- Jessa Lucas
- Jan 9, 2021
- 8 min read
Chapter Three
No Resurrections on the Sabbath
The thing about Sabbath Winters is that she doesn’t bring people back from the dead, even though she’s a necromancer. She’s kind of conflicted like that.
Sabbath, as her name suggests, was born to very strict Catholic parents. I still remember meeting her at ten years old, on our first day at Spellfall.
“Sabbath, how can you be religious and a witch?” I’d asked innocently.
She’d shrugged. “I just decide not to be a bad one.”
Her answer had been simple, as if it would always be as black and white as the day we met. And for the most part, it has been.
As a result, Sabbath Winters never, under any circumstances: 1) summons demons, 2) says the Lord’s name in vain, or 3) brings back people that the good Lord has called home.
Until tonight, apparently.
“Sabbath,” I say, as my first words back from the dead. “You are so going to Hell.”
She grins.
“Thank you for bringing me back,” I whisper into her ear, the hiccup of a sob really giving away that No Chill thing that Purgatory has brought out of me. We hug, and for five glorious seconds I want nothing more than to feel something real. I’m just so happy to have her back.
To be back.
“Did you even see her?”
“Do I look like I’ve been burnt to a crisp by hellfire, Sabbath?”
“Okay, okay.” She frowns. “I’m sorry it all went so wrong—”
“You have blood on your face.”
Lifting ginger fingers to her nose, she wipes. “Oh.”
Glancing around, I find the moon still winking from behind the same vaporous streak of clouds. It can’t be more than a few minutes since the séance went catastrophic levels of wrong. “What in the unholy cauldron happened, Sab?”
I would like to say that it looks exactly how I’d left it, except… that would be a lie. The salt circle is broken, granules strewn across the floor. The formidable wall of books has toppled, spines bent, volumes thrown aside with a huge lack of consideration for preservation. There’s also a curious amount of blood splattered... like, everywhere.
When my gaze returns to Sab, I notice she looks exhausted, drained of all her energy.
“I don’t know what happened,” she admits, turning helplessly to the disarray of books that does, in fact, look very unhelpful. “We did it exactly right, Mika. We cleansed the room, said the right words. Maybe it was the ancestral powers tonight, or the fact that the moon isn’t full… none of that was in my books, but—”
“Sab.” I interrupt her calmly, depositing both hands on either side of her very beautiful, curl-filled head. I make her look at me and she peers up guiltily. She’s getting my most serious face right now. Usually, this goes the other way around. “Sabbath Estacia Winters, this was not your fault. Okay?”
“Your candle just whipped out and your whole body was, like, convulsing. It was awful, and then you stopped moving. Mika, I panicked—” her words tremble as she bursts into tears.
I can’t blame her. If anything ever happened to Sabbath…
Her breath catches on a sob and I grab her hand, shaking it to get her attention.
“But you did it, Sab. I’m alive. Look!” I make an exaggerated gesture with my free hand, showing off my body. My living, breathing body. “Actual living witch, here.”
Wiping tears from her eyes, Sabbath sniffs, and with a rueful smile, she plucks a lock of my hair. “Well, mostly alive. Your hair is... it’s white.”
“What—?”
“Well, don’t freak out, okay? Last year in Anatomy of the Dead, my professor said this is pretty standard. Maybe we can fix it?” she asks hopefully. Sab’s definitely a fixer. There’s a new sparkle in her eye, now that she has something conceivable to work toward that will remedy the horrendous fact that I died tonight.
“It’s alright,” I shrug. “At least now I can dye my hair some fun colors like Tuesday Jones.”
As I examine a few strands of resuscitated hair, Sabbath digs out a textbook, skipping over the others scattered across the floor and sinking into her bed. She wasn’t kidding about my hair—it’s stark white, as if all the blinding light of Purgatory had actually been wet paint and I’d rolled around in it. I check out my hands just in case, but so far, they seem to retain their color. “Oh. SABBATH.”
Her gaze pops up to me, eyes opening wide to mock the exaggerated way I blurt her name when I have something semi-important to say.
“Yes, MIKA?”
I join her on her bed, hugging a pillow into my chest as she listens attentively. “The Afterlife. I was in, like, full-frontal Purgatory, Sab. It’s real. Well, maybe…”
“Wait, what?”
“There were no pearly gates or anything, and I called the guy the wrong name—omens, Sabbath! You would’ve cringed so hard. I accidentally cursed in Maybe-Purgatory.”
Her jaw drops a little. “You didn’t, Mika.”
“I know. Not my best moment.”
“So?” She asks, book momentarily forgotten on her lap as she bites her lip anxiously. “What was it like?”
“Well, I didn’t see God,” I crinkle up my nose, not wanting to disappoint her. “Unless God is the little bald guy I called by the wrong name. Frankly, I wouldn’t put it past him.”
Sabbath’s face falls a little, so I try to make up for it by being upbeat, and not mentioning the part about probably not being able to scream for help in Purgatory. “It was kind of cool, actually,” I enthuse. “There were all these doors that seemed to go to different places, and it was like the whole universe overhead. But maybe the Afterlife is different for witches, somehow. I mean, I didn’t really get a good look at the place. I was like a ninja. In and out, thanks to you.”
Sabbath wrings her hands, watching them as if they’re exceedingly interesting. They’re not. I’ve told her this a million times, but still, she stares. I know it’s the conflict she has, bubbling up inside, reminding her of all the incompatibilities of being religious and being a witch. I hear the enchantless have similar conflicts, with being religious and being plain old human.
“Sabbath,” I say quietly, “You worked a huge actual miracle tonight. That’s God’s, like, whole schtick, right? You did a God thing,” I assure her. It’s good that she’s trying to be like him. Sabbath’s God seems pretty cool, flipping tables all angry-like and telling people not to work on their day off. Like, boundaries.
“Yeah, but—”
I shake my head. “The fact is,” I say, interrupting her, and trying to sound like the kind of know-it-all Sabbath will listen to, “magic is part of our world. It’s part of you. And it can be a good or a bad part, just as much as anything else. Besides, I bet God has a way bigger imagination than people give him credit for. He’s all Mr. Creator of The Universe, yeah? There’s no way a person, witch or not, could understand so much imagination. Am I right, or am I right?”
Sabbath grimaces, because the combination of God and imagination are, for some reason, a hard potion for Sabbath to swallow—even though it’s my very humble opinion that you’ve gotta be okay with a little imagination to believe God would want anything to do with this hot mess of a universe in the first place.
“Remember, Sabbath?” I ask, deciding to simplify my pep talk with words she has no option but to accept. “Just don’t be a bad witch.”
“I’ll do my best.” She manages a small smile, but it cracks as a tear comes to her eye. “God, Mika. I’m just so fucking happy it worked.”
I decide not to react to her use of such a word, because it means a lot that in the last five minutes, Sabbath Winters has broken, like, four of her three biggest rules for me (the F-bomb rule is implied).
Once more, I notice the drops of red smeared on the wooden floors, and my gaze swivels between my best friend and the Mystery of the Blood Splatter. “Sab, how’d you do it, exactly? Raise me from the dead. I thought you had religious exemptions last year.”
“I did. But we don’t even get to resurrection until like tenth year.” She looks at me like that was supposed to be obvious to someone who was just brought back to life by a seventh-year.
“Yeah,” I answer slowly. “So, it bears repeating. How’d you do it?”
With lots of blood dripping from her nose, apparently.
Sab’s head shakes a little, her eyes searching somewhere just over my head for an answer. “The same way I brought back those hamsters. I just… knew. I knew what to do, and it worked.”
Raw power. Those are the words Sabbath is looking for. It’s why she got accepted to Spellfall.
There are international magical boarding schools like ours scattered across all five continents, but Spellfall is the best for necromancy. Each tends to have a different specialty. Burnbright, for example, specializes in runes and blood sacrifice, and it regularly produces the most nefarious of magic users.
To no one’s surprise, that’s where my mother went.
Spellfall, on the other hand, is notorious for spitting out the noble-y type of witches—the ones who ascend to positions of power and notoriety. Receiving my invitation to Spellfall Academy of Enchantment is the second clearest memory I’ve retained from childhood: my father’s deep frown lines smoothing, my Gran clasping her hands together with the fiendish grin that I always thought gave me a glimpse into her youth.
“You’ve made it into the most prestigious!” she’d exclaimed.
“I’m proud of you,” my father had declared, patting me on the back.
Even at ten, I’d felt the relief roll off them in palpable waves, some small fear alleviated with the knowledge that I’d attend their more virtuous alma mater instead of Mom’s.
I know now that there’s nothing exceptional enough about me or my wakened magic to have warranted such an invitation. Frankly, I wonder sometimes if the High Council decided to send me here to accommodate for the darkness that’s so obviously in my bloodline. Try to course-correct before it’s too late.
As far as Sabbath goes, she totally belongs at Spellfall. Take the aforementioned hamsters. She raised her hamster’s babies from the dead at the ripe young age of six, after their mother turned cannibal and decided to have them for dinner. Sabbath’s tangle with her resurrected pets may have been the joke of the year when it hit the rumor mill, but the fact is that it’s exceedingly rare for an untrained witch—or warlock—to revive the dead drawing only from their own wakened magic. That’s what years of training are supposed to be for.
I, however, am a basic witch, and like most basic witches, I get a bit of a buzz drinking pumpkin spice lattes and stirring up foggy brews. Being an inconsequential, totally unthreatening alchemist is fine by me, though.
“Sab, something really bad happened tonight, I feel it.”
“I know, I—”
We flutter to a dead silence because there’s the torrential clickity-clack of heels pounding their way up the spiral staircase at the end of the hall outside our room. That sound is a harbinger of Hell.
And here I was worried about real Hell a few minutes ago.
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