Veiled by Silvina Niccum Page B

me.
    I was quickly swallowed up
by the many forms that encircled the little light that was
Celeste’s aura.
    “ Tess, no!” Alex’s
strangled shout sounded distant.
    There, surrounded by
darkened ugly faces, stood Celeste. Her eyes were shut tight and
her fingers stopped her ears. She seemed to have retreated into
herself and was repeating something over and over again.
    I didn’t want to startle
her, but I knew that I must do something quick, because the voices
were turning on me now. I laid the palm of my hand softly on her
cheek. But she didn’t feel it, and her eyes were shut
tightly.
    “ Celeste!” I said, but she
couldn’t hear me. My mind was having a hard time focusing amid the
noise that the vile spirits were creating. What do I do? What do I do? I thought
and suddenly I found myself imitating Celeste’s technique and
stopping my own ears, trying to shut the noise out.
    No…be strong! I told myself, you are
here for her, don’t worry about yourself. In an instant I moved my hands away from my own ears and put
them over Celeste’s hands and I tried to pry them away from her own
ears. Startled, she looked up and stared at me,
dumbfounded.
    “ Let’s get out of here,
Cel,” I said trying hard to smile. She nodded, but neither of us
could move. The circle seemed to close in tighter around us and we
were trapped.
    We hugged and clung to each
other. “Thanks for coming, Tess,” Celeste whispered in my ear. “I
feel better having you here…but now we are both
trapped.”
    “ We are only as trapped as
we think we are,” I said, though I didn’t know where this idea had
come from.
    “ You think they’ll let us
go?” Celeste asked with a tired shaky voice. “You don’t think
they’ll just follow us wherever we go? They did that to me once
already…and now I am resigned to staying here.”
    I struggled to know what to
say that would give her, and I, hope of escaping. But by now our
whole clan could have been overpowered. We could all be trapped
here, forced to listen to their lies—lies that sounded truer and
truer the longer we stayed.
    Close to my ear I heard a
distinct voice, one that asserted itself more than the
rest.
    “ I’ll cut you a deal…” it
said. “If one of you willingly gives herself up and joins us…the
other can go free.”
    That voice…I had heard that
voice before, it was, it was….
    My thoughts were
interrupted by a loud growl-like noise in the distance. My mind
tried to make sense of what was going on around it. I dared not
open my eyes for fear of the faces that surrounded us. But then one
thought occurred to me. Agatha . That was the voice I heard.
It was her!
    This thought somehow did
the opposite of what it should have done; it gave me strength to
open my eyes to face her. The memory of my resolution after our
last encounter, gave me that strength. I was not going to be weak!
I was going to face her, and any rebel that tried to destroy our
future. But when I opened my eyes, I was not ready for the scene
that was unfolding itself around us.
    “ Um…Celeste?”
    “ What?” Her voice was
barely audible.
    “ You might want to open
your eyes and see this.”
    She did and looked with
astonishment at the flying forms of rebels that looked like they
were being plucked up and thrown this way and that with an
incredible speed. So fast was this, that the other rebels hardly
knew what was going on before they too fell prey to the unseen
force that was chucking them.
    All I could discern were
streaks of light at the base of them and the sound…the growling
sound that came closer and closer to us.
    Once the way before us was
cleared and only Agatha and a few other spirits remained at our
side, the streaks of light stopped abruptly and smiled at
us.
    Beside me I could see
Celeste’s aura brighten as she let out weak and nervous laugh.
Russell, Dane, Alex, and Dorian looked back at us and in one bound
they scooped us up into their arms and took us away, followed by
Valerie,