Halo of Light

CIN

Audrey had me on a job. Again.

I crouched in a small space in the corner which I knew from earlier recon missions was a blind space on the security cameras. Libraries like this one rarely had incredible security systems.

Well, I take that back. They were incredible. Incredibly shitty. So incredibly bad that it was a wonder they had one at all. Five cameras on the whole floor.

And this floor was the floor a clever person would want to protect.

It was the floor with all the spell tomes.

Normals thought they were just old books. Special collections. Dusty leaves of paper bound beneath decaying boards. They smelled of ancient wisdom and human experience. Magic. Things normals mistook for random scribblings of mad witches who were eventually burned at the stake.

But they were prized possessions and stored the collective wisdom passed down through family lines. Spells and incantations that could craft powerful spells and talismans or unbind powerful hexes. And I was here to steal one.

Me. Steal a witch’s grimoire.

If only I were a witch.

“The cameras are off,” a soft voice said.

I looked to my right and saw two glowing golden eyes bouncing along a foot and a half off the floor. Soon an entire gray cat emerged from the shadows.

“The cords?”

“All chewed through. Only took me a second.” Bastet, my Russian Blue familiar, sauntered up to me in that little prancing way she had. She was graceful, but also very haughty and that was most obvious from the way her feet fell when she walked.

“More like ten minutes.”

“Is that how long it took? I’m bad with time.”

I scoffed. “Oh, girl. You’re a cat. You don’t even know what time is.”

Bastet hesitated. I could tell she was wondering if I’d insulted her. It would determine her response.

“It’s the sun rising and setting. Then night, then another day.”

She must have decided that I wasn’t insulting her.

“Fair enough,” I said, pursing my lips. “About as good an explanation as even Einstein could give.”

She settled on her haunches beside me. “What are you waiting for, Cin?”

“I’m sensing something. Something is off tonight.” I glanced out the window near the door. Special collections were often deep inside a library, where sunlight couldn’t reach the prized books. This one wasn’t.

The library belonged to an organization most people had never heard of: the Men with Red Hats Society. I had no idea they even existed until that day. Who would think up such a ridiculous name? Men, I guessed.

“You’re always sensing things. You say that a lot, Cin. I sensed a mouse in a wall for a moment,” Bastet said. “Sensed. What does that mean?”

“To sense. To feel something. Some sense you rely on—smell, taste, hear—told you there was a mouse in a wall.”

She began licking the back of her paw. “Hmm. It may not have been a mouse.”

I frowned at her, wondering if I should make the move for the tome and then hurry out of there. The hackles on my neck were lifting. I was feeling something now. A presence. Or a dread that something terrible was going to happen, like maybe a supervolcano under Greenland was about to explode and destroy everything along the United States’ eastern seaboard.

“I’m surprised you didn’t go after the rodent, cat,” I said, shifting on my heels to stare toward the other side of the small room.

“I would have, but it vanished.”

“It vanished?” My voice was heavy with disbelief.

“Yes.”

I watched her through the shadows for a few seconds before I realized she wasn’t going to elaborate. She was a cat, after all, so elaboration wasn’t her strong suit though I would have sometimes appreciated that. Perhaps just a bit of imagination for the moments when she left some fact enigmatically hanging between us and I had to sort whether the information was relevant or background noise. But more details often came with more drama, and Bastet being a drama queen would have simply added to the trouble she sometimes caused.

So I nodded and dropped it. What I needed to do was decide if I was going to grab the tome and get out of Dodge or if I was going to get out of Dodge without the tome.

Audrey said she needed it as part of her research into crafting talismans and amulets for non-witches. And of course that benefitted me in some way, not being a witch, and it also gave me a side income. Audrey was independently wealthy and… I was not. In casual terms, I was poor as dirt. I didn’t mind it, there was only myself and Bastet to support, so I got by just fine. Money dropped from the sky when it needed to. Jobs cropped up, most of them from Audrey who sat on her prim little stool in the bookshop and fortune-telling half of our shared space, directing me out into the larger world to retrieve treasures for her.

The more she discovered or crafted spells to benefit those like me, sorceresses, the better. There was nothing I loved more than using her witchcraft to my advantage.

I guess that made me a mongrel of some kind.

Well, then, that decided it. I needed the tome. The security cameras were off, what was I waiting for? The fools who owned this library clearly did not understand the trove of wisdom in their clutches, so I was going to relieve them of the weight and not feel a single ounce of guilt about it.

In the words of a famous archeologist, it belonged in a museum. Or at least in Audrey’s hands, where it could do the world good, i.e. me.

I cast a glance around the room, checking the shadows, feeling them with some extra sense, making sure there was nothing waiting to hurt me, and rose to my full height. Bastet’s golden eyes followed me. I held out my hand, which began to glow with a soft blue light. My fingertips looked like the single flame of a candle, and I walked through the stacks of books. The golden etched titles jumped out at me as the light from my hand flickered off them. Bastet padded along behind me. The Strange Visions of Hester Dimple. Incantations of Light. The Grimoire of Goody Mellodie. Sorcery for Modern Ladies.

If I’d had a grape-flavored popsicle and the time, I’d have grabbed a few, curled up on a sofa, and perused them. Books like these were often the only ones in print. Their illustrations were usually hand-drawn and ink-blotted. Sorcery books could help me, but rarely did they give me information that furthered my skills.

Finally, I located the one I’d been sent for. Peggy Darling’s Magick Book: A Reckoning Before Her Deathe.

A cloud of dust lifted like a ghost as my fingers settled on the binding. Gingerly, I removed it from the stack of old tomes. The boards were dark leather and the cover was embossed with the title in gold etching. A pattern encircled the cover in a rectangle. The ragged pages extended past the crooked edges of the boards. I opened the cover and studied the title page. The late sixteen hundreds. The Massachusetts area. Why was I not surprised?

There was a scrawled note full of inkblots. “On this day, I have seen a darkneſs that mine eyes do not yet understand. From this tar ſpille, ſcreams echo. It reaches into the hearts of the villagers, my once deare neighbors whom I have healed and cared for. It conſumes them. I have ſeen mine own future. Tomorrow they come for me. — Peggy Darling, Healer.”

A sigh escaped me. I shut the book, tucking away my indignation at normal people’s responses to magic. To healers. Sorcery, witchcraft, all of it. There would be time to reflect on it later.

“Found it, Bastet.”

“Very good. Now let’s leave. I heard something in the walls as soon as you pulled it out.”

“That’s what she said,” I answered her, then reconsidered taking a joking tack. “Wait. What do you mean, cat?”

“Another mouse. It was there, now it is gone.”

“Enigmatic.”

“I don’t know what that word means.”

“Mysterious?”

“Something is coming,” Bastet said, perhaps deciding that mysterious made sense. 

I knew what she meant. That sensation, the one about something being off, it had gotten stronger. I turned and looked for what could be disturbing me, searching through the shadows and peering into the dark corners.

The darkness became inky black as though even the emergency lights of the special collections room were blotted out. The halo from the blue light flowing off my fingers stuttered as a blanket of sheer night swelled from the walls and oozed through the stacks of books.

I backed away from the swelling tar and bumped into a shelf. My heart thudded at the same time that I collided with the shelf, startling me. I turned and hurried to the door.

“Come on,” I said, scooping Bastet up. She could run fast, and see better than me in the dark, but there was no way in Hades I was letting my cat suffocate in whatever was coming after us.

“I should be carrying you,” she observed in her deadpan tone.

“I wish you would!”

“You know that I can see very well in the dark, Cin.”

“I know!” I banged through the special collections door, shoving it open as hard as I could. It slammed against the outside wall and the glass shattered, raining down on the tile like raindrops over wind-chimes.

Basted placed her paws on my collar bone and peeked over my shoulder as I trotted through the upstairs floor. “Have we given up on being sneaky?”

“Yes, this isn’t exactly the time for stealth, cat.”

I skidded through a turn as I raced toward the stairs to the main level.

“Is it still behind us?” I asked, pushing Bastet up onto my shoulder more. My other arm held the grimoire tightly to my chest. “Can you see it?”

“Yes. The shadows are moving like they’re alive.”

I couldn’t suppress a shiver. “What the hell is it?”

“I thought you would know. I hear screams in the walls.”

“Screams?” I echoed. I didn’t have time to make sense of what she was saying. My brain was too busy focusing on staying ahead of the shadow.

“Animals shrieking. Then going silent quickly, like when my talons destroy them.” Talons. Bastet had learned that word a week ago. 

“What kind of animals? Mice? Are you saying the mice scream, then go silent?”

“Yes, Cin. I think that shadow is what killed the mouse.”

“Mouse. Just one mouse has died. Or are all the mice dying?” I crunched down on my lip, the fear intensifying as I tried to stay ahead of the unknown shadow. “A lot of carnage, it sounds like.”

“All the mice, Cin.”

“That definitely counts as carnage.”

I raced down the stairs, skidded around the landing, then hurried down the last set, being careful to not accidentally toss the cat. Through the unlit main floor of the Men with Red Hats Society library, the window of the narrow door of the exit glowed with the outside street lighting. The silhouettes of trees loomed just beyond. My heart skipped five beats at their velvet profiles. Me. Afraid of the shadows. Since when? Well, since they’d recently come to life and began pursuing me, the dicks.

My pause had taken just three seconds. There was no time for a debate with myself about what my next move was, really. One look over my shoulder, back up at the stairwell where the shadows seemed to ripple with dark energy, and I knew: I had to leave the stupid building.

I took off at a sprint, leapt over a bean bag or two in the kids section of the little library, then slammed through the door I’d gotten us through earlier. I’d been particularly proud of that one, using both my magic and my lockpicking skills to break in. I’d left the stupid door unlocked just for an occasion such as this. In my line of work, I tended to like having fast-getaways ready even if I never needed a getaway driver.

“Carnage.” Bastet repeated,  trying out the word. “What’s that?”

“Death. Blood, violence, gore. What you do to mice when you get a hold of them, cat.”

“I do nothing that shouldn’t be done. It’s my calling. What I was made for. But if the shadow gets to us, will it kill us?”

Us. I shivered. Not if I can help it.

The two of us. My cat and me. On that topic, having a team meant more liability. I worked alone, my only partner, Bastet, the Russian Blue. Even when Malcolm begged me to take him along, I refused for just this reason—getaways, malicious shadows, near-death experiences and death-experiences both. Sometimes people died. Most people I’d known and loved were actually already dead. My parents. My aunt. The one and only friend I’d had throughout my school years, Christie.

Bastet could evade just about anyone, being a cat and all. A demon like Malcolm with a couple of clever glamours on him was too big and bulky to ever come in handy. Stealth just didn’t work with him because glamours didn’t change his actual size or shrink his horns down—they were always getting caught in things: chandeliers, clothing racks, tree branches.

I looked over my shoulder as I trotted down the front steps and out onto the sidewalk. A tentacle of shadow reached for me. I screamed and leapt away, panting in fear as I did my best to dodge the thing.

“Killing us seems to be its likely goal, especially if you’re right about all the mice. So, let’s not find out.”

I sprinted about twenty five yards, then slowed. I moved out from under the darkness of the trees lining the avenue. I got us into the middle of the street where the light from the lamps was a steady yellow glow. 

“I am right about the mice. Don’t you dare doubt me.” I felt her begin to move and knew she was licking one of her paws again, trying to comfort herself. “What does it want with us?”

I glanced down at the grimoire in my hands. Could it be the tome? Tough shit. I wasn’t giving my prize up now even if a murderous shadow was after us.

Bastet stopped grooming and put one paw on my cheek. That was her way of connecting with me. “It nearly got us.”

“Got me, cat. I’ll drop you and you’ll run before I let that monstrosity near you.”

“That plan suits me.”

“Real great, Bastet,” I huffed as I trotted through the night shrouded streets. I avoided shadows, for once in my life not sure which of them might be an extension of the one chasing us.

“You don’t think we should both die, do you, Cin?” She withdrew her paw.

“No, no, I think you should definitely try to keep living after I’m murdered by a shadow monster.” Finally we’d reached a subway entrance. I didn’t care where it took me at that point—I just needed to put as much distance between us and the shadow wraith as I could. Wraith seemed like the right word for it, though I had zero experience with them.

“Thank you. I continue to hear the screams of rodents as it passes through walls. Whatever it is, it’s leaving a trail of carnage in its path.”

“Look at you, using carnage in a sentence.”

At the bottom of the stairs, we emerged onto the platform. Luck was on our side: a train was about to depart. Though I was already out of breath from all the sprinting I’d done, I put the pedal to the metal and raced to jump on just as the doors clamped shut behind me.

“If you die, Cin, who will continue my education?”

I collapsed into an empty seat facing the doors we’d come through. The compartment was all but empty, except for a few homeless-looking strangers slumped against windows.

No sign of the shadow wraith. I exhaled and held the book against the edge of my thigh as the Russian Blue settled onto my lap.

“Don’t worry your little gray head, Bastet. I’m not going to die,” I promised, ruffling her neck fur. It was a terrible promise, but what else was I going to say? We’d only been together ten months and I was responsible for her. If I ever did die, the bond would vanish and she’d return to being an average cat.

The thought broke my heart.

And that was exactly why I kept my circle so small and worked alone.