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Hazel stepped into the room, Merle filing in behind her.
Sophie grabbed a small bag and poured a line of salt around the pentacle, connecting the ends of the five-pointed star. The circle would function as a protective barrier, keeping out intrusive spirits while Merle called upon the Shadows. Anytime witches did magic that required deep focus, it stirred the layers of energy in the world and could rouse nosy specters. Drawn by the intensity of the powers the witch was using, they’d come, like moths to a flame, and some of them might just try to attack the witch.
Salt naturally repelled evil spirits, and the pentagram was an added form of protection. Wards would often be laid in the shape of a pentacle, the five endpoints representing the four elements, with the fifth point standing in for the power of the witch over the other four.
Next, Sophie placed five candles on the floor, one on each of the star’s points, and lit them with a match. She used the same match to ignite a bundle of dried sage—utilized to cleanse a space of dark energy—and waved it around the room.
A sneeze came from behind Hazel, and she turned to see Selene rubbing her nose. She hadn’t even realized the younger witch had lingered in the door.
“Bless you,” Hazel said quietly, keeping her voice free of the bitterness she felt.
Juneau’s youngest granddaughter sneered and opened her mouth to say something.
“Selene,” Sophie said, a note of warning in her voice.
Selene’s eyes tracked to her mother, and something passed between the two.
“I believe you’re on childcare duty.” Sophie put one hand on her hip.
From somewhere down the hallway, the high-pitched screeching of kids in full play-battle mode sounded.
“Right,” Selene said. With one last look at the scene in the room and a passing glance of ice-cold contempt at Hazel and Merle, she left and closed the door behind her.
Sophie exhaled roughly. “Please excuse her behavior. She’s been having a rough time of it lately. She was close to my mother, and not having her around anymore…she’s been struggling.” She rubbed her forehead and added in a murmur, “I can’t even seem to talk to her anymore.”
Despite herself, Hazel felt a pang of sympathy, knowing all too well what it was like to have an estranged daughter.
“Well,” she said and cleared her throat, “if this works and we can craft a new spell from the one we get from your mother, we can release her fully from the Shadows. I’m sure Selene will calm down once she has her back in her life.”
Sophie nodded, the lines around her mouth tight. “That’s the plan.”
“All right, then.” Merle clapped her hands. “Let’s get this over with.”
She stepped into the circle and sat down in the middle of the pentacle, the movement a bit clumsy due to her rounded belly. As the one who had bound Juneau in the Shadows, Merle was the only one who could release her again—or call her forth to the edge of the veil, close enough to listen and speak, but not enough to pass over the threshold and into this world.
Taking a deep breath, Merle closed her eyes. “May Arawn’s power grant me protection,” she muttered.
At that, Sophie shifted uneasily, and Hazel rolled her eyes out of view of the other witch. Always with that misguided apprehension about Arawn, when he was not the threat the witch community should be worried about. Not with the specter of other gods and newly awakening beasts looming on the horizon, and with the witches’ magic fading because of the slow death of the Powers That Be.
“By the magic of my line,” Merle intoned, breaking Hazel’s dark musing, “with the power passed unto me, I call upon the Shadows to obey my commands.”
The air thickened, pressing against Hazel’s skin as if she’d stepped into a rainforest. A coiling mass of dark smoke began to form in front of Merle, coming into view like a shimmering mirage, and the pulse of the MacKenna line’s magic filled the room. Merle was drawing on her ancestors’ powers to exercise her right to call forth the person she’d bound. It was one of the arcane rules of witchcraft that the power to unbind someone from the Shadows remained within the family of the witch who’d originally made the call to leash the spirit—or person—in the magical prison.
The veil of the Shadows coiled and uncoiled with inky gray and black, a living force with a vicious nature. It perpetually hungered and would draw on the life force of whoever was banished into its murky depths. Prisoners of the Shadows suffered from relentless starvation while being denied the mercy of death.
No one had ever been able to explain to Hazel what exactly the Shadows were, where they came from, and how the witches had first come to use them as the cruelest form of punishment. By all accounts, theirs was a symbiosis that had begun eons ago. The witches would feed the Shadows with prisoners every now and then, and the Shadows, in turn, all too gladly took them and made them suffer.
The problem was getting the prisoners out of the Shadows again. Sometimes, the ravenous depth of darkness was a bit too reluctant to let them go.
The stygian smoke in front of Merle wound tighter and tighter, and the whisper of the Shadows filled the room, raising the hairs on Hazel’s neck.
“Bring forth Juneau Laroche,” Merle called out, “bound in the Shadows by Merle, daughter of Emily, of the MacKenna family.”
The whisper turned to a hiss, the air flashing with aggression, but Merle made a sharp gesture with her hand, her power spiking, and the Shadows relented. Abruptly, the noise of their whisper cut off, and silence reigned.
For a heartbeat, everything was quiet.
Then a snarl filled Hazel’s head.
