t real.”
I chanted that until I really believed it, until I wasn’t scared out of my mind, and until I felt the wooden stool underneath me.
I opened my eyes and gasped. I was back in my room, but the canvas in front of me was no longer blank. In pink chalk, the same chalk that was in my right hand, someone had scribbled: COVEN OF THE NIGHT STAR.
“You see … now … coven,” he said. “Find them … hear me?”
His voice faded completely, and the temperature returned to normal. I was alone again.