“I didn’t say it was off.” I could hear him sigh on the other end, and knew he’d be running his hand through his messy hair. “I said I need to think about your safety first. There has to be a way to do my job and love you at the same time.”
The silence was deafening, but I knew he hadn’t hung up.
“That was stupid, to say it over the phone like that.” He sighed again.
“No, it’s . . . yes, there should be a way we can have both,” I added quickly.
“Where are you? Your car’s not at your house, I wanna talk . . . not on the phone.”
“On my way to Dublin . . . ”
“Damn it, Elyse! I need to be close to you to protect you! Why didn’t you tell me you were going?”
Just like that, he was angry again, and so was I.
“Clara’s with me. See you at school on Monday.” I rushed the end of the call, hung up the phone, and turned it off. Then, I shoved it into the glove box and threw my feet on the dashboard.
“Sorry you had to hear that.”
“No, it’s fine. I get it. Boys can be so bullheaded sometimes.” She pulled the car to a stop at a gas station to grab drinks and use the ladies room. I thought the noise had come back again in the speakers. I could hear it through the speakers, but this time, it sounded like someone shouting amidst the static. When Clara opened the door of the Cooper to get in, the sound disappeared again.
“So, should I get used to ‘nice Clara’ then?” I looked at her to gauge her response.
“Well, ya know, your sister is a pain in the ass, right? I guess I was just targeting my annoyance with her at you. It worked for the most part too, and then you had to go get yourself kidnapped . . . so, yeah.” She chanced a look in my direction.
“That makes . . . a lot of sense.” I couldn’t contain my laughter at the thought of her spending thirteen years hanging out my sister and wanting to pull her hair out, only to keep a close eye on me.
“Maybe at some point, I actually started to resent you. I mean . . . if it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t have spent so many years palling around with Michelle. Then, I realized I kinda like her. Don’t get me wrong, she needs and attitude adjustment, big time.”
This time, she struggled to contain her laughter. I felt it was probably since she had become fond of Michelle. I hadn’t resolved my sister to being a complete waste of space. I liked to believe she had human moments, too. Although, thinking of her latest arguments, boys and cars were her only vice. Yes. She needed a big attitude adjustment.
We laughed together over some of my sister’s many habits, some that I had no clue about. I had never been on a road trip with another girl before, and realized I was actually having a good time. It was very refreshing to complain about needing a bathroom break and not get reprimanded. At the same time, I missed Chad and the fun games we played on our drives to Alistair’s house, and the first time he had brought me out to the small shop.
By the time we had arrived at Spirit, it was dark. I didn’t even know the operating hours. Hoping the lady hadn’t closed up for the night, I ran to the porch. When I saw that the lights were still on inside, I opened the door and heard the familiar chime of the bell. “Hello, anyone here?”
We walked through the shop, since I knew just what I wanted. I went straight back to the shelves, behind the small table out front, and looked through the books.
The little woman still hadn’t come to the counter by the time I grabbed my book and was ready to cash out.
“Hello? I’d just like to buy a book!” I yelled to the back of the store, but still received no answer.
The bell above the store’s entrance rang. I looked back in time to see Chad pushing through the door and panting so hard, he sounded like an asthmatic in desperate need of his inhaler.
“How did you?”
“Never mind that, let’s just get out of here,” he said, motioning for us to leave.
“I need a new book. I think I can manage to go to a store and buy a book.”
The sound of glass breaking came from the back room.
“Hello?” Clara took a look at us and then went through the beaded curtain, to the hidden room.
“Elyse . . . Chad, come quick!” Clara yelled from behind the curtain.
As we turned the corner, I could see Clara crouching down on the ground, next to a pair of feet. I rushed behind the curtain and saw the little woman lying on her back with her eyes closed. There was a teacup next to her on the floor, its contents spilled over the carpet.
“What happened to her?” I asked Clara as I knelt down and placed a hand on her brow.
“I found her like this. I thought I saw someone running out the back, but couldn’t be sure.”
Chad ran to the back of the small house. It looked as though the front of the house was the store, and the woman lived in the rest of it. The room we were in was a small kitchen. The rug was green and matched the curtains on the windows that we could see from the porch.
The woman woke and described her assailant as a woman with short brown hair. She was yelling about a friend of hers, who may or may not have left something in this house, and she wanted it.
“Sounds like my aunt,” I said to Chad and Clara.
“Your aunt?” the woman asked.
“Yes, she’s my Aunt Sabina. For whatever reason, I think she tried to kill my mother, and now she’s trying to kill me.”
“You think she’s behind all of it?” Chad asked me.
He was sitting in front of me, holding my hand. It was the first time he had touched me since the men attacked me in the woods. I wanted to curl up in a ball on his lap and have him wrap his arms around me. I was getting wearisome with the thought of my own aunt wanting me dead. Instead, I stood and let his hand fall away from me.
“Yes, I think she’s the one who told Sigmis about my parents. She may not be the one who burnt the house down, but she started it.”
The small woman looked at me, wide-eyed, as if she had just unearthed a great mystery.
“Now I know.” She jumped up from her chair, leaving the ice pack for her head on the table, and disappeared behind the beaded curtain to the store.
I heard the front door close and lock, and became a bit nervous. What had we just opened up about, and in front of whom?
She came back to the kitchen and clearly saw the look on my face. “It’s okay,” she said, before moving to a room farther back in the house and begged us to follow her.
“We must cast a circle.” She pointed to the circle she had on the floor. It was a circle of rope with no end.
“Wait, why?”
“Shh, just do it.” She moved within the circle, and once we had all stepped inside, she lit a candle in the middle. The flames rose and lowered, and the wicks of the other candles in the house, all lit.
“I’ve only ever seen one person do that when casting a circle,” Chad said to the woman.
“That’s because I didn’t do it.” She looked at me.
“I didn’t,” I said to the eyes all staring at me.
“Of course you did. You thought of what would happen and it happened, as I knew it would.” She sat down and looked up for us to follow.
“Now for explanations.” She began to chant and I felt as if I were drifting into sleep.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The woman finished her chant and handed me a chalice. I was skeptical, but she urged me to drink. The images started flowing almost the minute I pulled the cup from my mouth, and the woman began to speak in my mind.
“I am a spirit walker. I tell stories in the way that a telepath may show you what is to be. I tell what has been. My name is Ophelia Can, and this is your parents’ true home.”
The words struck me like lightning to a rod. I could feel Chad holding one hand and Clara holding the other. They held onto me as a vision swept through my mind with a jolt of electricity. I nodded to them, and them to me, before I closed my eyes and accepted the quest.
I
could see a tall, dark-haired man. He was in the kitchen of the small house, brooding over a book on the table. Everything in the home was exactly as I had seen it. He moved his hair from his eyes by running a hand through it. A woman, tall and slender, walked behind him and placed a kiss on his temple. Her hair was as dark as mine and it rippled in waves down her back, to her waist. Her skin was tanned and flawless. She held his head backward so he could look up at her, and she smiled.
I couldn’t help myself. I smiled with her, and then so did he. A small giggle escaped my mouth and they both looked at me as if I were truly there. They stood still and I tried to speak to them.
“Mom?”
The woman’s eyes grew wide and she moved from behind the man sitting in front of her. Then I saw her hand go to her swollen stomach. She was pregnant, and the book the man was brooding over was a manual for the crib, laying across the floor between us.
“Elyse?” she asked, and her voice was as beautiful as I had dreamed it would be.
“Yes, but how?”
“Ophelia. She is with you?”
“Yes,” I said, looking around for her, but I couldn’t find her or my friends. I still felt Chad holding me, so I knew I was safe.
“She is showing you this, which means you’re not here anymore.” She rubbed her swollen abdomen and it shrunk down. “You’ve turned eighteen?”
“Yes, it’s almost the winter solstice.”
“Good, then you will be able to free us. We have been in an immortal slumber for eighteen years. You must help us.”
“What? I thought you gave me up when I was one.”
“No, my sister cursed us. She took you from my womb, and left us here to relive this day over and over. Little did she know we had Ophelia. Once your coven becomes whole, you must free us, and be careful about those who you surround yourself with. Not everyone can be considered a friend.”
“What do you mean?”
“Elyse, listen to your mother. She knows what she is talking about.”
“Why should I listen to either of you? How do I know this is even real? No, you gave me away! You didn’t want me!”
She tried to reach out to me, but I pulled away. When I opened my eyes, I saw it was the hand Clara was holding that had slipped away and broke the contact. My parents were gone.
“I want to go home.” I pulled my hand from Chad’s and walked out of the room.
I didn’t stop walking until I was sitting in the passenger seat of my car. Clara had agreed to drive the pick-up back and Chad slipped into the driver’s seat of the Cooper. After clicking the seatbelt, I turned my body so that I faced the window. I didn’t want to talk, and he didn’t try to get me to.
The next few weeks had gone without discussing what happened at Spirit that night. I wasn’t ready to tell them what I had learned. As the days went on and the upcoming winter solstice loomed over me, I felt I had to at least tell Chad. I chose to tell Clara at the same time, so I didn’t risk another argument between my protector and myself.
Chad had been my best friend since grade school, and Clara had saved my life on two different occasions. They had to be people I could count on as friends; people I could trust. Clara had been more of a nemesis than a friend. She had explained that it was a ruse to stay close to me, so she could keep an eye on me until the time came when she could explain why. Also, Chad and I may have been at odds with each other, but I knew I would always be able to trust him with my life. He was, after all, my protector.
Clara and Michelle had started spending less and less time together over the last few weeks. She hadn’t come to the house nearly as much, and I figured that was a way for her to give me space. Friday, before the winter solstice, I asked her and Chad to meet me at the clearing in the woods, where we were to perform the blood ritual.
I thought I owed them an explanation. I had written it all down in the new Book of Shadows I had unintentionally taken from the store that night. Seeing as how it belonged to my parents, I didn’t think Ophelia would mind. However, I did mail her the money for the price of the book, and she wrote me back asking if I was okay. I didn’t have the heart to answer her, and so I hadn’t.
It started to snow when I arrived at the site, and shortly after, Chad parked his pickup next to the Cooper. We walked the hundred feet to the clearing together in silence. When we got there, I started the circle and placed the candles in the appropriate places while waiting for Clara.
“Are we ever going to talk about us?” he asked after a few minutes of waiting.
“I don’t think we should. Not yet, anyway. I think you were right. We need to do what’s important first and then see if we can find a way to do both. Right now . . . I don’t think we can.” I looked at him for a moment and broke eye contact when Clara walked into the circle.
Since we were out in the open, I cast a circle for the privacy it would give us. The three of us held hands and chanted for protection from the goddess of the earth. Once the candles were lit, we spoke openly.
I told them what I had seen in the vision Ophelia had given me, and the conversation I had with my parents. I also told them of the vision I thought I had in the days that followed. My mother had come to me, alone that time, and still she was no longer pregnant. She said she no longer had to be. She knew I was alive and well, and that I would be taking my place as the high priestess of the Crawford line. It was a right Sabina had wanted her entire life.
She thought her sister wanted it so badly that she had helped their mother’s illness along, and blamed my father for it. She may have hoped it would cause the two families to come together in war, leaving my parents victims of the crossfire. When that hadn’t happened, Sabina cast a spell to make them unreachable on our plane of existence. She trapped them in a time loop, making them repeat one day over and over; the day she ripped me from my mother’s womb. Ophelia and the rest of my father’s coven had worked the magic they could to release them from the loop, but were unsuccessful in returning them to this plane.
They have been trapped alone, but together, for eighteen years, waiting for me to take my place as the High Priestess of the Crawford and Sigmis families. With both of their blood in me, they couldn’t begin to tell me how much power I, or my coven, would possess. Once we shared blood in the ritual, we would share our power as well.
Gwen Crawford was also vague about the other topic she had shared with me that night at their house in Dublin. She said I should be careful of who I called a friend.
“Not everyone who seems friendly is a true friend. Also, those who may not seem like they are your friends will be your closest allies.” She had repeated those words, but would not divulge what her meaning was.
“I’ve learned this first hand. Please be careful, my daughter, and know your father and I love you very much. We would have never given you away, had we the choice.”
I could see on Chad and Clara’s faces that they were having only minimal difficulty in understanding what I had told them. They, more than myself, could understand something like that happening because they had grown up knowing who and what they were.
“Well, I can see why you would want to keep this to yourself, but I hope you don’t think we are the ones who can’t be trusted,” Clara finally said when the snow had started to cover our feet.
“No, I don’t think anyone of you can’t be trusted.”
“Then why haven’t Matt and Crystal been invited to this little pow-wow?” Chad pointed out.
“To be honest, you two were with me that night. I didn’t think about them needing an explanation.”
“I think we should go to my house, and we can call them on the way. We need to tell my dad, so he can let the rents know what’s happened to your parents.
“I think your father might already know. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you first. He’s the first one who told me they were alive.”
“You think my father had something to do with this?” he screamed at me. When he did, his hand fe
ll free of mine, breaking the circle.
“What have you done?”
We looked around and noticed the fire before the explosion happened. The pick-up went flying into the woods and parts of it went in every direction, landing in the snow with a thud.
“My dad’s gonna kick my ass, E.”
“Why? We didn’t blow it up,” I said as we ran towards the cars.
We stopped short of my car and looked around. “Clara, where did you park?”
I looked at her and she pointed to the car that had obviously been struck first. As a tire came rolling in front of us, the fire started to sizzle as it rolled over the freshly fallen snow.
“I guess I parked too close to the truck.” She started to laugh.
“What the fuck . . . get in the car.” Chad pulled the keys from my hand as we rushed to the Cooper. “I can’t believe you think my father could have something to do with this!” he yelled as he pushed the shifter into reverse and pulled the car out of the parking area, driving backward down the street.
“No, you didn’t let me finish!” I yelled back at him. “I think Chester has known this whole time where my parents were . . . are. He said they were fine, and my mother told me that my father’s coven helped them out of the loop. Maybe they told Chester . . . they were all joined into one coven.”
“Oh,” was all he said.
“You can be hardheaded sometimes, Chad, but listen guys . . . can we maybe get outta here and talk about this later?” Clara yelled from the backseat, where she was tossed back and forth as the car backed up and turned around.
“Yes!” Chad and I screamed together.
Chad swerved to miss a ball of fire that landed in front of the car once we started moving forward. I looked back and saw it start to roll down the street after us. “I think that’s a tire!” I heard Clara exclaim as she pushed her nose to the window in the back of the car.
“Could you please get it off our tail?” Chad yelled as he shifted the little car, getting it to top speed.
Immortal Slumber (The Crawford Witch Chronicles Book 1) Page 13