The Amber Lee Boxed Set

  Was this thing responsible for the deaths of the birds in town? Were they falling whenever it passed close to them? Was it a harbinger of death, or a reaper? I couldn’t tell. Not immediately. But as I readied my mind and soul to attack the thing with all of my might the bird cawed, and the sound gave me pause.

  In my mind’s eye, the bird’s caws were intelligent. Directed. I hadn’t noticed it yesterday, but I noticed it now. The crow took flight and landed at my feet, only a few yards away. Another caw, and this time I received the message. It was… apologizing. Caw. And it wanted me to follow it.

  Right now.

  Was history repeating itself? Months ago, a big Raven was appearing to me, warning me of impending danger and leading me toward the clues that helped me solve the mystery of Lily’s death. But the Raven wasn’t real. It was Lily’s ghost showing itself to me in the only way it could. I sometimes wondered whether the bird ever truly existed in the real world at all, or if I only ever saw it with my mind’s eye so vividly I believed it to be real.

  But this bird was real. And if I concentrated enough and watched it with my mind’s eye—with my ethereal senses—I would see that it has an ethereal counterpart. A larger crow made almost entirely of shadow, with glowing yellow eyes poised at the front of its face instead of on its sides. A shadow bird.

  I had never before heard of such a thing, but I had heard that crows were often thought to be harbingers of death—and not reapers. Maybe its passing caused things to die. Weak things, like plants and animals. Maybe it wasn’t at all responsible for the death, and all it wanted to do was deliver a message. A message to me.

  But why me?

  Whatever it wanted, it had my attention now. So I got dressed as fast as I could and followed the bird wherever it wanted to take me, cautious to keep my eyes on it and reminded about the time I followed a bird right to the riverbank and then took a dip in the freezing cold water. This was all looking way too familiar, but I pressed on.

  The bird flew ahead, and I followed on foot. It took me out of the suburbs, ten minutes or so, and then into a densely forested park. This was a public park, with a hiking trail that led up to the cliffs, but I hadn’t been inside of it very often; and I had never walked off the path, either. Not that I thought I would get lost if I did, but the path had been carefully carved out through the flattest parts of the forest. The rest of it was a jungle of dips and hills, of rocks and trees.

  The bird fluttered from tree to tree, seeming to wait whenever I fell behind and take off as I approached. Odd, sure. But unsettling, too. Because wherever it waited—wherever it stayed for more than a moment—the things it touched would begin to decay and wilt away. Healthy brown tree bark would turn black, leaves would go brown and fall to the ground, and wounds of sap would begin to leak.

  Thump.

  I jumped and backed up as a large hunk of dead thing hit the ground not three feet from me. My heart skipped and bounced behind my ribcage as I approached, hands trembling, to investigate. It was an owl. An owl! I stared up into the trees to see where it had fallen from but couldn’t spot a nest.

  Thump-thump.

  Two more birds fell from the sky. They were falling.

  “Stop!” I yelled into the forest, hoping that the crow could hear me. “Stop it right now!”

  I didn’t care if it wasn’t its fault. I couldn’t bear to see what was happening here. Everything was dying, and for what?

  I stood up and searched for the bird, but I couldn’t find it in the trees. What did catch my eye, though, was a slight pillar of smoke rising into the air not far from where I was. I approached, careful not to move too quickly for fear of falling over and really hurting myself, and arrived at the foot of a cottage situated in the middle of a small clearing.

  A clearing stained with the touch of death.

  Thin white mist floated a few inches off the ground and retreated as I moved through it, step by step. The cottage was a small building. A single floor made of stone with box windows and a door on the long edge, and a chimney on the far end. The wooden roof had collapsed in some places, but otherwise seemed to be in good repair. And whatever vines had once smothered the cottage and hidden it from sight now lay dead around its feet, like a former owner killed over a property dispute.

  Something about this was starting to feel familiar. Hadn’t I written about a dying forest before? Birds falling out of the sky, trees and grass, and plants dying? The story came from a dream, and in the story there were wolves. But I couldn’t remember if they had a part in my dream of if they were just an added touch of fiction on my part.

  The déjà vu was tough to ignore, but I shoved it to the back of my mind and called out. The chimney was smoking, and that meant someone was here.

  “Hello?” I said. The woods took my voice and spread it far.

  A second passed, then another, and another.

  I called again.

  The door to the cottage creaked open, and for a moment I wasn’t sure what I was going to find on the other side. In my dream, and in the story, it was a tall, hooded figure with a skull for a face and bony fingers. In my dream, the thing I encountered in the woods was death incarnate; and it was about to try and kill me. Would death be waiting for me behind that door?

  I shouldn’t have come here. Not alone. I should have waited for Frank and Damien, I should have asked Aaron to come. Damn my intrepidity! I was about to turn around when the door opened, but the cottage’s inner shadow and darkness swallowed whatever figure lay beyond the threshold. I watched, heart thumping in my ears. Lub-dub. Lub-dub. Then, as if manifested from the darkness itself, a dark woman stepped out of the cottage like a specter out of a tomb.

  An instant passed, something fluttered nearby, and from the trees came the crow, rushing down from the skies to settle on the shoulders of the beauty wreathed in black. She was wearing an old fashioned black dress that came down to her feet and had a high neck line. Her skin was pale, but I noted a distinctly olive green hue to it. Her lips were full and red, her eyes dark and heavy with liner and shadow. But she seemed sunken, too pale, and the purple bags under her eyes gave away immense tiredness.

  Lub-dub—lub-dub—lub-dub!

  I stared, perplexed, and swallowed. “W-who are you?”

  The lady in black curtsied and said “It iz an honor to finally meet ze red witch.”

  Chapter Six

  “Do I know you?” I asked.

  “Not yet,” she said, “And yet a part of you does.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “But you will.”

  She was French. I had spent enough time around the French to recognize the accent. And if her voice didn’t give her European heritage away, her olive skin surely did. Here was a girl who, tired as she was, was absolutely stunning. Her features were soft and sharp in all the right places, eyes piercing and intelligent, and her lips full and pouty.

  I was drawn, pulled in like a fly to a trap.

  With a simple wave of her hand she broke me away from my own thoughts and urged me into the cottage she had been living in. The inside was quaint and cozy, but by no means comfortable. Broken furniture was strewn about the place, tables and chairs lost to the ravages of time, and no bed to speak of. I wondered how she was living here at all, if you could even call it living.

  At least there was a fireplace for the cold, and the cottage was warmer for it.

  We stared at each other from atop the remains of an old, crooked table. It had lost one of its legs and lay dilapidated on its side like, the corpse of a soldier left on a battlefield. Neither of us said a word until, finally, I found the right thing to say.

  “I know you,” I said, from the part of me that acted without thinking.

  “As I know you,” said the French girl.

  “How do we know each other?”

  “Through our dreams. You have dreamt about me, oui?”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “And I have dreamt about you. The red witch
. The purifying flame that fights the darkness.”

  “I don’t know who you think I am but—”

  “You are ze red witch,” she said, advancing. I jerked back a pace. “I will not hurt you,” she said.

  “I’m sorry, I just don’t even know your name.”

  “Collette.”

  “Collette, thank you. My name is Amber.”

  “Amber. A fitting name.”

  I took a breath. A beat. “So, we have been dreaming about each other,” I said, “Fine. I’ll accept that. Now, could you tell me why you’re here and why your bird has been off killing things?”

  Collette sighed and gestured to the only set of thatched chairs ready to sit on. I approached the seat and checked it for structural flaws by giving the backrest a good shake, but it seemed sturdy enough so I sat down. The French girl sat opposite me, displaying the pinnacle of ladylike manner in her posture; back straight, hands at her knees crossed over each other. Boarding school, probably. I straightened out my own back.

  “From the top, please,” I said.

  Collette nodded. “Very well,” she said. “I am a witch, like you.”

  A new witch! Part of me hummed and beamed, excited, but I contained it. I nodded.

  “A few months ago,” she continued, “I started having dreams about a red witch. She always appeared to me wearing a cloak—a red-hooded cloak—wreathed in fire. Ze red witch never spoke, but she was always my enemy; battling the darkness I was wreaking upon her land.”

  “Sounds familiar,” I said. I could barely recall the dream I had, though I probably had it written down somewhere. What I did recall, though, was the story I had written. In it, I was powerless to fight the darkness, but I tried anyway. Also, I did own a red cloak. I hadn’t used it in a while, but it was there, in my attic, hanging on a rack.

  “Indeed,” Collette said. “I could not believe I would ever do battle with another witch. I would never dream of being someone’s nemesis. And yet, we were enemies. Until I learned what ze dreams meant.”

  “What did the dreams mean?” I asked.

  “I was being told zat I would need your ‘elp.”

  “It sounds to me like we were on opposite sides of the spectrum. Why would we suddenly help each other?”

  “Because it was not me you were fighting.”

  A gust of wind shrieked through the cracks in the building. The front door swung open and a barrage of dead leaves flew in. I snapped upright and with a wave of my hand willed for the door to close—and it did. The leaves settled, the fire continued to crackle, and Collette was left stunned.

  “Zis is why I need your ‘elp,” she said, “Your sorceress magic is powerful, raw, and charged.”

  Sorceress? “I guess. But I’m new to all this still.” A few months as a True Witch didn’t count for much. I knew that.

  Collette took a deep breath and readjusted a strand of loose dark hair. “Do you know much about the realm beyond that which we see with our own eyes?”

  “The Nether?” I asked.

  “The Nether iz not truly a place. It iz a state of being for beings without a body. No. I speak of places. Realms which can be visited by those who know how to open ze doors.”

  “What exactly are we talking about here?”

  “I am talking about a place of pure darkness, where ze restless souls of the dead dwell. Waiting for their salvation. I am talking about ze Underworld.”

  “As in the Greek Underworld?”

  “Precisely.”

  “I know what I’ve learned from books. Almost every religion known to man has a story to tell about the Underworld; a realm of the dead.”

  “What if I told you zat some of them were true?”

  I narrowed my eyes. “The past months since my transition from human to witch have taught me that nothing’s impossible, but I’ve never come across the real Underworld before.”

  “It iz not a place one simply stumbles upon. There are gates and doorways, some natural, some man-made. When I became a witch a gate to ze Underworld opened before me and swallowed me whole.”

  My fingers were starting to go cold. I wondered if the fire was out but it was still softly cracking in the corner of the room, so I rubbed my hands together. “And you survived?”

  “I wandered the halls of the dead for days without food and subsisting only on whatever water I could find in ze cavernous underground, but ze Underworld changed me. I became infused with its power and emerged from a gate of my own creation, alive—yet changed.”

  “Changed? How?”

  “I brought something back with me. A shadow, coiled around my âme—my soul. It was powerful. It knew many secrets and lent me its power, but it was greedy. Treacherous. And on the night of ze new moon it ripped itself from my body, took a piece of my soul, and left me to die.”

  Collette, I noticed, spoke with her hands and was a theatrical person at heart. Her facial expressions were flawless and she spoke with such passion, I was hooked. It was like watching a movie. I had to remind myself that it was real.

  “So… now what?” I asked.

  “I am dying.”

  The cold came again, but this time it went for my stomach and sat there like a block of ice. “Dying?”

  Collette nodded. Her eyes started to glisten. “My shadow has been following me, ruining my sleep and stealing my essence. I grow weaker by the day. I cannot control my powers and I—”

  “Is that why everything’s… dying?”

  “Yes,” Collette said, “Ze bird, I was able to summon it but I cannot contain its aura and every use of my powers drains me further. I fear that before long, I will be dead—and my shadow will have what it wants.”

  I didn’t care to ask “which is?” I had a feeling I knew where this was going.

  Collette dropped her head and brought her hands to her face. Her private school composure broke before my eyes, and the woman sobbed silently. I stood up and approached, knelt before her, and took one of her hands, but she covered her face with the other. Her fingers were pale and cold. Delicate.

  “I’m sorry this has happened to you,” I said. “And I’ll do whatever I can to help.”

  I still didn’t know how any of this had anything to do with me, but I figured she needed my help somehow. She had been dreaming about me and I had been dreaming about her. I couldn’t argue with the strange cosmic binding going on between us. And despite having problems of my own to deal with, I couldn’t just turn her away.

  Number one, if what she was saying was true, then it meant that there was some kind of Shadow creature out there planning to destroy my town—assuming the dream I had where everything died held true. Number two, she was dying—and that sucked. And number three, if I were to turn her down because I had other problems, I would go down in the history books as the biggest asshole on the planet.

  I had no choice.

  “Thank you,” said Collette. “From the bottom of my heart, thank you.”

  I stood up, still with her hand in mine. Her palm was starting to warm. “Tell me what I can do, and I’ll do it.”

  Collette stood and crossed toward the side of the room, slipping away from my grasp. She had a wheelie suitcase there full of her things. I watched her open one of the side zips and pull out a ruled A4 notepad which she flipped to a page filled with writing. She also had, in her hand, a talisman. It was a palm-sized silver locket with a fleur-de-lis on the front.

  “There is a ritual,” she said, “That would draw the shadow out of its hiding place. I can then capture it and reintegrate it into my soul.”

  She handed me the amulet and I ran my fingers over the flower pattern on the front. The thing wouldn’t open, though. “What’s this?”

  “Zis is my special amulet. It will ‘elp me concentrate and focus my magick.”

  “Aren’t you worried the shadow would just… get out again?”

  Collette shook her head and wiped the space under her eyes with the back of her hands. “I have spent weeks prep
aring a spiritual bulwark against the shadow’s energy. Once it is inside, I can close ze gates and keep it contained forever.”

  “And… you’re sure?”

  “I understand your hesitation,” she said, returning to her old composed self, “But I cannot fail. If I do, everyone loses. Zat is why I am sure of myself.”

  I nodded. “Alright,” I said, “I’ll help you. I’ll get my coven and bring them out here in a few hours.”

  “Non,” she said, “No. I need time to prepare. Tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow, then,” I said. I handed the locket back to her. “Only… before I go, could you do something about that bird of yours? I don’t want to see any more little creatures dying around here.”

  Collette nodded. “Of course. And as soon as I am myself again I will do my best to repair whatever damage my power has caused here.”

  “As witches, we’re blessed with the power of magick,” I said. “I learned the hard way that, in magick, there are some mistakes you just can’t fix and others that you’ll keep paying for the rest of your life.”

  “I am already paying for zis, Amber, I assure you.”

  I had no doubt of that, but something about her energy kept me on edge. I felt like a cat unsure whether to approach the stranger or keep my distance in case I needed to scatter. I didn’t think I was in any direct danger, but I didn’t know enough about Necromancers to decide with any certainty.

  I wondered what Frank had to say about them.

  Chapter Seven

  “Oh don’t get me started on those crazy sons-of-bitches,” said Frank. I knew he had an opinion. “Those bastards are shifty. Shiftyyyyy. Messing around with corpses in morgues, breaking into cemeteries, dabbling with the souls of people just trying to get some damned sleep. I tell you, if some asshole necromancer tries to fiddle with my corpse when I’m dead I’m gonna haunt the fuck out of him.

  “What if he’s cute?” I asked.

  “Then at least I’ll enjoy it, but I’m being serious here. We can’t trust necromancers.”

  “I feel like I can trust her.”

  “And why’s that?”