I open my mouth too, ready to come up with an excuse, any excuse – but all that comes out is a small squeak of indecision as I realize… I have no idea what to tell her.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“Just get in the truck, I’ll explain back at the house.” I move past her as she stands, frozen. “Please, Maeve, we can’t stay here, if someone sees the smoke, they’ll call the cops or the fire brigade and we’ll get taken in to be asked questions that neither of us can answer.”
“You could,” she spits, turning to face me. “So, answer them, now!”
“I will, I promise.” I throw open the truck door. “At the house.”
“Are you kidding? I can’t drive!” She yells, pointing to her rapidly swelling nose. “My eyes feel like they’re gonna pop out of their sockets! Yet, when it happened, I didn’t put my hands out to protect myself! I didn't even flinch. Jesus Christ, T! At the speed we were going, I could have died and I couldn’t control my own hands! What the hell was that?”
“Maeve, I –” Sirens blare in the distance. My eyes go wide and my heart pounds against my ribcage. “I’ll drive, just get in the truck and tell me how, okay?”
Still, she doesn’t move and now I’m getting desperate. “Please! I can’t afford to find out what happens if I get caught here. They’ll take me back to the academy…”
“Why is that such a bad thing? It’s just a school!”
“No, it’s not! It’s not just a school and if I get taken back there…” I stop myself and push a hand through my hair. Maeve raises an eyebrow and suddenly, I see no other choice. “Look, if I get taken back to the academy, they will kill me and I don’t mean in a ‘my mother’s going to kill me for drinking alcohol or smoking’ kind of way. I mean they will take me into a room, strap me to a table and murder me.”
She takes a second to process my words and then she nods. “And what about those guys? Were they were chasing us because they wanted to kill you, too?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
The sirens are getting closer. My heart is racing and I don’t have time to explain.
“I can’t explain here. I have to go, now! If you’re gonna give me up to the cops, all I ask is that you give me enough time to skip town, okay?” I don’t wait for her answer before I throw myself into the driver’s seat and slam the door shut.
I squirm, on the edge of panic, and a lump rises in my throat as I realize I have no idea how to do this.
Inserting the key, I twist it and nothing happens. With bated breath, I keep twisting, praying the truck will jump to life as the sirens get louder.
“Come on, come on, come on!” I twist again. The engine does nothing but stutter.
“You have to put your foot on the clutch.” Maeve’s voice appears at the passenger window and I watch as she climbs into the seat. “Press down on the clutch and then turn the key.”
I follow her instruction and finally, the engine gives a powerful roar.
“Okay, now press the clutch all of the way to the floor and I’ll put it into gear for you.” I push the clutch-thingy down and give her a nod. She moves the gear stick into one of the slots. “Now, release the clutch slowly and apply the gas, and when I say so, press the clutch down again and I’ll move you into higher gears.”
I do as she says and suddenly, we’re moving. I round the bend, carefully and then we begin changing up gears and driving at a higher speed. I hear the sirens shrink away in the distance and let out a relieved sigh.
“You’re doing great, T,” Maeve tells me. “Just keep going until we reach the house… Although, I am sure as hell glad we are the only car on this road because you can’t drive straight to literally save your life.”
“Whatever,” I say, pushing my foot down harder on the gas pedal. We’re speeding down the road and suddenly, the house is in sight and the blares of the sirens are a distant sound.
Driving up the path, we arrive at the gravelled porch way and Maeve jumps from the truck. I unplug my seatbelt and follow her.
“Why are you running?”
“You really know nothing, do you?” She whips around. “That road leads to only one place and that’s here! The first thing cops are going to do when they find the burning, dead bodies is come looking for the reason they were on the road in the first place, which, in case you didn’t know, is you!”
I curse under my breath and run my hands through my hair.
“Okay,” I say, taking a deep breath and willing myself to calm down. “What do we do?”
“We grab as much food and as many essentials as we can and then we get gone before the cops get here,” she tells me, turning to head into the house.
“Maeve…” I stop her. “I’m not saying I wouldn’t leave if we could but how’re we going to get gone when that road is the only one in-or-out of here and its currently blocked with cops and burning dead bodies?”
“Shit!” She yells, pushing her hand through her hair and then she grabs my arm, kicks the front door open and pulls me to the kitchen. Practically throwing me onto one of the stools, she looms over me with crossed arms and pouted lips. “Alright, start talking!”
I take a deep breath. “What do you want to know?”
“Let’s start with the dead guy on the bus…” I expect her to sit down but she doesn’t. She spreads her palms out on the island top and stares at me intently; like she’s a boss interviewing somebody for a job, and I feel majorly under qualified.
The hair on my arms stands firm under her inquisitive stare. She lifts an eyebrow, waiting as I bite my lip and search for something to say.
Finally, I find my voice and admit, “I stopped his heart after I broke his arm.”
“Yeah, see, that makes no sense to me because I watched him die and I saw you stand back, looking every bit as shocked as the rest of us. You didn’t touch him. Explain that!”
“I – Um…” I cough to clear my throat. “I used magic.”
“Magic?” She nods, finally taking a seat. She joins her hands together and places them in front of her on the island top, fingers interlocked. Her face is stern and I brace myself for her reaction.
“...Okay,” she speaks, calmly.
“Okay?” I exclaim. “That’s it?” I’m shocked. All of the witch-based TV shows and movies gave me expectations of a much bigger reaction.
“What else am I supposed to say to that?” She shrugs.
“I don’t know! Tell me that I’m lying? Tell me that I’m insane and that magic isn’t real?” I choke out. “Anything other than a generic ‘okay.”’
“In the past hour alone, you’ve managed to take over my body, flip a goddamn range rover and set a fire with nothing but a snap of your fingers.” She counts out the facts on her fingers. “And, since I’ve known you, you’ve killed three guys without lifting a hand. What part of magic am I supposed to find so unbelievable?”
Well, when she puts it like that…
“I guess we’re settled, then.”
“Oh, no! Not even close! Next, I want you to tell me the whole truth about the academy and those two guys, starting with why they want you dead?”
I sigh. “For lack of a better term, its witch school,” I tell her. “It’s one of many all over the world. They’re run by superior witches and governed overall by a high council. The school I belong – or more accurately, belonged, to – is the Raven-Hill academy for ‘bright young witches.’ I was practically raised there from being four years old. My mother, she was a Raven-Hill and her grandfather was on the high council… he founded the school. I moved there after she was murdered. It was one of the only places I’ve ever known and it was a safe-haven… until they tried to drain my power for the collective.”
I take a breath and continue. “They wanted to strap me down and bleed me enough to get all of the essence that makes me a witch. The problem with that is that my power is in every fibre of my blood, and to get it all, it’d have a ninety-nine-percent chance of being fatal. So, I escap
ed and I took a few of them down before I did. As for those guys, they were witch hunters.”
“What is the collective?”
“It’s like –” my words get stuck in my throat. “Look, I’ll get into all of that later but right now, it’s not important. The important thing is that we get our stories straight because when the police get here, I don’t think ‘I’m a witch and they were witch hunters’ is going to cut it.”
“Well I know what I’m saying. I’m telling the cops that you’re a psycho who kidnapped me and those two guys were my father and brother, trying to save me and you killed them.” She shrugs with a smirk. “It saves my ass…”
“Nice…” I snort. “Or we could tell them that they were our father and brother and they were coming to visit us and got into an accident. It should take a day or two to verify, giving us time to vacate.”
“Or you could just kill ‘em…” Jumping from the stool and grabbing two apple juices from the fridge, she tosses me one and leans back on the island. “I mean, it seems like something you do a lot.”
“Yeah, to bad people who’re trying to kill me, not innocent cops just doing their jobs.” I roll my eyes, grabbing the drink and stepping from the stool. “I’m going to go shower, I don’t want to smell like fire and blood when they get here.”
I smile at Maeve and walk from the kitchen. I’m just about to round the corner to the foyer when I hear her voice sound again.
“Just out of curiosity, T…” Her tone is light and conveys amused interest. “How old were you when you first killed someone?”
I still, and my stomach drops so hard that I think it might fall out.
Bile rises in my throat and the nausea running through my veins makes my head spin. I never expected her to ask that. I swallow hard, knowing that I’m not mentally prepared to answer but also knowing that if I don’t, she won’t drop it and if she doesn’t drop it, I won’t be able to pretend I’ve forgotten again.
I need to be able pretend for the sake of my own sanity. If I don’t, I won’t survive and the last thing I want is to prolong the torture of my own mind.
“I was six,” I answer and then I keep walking, taking the steps two at a time.
She shouts after me; follow up questions that I pretend I don’t hear.
My legs speed up, carrying me with them as I search out a bathroom. Flashes of my first kill invade my mind and my chest heaves, unable to catch a breath.
I try door after door until finally I come to one leading to a shower room. I rush inside, slamming it shut behind me. Turning, I press my back against the white painted wooden door and slide down to the ground, clutching my knees and gasping for air.
Reaching my hand to the lock above me, I click it then bury my head in my knees, muttering in a low breath a prayer that it was as easy to lock up a memory.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Ringing my hair out in a towel, I walk downstairs feeling fresh and ready to face whoever comes to the door. I focus on the task at hand: getting my story straight and looking as innocent as possible with a hint of distraught as the cop tells me that my ‘family’ is dead.
Maeve is asleep on the couch in the dining room. I should wake her and prepare our version of the truth but she looks so worn out and peaceful that I can’t bring myself to.
I don’t blame her for needing rest after what I put her through. It's not an easy ride having someone take control of your body and thoughts, the way I did; it’s grating, exhausting and completely invasive. I know that better than anyone…
The memory begins to creep up on me and I repel it back. Not today. I can’t today.
Instead, I spread myself out on the floor, feeling the bones in my back crack against the hardness of the wood beneath me.
Taking a breath, I begin my exercise; the one taught to us by the superior to keep contact with our magic. I wonder if they’ve appointed someone new to the position by now – after all, Darian’s been dead four days, almost, and there are still young witches in need of a leader. Not that Darian was ever much of a leader — not to me, anyway— he was always kind of lacking in the authoritative role unless he truly needed to make a point… And even then, he wasn’t so much a leader as he was a sadistic bastard.
Pushing my legs into the air, I press my hands to my back and put all of my weight on my shoulders. I need to focus for the next part. I take another breath as the slight hum calls to me. It’s tired but it’s still beckoning me to use it, to completely exhaust it for my own needs, whatever they may be.
Sometimes I forget how ruthless it is. I could kill a man for no other reason than feeling like it and the energy slithering its way through me would welcome the adrenaline-fuelled-rush; like a junkie needing their fix, and as much as I am sickened by myself for it, I would welcome it too because it sure as hell beats feeling nothing.
Magic is ,u drug… and I, its willing junkie.
“Focus on feeling nothing, not one single pound on your small, delicate frame. You’re already lifted, so now you just need to float.” I hear Darian’s voice in my head.
I do as he instructed and pretend I’m a speck of dust making its way through the air. Taking my hands from my back, I place them behind my head on the floor and push.
It’s not long before my arms are stretched out to their full extension.
To an onlooker, what I’m doing may look like a simple hand-stand but they can’t feel what I feel: a feather-like existence of no longer being a product of mass, weighted down to the earth. Pushing further until I’m balancing on the proximal part of my hand, I stretch out fully, allowing me to stand, upside down on nothing but the tips of my fingers.
The tingles of electric energy shoot through me and align themselves in my core.
The next step would be getting my hands off the ground completely but I’ve never been able to do that. Darian once said it was my heavy heart keeping me chained to the world.
The heart he broke with his betrayal.
“Whoa!”
I lose my balance and slam down into the ground. Hissing, I try to catch my breath but it’s too painful. I’m winded and wheezing as I look up to find Maeve with her hand covering her mouth.
“I am so sorry!” She says that but she’s stifling a laugh that tells me she’s more amused than sorry. “I guess it makes us half-even for my broken nose.”
When she says it, my eyes focus on her face and my stomach twinges with guilt.
“Is there anything you can do about this by the way? It really hurts and I have no idea how we’re going to explain it to the cops.”
She’s right, again...
When I’m finally able to get my breathing under control, I get to my feet and study her face closer. It’s purple and her eyes are black golf balls on either side of the misdirected eggplant that was once her pretty button nose.
“I can set it, I think… and maybe a glamour to hide it from the cops but I don’t think I can heal it.”
Healing is above my age-grade. If I was still at the academy, I’d be getting prepared to start the pre-trials for the next grade, but now, that seems like another lifetime completely; like an alternate reality, almost – one where nobody tried to kill me and I didn’t have to kill anybody else.
I bet it’s a nice reality.
Sitting Maeve down, I tap into the low hum. It’s already so used-up but it excites as I caress it. My body jolts to life like it’s been hit by a lightning strike and I hate how I react to the power – how much I love it and crave it.
I focus on the cartilage in Maeve's nose. I can hear it grinding in my ears every time she moves or even breathes. It sounds like a nail in a tumble dryer. I wince. I can feel some of her pain through the connection. It’s bad, and again, I feel guilty.
“Okay,” I say, swallowing the lump in my throat. “Brace yourself.”
She closes her eyes and I concentrate on forcing the mess of cartilage and bone to realign themselves in their original position. It’s easy enough to do because the
y haven’t been out of place long and like any living organism; the pieces seem to know where they’re meant to be but not how to get back there.
That’s where I come in.
When I have their exact pattern in mind, I choose a catalyst for my power in the form of a finger snap. Without further ado, I bring my fingers together to create the friction sound of skin on skin and hear the crunch of Maeve’s nose as it returns to its full form in the middle of her face. She flinches and cries out.
The blood drips in a thick red waterfall down her face.
“It’ll stop eventually and then I’ll do the glamour.”
“So, I’ll be in the same agony but I’ll still look hot?” Her voice sounds like she’s got a major cold and it’s all I can do to not laugh at her. “I mean, I know they’re cops and you just killed a bunch of people but what if one of them is drop-dead gorgeous?”
I roll my eyes and nod. “Yes, you’ll look hot. You can shamelessly flirt with the possibly good-looking people who might put us in jail.”
“Can you make me a blond?” she asks. “Oh, no… purple. I want to have pastel purple hair.”
“I guess it’s the least I can do, right?”
“Oh, this magic thing is so awesome. I’ll never need to go to a salon again in my life so long as I stick with you!”
“True, but you also might die,” I say with an amused smile. “I mean, there’s hunters, angry witches… the possibility of a demon here and there – all out for my blood. There are many downsides to my friendship.”
“It’s so worth it.” Her words would be heart-warming if she hadn’t already pulled her phone out to search different hair colours.
Half an hour passes before the bleeding finally stops.
“Thank god,” I mutter. “I thought the cops were gonna get here before you stopped leaking.”
She sets her phone down and turns to face me. “Okay, make me purple!”
“You know it’s just a glamour, right? It’ll fade after a couple weeks…”
“So, you’ll just do it again. It’s perfect! Next time, I’ll go pink.”
SACRIFICIUM (THE UNDERGROUND Book 1) Page 6