“You mean enough of their own blood and bodies,” she clarifies. “To conjure magic when you’re not strong commands a self-sacrifice. But it’s not like fasting or giving up something for Lent like Catholics do. It’s vicious, cutting off all your fingers, sometimes a hand or even an arm. In the most extreme cases witches are known to sacrifice an eye.”
I smile. Emme is almost as book smart as Dan. “You cracked more than a few of Taran’s witch books, didn’t you?”
“Taran really struggled in school.” She shrugs, growing timid. “I wanted to help her, and maybe learn a little more about witches.”
She jumps away when another creepy-crawly lands on top of her. “This doesn’t appear to be a stable spell, no matter all the sacrifices used to cast it.”
I pop another cracker in my mouth. Hey, they’re pretty good. “There are a lot of holes in the spell,” I agree. “But this place wasn’t meant to last forever.” I huff. “From what I can tell, it won’t last the night.”
A few more “plops” signal more bugs hitting the moist sand. “Bren, what are we going to do if this bubble breaks open?” Emme asks.
I polish off the last cracker and shove the plastic packaging into my pocket. “Swim,” I suggest.
Panic sends her back toward the exit. “I don’t know how to swim,” she says. “You know as much.”
I speak between bites. “Seeing all the crazy we go through on a monthly basis, you couldn’t have squeezed in a few lessons?”
More bugs land on the sand when she shakes out her hair. “When would I have squeezed those lessons in, Bren? Between my shifts in Hospice or when I wasn’t being chased by something rabid?”
“All right,” I say. “I can see your point.”
Emme lurches away from a spindly spider thing. More of that smell brushes against my nose, this time from the section of rock closest to Emme. I take a chance and give it a push. It gives a little. I press more of my weight into it, shoving my hands aggressively forward.
I step back, frowning when I see the indentations my hands made. It’s like cement in here, the way it gets when it’s close to hardening.
“The walls aren’t real,” Emme says. Her fingertips run along my handprints. She pushes at the center of the palm. It doesn’t give, but that’s not what she’s trying to do. “Or they were, but like the rest of this place, they’re coming undone.”
I scratch at my beard and look around. “Em, what’s the Latin word for open?”
“Abre, I think,” she replies.
My hands grip the wall. “Okay, hold your breath.”
“Hold my breath?” Her weight shifts from side to side as she maybe or maybe not questions my sanity. “Are you serious?”
“Yeah,” I say. “What’s the problem? You said it yourself, this place isn’t real.”
“What’s my problem?” she demands. “Just because it’s not real doesn’t mean I’m ready for the remains to crumble around me and drown.”
I push off the wall. “I sense you have some doubts here.”
“You think?” The flashlight from my phone slams into my eyes when Emme rams her hands on her hips. For the first time ever, I can catch a small likeness to Taran. It’s fair to say, I could’ve gone without catching that likeness.
“I know it seems like we went far, but I don’t think we’re more than a few feet from the surface.”
She blinks back at me. “How many feet?”
I give a one shoulder shrug and look up. “I don’t know, twenty, maybe forty?”
“Oh,” she says.
Emme nods the way my last date did before she tried to run me over with her car. So what if I accidently hit on her MILF of a mom? These things happen.
“Only forty feet,” she says. “Forgive me for sounding so irrational. I don’t understand why I fretted so.”
I laugh. Then again that broad wouldn’t have used a word like “fretted.”
“Bren,” Emme says. “Don’t laugh. I don’t want to die.”
My features soften and my laughter dwindles. “I won’t let you, baby.”
Emme stops moving. Slowly, very slowly, she adjusts her purse so it crosses her chest. She pinches her nose and gives a nod.
With that, I press my shoulder into the wall. “Abre,” I mutter.
I shove harder, adding more command to my voice. “Abre!”
My beast perks up, the magic that houses and nurtures him, flowing through me. “Abre!”
Light floods the space as the walls expand. Insects rain down in sheets. I ignore the clicking sounds of pinchers at my ear, the scurry of their tiny limbs, and the bodies sliding down my back, clawing to hang on.
The wall isn’t that hard to push, not like that flat stone it took Emme’s force to set aside. It’s more like how a human would shove a heavy piece of furniture across the floor.
Each motion, each budge forward, releases more of that smell, like opening a window and allowing the air to drift through in pungent bursts.
In a blur of soft motion, the layers of spells dissolve into one, stacking on top of each other to form a semi-circular wall of stone, the size of a small track field swarming with bugs. The insects topple all over themselves, scurrying through the wet sand at my feet where it’s safe and where mounds of fresh food await them.
It’s kind of cool. These bugs, lake critters, whatever you want to call them are different from what I’ve seen around Tahoe. You get used to the spiders and everything that burrows through the forest floor. For years, the paws of my beast have uncovered them as they kick through mounds of soil, rock, and dirt.
These little guys don’t get to see the outside world. They get only specks of light from the moon and sun. I envy them, in a way. They don’t have to belong. They’re never judged. They just
