Free Camdeboo Nights by Nerine Dorman Page A

people who had been and were no more. If she tried to listen, she could even hear their whispers, like dry leaves stirred by the wind. But it was better to tune out the dead. Once they knew a person could see them, they sometimes became pests.
    When I die...I don’t... She suppressed that train of thought. No ghosts tonight, thank you.
    “You scared, Helen?”
    “No!” her companion answered, a little too quickly. Helen turned, rubbing her arms.
    “I guess your mother named you after her,” Arwen said.
    “Who?”
    “Helen Martins, you twit.”
    “Oh. Yes.”
    Helen hunkered down next to Arwen. The lettering on the cement marker was difficult to make out in the starlight, but they weren’t here to read gravestones. Arwen busied herself unpacking her tools.
    She had the dagger that Aunt Sonja had given her for a yuletide gift the previous winter. It wasn’t very sharp but it was pretty. The handle had been molded out of a hard resin twisted to resemble an animal horn. The blade wasn’t straight, but wavy–a kris .
    Next was a small flask of red wine and a silver goblet. The goblet she’d pilfered from Szandor’s workshop.
    A small cloth drawstring bag contained salt. She had matches and five fat beeswax candles. She checked off the matches, incense sticks and an offering of dried herbs–mostly from her mother’s garden she’d tied together with black satin ribbon.
    “What’s all the stuff for?” Helen asked.
    “It’s what we’ll be needing. Now’s not the time or place for Witchcraft one-oh-one.”
    “What are we actually going to do here?”
    “I want to summon the genius loci of Nieu Bethesda.”
    “Why?” To give Helen some credit, she didn’t ask what a genius loci was.
    “To see if I can.”
    “What if we get caught? Aren’t there laws against witchcraft and stuff?”
    “What?” Arwen asked. “Are you scared of getting caught?”
    “No.”
    “Well, I’ve done this a million times before.” She wasn’t about to tell Helen she’d only practiced this in her bedroom.
    “Why do you need me then?”
    Because my Wyrd told me , was not going to be a good answer. Arwen paused, thinking of how much she should say. Sometimes some of the truth was better than none.
    “You’ve got the vibe, the sparkly bits about you that I need. Sure, I can see stuff, know stuff and do stuff but you’ve got potential to have the power. All the big dudes throughout history tended to work in pairs. One guy would conduct the summoning while the other would be the sensitive.”
    “So, what you’re telling me is that I’m some sort of magical battery?”
    Both of them paused then laughed. To be quite honest, Arwen wasn’t sure but something about Helen seemed somehow more than the average and tonight she was about to find out.
    “Oh, shit, Helen, you’re funny. Ja , if you want to look at it like that. My aunt says that some people are born with the chance that they may be really powerful with magic and stuff. It takes a little nudging but if what I suspect is true then we’ll know when we see the results.”
    “What results?”
    “Oh, like stuff. You’ll see. It’s nothing scary.”
    Truth be told, Arwen was nervous tonight and she didn’t know what to expect. She’d practiced the ritual until she could do it with her eyes closed, without relying on her script. The words of welcoming for the Guardians of the Quarters were inscribed on her heart. Yet, when faced with finally practicing the real thing, her hands shook and her mouth was unaccountably dry.
    She set up her altar before the owl-shaped headstone then motioned for Helen to stand to her right. Arwen poured the wine into the goblet then placed the salt in its bowl. A circle drawn with a stick demarcated their sacred space around the gravesite. Some of what she did was based on what she’d read on the internet and in Aunt Sonja’s books but much of it she based on her own gut feeling.
    So long as no one disturbed them tonight, everything