Night: Celia and the Sister Duo

Sister Uno (Scenes 1-4)

Siblings: your only enemy you can't live without.

—Anonymous

1

After thanking Mrs. Amame for explaining the situation to her sisters, Celia waved Colibe and Kendra and their parents goodbye and left the Police Station at around 4:00 p.m. The sun loomed just over the horizon to the west in a golden blaze against the sky, and Celia had to shade her face when she looked for Katherine Hearn's car in the parking lot. Her car was a dark shade of gray and was hard to spot in the blaze of the looming sunset, hidden in the shade of the Police Station’s parking lot, where Katherine miraculously found a parking space.

Following close, Celia looked at her elder sisters. Her eldest sister, Katherine Hearn, wore a thick jacket over her university uniform, her long braided twin tails swinging behind her as she walked, so she must have cut class to pick her up. Her elder sister, Madison Hearn, had changed her university uniform for tall boots and tight black slacks and a turtleneck sweater under a thick jacket with her hair tied in a low ponytail down to the small of her back, so she must have stood someone up. But before they walked any further, both of her sisters halted and turned around and glared down at her.

Celia tensed. "Please don't tell Mom and Dad."

"And why the hell shouldn't we?" Katherine said, bending over Celia and glaring beneath a fringe of hair, her side bangs and braided twin tails shifting in a slight breeze. "I was about to start my presentation, but because of you, it got pushed to next Monday, the first day of finals, you ass! Do you have any idea how much that sucks?"

Celia thought differently, though; having an extra week to prepare seemed like a godsend, but she refrained from voicing her thoughts.

"And because of you," Madison Hearn added, folding her arms over her chest and glaring down at her in contempt, her hair shifting somewhat in the breeze, "I had to cancel my date, thank you very much," and she let out a sigh. "Seriously, why do you have to be such a brat all the time?"

Celia gulped, mentally cursing the accuracy of her intuition, and said, "I'm really sorry, okay? I didn't mean to screw up your lives. It's just that—"

Then both sisters reached out and touched Celia's shoulders, and their expressions softened.

"We were really worried about you," Katherine said. "We thought something happened to you."

Celia looked down at her feet. "I'm really sorry, guys."

Katherine and Madison traded knowing glances before looking back at her. Both sisters were still angry at her, of course, but now wasn't the right time for scolding.

So Madison said, "Show me your hand."

Celia showed her uninjured hand.

"Your other hand," she said.

Celia showed her bandaged hand, and Madison took off the medical tape and unwound the bandage wrap and turned Celia's hand palm up. The small pin prick still showed blood, traces of it still spidering along the creases of her palm.

"It's not congealing," Madison said. "You used one of Grandma's blood spells again, didn't you?"

Celia said nothing but nodded her head that she had.

So Madison raised up Celia's hand and licked her palm clean of blood, leaving only the pinprick left. She then pressed her own palm flat against Celia's and said an incantation in her mind.

The spell took effect and glowed bright red between their palms, and Celia winced.

"Ow!" Celia shook her hand to alleviate the residual stinging, still wincing, and said, "You could've warned me, geez!"

"You used a blood spell, Celia," Madison said, placing her hand atop her younger sister's head and ruffling her hair. "What did you expect, a flu shot?"

Celia pulled a face but refrained from answering. It wasn't the sharp pain of initial contact she was complaining about, though; it was the residual stinging sensation of reconnecting nerve endings that got her pulling faces.

"Aw, did I cause a booboo?" Madison said. "Was it that bad?"

"Don't make me put a blood seal on you," she said.

"Guys," Katherine yelled from her car across the pavement, pointing to her watch, "I still have one more class, so can you continue your cat fight after I drop you off?"

"Coming!" Madison said.

"Wait, where are we going?" Celia said.

"To Dad's bookstore," Madison said, as Celia followed her heels. "I need to check something out for a paper I have to write. You have the keys?" she asked Katherine, as all three sisters opened the doors and climbed into her car and buckled up inside. "I'll give them back when I'm done."

"Don't you have the access card with you?" Katherine said, taking her key ring from her belt clip and putting her driver’s key into the ignition.

"Yeah, but I need the keys to get into the private room, where the big books are."

"Is this for your paper?"

"Yeah," Madison said, deadpanning like it was the most obvious thing in the world. "The teacher decided to be a massive dick-hole and assigned us paper topics, and I just had to get one of the complicated ones. Wanna guess?"

"Nope. I wanna save my brain cells, thank you," Katherine said and reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out a larger second ring full of keys and handed it to Madison, who took it. "It's the black one with the crescent on it," and she started up the car and backed out of the parking space.

All the while, Celia simpered, thanking her lucky stars that she and her friends were already finished with finals and papers the week before. After a long day, she wanted nothing more than to return home and take a nap before dinner, but when she remembered her promise to Nico to help save Mara, she knew that half of that battle had been won already. Now all she had left was to check on Mara’s wellbeing at the Nayland Hospital, but since Katherine wasn’t going there, she needed another method to reach Mara. How was she to do that at the bookstore?

Turning the problem over in her mind, Celia looked at Madison in the front passenger seat complaining about her last-minute term paper, to which Katherine said that it will only get worse in college. Then Celia got an idea.

2

After Katherine dropped off her younger sisters at the Arcana Bookstore, she sped off down the street and turned left towards Shad-Row University to hopefully sneak into her last lecture class before her professor marked her as tardy.

Celia and Madison waved her off from the curb, then went to the entrance of the bookstore that had a poster sign taped to the window pane of the door. It read:

CLOSED ( <_< )

Dear patrons, Mr. Ian Easton Hearn and Mr. Collin Kent Faraone are away on business from Saturday (Dec. 16) to Sunday (Dec. 31). If you need help, contact us via phone number at (702) 349-0434 or e-mail at [email protected] or [email protected]. Sorry for the inconvenience!

Both sisters snorted at their father's attempt to be hip with the times and traded knowing glances and cheesy grins, for he was trying a tad too hard using an emoticon for something as humdrum as an absentee notice.

"Why does Dad keep trying so hard?" Madison said, taking out her card from her wallet and sliding it down the access slide, opening the door and entering past the threshold. "It's kinda scary!"

"You think so?" Celia said, following her sister inside and turning on the lights. "Come on, Dad's actually trying, so cut him a break! At least he knows how to use an emoticon, unlike that douchebag boyfriend of yours."

"Why are you bringing that up?" she said, glaring back at her sister, seemingly about to pop a blood vessel, and a pulse of contempt beat through the bookstore. "I dumped that bastard, so why do you keep harping on it, huh?"

"Oh, I don't know," Celia said, smiling and walking along one of the shelves full of books and running her fingers across the spines and adding distance between herself and her sister. "You seem to keep going after those idiot types, you know? Or maybe they're just attracted to you, and you keep dumping them when they piss you off. Or maybe—"

"Maybe you should just mind your damn business!" Madison said, her cherry-blonde hair beginning to float on waves of anger.

"Or maybe you just need to raise your standards."

"Are you fucking calling me a slut?"

"You said it, Maddy, not me," Celia said.

"That's it! I am so fire-bombing your ass," she said, sprinting at her miscreant little sister, but Celia teleported two shelves away from her. "You bitch, get over here!"

Celia giggled her head off behind the bookshelf, her own hair starting to float in her excitement, and said, "So you can do naughty things to my ass? No way!"

"Celia, I don't have time for this!"

"But I have all the time in the world, big sis," she said, peaking past one of the shelves and spying her fuming sister near the central walkway, then hiding just before Madison caught sight of her. "You'll just have to deal with bratty little me, so deal!"

"Fucking little troll-whore, I swear," Madison muttered to herself, walking past Celia on the way to the door of the back room. When she got out the large ring of keys, she flipped through them for the black one with the crescent on it, found it, and was about to unlock the door with it—

When Celia teleported in front of her, snatched the keys, and teleported out of her reach.

For a moment, Madison just stood there, barely comprehending what had happened beyond the fact that she was seconds away from screaming her head off and that Celia was now the absolute worst minx of a sister she was cursed to have in her life.

Then she screamed for several moments.

At the sound of her screaming, many passers-by paused and looked in through the windows of the Arcana Bookstore, which would later give rise to an urban legend about a fire elemental haunting the Arcana Bookstore at sunset. What they saw scared them away, some of them running for their lives, only to spread the makings of what they saw (or thought they saw) on internet creepypasta forums.

Moments later, a heat wave of light flashed through the windows, lighting up the corner of Faraway Street and Camden Street.

Inside the bookstore, the pages of most of the books on the shelves showed foxing on the edges, but near the epicenter of Madison's fit was the smell of searing paper and the melted glue of ruined book bindings. When she finally regained herself, she screamed, "Celia, when I get my hands on you, I'm fucking ROASTING YOU ALIIIIIIIIIVE!"

3

A circle of pink roses appeared on the walkway entrance to the Hearn family mansion, a massive three-story Queen Anne-style house surrounded by a row of hedge bushes, and on it Celia appeared with the big ring of keys in hand. The sun had just set over the horizon to the west, leaving a civil twilight lingering on the sky in hues of ever-fading reds and blues. As such, the automatic lights in the house turned on, lighting the windows and the veranda at her approach, as she climbed the steps into the veranda and dug into one of her jacket pockets.

She took out her key to the house and unlocked the door, but she paused and looked back over her shoulder across the front lawn and across the lighted street and into the horizon of neighborhood houses against a westering sky. No doubt when Madison finds her, Celia knew she would be in a whole heap of trouble, but she kept her nerve steady and her mind focused and smiled to herself.

Her breath fogged in the chill as she said to the air, "Maddy, Kathy, please find it in your hearts to forgive me," and now her smile disappeared, and a stern look lighted on her face and flashed across her maroon eyes when she turned back towards the house. "I have to do this for Mara; if I was in the same position, you'd do the same for me."

She passed the threshold and shut the door with a thud, like the thud of a casket shutting over the dead. Mara's outburst at the wall of the old Rancaster district still rang through her mind like a hangover, making her clench onto the ring of keys she'd stolen from Madison.

She walked through the foyer and turned up into a flight of stairs that led into an upper hallway connecting a set of rooms: her parents' shared master bedroom at one end of the hallway, then Katherine's room, then Madison's room, and lastly Celia’s own room at the other end next to the stairs.

She ran towards her room, opening the door wide open, and took off her jacket and flung it on her bed, then sprinted along the hallway to Katherine's room and tried the handle, but it was locked with a magic incantation on the other side.

So she placed her hand to the ground and formed another seal and moved it with her mind underneath the door, then blinked out of sight and appeared in her sister's room. She opened her sister's door from the inside, then ran into her sister's bathroom and spied a full-body vanity mirror on caster wheels.

Rolling that mirror out into the hallway and into her own bedroom, she locked her door and rolled the mirror into position, so that the mirror caught her bedroom door in its reflection. She then thumbed through the keys, skipping over the one with the crescent on it, and found the so-called 'dreamer's key,' shaped like an arrow, the key that opened the doors of other people's dreams.

She then proceeded to her bedroom door, and in the reflection of the mirror, she stood there thinking of her promise to Nico to save Mara Cairns, safe in body in the hospital, but not in mind the last time she had seen her. Using the key, she unlocked her door and opened it into the lurid and ever-shifting haze of the Phantom Realms.

She was about to enter with the keys, but she thought better of it and left the keys on top of her bed, then grabbed a few sticky notes from her desk and a marker and wrote these messages for her sisters:

If you need to find me, use the 'dreamer's key' with the mirror, and think of Nico Cairns before you enter.

—CELIA HEARN

P.S. Sorry, Kathy, for stealing your mirror. You can chew me out later when I get back!

—C. H.

P.P.S. Sorry, Maddy, for harping on your boyfriends. You can roast me later when I get back!

—C. H.

Once she had them written, she stuck them to the inside of her door, but then she thought of Madison again, probably screaming on her smartphone for Katherine to get out of class and help find Celia, and Katherine was probably up to her eyeballs in school work right now and trying to ignore her own vibrating smartphone as Madison kept trying to reach her. And since Celia was feeling extra perky this evening, she wrote one more sticky note and put it on the door that read:

P.P.P.S. And if I'm in trouble, SAVE MY BRATTY ASS! I'll return the favor and be your love slave for a week! ( -_^ )

—C. H.

With that done, Celia smiled once again and stepped past the threshold, letting the door close behind her with a thud, like the thud of the casket over Nico Cairns' body.

4

"Come on, come on, come on, come on, come on! Stop fiddling with your school work and pick up the phone already!"

When Katherine finally picked up after fifteen minutes of prerecorded messages telling her that she couldn't be on today, Madison was hysterical. She was walking up and down the sidewalk next to her father's bookstore, scaring off passers-by with a maniacal glare with her hair floating in the air like a redhead Medusa after getting dumped and a tangible heat glowing visibly red from her body like steam.

Squeezing her right hand into a tight knuckle-white fist, she yelled into her smartphone in her left hand, saying, "Kathy, get out of class and help me find her! Ugh, I'm gonna fucking roast her scrawny ass for this! Arrrrrgh!"

"Calm down!" Katherine said over the connection. "What did Celia do this time?"

"She fucking stole the keys you gave me," she said, halting her back-and-forth steps along the sidewalk and cracking the concrete with a stomp of her foot, "and she teleported right out of the bookstore! Maybe I should've called the cops on her ass, and that'll fucking teach her!"

"Maybe she just teleported into the private room," Katherine said, trying to reason her sister out of such action. "She did that the last time I was there with her."

"I already checked, and she's not there!"

"You can't teleport, so how do you know she’s not there?"

"Look, if she was in there," Madison said, "I'd have strangled her by now!"

The voice on the other end of the connection let out a long sigh and said, "Look, I'll come over there and see for myself, okay?" Then came a pause, as if Katherine was running several worst-case scenarios through her head. "Did you have an outburst in the bookstore?"

For the first time since Celia left the premises, Madison calmed down long enough to take stock of her surroundings and pressed her face to the windows of the bookstore. Although the books stopped smoldering, the carpet in the middle of the walkway area was singed black where she had exploded into a fit over Celia's theft.

All at once, she gulped and said into her smartphone, "Um, just a little one, I swear! I didn't burn the whole bookstore down, okay? So—"

"Maddy."

Madison paused, unnerved at Katherine's tone of voice, and said, "Y-yes, what is it, sis?"

"Please don't tell me you fried everything on the shelves," Katherine said, then paused for her sister's reply, but when Madison wasn't sure how to tell her about the stupid burn mark in the middle of the walkway, Katherine added, "Oh my God, please don't make my day any worse than it already is, sis! I am so freaking out right now!"

"Listen, it's not as bad as you think," Madison said, looking inside through the window again and willing the carpet stain to disappear before her sister arrived. "If we just explain that Celia was the cause of all this—"

"Oh my God, we are soooooo fucked when Dad and Mr. Faraone come back," she said, sulking through the connection's static and mumbling something about spending all of her weekends during the next semester working part-time to pay for the repair bills for whatever damage Madison had caused.

"It's all Celia's fault, I'm telling you!" Madison said, continuing her maniacal pacing up and down the sidewalk again and scaring away more passers-by. "When they come back, you and I are gonna show them what Celia did, and we're gonna have Dad disown her scrawny ass—"

"Maddy."

"And then we're gonna ship her off to Switzerland, and then we'll finally be—"

"Maddy!"

Madison winced at her own nickname screaming into her ear, pulling the smartphone away and then putting it close to her ear and saying, "Geez, what is it?"

The voice on the other end paused, then said, "I don't know, but I've got a bad feeling about this. I know Celia can be a handful sometimes, but she would never be this reckless without a reason. You and I both know how much she cares about her friends. We also got a phone call from the Police Station to pick her up today, and we saw her friends there, too. That is not a coincidence. And on top of that, you and I both heard it from Mrs. Amame herself. Those girls saved Mara's life today, and Celia even used a blood spell to locate Mara and her sister in the Rancaster district! There has to be something more to this! You get me?"

It took some moments for all this information to sink into Madison's head, stopping on the sidewalk and looking into the bookstore in thought. "Yeah, I get you."

"Good," Katherine said, then added, "Oh, and one more thing."

"What's that?"

"Don't you ever say what you just said about Celia ever again. She's family! You saying that about her is like you saying that about me! Don't ever say that again, got it?"

"Yeah," Madison said, knowing that Katherine was right. "Kathy, I'm sorry. I was just really—"

Then the connection cut out. Katherine had hung up.

Madison closed her smartphone and stared out across the buildings towards the westering sky, the last traces of blue now fading into astral twilight and the first bit of luminous crescent that was the new moon coming into view.

"Celia," Madison said to the evening air, "whatever's going on with you, you don't have to hide it from me or Kathy. You don't have to bear it alone."

Tsuzuku