“Now what?” Bonnie asked, when they’d scattered all the herbs. “There are candles in the other bag, and matches. And a flashlight. And, yikes, a knife.”
There were twelve candles, four each of black, white, and red. Mrs. Flowers hadn’t included any kind of note to tell them what the colors meant or what exactly to do with them, so Elena, hoping she was doing the right thing, decided to put them in a circle, colors alternating, around the tomb, outside the circle of herbs.
“And what do we do next?” Bonnie asked, watching as Elena lit the last candle.
“I’m not sure,” Elena told her, dripping a pool of candle wax on the floor and carefully sticking the candle upright in it. “Usually, you say something, maybe just saying what you want to happen, and it looks like you’re concentrating.”
Bonnie’s eyebrows shot up. “So the next step is that I say ‘open’ and think really hard? Elena, I’m not sure this is going to work.”
“Try it,” Elena said hopefully.
Bonnie frowned at the tomb. The flames of the candles danced, reflected in her eyes. “Open,” she said firmly.
Nothing happened.
“Open. I command you to open.” Bonnie said, more doubtfully, and closed her eyes, scrunching her forehead in concentration. Still, nothing changed.
Bonnie’s eyes opened and she huffed in frustration. “This is ridiculous.”
“Wait.” Elena thought of the knife, still in the bag. “Sometimes, you use blood. You say it’s important, that it’s one of the strongest ingredients you can use in a spell. Because it’s vitality, it’s life in its most basic form.” She hurried toward the bag and felt inside. The knife was more like a small dagger, its blade pure silver and its handle some kind of bone.
Bonnie hesitated, biting her lip, and then nodded. She came to stand beside Elena, her eyes fixed on the knife.
“I’ll go first, okay?” Elena said. She made a short, shallow cut on the inside of her own arm, hissing a little at the stinging pain. Turning her arm, she let the blood drip across Honoria and Thomas Fell’s effigies. Splotches of her blood stained their lips, the lids of their closed eyes. Blood dripped on Honoria’s neck and trickled down, making it look as if she’d been a vampire’s feast.
Please, Elena thought, breathing hard. Please let us in. She wasn’t sure who she was begging: Honoria Fell; the mysterious Powers that filled the universe; the Celestial Guardians; or Katherine, down below the church. Whoever was listening, she supposed. Whoever would help her.
Bonnie, white-faced but resolute, held out her own arm, and Elena ran the blade quickly across it, watching the blood spill out and over Bonnie’s porcelain-white skin. More blood spattered over Honoria and Thomas’s stone torsos and their folded hands.
“Draw on your Power, Bonnie,” Elena said softly. “It’s there. I’ve seen it. Pull it out of the earth under your feet and the plants growing all around us. Take it from the dead; they’re right here with us.”
Bonnie’s face tightened with concentration, her fine bones becoming more defined beneath her skin. The candle flames flickered, all at once, as if a wind had passed through the ruined church.
Elena wasn’t a Guardian here, and she didn’t have those Powers anymore. But she could remember what it had felt like when she and Bonnie worked together, their auras combining, feeding her Power into Bonnie’s. She tried to find that feeling, pushing out, trying to let Bonnie take whatever might help her. Her hand found Bonnie’s smaller one, and Bonnie twined their fingers together and squeezed hard.
All at once, the candles all went out. With a huge, grating cracking noise, the top of the stone tomb split in half, one side falling heavily to the flagstones of the floor.
Elena peered down. As she had expected, there was no grave beneath the stone. Instead of bones, she was looking down into the dark opening of a vault. In the stone wall below her were driven iron rungs, like a ladder.
“Wow.” Bonnie said next to her. She was pale, but her eyes were shining with excitement. “I can’t believe that worked. I can’t …” She closed her mouth, then cleared her throat and lifted her chin bravely. “What now?”
“Now you go home,” Elena said. She looked nervously out the broken wall of the church. It was still daylight, but the sun was sinking low. She pulled the flashlight out of the bag and tucked it into her back pocket. “I’m sorry, Bonnie, and thank you, thank you so much. But the next part I have to do by myself. And I’m not sure if it’s safe for you up here. Please go home before it gets dark.”
“If it’s not safe for me, it’s not safe for you,” Bonnie said stubbornly. “At least I can watch your back.”
Elena squeezed her friend’s hand. “Please, Bonnie,” she begged again. “I can’t do what I have to do if I’m worrying about you. I promise I’ll be okay.”
She knew she had no way of guaranteeing that, but Bonnie’s shoulders slumped in acceptance. “Be careful, Elena,” she said. “Call me as soon as you get home.”
“Okay.” Elena watched as Bonnie picked up the duffle bags with their depleted jars of herbs and left the church, casting worried glances back at Elena over her shoulder.
Once Bonnie’s small, upright figure was out of sight, Elena took a deep breath. There was an icy breeze coming from the opening in the tomb, and it smelled like earth and cold stone that never saw the light.
Steeling herself, she swung her legs over the edge of the tomb, took hold of an iron rung, and began to climb down into the vault beneath the church.