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Chapter Five: Back From the Brink - Part Two
Rowan
Please.
Please.
Don’t do this.
Rowan moaned, trying to beg Fate. He begged, pleaded, bribed, and threatened. He cried out to God. To the Old Ones. To any and all deities that would hear him. But — like the killer, like his aunt, and the world as a whole — none seemed to hear him scream.
He tried to stop the man. He tried to somehow grab with his mind at the man’s leg, his arm, his hands, anything. But nothing he did helped. It was like grasping at smoke. Every time he tried to hold onto a piece of the man’s will, it would slip and slither insubstantially through his mental grip.
Rowan saw his aunt slink on her stomach into the bushes, searching vainly for escape. She tried to pull herself, arms reaching desperately, into the heavy brush, but the man just reached down on the ground, pulling her out by her ankle.
She screamed, clawing at the wet, soaked-through ground. But she couldn’t find a hold, her fingers just dragging through the mud and leaving long, damnable lines leading out of the dying leaves.
The man yanked her out under the clear, windy night, her messy, mucked-up hair sticking to her face and in her mouth. She begged him, with barely coherent words almost drowned out by her tears, not to do this. She pleaded with him to, please, have mercy.
But the man just smiled down at her. Rowan could feel the supreme joy and righteousness the man felt when he gazed down at Rowan’s bleeding, weeping aunt. The man didn’t even see her, not really. He couldn’t see her as a beloved aunt or a loving mother. Not as a woman or a person. He didn’t see a living creature.
All he saw was a witch.
“How’s that famous Drury luck now?” His voice bit with bitterness and bloodlust mixing with pride. He brought the shovel high into the air.
Rowan tried to close his eyes even though he knew he couldn’t. Instead, he just stared out of the man’s eyes at his aunt’s panicked, frightened face.
He had to stop this. Now. Now or it’d be too late. He had to do something. He couldn’t just let this man kill her. Couldn’t simply watch it happen. He couldn’t, but what could he do? He was trapped. Stuck. He was nothing but a Widdershins. Just a jinx. A klutz and a screw-up. He couldn’t even do a spell. A simple spell.
Foolproof, he’d called it.
And yet this was what happened.
What always happened.
He saw his aunt struggle, scrambling to her feet. On a twisted ankle, she limped away toward the forest, her whole body racked with panicked sobs. She ran, faster than Rowan would have granted her considering her injuries, but somehow she managed.
The man — a little surprised himself — followed her, lengthening his stride and jogging to catch up with her.
Rowan cheered her on when she clumsily but determinedly made it mere steps from the woods. If she reached it there, she might just have a chance to elude him in the thickly treed forest. But, just as she approached the woods’ edge, she tripped on a large, gnarled root, hooking her foot in its raised, above-ground arch. She fell to the ground, her scream cut off when she knocked her head on a low-hanging branch.
She looked back, blood pouring down her forehead in a thin river that dripped down her face, as she tried to decide what she could do, where she could run.
But it was too late.
He was already almost upon her.
Not slowing this time, the man didn’t even miss a step when she fell. No, he wouldn’t let her get away again. Swinging the shovel high in the air, readying for the final strike, he sprinted at her.
Rowan couldn’t believe this was happening. Couldn’t believe what he was being forced to endure. How was he meant to survive watching his aunt die, to feel the force of every blow as the body he was stuck in struck her? The man reared back, his weight on his back foot. Growling, he began to swing.
But, when his arm stretched back, his footing slipped, bringing him down onto the ground hard and knocking the breath from his lungs before his head hit a large boulder that knocked him unconscious.
Holy hell, that hurt!
But, before he could process much more than that, blackness — a great, blinding dark — descended down upon Rowan.
Panic rose.
He couldn’t see anything. Hear anything.
His aunt.
He needed to know what had happened to his aunt. Had she run away when the man fell? Or had the falling shovel, already armed with the man’s momentum, struck her on its way down?
Oh, God, Aunt Gilly, please, be all right!
Damn this cursed, useless, misbegotten spell! He tried to wade his way through the interminable black, that somehow stuffed his soul alongside that of this godforsaken, hell-spawned murderer’s!
“Rowan?”
He stopped, even his spirit falling silent for a shocked second. Aunt Gilly?
“It is you, right?” Her voice sounded strained and stunned.
Holy mother of an ineffable, fucking God!
He heard her laugh. “It has to be you.” Her voice wobbled between sobs of relief and peals of laughter. “No one in the family but you and Paddy swears quite like that.”
What was happening? How could she hear him?
“He’s out,” she told him.
The man attacking her? Was he dead?
“No,” she told him, “just unconscious. But I can hear you talking through him.”
He was talking through him? Was his voice, his words, coming out of this man’s mouth? The idea creeped him out even while he wondered what else he could do with it.
“I’m not sure, but I’d think, with you — a separate consciousness — in there…” she told him with a slight, bewildered shrug in her voice, “if he’s out, you’re in.”
Rowan tried to get up. Tried to move the body. If he was inside the man — if he were truly in the passed-out man — then he should be able to use the body to help. But no matter what he tried, he couldn’t make the body budge. Couldn’t even get the man to so much as open his shut eyes.
“I doubt you’re nearly strong enough to possess the body. That I can hear you at all is rather remarkable.” He heard Aunt Gilly coo sadly, sounding so much like she had when he or any of his siblings or cousins had come home crying with bumps or bruises from playing. Feeling six-years-old again, Rowan wanted to weep with homesickness.
“Dear boy, you’re stuck inside of him, aren’t you?” She came close to stroke his hair. “And because of a spell. Oh, Rowan.” She sighed heavily before she tsked. “Which spell?”
He couldn’t remember its proper name, only that it was a window washing spell. The one that let a person see and enter through windows in time. But something had gone wrong.
“And now you’re stuck,” she replied. “Do you remember the counter spell?”
He hadn’t bothered to learn the counter spell, since he hadn’t actually planned to go back.
“You should always learn the counter spell,” his aunt admonished. “Magic, while useful and — in the right hands — fairly predictable, is uncontrollable. We don’t wield it so much as it wields us.” With another motherly tsk, she said, “I told your parents that they ought to have properly taught you the Old Ways.” She let out an aggrieved sigh. “Perhaps we all should have learned better.”
There were so many things he wanted to ask her. Like how Jack and his sister and brothers and cousins were. How his other aunts and uncles fared. And how his parents were. Were they all right? Were they hurt? Were they even alive? Where were they, that his aunt was roaming the castle grounds alone with a killer lying in wait?
“Oh, dear boy,” his aunt murmured sympathetically, “you don’t even know, do you—”
Rowan froze, feeling the body jerk slightly. Oh dear Lord. Was the man waking up?
He heard his aunt’s frightened gasp. Her hand — that had been stroking his hair comfortingly — was snatched away. Rowan sat still and silent, listening for the killer. The man moaned in pain, making Rowan start. With the man coming to, his aunt had to run. She had to flee as fast as she could.
“I won’t leave you,” she swore. “Not now when we finally found you again.”
Yes, she’d found him, but to find him here — what good did it do either of them? He was little more than a helpless, hapless ghost here.
“This isn’t about me, Rowan,” she insisted. “Fate did not bring you here to help me, dear boy.” She touched his cheek softly. “It brought me here to help you.”
Magic wields us, we don’t wield it.
“You must go back,” she told him, “back to wherever you were. This clearly isn’t your way home, but you must find one, Rowan. We need you. Do you understand?”
Yes, he understood. No matter how close he was to what he wanted, he had to go back to The Elysium. He had to go back, so he could come home.
“I’ll do what I must to get you out of this body,” his aunt told him, “so you can find another way back to us.”
But how? He didn’t know the counter spell. And even if he did, he could already feel the man starting to wake. Once he did, Rowan would no longer have even this small measure of control.
“We shall figure out something,” she told him. “Now, quickly, tell me the spell you used.”
As succinctly as he could, he told her about the spell and the potion he’d used. He’d told her that instead of using a proper casting bowl to mix the potion, they’d made do with an empty jar. How they’d substituted some of the spell’s more archaic words when they translated it into English and how, instead of squeezing the lemons by hand, they’d used an electric juicer from the kitchen. He told her how, without a second person to bless the water, he’d let Calla do it. It all seemed so foolish while he recounted it. He should have been more careful. He shouldn’t have let Calla talk him into cutting corners. He shouldn’t have even tried the spell in the first place.
“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” his aunt told him. “Your heart was in the right place; you just don’t have the knowledge or experience yet. And no wonder,” she said, gripping his hand, “as few of us left do.”
But, just as she squeezed his hand in comfort, the hand grabbed back with menace.
He heard his aunt scream. She tried to wrench her hand back. Rowan wanted to yell for her to run, but the man’s eyes opened suddenly, even as his mind struggled to right itself. Rowan felt himself get slammed back by the force of the man’s rage.
“What did you do to me, witch?” He growled, the angry voice still groggy. He backhanded Aunt Gilly, the slap cracking across her face, making her fall back only to be yanked back up by his grip on her wrist.
Blood and spittle sprayed from Aunt Gilly’s mouth. “Rowan!”
“What did you say?” He pulled her nearer. “What did you say?”
Rowan gaped at his aunt’s face, now smeared with blood. “Rowan!” Her mouth was bruised and bleeding from where his hand smashed her lips against her teeth. “Rowan,” she said again before she mumbled something unintelligible.
He couldn’t understand her. He wanted the man to bring her closer again, but instead he thrust her away, throwing her to the ground. “Was that a spell, witch?” the man yelled. “Did you just curse me!”
The man pulled his foot back and kicked Rowan’s aunt in the stomach again and again with steel-toed boots. “Shut your fucking mouth!” The murderer slammed his heel down hard onto her curved-over back. She rolled into a fetal position in an attempt to protect her sensitive middle.
Rowan, helpless yet again, winced and listened to his aunt wail and groan, all the while screaming something he still couldn’t understand. It wasn’t until the killer picked up the discarded shovel and raised it high into the air that Rowan heard what his aunt was screaming.
“Home in heart, from end to start, bring me back from what was part!” she yelled at the top of her lungs. “Home in heart, from end to start, bring me back from what was part!”
Rowan paused, trying to make sense of his aunt’s words, trying to commit it to memory even as his mind wrestled with the horror of the situation.
“Say it, Rowan,” his aunt yelled while she shielded her head and stomach before the man brought the shovel down hard.
His aunt turned and rolled, evading — or at least, deflecting — his blows. The man seethed. He struck and struck and struck, never hitting what he aimed at.
With a frustrated growl, he grabbed the shovel in both hands, hoisting it up and over his head. With a heaving swing, the man brought the shovel down. Rowan saw his aunt cringe and turn, sure that there was no escaping this hit.
But, as the shovel landed and struck, bone-rattling vibrations sent painful tremors traveling up both arms, shocking any thought from both the man and Rowan.
“Stinking, boot-sticking shit!”
“Rowan,” he heard his aunt yell, “say it! Say it now!”
But, right when he was about to — the moment he was able to — the man recovered enough to slam his fist into her jaw again.
Aunt Gilly!
Rowan tried to scream the words over and over again but, no longer in control, his voice did nothing but echo within the mental prison that held him.
“Fucking witch.” The man grabbed Gillian Drury by her hair, yanking her back with his fist. “You cursed me, didn’t you? Do you think a little bad luck is going to save you?”
Bad luck?
Curses?
Rowan inhaled deeply when the realization hit.
We don’t wield magic, so much as it wields us.
Rowan was Widdershins. He had a Widdershins’s soul, no matter what body he was in. It was why the man couldn’t get a clear shot at his aunt. It was why he’d tripped. His luck — Rowan’s luck — had stopped him. Or, at least, stalled him.
If he could get the curse to work once more, he could gain control just long enough to say the spell and get back.
But then what would happen to his aunt? If he left, she’d be alone with this killer, without even the hope of help. He had to knock the man unconscious again. Give himself time to say the spell and his aunt time to run away. But how do I do that? he wondered while the man struggled with the shovel now stuck in the trees’ thick, heavy roots.
Rowan had spent his whole life trying to avoid the trips and follies of being Widdershins; he’d never thought he’d ever deliberately — desperately — try to fall into them. He had no control over his luck, no matter how he hard he willed it. And, even if he concentrated on the man, on the shovel, on the weather, on the land, nothing happened. It seemed that Rowan could make his luck no worse, any more than he could make it better.
Devil be double damned!
“Rowan,” he heard his aunt pant, her strength all but gone.
He watched her, shaky-armed and weary, wrestle with the man over the shovel. Wrenching it one way, then the other, they both tried to force it away from the other.
“Rowan,” he heard his aunt call again.
“Shut the fuck up, witch!”
But she didn’t. Looking deep into the killer’s eyes, she peered past the man and into the dark, gazing straight at Rowan. “You won’t have much time, when the moment comes. No matter what happens, you must escape as fast as you can. You have to leave me—”
“What the hell are you going on about?”
No, he couldn’t leave her.
“You must, Rowan!” His aunt tugged the shovel — the man — closer. “No matter what happens. You must survive,” she said with such conviction. “You must get back. Our family depends on you.” With a sad, but still determined look on her face, she whispered, “My Jack’s life — his future — depends on you.”
Rowan sucked in a deep breath, an inkling of her words prickling his thoughts. Replaying her words — sure there was something more significant hidden within them — he tried to figure out what his aunt wasn’t saying. He wished he could ask her, could get her to explain.
With tears in her eyes, she whimpered with fear and regret warring in the deep, Drury green. “I’m so sorry, Rowan. We should have kept up with the Old Ways, with the rituals and practices. If we had, perhaps we could have protected you better.” Her lip quivered. “Your duty to our family is to protect us, but our duty,” she said sadly, tender guilt glittering in her eyes, “was and is always to protect you.” She swallowed hard — decisiveness steeling her gaze — before she finally smiled. “Let me do my duty.”
“What are you talking about?” Rowan could hear the suspicion that raced through the man clear in his voice.
With a great groan of effort, Gillian Drury yanked hard on the shovel’s hard, wooden handle. With a deep breath, she began to chant. It took Rowan a full verse before he was able to decipher the words. An old song, one he’d grown up listening to. He recognized the Song of Spring, that was always sung during the spring equinox rituals to promote rain, growth, and fertility.
The man turned his head up, stunned when the skies opened with a loud crackle of thunder before a great pour rained down hard on them, soaking them in just seconds.
“Stop it!” The man’s voice creaked with fear before he turned back to Rowan’s aunt. Crazed panic coursing through the man, he reached out one hand to crush Gillian’s throat in his fist in an effort to stop the torrent of words still sputtering from the Drury’s mouth.
“Stop it!” The killer jerked the shovel, but his aunt’s grip was unshakable.
Rowan couldn’t believe what was happening. Could hardly concentrate as his aunt yelled his name one more time. “Rowan!” she cried over the thunder and around the still choking grasp. “You must survive. Whatever happens.”
Rowan felt his spirit drop. He listened to the thunder pound — felt the storm rage around him — and his aunt’s words sunk in with heavy meaning.
No!
No, she couldn’t mean what he thought she did. She just couldn’t. He saw her sob. “Tell my Jack that I love him. Always and forever.” And then she let the shovel go. “Goodbye, Rowan.”
The man raised the shovel, held in one large, beefy hand, high up in the air.
“Home in heart, from end to start, bring me back from what was part,” she said once more before a blindingly bright streak of lightning struck the shovel.
Rowan screamed as searing hot pain shocked through the killer’s body, his own silent cry a mental echo in the chorus of his aunt’s and the murderer’s cries.
He could feel them — all three of them — connected by the electrical current running alive within them, a burning wire killing them all.
This was his moment.
His only moment.
In the shock and scorching torment, Rowan knew the man had no control over his rigid, thrumming body. If he was going to say the spell, the time was now. But Rowan could hardly think of anything beyond the all-consuming agony.
Rowan!
She hadn’t said a word — the electric pain too much to speak — but he’d heard her. Aunt Gilly had sacrificed herself to give him this chance. Had given up her life to save him.
He wouldn’t waste it.
So, summoning up all his strength, Rowan focused on the spell. Feeling weakness and something infinitely darker threatening just on the threshold of his consciousness, Rowan yelled the spell on a last, dying gasp before the light exploded, plunging him into black.
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