I can’t believe I did not see it. He spoke about witches all the time. Was he testing me? Trying to see my reaction? I feel completely drained. My mother is right. I need to have a clear head to see Sam. “You’re right. I’m pretty mentally exhausted.” I let out a long slow breath before pulling myself up. “I think I’m going to go and lie down.”
“Did you want any of us to go with you?” My mother stands with a worried look on her face that I might pass out again.
“Thank you, but I think I need some time alone.” I smile toreassure them that I am OK. My mother relaxes and sits back down.
I make my way out of the living room and up the old staircase to my room. I shut the door behind me and make my way over to my bed. I lie down, gently breathing in the fresh clean smell of the cotton bedding and wrapping myself in the duvet. I make myself into a burrito so that every inch of me is swallowed by the white mass of comfort. It makes me feel small and safe. Like everything that has just happened didn’t.
But it did. All of it. I sob silently into the soft material. I sob until I do eventually pass out again.
Twenty-One
My dreams are darkness. No future, no past. My magic is as lost as I am. I awaken to darkness around me, my head throbbing from the past twenty-four hours. I reach to the lamp next to me lighting the room around me. I pull off the duvet which is completely wrapped around me and a chill of the nightly air hits me making me shiver.
I place my feet on the ground and stand from my cocoon bed. I try to wrap my head around everything I have been told. I feel like I don’t even know where to start with it all. I look around the room, this room of safety where I have slept so well.
Now I just feel so unsure of everything even more so than I already did. But there is one constant. One thing my heart just aches for. Sam.
Without another thought I creep to find my jumper and boots, which I then carry carefully and quietly down the corridor and down the stairs. I pause at the bottom for any sound of my family, but the cottage is silent. I look at the clock. It’s just gone midnight. I slowly peek inside the living room and see my mother asleep on the armchair next to the fire and Aradia on the sofa also sound asleep, empty bottles of red around them. I am guessing Granny will be in bed.
I close the door to the living room and find my coat and slip on my boots. I turn the lock on the front door slowly until it clicks.
“You might want this,” a quiet voice says behind me. I turn, shocked that I have been caught. I am met with Granny holding my pink fluffy scarf in her hand and her hand on her hip.
“I, er, I…” I stutter.
“He won’t be home. I had to tell Gloria.” She sighs, looking worried. “It wasn’t right not to let her know. She has to protect her family in how she sees fit.”
“Where is he?” I ask, frightened of what this means for us. For him.
She smiles. “When Sam feels emotions, like yourself, he needs to let the magic out.” She tucks a piece of hair behind my ear. “You know where he will be.”
I nod. He will be in the forest where he told me not to go at night, but I need to see him.
“Is he mad?” I feel tears brimming in my eyes.
She looks down and then back to me. “I don’t know, sweetheart. I’m not sure what he knows.”
I nod. “I need to see him.”
“I’m guessing me asking you to wait until the morning isn’t going to stop you?” she asks, raising one eyebrow.
I shake my head. “I don’t know what I want to do, but I know I need to see him, right now,” I say with tears in my eyes.
She pulls me to her, holding me tight with all her might. “Oh, sweet girl, I’m so sorry you’ve been caught up in all of this.” She sighs and lets me out of her embrace.
“I don’t want you to be sorry, Granny. You have opened my eyes to who our kind truly are. Beautiful, kind and loving people who have been misunderstood all this time. I am forever grateful for the life you have shown me.”
I can see the tears fighting in my granny’s eyes as she nodssmiling at me. “Let me show you something before you go.”
I nod, my own eyes also brimming with tears. “OK.”
My granny throws on her own woollen shawl over her night gown and pushes on her Wellington boots before leading me out of the front door. She picks up an old gas lantern that always hangs up on a hook by the front door.
“I could get a torch.” She smiles to herself using a match to light it. “But I’m not one to fix something that isn’t broken.”
She pulls the lamp off the hook and carries it in her hand, opening the front door in her other. She places her finger to her lips and peeks inside the front room before sliding out of the front of the cottage.
We walk around the side of the cottage down the old stone path that weaves itself into the back garden and down to the summer house where Granny paints and Aradia practises yoga. We walk past the chicken coop where the hens are fast asleep in their beds. Past the snowdrops, winter aconite, lesser celandine and hellebores which brighten the border of the trees beyond the picket fences.
