“Wakey, wakey, little healer.”
Jewel stirred at the sound of the familiar voice. It wasn’t the voice she wanted to hear, even though the owner was the one she had reached out to. She blinked slowly, her eyes adjusting to the darkness. “Celise?”
“You rang?” The sprite showed Jewel her phone. “Well, actually, you texted. But you get the sentiment.”
Jewel pushed herself into a sitting position and wiped the sleep from her eyes. She glanced at the grime-covered windows and saw that, though it was dark, there was a hint of light beginning to break through the night sky.
“You said it was urgent. So I got here as quickly as I could.”
Everything came rushing back into Jewel’s mind, and her heart felt like it would crack in two. “I couldn’t stay there. Peri would have bound me, and I wouldn’t have been able to leave. Ifwe’re doing this, we need to get on it. I’m tired, and I don’t know how long I can keep my mate bond closed.”
Celise tapped her chin and then nodded. “I think we can move up the timeline.” The sprite picked up Jewel’s phone, slipped both hers and Jewel’s into her pocket, and then helped Jewel to her feet. “Let’s get going. We’ve got work to do.”
Celise opened a portal, and Jewel followed her through it. “Where are we going?” Jewel was still trying to wake up from the impromptu nap. The exhaustion she felt earlier lingered.
“We’ve got to make a stop to gather some things, and then we’ll head to the location that has the power we need to generate the spell.”
Celise sounded oddly cheerful, like a gleeful child on their way to get ice cream. Jewel wondered if the sprite would start skipping instead of walking.
Jewel looked around and saw that they were in what appeared to be a village—quite primitive, actually. It felt as if they had stepped back in time a couple of hundred years. The people ignored them as they walked down the dirt road that ran between the cottage-like structures on either side. Celise stopped at the very last cottage where an elderly woman—wrinkled with age and hunched over, balancing herself on a cane—stepped off the stoop.
“I wondered when you’d show up.” The old woman’s voice was crackly and rough.
“These things take time. Do you have what I need?”
The old woman tsked. “I told you I did. Why would I lie?”
Celise huffed and muttered, “I can think of many reasons,” but Jewel didn’t think it was loud enough for the old woman to hear.
“It’s in one of these pockets.” The woman stuck her hand in various places in the ragged skirt that had seen better days. Afterseveral tries, she finally pulled out a small bottle. “That’s all there is, so don’t waste it.”
“I’m perfectly capable of keeping sacred things safe,” Celise grumbled. She then turned and continued down the path they had been walking.
“Remember the part I played in this, sprite,” the old woman called out.
Celise simply raised her hand as if to wave the woman’s words away.
Soon enough, they exited the strange place and began walking into the trees, still on a path but now alone. Once again, Celise opened a portal and motioned for Jewel to step through. She did and entered a clearing. There was a large rock, as tall as a house, with vines and moss growing all over it. Trees circled the clearing, but in the center, nothing grew—no grass, no flowers, no weeds—just dirt beneath her feet.
“What is this place?” Unease grew inside Jewel, more intense than usual when she was around Celise.
“A sacred place,” the sprite answered. “Old magic dwells here.”
Jewel’s brow furrowed as she knelt and pressed her palm against the cool earth. A palpable sense of malevolent anger emanated from the ground, seeping into her being like a thick, suffocating fog. It wasn’t her own emotions she felt, but a dark and potent energy that belonged to someone else, or perhaps many others. She could feel it crawling up her arm like an insidious vine, creeping toward her heart. With a shudder, she withdrew her hand from the dirt, brushing off the remnants on her jeans with a grimace.
Celise watched her with interest. “You feel it.”
“I feel something evil.”
“Not evil,” the sprite countered. “Dark. Darkness does not equate to evil. We’ve already discussed this, Jewel. We must usethe darkness in order to bring your mother across the veil, back to the side of the living. That’s not an evil action. It’s one done out of deep love.”
Jewel noticed a large rock with a flat top, almost like an altar, though not as large. Celise was pulling things out of the satchel she always carried—the book that supposedly held the spell to bring back Jewel’s mother, several jars filled with various colored liquids, and other items that Jewel couldn’t identify and honestly wasn’t sure she wanted to.
She continued to walk around the clearing while Celise worked. The longer she stayed, the heavier the weight of the darkness pressed down on her. It was wrong. The healer magic in Jewel screamed at her to get out of there, but when she stepped up to the boundary where the dirt changed back to grass, Jewel found she couldn’t cross it. Her body literally wouldn’t move forward, no matter how hard her brain commanded her feet. She continued to step along the edge, trying to keep her panic under control. She didn’t want to tip Celise off to the fact that she was about to lose it. As she walked the circle, Jewel realized she was trapped.
“It’s almost time,” Celise said. “Just need to invite some guests.”
Jewel turned to face her. “What guests?”
