Arianna's Awakening (Arianna Rose Part 1 & The Awakening Part 2) by Christopher Martucci, Jennifer Martucci

filled the air.  He turned and looked to Mark who was just a step behind him and nodded solemnly.
    At the bottom of the steps, he and his men rounded a corner, and before them stood a hideous display of blasphemy.  Five sinners in all chanted at the vertices of a pentagram drawn in chalk on the concrete floor.  Candles and incense burned, suffocating the room with unholy light and fragrance.  Around the pentagram, a circle had been traced.  Just outside the perimeter of the circle, a blue book with a silver pentagram inscribed at its center sat on the dirt-coated floor.  He knew it well.  Widely held as the most thorough and respected authority on witchcraft, it was a mark of defilement in his eyes, a blasphemous reminder of man’s frailties.  In it pages was the despicable history and philosophy of witchcraft, as well as powerful spells and ritual instructions.  To the novice, the book was a veritable how-to book for the induction into the ungodly practice.  To the experienced sorceress, it was a reference guide that had long since been committed to memory.  Beside it sat a notebook with the words “Book of Shadows” scrawled across it in loopy handwriting.   The Book of Shadows was a common term for a witch’s journal.  It was where she would record each of her rituals and their outcomes, along with her profane journey down the path of evil.  He loathed to touch such offensive works, but needed to confiscate them as evidence for his congregates.  But before he reached for the book, before he made his presence known, he searched his soul and tried to sense the Sola’s presence.
    He closed his eyes and held his hands out at his sides, palms facing upward.  He felt her existence thrumming through his core like a constant current of electricity, coursing through his very being.  She was near; of that he was certain.  But he did not feel the charge of her growing power.   The energy he sensed in the room was different from that of the dangerous seer.  The energy of the room, concentrated in the encircled pentagram was latent, its force as yet untapped.  He opened his eyes and noticed that one of the cloaked conjurers watched him. 
    “Who dares to conjure evil in this house?” he boomed.  No one answered, but five sets of eyes now stared at him.  “Who is the high priestess of this ritual?” he demanded again.
    One of the hooded fiends lowered her cloak.  “I’m not a priestess or anything,” she answered.  “But I am hosting this ceremony.”
    Her face was smooth and round, childlike, yet had been tainted by dark makeup.  He guessed she was perhaps eighteen years old. 
    “Ceremony,” Howard said and stooped to pick up the blue book.  “You call gathering together to summon darkness a ceremony?  This is an abomination, an offense against God!”
    Howard scanned the faces of the cloaked children.  He searched with his soul, with God’s gift, and realized they were not the devil’s disciples; they possessed no genuine power.  They were just misguided teenagers intrigued by unholiness.
    Howard paused and took a deep breath. “Whose book is this?” he demanded but no one answered right away.  “Whose book is this?” he boomed a second time.
      “That’s my book,” the baby-faced girl said in a voice that quavered, betraying the confidence she’d feigned.  A silver earring looped through her nostril quivered and reflected the candlelight, and he noticed that her dark hair was streaked with scarlet strips.
    He stepped toward the girl, closed the distance between them and removed his own hood.  She gasped and he took her plump face in his hand and squeezed her cheeks.
    “Take your fucking hands off her!” another male voice shrieked.
    Howard glanced back to his men and nodded.  All twelve stepped from the shadows and drew their weapons.  He returned his attention to the girl.  One hand held her face while the other clutched the book.  He raised it and placed it close