He only hesitated for a second. “I figured,” he said eventually, “since you’ve never called before. What is it?”
“I’m in the woods.” I struggled to get up—my knee hurt; the skin had ripped from falling on the brambles.
“Are you lost? Are you hurt?” Genuine concerned sounded in his voice, something I had never thought possible.
“I’m not hurt, but I’m… I did something terrible.” A sob wrecked through me and even though I hated myself for it, I couldn’t hide it. “I don’t know if you can help. I don’t know if anyone can. She tricked me, and now I cursed her and…”
“Kieran, you’re babbling. Calm down.” Arthan’s voice sounded soothing, but I couldn’t follow his request. I couldn’t calm down. If anything, this made me even more nervous.
“I performed a death curse,” I gushed. “Using human skin on a hex bag. It was terrible.”
Arthan didn’t reply at first.
Even though vampires were nowhere near as skilled with spells as witches, I figured he knew enough about witchcraft and had been around for a long enough time to understand what I was talking about.
“Why would you do that?” he asked eventually. “Isn’t that magic forbidden?”
“I know,” I cried. “But she told me to. And my family said that I couldn’t refuse a Baba Yaga, so I—”
“Wait, what?” Arthan interrupted me mid-sentence. “There’s a Baba Yaga?”
“Yes.” I looked down at the hole leading to the core of the earth. “That’s why I’m in the woods. I was at her cabin.”
“Just… stay put,” Arthan said. “I can track you down. Now I’ve drank your blood, that shouldn’t be an issue.”
I frowned, surprised by what he was saying. “You’re coming here?”
“Yes,” he stated. “You managed to get out of her cabin, right?”
“I did, and now the whole thing vanished in a hole.”
“Okay, good. I’m glad you got out.” He actually sounded relieved. Was that just because he enjoyed drinking my blood as much as I enjoyed having him drink it… Or was it something else? Was he genuinely concerned about me?
“Stay put, and I’ll be there as soon as possible.”
“Okay. I will.” I put down the phone, wrapped my arms around myself and waited.
Somewhere in the distance, a wolf howled.
As long as I didn’t leave the woods, as long as I didn’t have to face my parents, I could pretend it hadn’t happened. That I hadn’t cursed my own sister, that I hadn’t fallen into the Baba Yaga’s trap.
As long as I was here, in this world seemingly between nightmare and reality, everything was still okay. But the moment I left here, I would have to face the truth, the consequences of what I had done.
And the monster I had turned into.
Chapter 11
Arthan didn’t take long to get there. He appeared in the form of a bat, one of the many alternative shapes a vampire could shift into, and then shifted into a human mid-way down to the ground.
I was still sitting on the ground, as dumbstruck as if I had been hit by lightning. I couldn’t move, my limbs felt like lead and my head was ready to explode.
“Kieran.” Arthan touched my shoulder lightly, a touch that sent a wave of electricity through me. Even though it had only been one day, I longed for him to…
To touch me.
Not just to bite me, but so much more.
I put my hand on his, squeezing it.
Even if it was all kinds of wrong, it still felt right.
“Tell me everything.” Arthan glanced over my shoulder at the swamp into which the chicken-legged hut had drowned. “There was a Baba Yaga here?” He offered me a hand to help me up.
“Yes,” I said as he pulled me to my feet. “She visited my aunt and I at the Hexagon. She asked for a hex bag made from human skin. I told her we didn’t have any, but then Aileen realized what she was and well… Aileen agreed to perform the ritual. But the Baba Yaga didn’t want Aileen to come, just me.”
“Just you?” Arthan narrowed his eyes. “Then, what?”
I licked my lips nervously. “I came to the witch’s cabin tonight, and I asked her what kind of curse she wanted. She wanted a death curse.” Tears sprang in my eyes. “I didn’t know what to do. My parents had told me that I couldn’t say no to a Baba Yaga, but at the same time, I didn’t want to do it, but then she threatened me…”
In my fear, I clutched onto his shirt, holding on to it for dear life. He barely seemed to notice, his gaze lingering on my face.
“She threatened to expose us.” Had I really said ‘us’? “I mean, to expose what we are doing.”
Arthan blinked, and then slowly nodded. “She blackmailed you.”
“Yes. I had no choice. If my family found out… It wouldn’t just mean banishment for me, which I can live with, but for my sister…” I shook my head. “I couldn’t let that happen, so I went ahead with it. I performed the death curse.”
“And it worked?” This time, Arthan’s frown grew even deeper, as if he hadn’t suspected it would.
“Yes, unfortunately. Then I… I asked her for the name of the person to be cursed. And she…” I started sobbing louder now, the tears flooding out of my eyes.
I felt embarrassed that I was crying like this in front of him, but Arthan pulled me close, holding my head against his chest.
It was so comforting, this silence, the hollow place where his heart should be. I wanted him to hold me like this forever, so the rest of the world could disappear and there was only us, and no terrifying witches and death curses.
“Whose name did she say?” Arthan’s question was a whisper, barely stronger than the wind that carried his voice.
“My… My…” I struggled to get the words out. “My sister.”
I felt Arthan tense, but he kept on holding me. We stood like that for what felt like an eternity, just the two of us locked in an embrace, the rest of the world falling away.
He slowly, gently, let go of me, and held me at arm’s length, studying my features. “Baba Yagas are terrible creatures, Kieran. They will stop at nothing to get what they want.”
“But what could she possibly want?” I asked, my voice still trembling. “My sister is in a freaking coma already. What is the point of killing her?”
“What do you know about the night your sister ended up in a coma?”
I shrugged. “Not much. Nothing, really. My sister and my grandmother were out hunting for a rogue wendigo that had terrorized the witches in town for weeks.” I sighed, not really wanting to relive that night. “It was supposed to be routine, you know. Killing a wendigo, that would be a feat for someone like me, but my sister, she had faced a lot worse than that already.”
Arthan tucked a loose strand of hair behind my ear. “I don’t think you give yourself enough credit, Kieran. You did just perform one of the forbidden curses, and only a minority of witches can do that. Plus, you managed to escape from a Baba Yaga.”
“Only barely. Her house nearly collapsed on top of me. And I escaped mostly because I was angry as hell. I made her blood boil in her veins, distracting her long enough to get out, but unfortunately not bad enough to kill her.”
Arthan ran a hand through his hair. “So, your sister’s coma was caused by a wendigo attack?”
“Yes. At least, as far as we know. The third witch to join the task force to track down the wendigo, my sister’s best friend, is the one who brought her home. She was the only one who survived, relatively okay physically, but her mind has been a complete mess ever since.” I frowned. “What does this have to do with anything, though?”
Arthan scratched his neck. “I’m not sure yet, but it’s like you said—why would she want to kill a girl who is already in a coma? It doesn’t make much sense.”
“I don’t know what to do.” Tears threatened to spill from my eyes again. “I killed my own sister.”
“Not yet.” Arthan wiped the tears away with his thumb, a
gesture so intimate it made me shiver—and probably would’ve done a lot more than that if the circumstances were different. “Is there a way to stop the curse?”
“No.” My voice broke, and I felt my heart breaking too, rupturing in half in my chest. “It’s not possible. You can’t reverse a death curse, even if I somehow managed to kill the Baba Yaga, which is unlikely, I couldn’t…”
I paused, remembering what the chained-up girl in the Baba Yaga’s hut had said.
She could help. If I came back for her, she could help me.
“The girl.” I let go of Arthan, stepping away from him. “The Baba Yaga is holding some girl hostage, all chained up. The girl said she could help, that she could help my sister.”
Arthan’s eyes narrowed and a dark, haunting look flashed across his features. “A girl held hostage by the Baba Yaga?”
“Yes, with this weird chain around her neck, with all of these symbols on. I’m not sure what they say, but the symbols are old. They look like the runes druids used.”
This seemed to mean something to Arthan, because he turned even paler than usual, all the remnants of color draining from his skin. “Are you sure?”
“Yes, quite sure.”
“And this girl said she could help you? Do you think that’s true?” Arthan seemed skeptical.
“I don’t know. Maybe she was just grasping onto straws, trying to convince me so I would help her escape the Baba Yaga. But even if so… I cut off part of her skin to make the hex bag. It couldn’t hurt if I tried to help her.”
“And maybe she does know something from being held captive by the Baba Yaga…” Arthan mused. “It’s not a bad idea. But it will mean facing the Baba Yaga again, and convincing her to crawl back out of that hole she disappeared into…” He glanced at the empty land behind me.
“And I have no idea how to do that,” I confessed. “I barely know anything about Baba Yagas.”
“They’re not exactly my forte either, but I know someone who can help us. A bone witch, who owes me a favor or to.”
The way he said ‘us’, with both of us still standing so close, so intimate… If I wasn’t so worried about my sister, it would’ve made me think a thousand things I better not dwell on.
He was so handsome, the way the moonlight reflected off his skin, the way his eyes were almost red in this darkness. I was supposed to think of him as an abomination. A being that was neither dead nor alive, the complete opposite of what I was. Yet, I couldn’t. He was so much more than that…
I wanted to touch him. Run my hands all over his body, feel his muscles underneath his shirt…
Focus, Kieran, focus.
The most important part about the ‘us’ was that he would help me. I wasn’t alone in this.
Even when I had called him, I hadn’t expected him to show up and offer to help me. I gazed up at him, and our eyes met. I wondered if he…
If he thought the same thing I was.
I glanced down at my hands locked around his shoulders.
Maybe it was more than just exchanging blood. Maybe the reason his presence was so soothing to me was not related to that at all…
Maybe what I felt for him was much stronger than that.
Chapter 12
Father and Aileen were waiting for me at the edge of the forest. After calming down somewhat, Arthan had promised he would reach out to the bone witch he knew and ask her how soon she could meet us. In the meantime, I had to face my parents and aunt and pretend everything was fine and I wasn’t secretly dying on the inside.
“How did it go?” Aileen asked the moment I exited the woods. She looked as if she’d aged a thousand years since I had walked toward the canopy of trees and disappeared.
I felt tired. Exhausted. All my energy was drained, and I wasn’t sure if it was the spell, my attack on the Baba Yaga, or just the sheer weight of realizing what I had done, but I wanted to crawl into bed and sleep for at least three weeks.
I shrugged. “I don’t want to talk about it, if you don’t mind. The spell wore me out.”
Dad and Aileen exchanged a worried look. “What curse did she want you to perform?”
I hesitated, pondering if maybe I should come clean to them or not. This was my chance, my golden opportunity to tell them the truth, of how I got tricked by the Baba Yaga and what she had forced me to do.
Instead, I closed my mouth again, gazed down at the floor and shrugged again. “Just some mild poisoning. I don’t know why she needed a blood witch in the first place, really.”
As I walked past them, Father and Aileen hurried after me.
“That’s strange,” Aileen said eventually, suspicion running through her voice. “Why would she go through all that trouble for such an easy spell?”
“Maybe she just wanted to make sure it worked.” I could’ve slapped myself across the face—I should’ve picked a more damning curse, that would’ve made my story a lot more believable.
“Either way, I’m glad to see you.” Father rubbed his hand through my hair, something he always used to do when I was younger. God, how I missed those days. Even if my youth seemed overshadowed by my older sister who was, without a doubt, better than I was at just about anything she did, I would’ve traded that reality with this new one, where my sister was comatose and doomed to die by my own hand, in a heartbeat.
Now, I cringed when Dad touched me, feeling nearly overwhelmed by guilt. “Uhm… Sorry…” I said when I pulled away. “I’m just really tired.”
Father looked at me curiously for a second, but then nodded. “I understand. We’ll just go home, and you can sleep as long as you want; you don’t even need to go to school if you don’t want to.”
“Thanks.” I smiled at him, but it was a half-hearted smile. “I’ll see about it.”
“She didn’t trick you?” Aileen asked while we continued our trek to the car. “She didn’t try anything weird, or—”
“No,” I snapped, interrupting her. “Can we please let it drop now? I’m exhausted.”
“Sure, honey.” Dad put an arm around my shoulder and shot Aileen an angry glare. “Let’s go home.”
Home. To the sister I had betrayed, who could die at any moment due to my actions. I didn’t want that at all.
When we got in the car, Dad started the engine and my phone already beeped. I retrieved it from my backpack and looked at the name of the person texting me.
Arthan.
That was fast.
My heart hammered in my chest as I clicked on the button to open the message. What if the bone witch didn’t want to help? What if we found no way to save my sister?
With a trembling hand, I opened the message and breathed in relief as I read the contents.
She’ll help. We can meet her tomorrow night. But she said to bring a human and the bones of a freshly dug-up corpse.
My eyes widened. Blood, death curses, now desecrated graves? What had I become?
I texted back. A freshly dug-up corpse, really?
Yes. She wasn’t joking. She never jokes. The response came almost immediately.
Father pulled out of the parking lot near the forest, and on to the road.
Aileen kept glancing at me, and I wondered if she believed my story or not. She seemed more than a bit suspicious.
And why a human? I asked Arthan through text message.
She didn’t specify, but best to comply. Bring one of your friends?
My friends. Camille. Dean. I sighed, staring at the contents of the last message and hoping that there would be some other way. I hadn’t told my friends about who I really was. They had no idea I was a witch, let alone that witches were even real. Vampires, Baba Yagas, to them, these were all creatures existing only in people’s imagination.
Could I expose my friends to this world?
I looked at Dad and Aileen. They would say I couldn’t, of course. Our world was meant to stay hidden in the shadows. Already ages ago, back in the days of the infamous witch trials, our kind had learned it w
as best to stick to the shadows rather than risk exposing yourself and being burned at the stake. Our laws prescribed we should never tell humans about our existence.
But Camille and Dean, I could trust. I had known them my whole life. Besides, if the bone witch needed a human, then what better chance than asking them? Even if Camille was mad at me, she loved me, so she would help me. I hope.
She’s not going to hurt the human, right? I texted to Arthan, just in case. Rescuing my sister at the expense of Camille or Dean didn’t exactly rank high on my wish list either.
No, she promised. The human is supposed to trick the Baba Yaga. I’ll explain more tomorrow. Meet me at 7 at the graveyard?
The graveyard. A shiver went down my spine as I thought about it—not because of the place, because I rather enjoyed the tranquil atmosphere of the rows upon rows of tombstones, but because of the bone witch’s other demand: Bones of a freshly dug-up corpse.
I wished I had never gone to Hexagon today. That I had stayed home, read a book, watched some TV. It was crazy how, in an instance, just the blink of an eye, your entire life could be turned upside down and there was nothing you could do to stop it.
Ok. Thank you for helping me, I texted back to Arthan, right before Dad pulled up onto our driveway.
As I got out of the vehicle, I glanced at the small, crescent moon in the night sky and wished I was a genie instead of a blood witch, and that I could wish myself back to the moment right before I’d met that monstrous Baba Yaga.
Chapter 13
“Come on, Camille, don’t be like that.” I threw my hands in the air, growing more than a little annoyed.
I had barely slept last night, but I had managed to drag myself out of bed and, despite Dad telling me I absolutely didn’t have to, I’d forced myself to go to school so I could see Camille and Dean, and tell them what was going on.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized I should’ve told them a long time ago. They were my best friends, and they knew me better than anyone else, besides my parents. They deserved to know the truth about me.
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