Chapter 15

15

CAROLINA

I don’t even need to wave my hand to do it. Summoning shadows has always been second nature to me, as easy as breathing. Closing myself off to the environment. Encasing myself in darkness and not letting anything break the shroud. The shadows respond to my emotions, curling around me like a protective blanket, muting the world beyond us.

The shadows stretch and swirl, filling every corner of the room like they’ve been waiting for this moment. Declan and I can see each other, but the room beyond the shadows is hidden from sight. It’s as if the space between us and the rest of the world has dissolved, and nothing else exists outside this cocoon of darkness.

Declan sucks in a breath. I probably could have warned him.

His blue eyes are wide as they move around the room. I’m watching him try to find an explanation for it in real time. His gaze fixates on the corners of the room like a fog machine is going to appear suddenly.

He’s waiting for some logical reveal, but I can see the exact moment when it dawns on him that this is real, that he’s in my world now .

I don’t rush him. I don’t even roll my eyes. I just wait for him to say something.

When he finally does, his voice doesn’t hold the fear I expected but rather a blanket of awe that wraps around me.

“God, you’re a witch . A real, honest-to-God witch. I thought…” He blinks, scratching the back of his head. “I don’t know what I thought.”

“Probably that I was crazy,” I say, lifting a shoulder in a half-shrug.

“Something like that. Camila? She can do the…” He waves his hand around in the air, searching for words, “…the shadow thing too?”

“ Declan , a witchling could ‘do the shadow thing.’”

He looks offended. “Sorry, I didn’t realize encasing a room in shadows was infantile, Carolina . ” There’s a playful defensiveness in his voice, but beneath it, I can still hear the awe.

I couldn’t believe we were arguing about this. He’s taking this far better than I thought he would. Most people would’ve bolted by now. I tell him as much.

“You’re taking this pretty well.” I drop the shadows around us. The room brightens instantly, like the shadows were never there at all, but the shift in the atmosphere lingers between us.

“I’m not entirely convinced this isn’t a dream, but in the event this is real, I’d like to remember being cool about it in the future.” Declan’s head swivels around the room, his hands reaching out to touch shadows that were long gone. “So, Camila…”

“Witch.”

“Parents?” he asks, his eyes finally settling on my face. There’s a seriousness in his expression now, a need to understand more.

“Mom was a witch. Her parents were witches, too.”

“And your dad? ”

“Just a white man.”

“Typical,” he says. Then his eyes widen when they drift down my body. “Uh…Carolina…”

It’s then that I notice Luna has coiled herself around my body. Well, I noticed when she did it, but I’m only just now realizing that her existence is quite frightening to other people.

“You said you’d stop doing that!” Luna says, unwrapping herself from my body. “Do you know what it’s like to be napping under the couch just to be suddenly catapulted into complete darkness? You awful girl,” she hisses.

I ignore her squawking. Luna has always had a flair for the dramatic. “Luna, this is Declan.”

“Oh good, you see the snake, too,” he says, his voice raising multiple octaves and his skin paling. “Good, good, good. I just?—”

Declan falls back on the couch, seemingly passed out from shock. I don’t even try to catch him—it’s clear that the combination of shadows and a talking snake has been too much for him.

“Well, that’s embarrassing,” Luna remarks.

I raise my eyebrows at her. “That’s embarrassing? You’re almost 800 years old and afraid of shadows.”

“I. Was. Sleeping .”

“Right,” I say as the door opens.

Camila walks in with Silas close behind her. The energy in the room shifts again, lighter now that Camila is here. She always has a way of bringing calm with her.

Her eyes widen when she sees Declan sprawled on the couch. “Oh, dear. Luna, you scared him.”

“You owe me $10,” Silas gloats, hopping onto the potion table.

“Silas,” Camila hisses and then looks at me with a guilty expression. “Sorry, I thought the shadows would have got him.”

I glare at her. “How did you know I would use the shadows?”

“Oh, just a hunch. Anyway, did you get anything from the demon upstairs?”

She thinks I used the shadows because that’s how Mom told Dad she was a witch. Of course, she had planned to tell him, and they’d been on a date while I was just desperately looking for some way to prove I was telling the truth—a totally different circumstance.

I cast a weary glance at Declan, but I know he’s fine where he is on the couch. He’ll wake up soon enough, and then the real questions will start.

“Not much. Lots of obscenities, not a lot of answers,” I shrug, walking over to her. I can still hear the demon’s growling voice in my head, but nothing useful came out of him. “Is the veritas potion almost done?”

Camila nods. “Yes, it just needs to simmer. It should be done in the next hour or so. What are we doing about the Declan situation?”

The Declan situation. “Not sure. I think once the initial shock wears off, he’s going to have questions, and we’ll either need to wipe his memory or answer those questions.”

Confusion crosses over Camila’s face. “If you were just going to cast a memory spell, why bother telling him in the first place?”

Why, indeed.

Like calls to like , my magic whispers.

Enough with that, I tell it.

“I don’t understand. There are bad witches called ‘demons,’ and they’re the ones who are kidnapping all of these people from town?” We’ve relocated to the shop, where he’s sitting at one of the tables asking us questions while Camila and I are working on the veritas potion behind the counter.

When he woke up again, we returned his phone to him, and for some reason, that was what made everything real to him—not the shadows or the talking cat and snake…the phone.

“So you do understand,” I say, tossing an herb into the pot with the potion in it.

“But why ?”

“We’re not exactly sure, but there’s this prophecy, and we think they’re trying to summon this super evil being and take over the Mortal World.” Camila’s voice is dripping with her usual sunshine, and it dramatically juxtaposes her response.

“Oh, is that all.” Declan’s sarcasm is back, but there’s an edge to it. He’s trying to keep up, but I can tell this is more than he bargained for.

“I mean, probably not, but it’s all we’ve got.”

“But that’s why,” Camila starts, uncorking a small glass bottle and ladling the liquid into it, “we have this. Let’s get some answers, shall we?”

Declan follows silently behind us as we climb the stairs to the attic.

He doesn’t point out that, structurally, we should not have an attic. So, I don’t have to tell him that magic has a way of being deceptive to the untrained eye.

He also doesn’t point out that, technically, we’ve taken Elijah Thorton hostage, which is most definitely a crime. So I also don’t have to tell him that the demon has taken over Elijah’s body and that if the demon is able to extract Elijah’s soul and complete whatever summoning they’re working on, it would probably lead to the downfall of man, not just Grove Meadow. Assuming the prophecy is right, that is.

Getting Elijah “settled” in the attic had been a battle. Once he’d come to, he resumed his attacks on the reformed crystal cage. The golden strands of magic shook with every collision. I cast a reinforcement spell for good measure.

When we get to the attic, Elijah is sitting in the center of the cage with his eyes closed and his legs crossed underneath him. It’s eerily calm. Too calm. The kind of calm that makes my skin crawl.

When Silas walks in front of the enclosure, Elijah pops one solid black eye open and appears to track Silas as he walks across the room.

“Silas, good to see you.” His voice is different, deeper, more guttural. It’s a jarring reminder that Elijah is no longer in control.

The three of us don’t react, and Camila throws the veritas potion into the cage. The magic of the crystals lets the vial pass through it and shatter on the ground in front of Elijah. The liquid turns into a gas that fills the space, stopping at the boundaries of the crystals, and then clears a moment later. Both of Elijah’s eyes are open now, but he’s fixated squarely on Camila.

“What’s your name?” she asks.

He tilts his head at her, and it’s difficult to separate this creature from the Elijah we’d grown up around—the one who tinkered in his garage with the door open so he could chat with his neighbors as he worked. Kids used his driveaway at the end of the cul-de-sac as a loop, and when tires needed air or chains needed realigning, he did it happily.

The man who had always been so kind, so present, was now just a vessel for something dark and twisted.

I hoped when this was over, there was a soul left to save. The thought of losing him completely gnaws at me, but I can’t dwell on it now.

“I have many names, but the one your familiar might recognize is Nightcrawler.”

The name sends a chill down my spine. I don’t know why I expected demons to have normal names. John. Damien, perhaps.

Silas turns his head to us. His eyes are sharp, and I can tell he’s already figured it out. “He’s a lower-level demon. They’re sent to do higher-level demons’ dirty work.”

Nightcrawler hisses at the comment, and I frown. The sound is like nails on a chalkboard, grating and unnatural. It is far too late to nope out of this whole thing, but dissociating from all of this is looking pretty good right now.

“Who sent you?” Camila asks.

The veins on his neck appear to jut out, and he looks like he’s having trouble breathing. I wonder if the truth potion hadn’t been strong enough when his skin starts to turn an interesting shade of purple.

“I do not know their names,” Nightcrawler finally bites out.

“But there are two of them?” I ask, stepping forward. “Two demons?”

His fingers dig into the skin on his face and drag down his cheeks, leaving deep scratch marks behind. The sight is grotesque, and I feel bile rise in my throat. I grimace at the sight of blood streaking from them and hear Declan’s sharp intake of breath, but I don’t turn to look at him .

“Not demons.” Nightcrawler’s voice has become more panicked and desperate. There’s fear in his voice now, and that scares me more than anything else. Not demons? Were witches doing this ? “I will not betray them. They are trying to save our kind.”

Just like in the alley, an energy ball begins to form in his hand, blue light illuminating the air around him. What is he ? —

“No!” I shout, but I can’t do anything to stop him.

Nightcrawler launches the energy at the cage with enough force that it bounces back at him, and his entire body goes up in flames. The smell of burning flesh fills the room, and his screams echo in my head. It’s over in seconds, but the image of him engulfed in fire is seared into my mind.

All that’s left of the demon is the pile of ash on the ground in the crystal cage. The silence that follows is deafening.

“So…that’s not good,” Camila whispers from beside me.

Silas circles her legs in a gesture of comfort. “Well, at least we stopped the summoning.”

“Right, but they’ll try again,” I note, kicking the crystal out of place and breaking the cage that once held Elijah. My foot nudges the ash, and the finality of what just happened sinks in.

Declan looks grim when I look at him. “Are you okay?”

His blue eyes seem less like pools of cerulean and more like hard sapphires now, an edge to them. “I will be when we catch who’s behind this. We should all get some rest and start fresh tomorrow.”

There’s a weariness in his voice that wasn’t there before. I want to ask him how he’s really feeling, but it’s not the time, and he doesn’t seem to feel like sharing. He’s pulling away, retreating into his thoughts.

I also don’t want him to leave, but I can’t say that either. I know it’s my magic and its weird obsession with him, but it’s distracting me from the present danger here in town .

On our way down the stairs, Declan says, “I can take the couch.”

Camila freezes on the second-floor landing. “You’re going to stay here? Even though you just watched a demon kill itself upstairs?”

“My chances of survival are probably better with two witches, a giant snake, and a talking cat,” Declan explains like it couldn’t be more obvious.

“Fair enough,” Camila nods and continues her walk.

I ignore the feeling of my magic rejoicing at the news that Declan will remain nearby. It swells inside me, warm and satisfied, but I push it down.

Don’t even say it, I warn my magic, and for once, it listens to me…which is never a good sign.