“I can’t believe it’s been three days,” I mutter, more to myself than her.
“Yeah, detoxing is supposed to be really painful and like, depressing…” She says and I don't correct her.
“I woke up hungry,” I tell her, attempting to change the subject.
“Yeah, I’ll bet. The dead guy doesn’t have a lot in the way of food but there’s enough alcohol to party for the next six months. I doubt we could get anyone to come though, since we’re in the middle of freaking nowhere.”
“We should probably go pick up some stuff from the store,” I say, eating the last chip from the packet. “If we’re going to be staying here for a while, I mean.”
“Since when did you and I become a ‘we’?” She snorts. “Oh wait, let me guess, right around the same time you realized you’ve never been on your own before and I might come in handy?”
“Pretty much…” I shrug. “So, are you coming to the store or not?”
She smiles. “I love how little you care about doing and saying things that most people would sugar-coat. It's like looking in a mirror.”
I can’t tell if her words are said as a compliment or an insult. I don’t care enough to spend time analysing them.
“I’ll go get dressed, then.” She jumps from her seat and makes her way around me, stopping when she spots the bloody prints. I don’t say anything as she looks under my stool to find my feet dripping thick, red liquid.
She meets my eyes. Again, I say nothing. Instead, I jump from my seat and exit the kitchen area and head back in the direction of the rooms.
Finger-combing my damp hair into a sloppy ponytail, I wrap a hair-tie around it three times and don’t bother changing. I roll white socks over my feet and watch in the mirror as the bottoms slowly turn a deep shade of bloody.
When the entire bottom is covered, I drag my beat up, old sneakers over them; hissing slightly as I step from the bed. The pressure of the rubber against the cuts cause sharp pains to shoot through my heels.
I make my way, carefully, down the stairs – the pain becoming more intense each time I lift my feet and slam them to the floor in an attempt to walk. I grasp the wall beside me and question why I did it. My brain comes up blank – almost as if it wasn’t my decision at all… but it was. I just shouldn’t have made it! I know that now.
“Are you ready to go?” Maeve asks, waiting by the open door. Her red hair has been carelessly dragged into messy bun and her outfit isn’t five-star either. She looks ready to run a marathon in her running shorts and hoodie.
I nod and step through the threshold, taking my first look outside.
“Whoa…”
I thought Maeve had been exaggerating when she said we were in the middle of nowhere but there’s nothing but trees in the immediate vicinity, and even though I heard her say it, I only now realize that we’re not in a populated area.
“I told you… lucky us though, right?” Maeve asks, unlocking the truck.
“What do you mean?”
She gestures around her. “No nosy neighbours we have to lie to about who we are or why we’re staying here. Though it does kind of blow… I had a whole bomb-ass backstory prepared.”
I pull myself into the seat and laugh.
“Let me guess… we’re his nieces from out of town who showed up for his funeral? Before his death was even announced…”
My words clearly cause a crack in the foundation of her lie because she hits me with a glare.
I snort.
Without another word, she starts up the truck and pulls out of the parking position.
“How did a guy like that live in a place like this, anyway?” I ponder aloud.
“According to a document I found in the kitchen, it was his grandmothers estate. She wanted it to remain in the family, and as luck would have it, the fat disappointing drunk – her words, not mine – was the last surviving member.”
“Wow, that’s crazy,” I say, looking out of the window.
We make our way down the long, winding brick road and she begins to play with the radio.
“Buckle up! We’ve got about two hours before we return to civilisation… So, if I were you, I’d get comfy.”
This time I hope she’s exaggerating, but as time ticks by and all I see are roads in front of us, I realize she’s not. I sigh, sinking down further into my seat. My hand reaches for the radio and I turn it up louder, hoping that the music filling the truck will eliminate the need for unnecessary conversation.
I don’t think Maeve minds much. She clearly finds me as annoying as I find her.
I’m reminded of Anna again. The way she always used to pretend I wasn’t her younger sister when her friends were around.
“Go away, Theo… You’re being so annoying!” I hear her voice in my head. I’d give anything to hear her voice one more time, telling me she loved me or even to go away. I wouldn’t care… as long as she was alive.
A stray tear escapes my eye and I quickly wipe it away. Maeve watches me but pretends not to notice.
I’m thankful for it.
I lay my head against the cold, hard glass of the truck window and watch as rain begins to fall fast from the sky. The dark clouds overhead tell me a storm is brewing. My intuition is saying the same thing about the witches…
The only difference is; I haven’t been employed by the nightmares of my dead sister and random witches to fight the rain.
CHAPTER FIVE
The store is bigger than any I’ve ever been in and there are more people around me than I’ve seen before in real life. I contemplate, for a second, about how much the academy kept us from with their psycho-babble bullshit about the dangers the mundane pose; when in reality, they were the dangerous ones.
“What do we need?” I ask, pushing the metal cart with a smile on my face. I’ve never pushed one before and find the way it moves fascinatingly fun. It glides as though it’s moving on air and every so often, when Maeve isn’t looking, I push it a little faster and stand on the back, letting it take me on a small ride.
“I don’t know, just grab anything that looks good.” Maeve shrugs, sweeping something off the shelf with her hand. I roll my eyes and keep moving forward.
I take my cue from her and throw something chocolate covered into the cart.
“Oh…” She smirks, pointing a finger. “How about one of those?”
I look to where she’s pointing and find two young males. I can’t tell if I should call them men or boys – they’re sort of in between looking.
One of them is well muscled underneath his pastel blue polo shirt and his legs are very long in a pair of loose fitting blue jeans. He’s at least six-foot and his face is extremely defined, past anything I could have ever imagined a male's face could look. My breath hitches as his impossibly dark green eyes collide with mine.
He smiles and I can’t think.
Anna always said that when a cute boy smiles at you, you should smile back so I have no idea why I am suddenly lifting my hand in a wave, with a look on my face that may lead him to think I have something psychologically wrong with me.
He laughs which brings the attention of his friend who is now also looking in my direction.
My mouth gapes. If I thought the first male was good looking, the second took everything he had, applied dark eyes, added an extra year or two, and did it better. Way better. He is just as tall, maybe even an inch taller and although he isn’t as well muscled, his frame was very well suited to his head. If I had to describe him in two words, I would say: Well proportioned.
Extremely well proportioned.
“Close your frickin’ mouth,” Maeve whisper yells. “They’re just guys.”
“I went to an all-girls school,” I tell her. “The only guys I ever interacted with were from our brother-school. We saw them once a year and they didn’t look like that…”
I left off that for the most part, we weren’t allowed to talk to the boys, period. They were brought in as suitors. We were matched on
personality and skill level when we were fifteen; to ensure that when the girls were of age to become married women and start a family, our magical blood wouldn’t be mixed with that of a mortal.
I shudder, the face of my match – Malcolm Fletcher – coming into mind.
“Power is excellence!” I hear the superior’s voice in my head. I’m sure that if I had left his neck intact and he was here, he would be disgusted with me – essentially, I’m living with a mundane teenager and lusting over their males. I look down at my feet.
“Oh my God, what’re you, Amish?” Maeve snorts. “They’re looking at you. Just smile at one, both, or neither and let’s shop.”
“Why don’t you smile at one of them?” I bite.
“It’s not me that they’re looking at! I’m not about to beg for the attention of two random guys in a grocery store.” She rolls her eyes.
I decide to smile at neither and keep my head down as we enter a new aisle.
“I’ve never seen this much stuff in one place before…” It’s overwhelming.
“Were you in a school or juvie?” She creases her eyebrows, pushing another thing that I don’t recognise into the cart.
I still, looking at a pile of – I don’t even know what – and trying to decide if I want to try it or not.
“Oh my God! Would you just push it in, already! It’s not like we’re paying for it anyway…”
“You want to steal?” I try to keep the shock out of my voice, but my wide eyes give me away.
“No, of course not!” She laughs, taking cookies from the shelf and placing them into the pocket of her baggy hoodie. “We want to steal...”
The way she flicks her eyebrow and smirks at me tells me it’s a challenge. She’s testing me and, suddenly, I feel like testing myself.
The two males have entered our aisle, now. They’re watching us, and they saw Maeve take the cookies. They seem to be watching to see what I’ll do next. I meet the taller one’s dark brown eyes and just like Maeve, he looks as though he’s daring me. I look at the chips on the shelf and then to Maeve and finally, back to him.
His eyes are so drawing that I almost feel like I can hear his thoughts. With some concentration, I think I may be able to.
I close my eyes, seemingly in thought, and concentrate on his mind. It’s unethical, but too intriguing to pass up.
The tingle passes through me and builds when it reaches my head.
The entire stores thoughts come rushing to me at once – including Maeve’s, who is thinking that there is no way I’m going to steal anything – until I finally isolate his.
‘So, are you going to put those chips in your bag or not?’ His deep voice invades my mind.
My eyes whip open to find him smiling wide. We’re still connected and I can hear him laughing at how long it’s taking me to decide.
Peer pressure is bad, I know this… but being bad seems so alluring right now – too alluring; like chocolate coloured eyes, cheekbones and thick lips, alluring. I bite my lip and make a quick snatch with my hand. Within seconds the chips are in my bag and the hard part is over.
“Not bad!” Maeve smiles and nudges my shoulder playfully. “I may make a street kid out of you, yet.”
I let out a breath and grin. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t impressed with myself, right now. I don’t care that it’s only a small bag of chips, I feel like a total badass!
My eyes meet the tall guy’s and I find him and his friend also looking impressed, and though I wasn’t searching for their approval, I can’t deny the giddy feeling that spreads through me.
I keep my eyes on him, and this time, I’m the one who is challenging him. I flick my eyebrow up at him and he smirks. He makes me way over to the candy section, and when he sees I’m the only one watching, he lifts his hand slightly and my mouth drops open as I watch a pack of candy fly from the shelf and reach him.
He stuffs it into his pocket and throws a wink my way before turning away and walking into another aisle.
He’s a witch.
My throat goes dry. I’ve only ever seen fully grown witches outside of the academies without a chaperone. He doesn’t look fully grown; older than me by two-or-three years, maybe, but not enough to have graduated. Witches aren’t allowed out of the academies until their twenty-third birthday…
“I uh – “ I swallow the lump in my throat. “I have to get something from the next aisle.”
I rush out of Maeve’s sights and round the corner of aisle five so fast that I almost knock a full display of chocolate bars to the ground. I keep going, not bothering to pick up the ones that dropped, until I finally reach them.
“Hey,” I shout to catch his attention. “How did you do that?”
“Do what?” His lips pull up in amusement as he turns to face me.
“How are you out of the academy?”
“How are you?”
“I asked you first!”
He snorts. “Let’s just say the academy and I weren’t a cohesive partnership…” My eyes squint at his response and he sighs. “They tried to kill me.”
My blood runs cold.
“Why?”
“Why did they try to kill you?” He crosses his arms. “You see how stupid that question sounds? I don’t know why the tried to kill me, Theo. All I know is that I barely escaped their attack.”
My skin bristles as he speaks my name and distrust has me searching for my power. It’s there and ready to use if I need it.
“How do you know who I am?”
“We pay attention. You’re not the first witch to run from the council. We have an inside man who feeds us the info of witches who manage to escape and the way I hear it… you did more than escape.” He looks impressed. “Any truth to those rumours?”
“That’s my business,” I bite. “Who exactly are ‘we’?”
“That’s my business.”
His smirk is infuriating and it makes me want to punch him.
“We’re an underground sanctuary,” green eyes interrupts. His sights are focused intently on me and his voice is deeper than I thought it would be. I finally look at him and my stomach flutters nervously. “We track the witches on the run and if they need a place to stay, we take them in. In exchange, they join our ranks, pledge allegiance and train with us for the battle that’s coming... I’m Knox, by the way.”
Silence settles between the three of us as they watch me mull it over.
“We’re all in this together, Theodora!” Not Knox tells me. “We survived the council and fought our way out. Now we’re being hunted and we need to stick together. You need to –”
“There you are, T!” Maeve rounds the corner, interrupting him. The look in not-Knox’s eyes shows annoyance. Maeve interrupted his sales pitch on why I should fight and die for the cause. She shifts awkwardly on her feet. “Oh… Never mind. I didn’t mean to interrupt… I’ll just be over there.”
She turns away, smirking and not-Knox begins to speak again.
I cut him off. “Look, I’ve never been around the mundane by myself before, and honestly, I don’t even know what I’m doing. I’m just taking it minute by minute, trying to unravel the stuff in my head and not die while doing it! I’m not looking to be some kind of witch-warrior combo. I have a good set up with Maeve so thanks… but no thanks.” I walk backwards, away from them. “It was nice to meet you Knox… Not-Knox.”
“It’s Tavis… and if you change your mind, give me a call.” He looks disappointed as he holds out a small piece of cardboard with his number on it. I hesitate for a minute before, finally, taking it and placing it in my pocket.
I want to laugh because of how crazy it is that he has business cards for a secret, underground witch army. Instead, I bite my lip and nod, turning away from them. I make my way back to Maeve and we continue shopping. She’s not asking about the guys, or at least she hasn’t yet…
“Okay, that’s everything,” I say, adding the last item to the cart. “So how are we going to do this?”
“Well… when we get near the checkout, we don’t check out. We just run!” She says it as though it’s something easy – just another every day thing – and not a crime. She sees the fear on my face and rolls her eyes. “Okay, you see those stacked boxes of stuff in between the exit and the checkout? We walk casually to that point and then we start running. The truck is a block away, giving us enough time to ditch whatever security may chase us before we get to it.”
“Security?” My eyes bug out and I gulp so loud it echoes in my throat.
“Of course!” She snorts. “They’re not just gonna let us leave with a smile like, ‘oh hey, sure just walk out of the exit with all that free crap. See you next time’. They’re gonna be pissed as hell. There’s over two-hundred dollars’ worth of stuff here...”
We approach the stacked boxes and my nerves play up. I’m not sure I can do this. I’m about to tell Maeve that I’ve changed my mind, but I spend so long debating it that I don’t even realize when I reach the boxes and my choice is ripped away from me.
“Ready?” she asks, bouncing on her feet. “Run!”
My instincts kick in before my brain does and, suddenly, I’m running faster than I ever thought I possibly could. The cuts on my feet are a painful sensation as they slam against the hard concrete. It doesn’t take long before the security officers near the checkout are on our tail. They’re hollering after us and their navy-blue uniforms are a blur to me as I speed up.
I can’t help the giggle that escapes my throat and without even thinking, my hand waves behind. I crane my neck and watch as the boxes come crashing down around them, blocking their path.
My lungs constrict in the cold air and I can barely breathe with the adrenaline flooding my body. Maeve yells out in excitement and I join her. I rip the elastic hair tie out and let my wavy brown hair whip freely around me; my smile wider than it’s been in years. The wind on my face is strong, my hair is in my mouth and my muscles feel like they’re being stretched and snapped, but I keep running – even after we lose sight of the security guard – because I’m not ready to lose the feeling of this moment...
SACRIFICIUM (THE UNDERGROUND Book 1) Page 4