Chapter 26
Imet Zale and Eva on the road above Lightkeep, out of breath and still tugging on my hat and gloves. It was bitterly cold, and the wind off the water was relentless as it needled at every inch of exposed skin.
“What is it? What’s going on?” I gasped, clutching at a stitch in my side, and fighting off a wave of dizziness. I definitely felt better than I had yesterday, but still a little off, and the ten-second transition from REM to standing out in the cold was throwing me for a loop.
“We tried to get in touch earlier—even called your house phone,” Eva said, with an expression that suggested they’d resorted to smoke signals. “But your mom said we couldn’t disturb you because you were sleeping.”
“Yeah, sorry, the whole inner balance thing knocked me for a loop,” I said. “But I’m here now, so what’s going on?”
“Come on, we’ve wasted enough time,” Eva said. “We’ll explain on the way.”
“On the way where?” I asked, jogging along to keep up.
“To where Nova is currently trying to stop her mother from conjuring a demon,” Eva said bleakly.
“WHAT?!” I cried out, though the wind stole the words right from my mouth and carried them away. “Right now? Are you serious?”
“I wish I wasn’t,” Eva said. She had her phone out, holding it in front of her like a map she was trying to follow. “Have you seen your texts?”
“No, I didn’t have time to—”
“Well, those have blown up too,” Zale said.
“Mostly from Nova. Her mom got home this afternoon, went straight to her study, locked the door, and didn’t come out.
She wouldn’t answer anyone’s calls or texts or knocks at the door.
Nova even tried to let herself in, and her mother hexed her. Actually hexed her!”
“You can’t be serious,” I gasped, struggling to keep up.
“I swear to the goddess, that’s what Nova said. Cast some kind of hex for confusion. The room went dark, and Nova got all confused and disoriented. She doesn’t know how long it lasted, but when it wore off, her mother was gone.”
It took me several seconds to process the fact that Nova had been hexed by her own mother, and then the questions began. “How does she know where Ostara went?”
“It was all those photos we took. Remember all the papers she had everywhere?” Eva said.
“Yeah, but I looked through all of those,” I told her. “And I couldn’t make heads or tails of any of it. None of it made sense.”
“Well, Nova figured it out, apparently. Don’t ask me how. But you know the papers with all the long complicated decimals on them?”
“Yeah, but I've never been great with math, and without context, I had no idea what—”
“It wasn’t math. It was geography,” Zale said.
“Huh?”
“Coordinates. Latitude and longitude. She was trying to find a place, not the answer to some magical equation.”
I felt like an idiot. Now that Zale had said it, it made perfect sense.
I’d seen latitude and longitude written out in that way before, but with no degree symbols, I hadn’t made the connection.
Hastily, I pulled out my phone, pulling off my glove with my teeth, and scrolling through the photos until I came to the papers with the lists of numbers.
She had crossed them out one by one, until, at the bottom of the page, she had circled a set of numbers, and then underlined them.
“Is this it?” I asked, holding it out to Zale.
“I think so, yeah. Don’t ask me how she thought of it, but she put the numbers into a maps app on her phone, and realized it was a spot in the woods not far from here.
Once she figured that out, she went AWOL.
Her phone goes straight to voicemail. We tried to find her at the Manor, but the house was empty. So we tried you.”
“But why does Nova think her mom is conjuring Abaddon?” I asked. “That’s a big leap to make.”
“She’s not sure, obviously, but there were other clues, too. When she came to from the hex, she tried to see if there was anything missing… you know, apart from her mother,” Zale explained.
“And she saw that there were two papers that had disappeared from her mother’s desk—a moon chart calendar, and a diagram of that conjuring Circle,” Eva finished.
My stomach twisted. If that was enough to make me nervous, Nova must be absolutely flipping out. I skidded to a stop, almost slipping on an icy patch. “If that’s really what’s happening, we can’t just go charging off into the woods!” I cried. “We need to go find help!”
But Eva was shaking her head. “I know, but there’s no time to find them.”
“Find who?”
“Our grandmothers. There’s some kind of meeting happening. I don’t think anyone’s home at your house either, Wren. Your mom’s car is gone.”
“What? That doesn’t make sense! It’s after midnight!” I said. Heart pounding, I returned to my texts. Immediately, I saw that one was from my mom, among the slew of messages from Eva, Zale, and Nova.
Hi sweetie, didn’t want to wake you. The Conclave asked us to an emergency meeting about Ostara. Not sure what’s going on, but I’ll keep you posted.
“Shit!” I gasped. “Do you think the Conclave knows?”
“About tonight? No way, or they’d be racing to get to the same spot we are,” Eva said, now leading us away from the road, and plunging into the edge of the forest.
“It’s probably about the archive,” Zale said. “Maybe they found a way in. Maybe they realized all those books are missing and that she must have taken them.”
“Xiomara did say something about sanctioning her. Maybe that’s what they’re doing,” I said.
Then I had to stop talking because I needed all my breath to keep up with Eva as she led us through the trees.
Both Eva and Zale had much longer legs than I did, so between that and my lingering fatigue, I was struggling to keep them in sight.
Just when I didn’t think I could run any more, Eva came to a sudden stop.
“We need to go slowly now,” she whispered. “We’re getting really close. Try not to make any noise.” She said this last part to Zale, who had a tendency to trip over roots and then swear loudly.
We crept forward and, as we did so, a strange feeling began to come over me.
It felt something like déjà vu, a subtle sense of familiarity that I couldn’t justify, because I knew I’d never traversed this far into the woods.
The furthest I’d ever gone was the Shadow Tree, and we’d missed the path to that long ago.
Somehow, though, I expected the trees that rose like buildings, the fir branches that drooped like sleeping arms, the soft carpet of pine needles.
When I reached out to steady myself, I knew right where my fingers would find a trunk to lean against. The feeling began to scare me.
Was I dreaming? Was any of this actually happening?
And then the trees began to thin, and I saw the clearing ahead.
Of course. I hadn’t been here before in real life, but I’d traveled here while scrying.
The clearing we approached was the very one where Ambrose had summoned Abaddon all those many years ago.
This was the place where those dark, desperate eyes met the sulfurous, glowing ones, and things were done that could not be undone.
I stopped, immobilized by fear. It took Zale and Eva a moment to realize I was no longer moving forward with them, and then they crept back to me.
“Wren? What’s wrong? What is it?” Zale asked.
“I know this place,” I whispered.
“You’ve been here before?” Eva prompted.
“No, but the Darkness has,” I said. “I don’t know how she did it, but Ostara found the exact spot where the Darkness conjured the demon. That’s it, right up ahead, I know it.”
Eva and Zale traded a startled look. Zale started to stammer, “If… if she’s right, we can’t… I mean, we shouldn’t…”
“We can’t turn back now, Zale!” Eva hissed. “Whether it’s the same place or not, we can’t just let this happen!”
“Maybe she’s not conjuring the demon at all!” Zale said desperately. “Maybe she’s just… just retracing steps, you know? Learning what she can?”
“And what if she’s not?” Eva countered. “What if she’s doing exactly what we’re afraid she’s doing?”
“But what can we do about it?” Zale squeaked, his panic mounting. “We don’t know anything about demons! She hexed her own daughter, you think she won’t hex us too?”
As we stood there, frozen with indecision, the screaming began.
We all stared at each other, round-eyed and silent for half a moment. Then, we were running.
There was no more question of keeping quiet or sneaking up on the place. We simply crashed through the underbrush now, heedless of who heard us, and what they thought might be approaching them. Could they even have heard us anyway, over the screams that continued to echo through the trees?
A violent wind had kicked up, whipping the tree branches around us, and sending blinding streams of dead leaves and frostbitten forest debris into the air all around us, like tiny tornadoes.
I knew the wind wasn’t natural—it was too warm, too sudden to have been caused by the weather.
It slowed our progress, but we fought through it, eyes squeezed nearly shut, until we stumbled out at last to the edge of the clearing.
The sight before us sent my pounding heart right up into my throat, choking me along with my fear.
Beside me, I felt Zale sink to the ground in shock.