Fight this, I told myself.
I could almost feel the spell around me, holding me in place. I tried to push against it, not with my body, but with my mind. But it was useless.
Rory had mentioned casting a binding spell on the coven. I hadn’t understood what he’d meant, or how that could have possibly saved him, but now I understood. My body wasn’t just held in place, it was like it no longer belonged to me at all.
One of the witches drew near, female and young. Perhaps close to my age. She reached out for me and I noticed that her nails were long and manicured.
Beside me, Rory somehow ripped free of the spell. He screamed out something — an incantation — and a jet of light burst from his palm, striking the witch in the chest.
She let out a shriek and fell to her feet, staggering backwards.
Just as suddenly as it began, my paralysis broke.
Rory grabbed my hand. Together, we ran in the opposite direction, with him half-dragging me towards the swinging door leading into the kitchen. My eyes were still adjusting to the darkness, but Rory seemed to know exactly where he was going.
I could feel hands grabbing at the back of my shirt and I was momentarily afraid that I would slip, but Rory's grip on my hand was like cold stone.
We entered the kitchen. The cook and the waitress were nowhere to be found. It was just as well, because the witches followed us in and a hurricane started.
That's what it seemed like, at least. A sudden wind whipped my hair back, causing me to stagger. A stack of plates rose, of their own accord, into the air and slammed themselves into us. Rory took the brunt of it, but I could feel shards of broken glass cutting my cheek and getting tangled in my hair. A table on casters — probably used as a food prep surface — rolled into our path, blown by the phantasmal wind that was whipping around us. Rory kicked it out of the way, but it cost us. I stumbled into him and we almost went down. I heard an ominous grinding noise and looked over to see a row of knives twisting on a magnetic knife rack mounted on the wall.
I let out a shriek as they pulled free and launched themselves at us.
Rory called out something in a foreign-sounding language.
And as suddenly as it had begun, the windstorm died and objects crashed to the floor, raining down all around us. The knives fell in mid-flight, missing us by inches.
Behind us, I could hear the witches chanting something together in a guttural-sounding language.
They're attempting another spell, I realized.
I fought the urge to turn around. I didn't really want to know. The logical part of my mind was rebelling against everything I was seeing, but I pushed that away. It was unimportant. However it was happening, this was real. Survival was the only thing that mattered. The door to the parking lot was the only thing that mattered.
It was only twenty feet away.
Rory, without breaking a stride, grabbed a large metal mixing bowl from the floor. He turned and threw it in their direction, incanting something under his breath.
I heard a sickening metallic-sounding thud and the chanting behind us abruptly stopped.
We reached the back door.
Rory wrenched it open and I chanced a look behind me. One of the witches – a female – was helping a male to his feet. The mixing bowl was lying next to them. The other witch, the same female I had hit, was flying towards us. Her face was a mask of rage. It distorted her natural beauty and made her look monstrous and inhuman.
Rory pulled me through the door and slammed it shut. I expected to hear another sickening thud, as the witch slammed into it, but the door remained quiet.
“Get in the car!” Rory said.
“What are you going to do?” I asked. I realized that, impossibly, I was afraid for him.
Rory nodded across the parking lot. I could see two hooded figures making their way towards us. It seemed to be a male and a female. These witches, however, didn't hover off the ground. They were making their way swiftly towards us, but they weren't running. They seemed to have come from the woods. I couldn't make out their faces.
I hurried towards the car, nearly slipping on the wet wooden steps. I caught myself on the wooden railing, but I felt something stab into my palm – perhaps a nail or a sharp piece of wood. I swore under my breath, but kept going, finding my balance again as I tore across the parking lot. The two witches immediately changed course, bee-lining for me.
Rory was right behind me. He seemed to be queuing up some kind of spell. His palms were glowing with an unnatural blue light.
The witches froze in place at seeing the light blooming in his palms.
Rory threw the light in their direction.
I reached the car, but turned to watch what happened next. The blue light launched towards them, flattening out like a knife-blade at it approached the witches.
The witches scattered, barely jumping out of the way of Rory's spell.
When the blue light from Rory’s spell hit the tree-line behind the parking lot, it sliced through a fifty-foot tall pine tree. Faster than I could react, the tree toppled into the parking lot, taking a tangle of power lines with it. The lights in the parking lot went out. White sparks erupted from a torn power line.
One of the witches on the ground screamed something — another spell — and the sparks immediately died.
Rory slipped into the driver's seat and slammed his key into the ignition.
Behind us, the back door flew open. The rest of the witches had arrived.
“Get in!”
I slid into the car. I barely had the door shut before Rory peeled off, slamming me into the passenger's seat. I fumbled for the buckle.
“Are you okay?” Rory demanded, peeling out of the parking lot and onto the two-lane highway.
I noticed that we were still driving in the direction of Hollow Hill.
Rory looked at me sharply, “Kendra, are you injured? Did they hurt you?”
I shook my head.
Rory let out a sigh of relief, but didn’t say anything. His mouth was set into a grim line, but he looked as shaken as I felt. There was a thin layer of sweat beading on his brow.
“Are we safe?” I asked. My voice, once again, no longer sounded like my own. I felt completely numb, but my body was beginning to tremble of it's own accord. I could feel something hot and wet on my cheeks. To my humiliation, I realized I was crying.
“No,” He said, shooting me a dark look. “They aren't just going to let us go.”
Our headlights cut through the darkness like blades. The two-lane highway was deserted except for us. I was waiting for the witches to swoop out of the darkness at any moment, but everything around us was still and silent. Within moments, the diner had vanished from our rear-view mirror.
We weren’t safe. That meant that, as much as I wanted to, I couldn’t fall apart right now. And I couldn’t deny that any of this was happening. So I focused on taking deep breaths and calming my body. I focused on small sensory details, grounding myself in the present moment. The seat beneath me felt cool and firm, smooth to the touch. The seatbelt was tight around me. Raindrops splattered against the windshield, momentarily catching the light. The sound they made was steady and soothing.
“Should we turn off the headlights?” I suggested, when I felt steady enough to speak. “We'll be less visible.”
“I wouldn't worry about that,” Rory replied. “I'm cloaking us.”
“Of course you are. So that was the coven.”
Rory nodded tightly. “They're afraid.”
“Of us helping Gwydion? Why?”
“It's not Gwydion,” Rory said. “It's what might come back in his place. If he doesn't complete the claiming successfully, his body will return, but it won't be him. It will be something dark and unnatural. It will have Gwydion's memories, but it won't be him anymore.”
“Oh.”
“You've heard of Ted Bundy, right? Or John Wayne Gasey?”
“
Serial killers,” I said harshly. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“Imagine if they had magic. Because that's what let out into the world when one of us fails the claiming. We become killers, completely devoid of compassion. We delight in causing suffering.”
“And the coven is afraid of Gwydion becoming something like that?”
“Yes and no,” Rory said. “They're afraid that he'll become something dark and twisted, sure. But they're more afraid that they won't be able to stop him. And they know that they'll be his first targets if he does fail.”
I knew that there was something I was missing here. “Gwydion would just be one witch,” I said. “And a brand new one at that. Why would they be afraid of him?”
“Because Gwydion bound himself to the earth,” Rory said. “The few instances of a witch doing this are always the same. The witch comes back immeasurably powerful. Essentially, any natural phenomena you can think of is under their control.” He paused, glancing over at me. “And you can imagine what kind of damage someone with power like that is capable of inflicting. The last time this happened, a witch failed her trial and what came back in her place destroyed her entire town. There was nothing left alive by the time she was done.”
“Oh,” I said again. “So if we fail, the coven won’t be able to stop him.”
Rory didn’t say anything. His eyes were trained on the road.
“Rory, where are you taking us?”
“Kendra, I understand how you must be feeling right now. But I’m doing what has to be done.”
“Even if I say no?”
He hesitated, “Are you saying no?”
“I don’t even know what you’re really asking me to do.”
“We're going to a place in the woods. It's the thinnest point between the worlds in Hollow Hill. And once we get there, I'm going to cast a spell to bind your blood to your brother's. Then I'm going to put us both into a state close to death, so that we can join him. If all goes well, I'll be able to guide us all out of the underworld before sunrise.”
“And if we aren't out by sunrise?”
“If we fail, then we're there forever.”
I thought again of my brother, standing in the doorway with the gun in his hand. Any chance he’d had at normalcy had vanished the moment he’d pulled the trigger. And yet, what Rory was saying was impossible. I couldn’t even fathom it — the only concept I had of the underworld was from Greek mythology. It hadn’t been painted in a flattering light.
I wanted proof that everything Rory had said was true, but I knew enough to know that some of it, at least, was true. I knew that Rory was a witch and that his coven was after us. Presumably, because they were attempting to stop us from saving Gwydion.
And I knew that my brother had changed, overnight, like magic.
It had been a little over a year ago. One minute, he'd been shooting enough drugs into his arm to put him into a coma, and the next, he'd suddenly gotten himself clean. He'd completely changed, with no preamble, nothing leading up to it. Even though he'd attended every narcotics anonymous meeting in a twenty mile radius, had been in rehab twice, and had been in therapy off and on for years, none of it had stuck for long. He'd have moments of lucidity, but in the end, he always went back to it.
And then, suddenly, he was cured. It was as though he'd never been an addict in the first place. He started returning my phone calls. He got a job. He found a stable place to live. He seemed, for the first time in my entire life, happy.
I knew that wasn't normal. Recovery doesn’t happen that way. And yet, though I was trained as a therapist, though I knew that people don’t just suddenly and completely change like that, I barely questioned it. I was just happy to have my brother back.
I wanted to ask Rory if he had done that, if he had given my brother back to me. In the light of everything that had happened, it seemed trivial. But it didn’t feel trivial to me at all.
I opened my mouth to speak, but the words never came out.
Because in that moment, something slammed into the back of Rory’s car.
The coven had found us again.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Rory swore under his breath.
My heart raced in my chest as we accelerated.
We'd ascended into the mountains and the road had narrowed. We were hugging a massive wall of rock on our right. On our left was a steep drop, hundreds of feet down into the darkness. I could barely make out the tops of evergreen trees that had grown out from the side of the cliff.
I gave the guard rail on our left a nervous look.
“We’re almost there,” Rory said, pushing down on the gas pedal.
Something slammed into us again. I felt the seatbelt tighten around me like a vise, slamming the breath out of my lungs. Sudden headlights blinded me. I heard the sound of squealing metal. Rory’s car rocked and veered into the oncoming lane, dangerously close to the edge of the cliff.
“Take the wheel!” Rory commanded. “I need to hold them off.”
He didn’t wait for me to respond. He released the wheel and turned around in his seat, to get a better view of the rear-view window.
My heart pounding, I lunged for the steering wheel, my arm digging into Rory's back. The car rocked dangerously again, but I managed to keep us on our present course without killing us.
Rory drew his hands in a complex motion — I saw it out of the corner of my eye — and he said something in that strange guttural-sounding language I'd heard earlier.
For a split second, nothing happened. Then I heard a twin explosion, one after the other, only a second apart. Glass pellets sprayed across the back of my head and I felt a sucking rush of cold air sweep over me. Rory had blown the windows out.
I glanced in the rear-view mirror. The car behind us was covered in a thick cloud of black smoke that obscured the headlights. It veered dangerously close to the guard-rail, but managed to correct itself at the last moment. So faintly that I thought I'd imagined it, I heard something shouted in that same language. The smoke cloud evaporated like it had never been there at all.
I turned my attention back to the road and managed to barely avoid plunging us to our death.
Rory screamed out another spell, not bothering with a fancy hand movement. A light erupted. For a moment, it was as though the car's high-beams had been turned on. The light was blinding and white, searing into my vision.
Instinctively, I looked away from it.
Spots were burned into my field of vision. For a moment, I was so stunned that I forgot what I was supposed to be doing.
Behind us, I heard the screech of wheels on pavement, then the sound of grinding metal. Then, as quickly as it had come, the light vanished.
Rory turned back around and smoothly grabbed the wheel. Dimly, I realized that I had been about to drive us straight over the cliff. I was breathing in gasps.
Frantically, I turned to look behind me.
An SUV – maybe a Jeep – had plowed into the guard-rail. A mess of twisted metal and smoke hugged the hood. One of the headlights had blown out, but the other was stabbing into the darkness like the eye of an angry cyclops. The vehicle was tilted at a precarious angle and the left wheel was suspended in the air, over the side of the cliff. The gray metal guard-rail was flattened against it, but amazingly, it seemed to be intact.
“We're here,” Rory said.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Rory turned off the highway, driving up a long narrow road so fast that I could hear the back tire shooting bits gravel into the darkness behind us. At any moment, I expected the witches to appear.
After several minutes, Rory parked the car beside a thick grove of trees. The road had ended.
Rory was out of the car before I could unfasten my seatbelt. He left the headlights on. They illuminated a clearing just ahead of us.
I fumbled with my seatbelt and staggered a few feet from the car. My head was swimming with fear. What was I doing? H
ow had I gotten here? This wasn’t the sort of thing that was ever supposed to happen to me.
“I need your help,” He said. “I can't carry him alone.”
Numbly, I walked to the rear of the car, feeling as though I were encased in ice. I tried to steel myself against what I was about to see, but I couldn't quite manage it. Rory popped the trunk. There, as though he could be sleeping, was my brother's body.
Gwydion had been with us all along.
He looked peaceful and utterly still. I suppose that he was handsome, with thick sandy blond hair that was beginning to show the first signs of needing a haircut. Lips that were almost too full for a man. The same severe cheekbones and narrow features as me, but on him they didn't look out of place. His eyes were wide-set and his eyebrows were high, giving him a perpetually surprised look that he wore at all times. He was paler than I remembered him, and somehow less substantial. Almost as though he were made of the same pale moonlight that was filtering in through the trees. As though he wasn’t quite solid anymore.
“Help me,” Rory grunted, grabbing my brother behind his arms.
Automatically, I grabbed Gwydion's legs. They felt utterly limp in my hands. Through his jeans, I could tell that his skin was cold to the touch.
I suppressed a noise of horror as I realized that my brother wasn't breathing. His chest wasn't moving at all.
Rory didn't seem concerned. He hefted my brother out of the trunk with a grunt.
“Over here,” He said, guiding my brother's body to a large clearing just beyond a copse of trees. It was dark, but I could – barely – make out the surrounding shapes of the trees in the distance. The clearing was perhaps fifty feet across and it formed almost a perfect circle.
We set Gwydion down in the center of the clearing. I don’t remember crossing the distance between the car and the clearing. My brain was locked up with panic.
Rory slid something off his shoulder. A bag of some sort. He unzipped it and began taking things from it. Above us, the moon slid out from beneath a cloud, and a ray of moonlight fell upon my brother's face. His expression seemed softer than normal, utterly tranquil. In that moment, I felt anything but.
The Claiming Page 4