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Chapter Fourteen
Rowan
I wake abruptly in the middle of the night. I’m not sure what woke me, other than my throbbing head. It must be the drugs wearing off. I feel like I’m hungover times ten.
Moonlight streams in through the windows by my bed, and I can see the dark outline of the forest outside. I don’t even remember getting up here. Ven must have helped me up the stairs. Minerva and Catticus Finch are sleeping at the foot of my bed, but Circe is sitting in the windowsill, staring out into the night. She lets out a strange yowl, her tail poofing out.
“What is it, girl?” I ask.
My voice comes out shaky and my heart squeezes painfully in my chest. I get that prickling feeling up the back of my neck like I’m being watched, every hair standing on end. Even though I’m three stories up. Should I get up or stay in bed and pretend I’m still asleep? Wake Ven, call the police? What am I going to say, that I have a strange feeling someone is outside in the woods?
As I contemplate my options, the house suddenly rumbles like there’s an earthquake, and a blinding white light pulses off of it. I sit bolt upright in bed. What in the holy hell? Ven had said the house was warded from demons, so did that mean…
I leap out of bed and run for the stairs. I hear footsteps from the second floor and Ven dashes out of her room as I hit the second-floor landing.
“What just happened?” I gasp.
Her eyes are wide, her red hair floating up around her in what I realize is a cloud of magic. Lights pours off her clenched fists. “Someone just tried to get into the house,” she says breathlessly. “Someone who doesn’t belong.”
My heart is pounding so fast I feel like I’m going to pass out. I lean against the bannister to steady myself. “What do we do?”
“The house should protect us,” she says.
“And if it doesn’t?”
“It will.” She nods firmly, a sharp jerk of her chin.
From where we’re standing, at the back side of the hallway which encircles the second floor, we can see down to the first-floor hallway, and at the opposite end, the front door. We slump down in a puddle of shaky legs, right in the middle of the floor. The house is still and silent, as if it hadn’t just lit up like the Fourth of July.
Then, somewhere off in the woods, there comes an ear-splitting shriek, followed by a roar that shakes the sky. A sound like a tree being split in two, followed by another roar, and then silence again. Ven and I huddle in each other’s arms, trembling.
We stay like that the rest of the night.
My back is stiff as hell when I wake the next morning and peel my cheek off the cold wooden floor. I have hair in my mouth. I’m not sure if it’s mine or Ven’s. Slowly, I push myself upright.
We’d made it.
Despite my terror, at some point exhaustion had taken over about an hour before dawn. I hadn’t heard another sound the rest of the night after the apparent fight in the forest. Had it been the same two creatures I’d seen before? The horned beast and the golden dragon?
And most importantly, what the hell does all of this have to do with me?
I want nothing more in this moment than to hop on the next plane back to L.A. and forget this strange nightmare my life has become. I had thought divorce was hard. Then world of magic and creepy monsters, enter stage left. It has a way of putting things in some serious perspective.
It also makes me strangely… angry. I’d felt at home the moment I stepped foot inside this place. The forest had awoken something inside me that I’d forgotten a long time ago. Now I know magic is actually real, and I’m supposedly a witch. And I realize, sitting here in the sunbeams that stream in from the skylight overhead, that I actually want to be a witch. I want that part of my life back that I foolishly threw away all those years ago. Really, really badly. It connects me to Sybil, in the only way I can be, since she’s gone.
But now I have terrifying monsters threatening to ruin it all.
“I am not putting up with this shit,” I mutter, my anger bubbling over.
Apparently not so quietly, because next to me, Ven stirs and sits up. “What?”
“I’m calling the sheriff. Having law enforcement deal with this.”
Ven is quiet for several long moments. “You can’t tell them about magic,” she says softly. “Even if they would believe you. Which they won’t. It’s against Raven Society code.”
My anger flares again. “So, we’re just supposed to let ourselves be stalked by supernatural creatures?”
“The house protected us,” Ven says. “And we’ll tell the Elders. They’ll help, of course.”
