The Spellbook

Sharon’s fingers shook as she gripped the little leather-bound black book tight, her knuckles white. Her heart pounded in her throat and her stomach was in free-fall.

Her mind flashed to the morning she’d woken up to find the book sitting on her nightstand, looking as if it had always been there, simply waiting for Sharon to notice it. The book had hummed happily when Sharon reached for it, buzzing beneath her touch as though impatient to be opened. The paper was yellowed and worn-thin with age, stained with magic on every page. Dark, spindly words were inked throughout, detailing spells and long-buried truths in equal measure.

Sharon had grown up hearing the stories of magic, of artifacts seeped in power which would appear at random to bestow gifts to the worthy, but she’d never dreamed she’d find one, or rather that one would find her. Those in possession of magic were few and far between, and most tended to stick to the cities. Magic did not come to college drop-outs working dead-end jobs in the middle-of-nowhere, Iowa.

“What are you waiting for?” Odie asked, wind-chime voice startling Sharon out of her thoughts, “Aren’t you going to open it?”

Sharon returned to the present, to the giant mausoleum that stood before them, the concealment charms that usually shrouded it like a thick fog pushed back temporarily. Odie stood behind her, constant as always. When Sharon had first found the book, it hadn’t even been a question whether to tell Odie. Friendships like theirs were rarer than magic.

“The stuff of legend,” they had always joked. And now they stood, both of them bloody and bruised, covered in substances that Sharon tried very hard not to contemplate, and Sharon knew that it was true. 'Stuff of legend', indeed.

The book, as it turned out, had contained more than magic. Pressed between its pages, held in place with sticking charms and other spells that had taken Sharon a full month of sleepless nights and hair-pulling to unravel, had been more money than either of them had ever had access to, growing up as they had, counting pennies and wearing second-hand everything. It had taken them a full hour to count it all out, once Sharon could be sure that she’d managed to get it all, and it had come out to a staggering $20,000. But the journal had promised more.

They’d used the money to follow the pages down into a secret history, something darker and stranger than anything they had ever previously imagine.

Magic.

Monsters.

Blood sacrifices.

Everything that a younger Sharon used to dream of when reading the stories of mages and their adventures, they'd found in the pages of the book. It had been everything and nothing like what she'd imagined.

As it turned out, Sharon was not really equipped for a life of close-calls and brushes with death. Neither was Odie, really. They had managed to survive thus far on a combination of Sharon’s newfound magical abilities, which were sporadic at best, and sheer dumb luck, which Odie liked to joke could run out at any moment.

Sharon’s curls stuck to the back of her neck. Their latest foray into the truths detailed in the journal had led them to a cemetery in Florida of all places, and the air was thick and soupy with humidity. Odie had been complaining constantly about it since stepping off of the plane.

“Sharon!” Odie snapped, “Are we doing this or what?” Sharon frowned down at the book. This was the last stop in the merry little tour it had led them on, and if the book was right, then they needed to get into the mausoleum. The only problem was that Sharon found herself frozen in place, the prospect of moving forward suddenly too terrifying to even contemplate.

“What if we didn’t?” she asked quickly, turning away from the stone doors and carved faces that looked down at her in judgement.

“It’s not too late," she pressed, "we could just pretend we never found this place or the journal and just—

“Just what?” Odie asked, stepping forward, arms crossed. Sharon gripped the book tighter, avoiding Odie’s familiar gray gaze. Since they’d been children, Odie had always been able to see through her with that gaze, and Sharon knew that if she looked up now, she’d break and all of her fears would come pouring out of her like rain. A gentle hand landed on her shoulder and Sharon looked up on instinct. Odie’s eyes met hers.

“Do you really want to go back to how things were?" Odie asked in a quiet voice, "Back to a dead-end job that barely pays the rent and every day being the same?”

And she didn’t. She really didn’t. That life had been killing her slowly for years now. So much so, that Sharon had jumped at the chance for magic, monsters and all, but they’d just barely escaped the last encounter with their lives. And Sharon could feel the press of exhaustion clouding her connection to the book’s magic. What if, this time, it wouldn’t be enough?

The book had given them a life that Sharon had scarcely been able to imagine, in the mundane drone of overdue bills and long shifts that had been their previous existence, and it promised something more at the end of all this. Magic, even magic from artifacts as powerful as the book in Sharon’s hands, was finite. It had always been an hourglass threatening to run out. Sharon knew that the day was coming when she would reach for the now familiar buzz of energy and her fingers would come up empty, and her nightmares consisted more of what would come after that than any of the other horrors they had encountered in their travels thus far. But the book offered a way to make magic permanent.

An infinite source. All they had to do was get through this mausoleum, and Sharon would never have to go back to life before the book.

Somehow, that thought scared Sharon more than anything else so far.

“Do you really think we can do this?” she asked, the words shaking in her mouth. The hand on her shoulder tightened, pouring courage into her.

“Never doubt it,” Odie said, and Sharon could hear a lifetime of friendship and adventure in the words.

She took a deep breath, and opened the book.