Chapter 51

Chapter

Fifty-One

AUCTIONED FOR HER BLOOD EXCERPT

Ember

" E mber! Hide!" Mom yells. "In the cellar! Now!"

I open my mouth to object—Mom can be so extra sometimes—but her eyes are wide, full of terror. Serious terror.

She tosses the vial of blood she just drew from my arm. It lands in the fireplace and she smashes the glass with the poker, and my blood evaporates in the lingering embers.

"What are you waiting for?" she yells as she runs to the door to make sure it's locked. "Cellar!"

This isn't a drill. It's the real thing, even though I have no idea what that thing is, only that she's been preparing me for it since…forever.

Heart galloping, I scramble past her and into her bedroom, and as I enter the room, her massive armoire shifts to the side, like a feather blown in the breeze. A brass handle appears on one of the thick pine floorboards, just like it does every time she's run these drills.

The handle is unnaturally cold in the hot humid air, and when I touch it the edges of the cellar door appear in the floor like magic.

Not like magic. It is magic. Magic I don't understand, and my mother refuses to even name. I've had little contact with other people outside Mom, but I've read enough books and seen enough TV to know that the things my mother can do are not normal.

"Faster!" Mom yells, her arms stretched wide above her. "I can't hold them off for long!"

I want to ask who "they" are, but I don't. Tugging on the handle, I pull up the door and quickly descend into the cold, dark space of the cellar, and then take a few steps back from the ladder as I wait for my mom to join me.

Above, the door slams shut and steals the light.

"Mom!" I reach for the ladder to climb back up to her, but it's gone.

Did I descend the illusion of a ladder, or can she make physical things disappear just like she can move that heavy armoire?

"Mom!" My scream scrapes my throat, but gets no response.

In the blink of an eye, the cracks of light around the cut floorboards vanish, and the armoire lands above me with a thud, moving back into position and landing as if accidentally dropped. Not my mother's style.

The space around me glows an ethereal deep blue, like I'm submerged in illuminated smoke, but the glow is thicker than smoke, more like a heavy liquid, and then it dissipates, plunging me back into darkness.

"Where is she?" asks a loud voice above. An unnatural voice, distorted, deep and menacing.

"Who?" my mother answers.

A slam echoes. Dust and dirt falls around me as our house shakes.

"You will pay for your disobedience!"

My mother screams. At least I think it's my mother, and the piercing sound hurts my ears and stabs my heart. Then the bloodcurdling sound fades, as if all the air behind it was consumed.

I pry my hands off my ears, not sure how they got there.

" Where is she?" another voice shouts and it echoes in my bones.

Who are they looking for?

Me?

Still in total darkness, I want to scream out for my mother, but I'm choked by fear that makes me feel weak and childish. A fourteen-year-old—fifteen in seven months—shouldn't be cowering in a cellar while her mother is in danger above, especially since she's doing it for me. I need to save Mom from whatever monstrous beings attacked our house, attacked her.

Hands in front of me, I search the space, heart racing, panic rising inside me.

I've been down here so many times during drills that I know it by heart. I reach for the stone foundation to get my bearings, my nostrils filling with musty, humid air as I step forward. The wall isn't as close as I expect and I fight to calm down as I stumble farther and farther, expecting my hands to strike damp stones at any moment.

But I can't seem to reach the edge of the room. I turn back, moving toward the middle where the ladder and trap door were.

The voices have grown quiet upstairs but furniture legs scrape over our pine planked floors, glass smashes and footsteps thud—but I can't tell how many feet are making those noises.

The sounds from above go quiet and the footsteps vanish. And still I haven't found one wall of the cellar room.

"Mom!" I shout. "Mom!" I stumble around the space again, trying to find a marker, any indication to orient myself in the utter darkness.

Finally, I sit, the ground cold under my butt as I hug my bent legs into my chest and shiver.

It's not cold down here, at least I don't think that it is, and yet my arms and legs are covered in goose bumps and the hair at the back of my neck prickles up to salute my terror.

I rock, counting to keep track of time, and then when the numbers get so high that the plan seems futile, I start to sing to myself. Kid songs, pop songs, ads from the TV—whatever comes into my mind.

Fatigue is threatening, so I pinch my arms and then slap my face. I've never done well in the dark, never even stepped outside our house after sunset, and it's so quiet down here that I'm not certain my ears even work.

I can hear my own voice but that doesn't prove much, so I clap a few times to verify that I can hear.

"Mom!" I yell again, crying now.

My nightmares visit me, even though I'm awake—recurring dreams of being trapped in a much smaller space filled with terror, smoke and screams.

But nightmares aren't real. Unlike what's going on now.

Mom's dead. Even if I escape from this tomb, I am alone, an orphan. Suddenly fourteen feels like a baby, not the near adult I believed it to be. But I can't give up. I need to be strong. And if there's any chance that Mom's still alive, I need to get up there to save her.

Standing, my legs are stiff from the cold and inaction; pins and needles scamper through them as I move. Hands ahead, I search for the walls, for the ladder, for anything that might help me orient myself and let me escape.

But what feels like hours later, I'm still pacing the room, turning each time I'm certain I've gone too far, and I've yet to find the edges of a room that I know has four sides, and I know is only about twenty feet in both width and length. I'm going insane.

It doesn't make sense, and I know it's not meant to.

This illusion of distance must be part of Mom's magic. A glimmer of hope flickers through me. If her magic is holding, does that mean she's alive? I have no idea.

I wish she'd answered my questions about how magic works, about why we stay isolated, but she refused so many times I stopped asking.

Closing my eyes, I draw deep breaths, longing to calm myself, to decrease my heart rate, to convince myself that all is well.

Light glows through my closed eyelids. I open them and gasp.

"Mom!" My mother is standing in front of me. I reach to hug her, but my arms go straight through.

She smiles and nods. "Ember, the immediate danger has passed."

"What danger? Who was that up there?"

Not reacting to my questions, she keeps talking. It's some kind of recording.

"But, my daughter, the danger you face will never pass. Not fully. I have done what I can to protect you, but at some point you will have to face the darkness."

How could anything be worse than the total darkness I've suffered through these past hours?

My mother's arm rises, and a light glows, illuminating the corner of the room that's not more than five feet away from me. Her magic, or someone's, kept me from finding that corner before.

"In this corner you will find a box," says the apparition of my mother. "In this box you will find documents, access to money, the deed to the farm that will be yours at eighteen. Until then, stay hidden. Tell no one you are alone, and—I cannot emphasize this enough—never go outside after dark. Not ever."

Her image disappears.

"Mom!" I step forward and turn but the image of her has gone.

The room fills with light, starting as a blue shimmer that brightens to white, revealing all four walls of the room, the box in the corner, and the ladder leading up to the trap door.

I grab the box, climb the stairs and push against the trap door, and it opens easily as if it's being pulled from above.

Hope again grabs my heart. "Mom?"

I climb out.

But she's not there. And her bedroom is in shambles. The armoire, standing to my left, is the only thing in the room that's where it was when I hid in the cellar. Her mattress is slashed, its guts strewn everywhere. The photographs and paintings are all on the floor, their frames twisted and the glass smashed. I shake the glass off a photo of mom and me making chocolate chip cookies when I was six and hug it to my chest.

Holes are punched into the plastered walls where the artwork and memorabilia once hung. There are holes too in the ceiling and the floor, and although I know the cellar is directly below her room, the holes in the floor open only to a small crawl space, less than three feet deep.

Somehow her magic hides the cellar, or is the cellar itself an illusion?

I decide to look under the trap door, but the armoire is back over the opening. Distracted by the destruction, I didn't hear it move. But its new location gives me hope that my mother is still here, still working to protect me.

I search the rest of our small farmhouse, but it's more of the same. Furniture slashed and broken, holes everywhere, books and clothes and dishes tossed to the floor. Even the kitchen cupboards and appliances have been yanked from the walls, their wires spilling out like veins onto the damaged floors.

Clutching the box against my chest, I search and search, but there's no evidence of her. I should feel glad that I can't spot any blood, but while I know little about magic, I know that the absence of blood doesn't mean she survived, or didn't suffer.

A wind arises, blowing torn curtains into the house and the front door slams shut.

I rush into the front room. It could be my mother and not the wind that made the door close.

A message is scratched into the back of the wooden door. My breath freezes in my lungs as I step closer to read it, every instinct inside me telling me this is not another message from my mom.

"Gullveig the Illuminant," it reads, "wherever you are, we will find you. Evanora will pay for her crimes."

I stagger back from the message. The words Gullveig the Illuminant mean nothing, and I'm a tiny bit relieved that whoever was here wasn't looking for me. Evanora could refer to my mom, Nora Cross, but I've never heard her called that.

As I try to make sense of the message, it fades, disappearing before my eyes. I run my hands over the wood, but it's smooth again, no hint of the words that were carved deeply into the surface.

Was the message just my imagination?

I turn around. The entire farmhouse is back to normal. No gutted furniture, no broken glass, no holes in the walls or ceiling or floorboards.

I rush from room to room and it's all the same. Everything is back where it was.

Breaths coming too quickly, I grab a paper bag from the drawer where Mom keeps them, and then sit and breathe into it until my light-headedness fades.

Was this, all of this, just my imagination? Will my mother step into the farmhouse at any minute, coming back from Henderson's General Store? Was this all a dream?

Is it still? I pinch my arm and feel it.

The box from the basement is sitting on the counter, above the drawer where I got the paper bag. The box is real. I'm not insane—or at least there's evidence to argue both sides.

And if I'm not insane, then whoever was here was looking for someone or something called Gullveig the Illuminant, and more importantly they have taken my mom.

I drop the box on the table, take my head in my hands, and weep.