The Etsey Series 1: The Seventh Veil by Heidi Cullinan Page A

tell her about Timothy, about Smith, about the way the lake had sneaked up on him, but a wave of nausea caught him first. He groaned and sank to the ground, shutting his eyes.
    “I’m going to take you to the cottage,” Madeline was saying, but she sounded miles away. “I’ll take care of you, Charles.”
    Charles tried to open his eyes, but they were too heavy. He cried out as he saw the wraiths rising, cold and gray and moaning. “Help me,” he whispered, clutching at Madeline. He tried again to open his eyes, but when he did, everything was strange.
    He saw Madeline, but she looked wrong, as if she were nothing but blue and silver and white, as if she were made of stars. Goddess, he thought. Not mine. But a goddess all the same. He watched sparks of magic dance about her shoulders. At the very least a sorceress. So much more than just a witch.
    “They try to pull me down with them,” Charles whispered to the Goddess, his words starting to slur. “They want me to help them, but I can’t.” They call me Father.
    Madeline blinked at him with eyes that shone like sapphires in a sea of silver dust. “I will help you, Charles. Rest now. I will help you.”
    Charles didn’t want to let go. He was afraid. But when heaviness forced his lids to close, he saw, to his relief, that the starry, sorceress Madeline stayed. She stayed right beside him, smiling with teeth like diamonds as blue light danced around her, and the wraiths faded into the night.
     
    Madeline moved her hands carefully from behind Charles’s neck and let his head fall gently to the ground. The magic was still humming against her fingers, and she felt her guides hovering behind her, waiting for her to release the power of the Morgan back to them. Still she lingered for a moment to touch Charles’s face. She smoothed her fingers over his sunken cheeks, over his eyes, which were still moving rapidly beneath the closed lids. She whispered one more spell, urging him into deeper stillness as she pulled tension from him. “ Rest, Charles ,” she whispered, giving the words a witch’s command. Then she pulled back the power and added in her own voice, “I will take care of you.”
    The guides moved even closer, their tension palatable through the magic’s margin. “Pull back now, and release to us. He is settled enough.”
    Madeline nodded, but she lingered just a moment longer, placing her hand over Charles’s chest to take one more reading, finding it just as troubling as she had the first time. Then she rose and turned to the guides.
    Four dark-gray shapes the size of men but with no human distinction of any kind surrounded and then moved through her, each element taking back the power it had given her to challenge the demon. They entered through her crown and ran through her body in a rush, making her tingle and gasp as they removed and redistributed energy. When they finished, they made a circle around her, holding her up as she rode through the rest of the reaction, stifling the sound she made when she cried out. She sailed up outside of herself, pushed out by the force of the alignment, and then she came back down, her mind, body, and spirit whole again. She grounded to her own magic, her own powers, then drew a deep breath and let it out again.
    As she opened her eyes, the guides drew back and formed a line before her.
    “I must take him to the cottage,” Madeline said. “And then I must study what he has told me to see what is true and to discover what the truth means.”
    Madeline could feel their uneasiness and their disapproval. “It is not appropriate for an Apprentice to take on such dark sources.”
    Temper flared in Madeline. “I am fully capable. I am the oldest Apprentice currently practicing, and it is with the witch’s Council’s permission I act as full witch in the Morgan’s stead.” She unclenched her hands and pressed them against her heavy black skirts. “I intend only to seek.” For now.
    The guides huddled