ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Copyright © 2020 by Devyn Forrest
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of characters to actual persons, living or dead is purely coincidental. Devyn Forrest holds exclusive rights to this work. Unauthorized duplication is prohibited.
Also by Devyn
Crestwood Academy
Wicked Blue Bloods
Cruel Blue Bloods
Twisted Blue Bloods
Savage Blue Bloods
Denver Athletics
Out For Blood
The Accident
The Trials
Olympic Village
Connect with Devyn
Table of Contents
Copyright Page
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter One
Thunder cracked in the jet-black Louisiana sky. It was one of those late-summer storms, the ones that called for hurricanes, floods and death. My eyes snapped open. I felt frantic, my heart pounding—but I didn’t know why. Not yet. I lay stretched out on my back, sweat pooling between my breasts and on my belly.
Flashes of my recent nightmare continued in the back of my brain, like some sort of movie I couldn’t turn off. The images grew fuzzier, wild, so I blinked again.
Something was off. Something was really wrong.
I had this feeling often. I knew to trust it like you’re meant to trust a stomachache or a reflex. It’s just what my body and mind did. I shot up from the bed and blinked out at the night. Sheets of rain slammed against the side of our three-story dark-brick home—built over 200 years ago. I used to share this home with my mother and father, but now I share it with Aunt Maria. There were so many beautiful memories in this house.
It was such a big, house for two women—two women who had grown closer and closer to one another over the last several years. She was everything to me now. The only family I had left and I held her as close to me as I could.
Lightning bolted across the sky, flashing light over the trees in our five-acre plot of land. The trees swayed so hard with the wind that I thought the limbs might crack right off and sweep across the grass.
It wouldn’t have been the first time a Louisiana storm all-out massacred our yard. It came with the territory and it was one thing we would never get used to.
I shivered, despite the thick, soup-like humidity. I reached for a cardigan on the back of my desk chair and swept it over my shoulders, then rushed toward the hall. With a brief glance down toward my aunt’s room, I noticed that she had her light on.
But when I reached the doorway, I found the bed completely empty, the blankets untouched for the night, which was very odd. The clock on the wall read three-thirty in the morning.
God. Something was really fucking off.
“Aunt Maria?” I tried out my voice, not knowing if I could really trust it. I snuck down the hall toward the winding staircase. Downstairs, most of the lights were still on, but there was an empty quality to it. The house felt hollow, without its normal beating heart.
I hadn’t bothered with slippers, and my feet felt shivery and cold as I trotted down the stairs toward the kitchen. Normally, when Aunt Maria couldn’t sleep, I found her reading in the kitchen standing up over her book, her hazel eyes tracing over the words. When I had been younger, she would notice I was there right away. But recently, she had looked or been so preoccupied in her own thoughts that I just knew something was up but not quite sure as to what. Her hazel eyes would flash toward me and she would always whisper, “There’s my beautiful niece—my blue-eyed wonder.”
Aunt Maria had come to live with us when I was eleven. I had caught her on more than one occasion doing weird stuff that really couldn’t be explained. When Mom and Dad passed away a year later, Aunt Maria became my legal guardian and that’s when shit really got real. At first, I thought she was having a seizure because the way her body would contort was alarming. I mean, it scared the shit out of me. I thought she would break a leg or an arm. I didn’t know what to make of it and then one night, I actually stood back and watched her transform into something she wasn’t—something that any normal person wouldn’t believe and just run for the hills.
In the beginning, I would just ignore the elephant in the room, but after a while, it was just too much to ignore. She finally sat me down and explained that she was a shapeshifter and my bloodline, her and my mother’s family. I was never fully aware of her powers or many details and I did try to read up on it, but there wasn’t much on the topic other than some folklore. I only learned that their abilities and were of a supernatural clan. Aunt Maria told me that I would learn everything in due time and that now was not that time. I trusted her and knew that she only had my best interests at heart, so I didn’t bother to press the matter any further.
“Aunt Maria?” I called her name again in the empty kitchen. It seemed like she had recently poured herself a cup of tea, and the kettle was still warm on the stovetop. The tea looked like she hadn’t drunk it yet like she had put it down to let it cool and then forgotten about it.
Our kitchen still had all the old appliances from maybe thirty years before. Things broke on us all the time like the oven, the refrigerator, and the plumbing beneath the sink. When my dad had been alive, this had been his non-stop mission to fix everything in the house and make sure everything was in tip-top shape. But with two women in the house that didn’t happen anymore.
We hadn’t kept up with things very well. If anything, we would have to always hire the town’s handyman to come by and do his thing.
My head snapped to the window as lightning crackled outside again. Something caught my eye between the trees. I shot toward the window, blinking out into the night. Just as the ghoulish, white light faded outside, I spotted something—
Long, greying brown hair, whipping in the wind.
A figure—no more than five feet tall, standing upright between the trees.
My heart pounded. For a moment, I expected this figure, who could only be my Aunt Maria, to begin to rush toward me, to find her way out of the rain. But she remained frozen where she was like someone had glued her feet to the ground and her arms spread wide like wings.
I rushed to the back door, which opened out onto our rickety porch. I still didn’t bother with shoes. When I stuck my feet out onto the crackly wood, I landed immediately in puddles. The wood felt like it might give out at any moment, like years of torrential downpour had finally done something to the infrastructure.
“Aunt Maria!”
I didn’t have time to pause. I leaped from the edge of the house to the porch steps, then stomped to the grass below. The rain splattered my face, and my hair was immediately drenched, falling in dirty blonde sheets down my back. I forced my legs forward, running through puddles. It felt like I was entering an actual Louisiana swamp, so thick with the mud and the rain. I thought of alligators, lurking at the edge of the property. I had seen them probably once a month for my entire life—their teeth flashing out of that long nos
e, white and menacing.
At the edge of the trees, I peered at my aunt. For whatever reason, I stopped running and gripped the tree trunk beside me. I shivered for a moment then took a long glance at her.
Her eyes were wide open, staring at the sky above and her lips were moving so fast that I couldn’t understand what she was saying. She was clearly in some kind of a trance and when I looked down, her white nightgown was soaked and stuck to her stomach and legs like a second skin. That is when I noticed that her feet were arched like a ballerina, toes pointing toward the ground. Her toes touched the earth, but that was it, the rest didn’t.
My eyes quickly snapped back up to her face. She was still so beautiful for her fifty-one years—her lips supple, her figure petite with her long locks whipping down her back every which way in the rain and wind. I finally took a step toward her and grabbed her arms. She immediately startled and fell to the ground coming out of whatever trance she had been in. Her hands gripped mine tightly, which had once been pearly white, but was now streaked with rain and mud.
“You have to leave now!” She murmured and slowly stood without releasing me. Her eyes were locked onto mine and were wide and crazy.
“Go where, Aunt Maria? We’re home. You’re just sleepwalking.” I said and tried to coax her to follow me into the house.
She looked like she was going out of her mind, like a frightened animal.
After I had grabbed her arms, I remembered that I had read once you weren’t meant to wake someone up if they were in the middle of sleepwalking. You were meant to slowly guide them back to their beds, slip them back in between the sheets like nothing had happened.
I was only sixteen years old—sixteen—with a fifty-one-year-old aunt that was in a major trance. She had become my guardian when she had already lived such a life without me. My mother, Coralia and my father, Joseph, had had more love between them than was necessary and made Aunt Maria my guardian because they knew that she would love me and take care of me the way they would have wanted.
I stood directly in front of her as the rain continued to run down over my cheeks, but I no longer really felt it. I think she fell back into the trance because her lips began to trace words faster and faster, as though she sensed I was right in front of her and wanted to tell me something. Her nightgown still clung to her like a second skin, showing her curvy, middle-aged, yet still beautiful frame.
Slowly, I brought my hand toward her wrist. This was how I would guide her back into the house. Maybe once we got out of the rain, I could safely give her some tea, and allow her to come out of what state she was in.
But the moment my fingers cut around my aunt’s wrist, something happened.
My head was thrust backward like I had been punched in the chin. My eyes snapped all the way open and instead of the black sky above, I saw strange, horrible things.
Flashes of light—not just the lightning snaking through the sky above me but death. My mother’s face instantly hovered in my vision—her as a much younger woman, looking far more like me when she was young. In the vision, she was wide awake, her brown hair whipping around her. She snarled and was arguing with something fiercely like she was getting ready to fight for her life.
Suddenly I was snapped out of my reverie by the sounds of my aunt gasping loudly. I forced my head down to look at her. My hand was still wrapped around her wrist. It was like I couldn’t fully let go. I could tell she could see me—really see me—and her hazel eyes burned into mine. She was shaking violently, as though she was in the middle of a seizure.
“Aunt Maria?” I demanded. “Maria! Can you hear me?”
Suddenly, she tore her hand back as hard as she could, forcing me to release her wrist. She looked at me like I was injuring her, but I hadn’t been holding on very hard at all.
Something flashed through her hazel eyes that I couldn’t put my finger on, but it sent a chill down my spine. A moment later, she quickly scanned the surrounding area, finally realizing where we were. In the middle of the woods behind our house, our bare feet absolutely soaked in mud. I had never been so frightened in my life.
How the hell had she come out here by herself?
When had she started sleepwalking?
Was she ever going to talk again?
Suddenly, her eyes snapped back to mine.
“Ivy. We need to get back inside. Now.”
“Aunt Maria!” I said. It took all my strength, not raise my voice. “I came looking for you—what are you doing out here—what is going on?”
I tried again to reach out to touch her, but she held back, pointing down the path back toward the house. “Go now. I’ll follow.”
There was no saying no to her. I turned around, incredulous, and walked down the path. When I arrived at the porch, I sprung up the staircase, praying again that it wouldn’t topple out from under us. Aunt Maria hustled up behind me. We stepped into the kitchen area together, with her slamming the door closed behind us. She huffed and gazed outside at the darkness one last time before turning to me.
“My God, what a storm,” she murmured, wiping her face.
I felt like I had just been in the middle of a horrible nightmare. I took several steps away from her. She shuffled her hand through her long, greying locks, still eyeing me. I knew she knew what I was thinking. Sometimes, it seemed like she always knew, even without asking. Especially since Mom and Dad had been gone. We were linked in so many ways that seemed impossible.
“I know I must have frightened you,” she started and flicked some wet tendrils out of her face.
“What the hell was that?” I asked, still in a state of shock. I watched as she played with the ring on her finger and contemplated how to answer my question. After a long, painful couple of minutes, I finally said, “It—it doesn’t matter. It’s late and I’m tired.
Aunt Maria nodded in agreement and then grew increasingly regal-looking, like a queen. She drew her shoulders back and then slipped out of her nightgown. She wore only her underwear and bra underneath. Her skin shone, looking almost like porcelain, or like the moonlight. She splayed the nightgown across the back of a kitchen chair.
“I agree that that is probably best that we get some sleep after all that.” She stated. Her voice was slowly returning to normal—sure of itself, deep and husky. It was the voice I had known for most of my life.
“Aunt Maria—why did you... why did pull away from me like I had burned you?” I asked. My throat felt tight. “I was trying to do what they say to do. You know? Guide the sleepwalker back to their bed, so you don’t scare them. But the way you looked at me...”
Aunt Maria’s eyes flicked back toward me. She walked to the kitchen kettle and snapped it over the stove. With a crack of the lighter, she lit the gas. The blue rushed up to the bottom, warming it.
“You woke me up when you did that,” she answered. “It’s nothing to be sorry about.”
I wanted to tell her about the images that had appeared in my mind. I wanted to tell her that I had only woken to come find her because I had been in the middle of a nasty nightmare. My stomach had told me that there was no answer but to get out, to find my aunt. I had known in every fiber of my body that something was off.
“Honey, you should really get some sleep. I’m sorry I woke you.” Aunt Maria said, flashing me a smile. She remained poised at the kettle in just her bra and underwear. Already, her beautiful hair had begun to dry out.
“Maybe I should call a doctor,” I suggested then. “If you don’t know why you were sleepwalking... Maybe it would just be better to have you checked out?”
“Ivy. Nothing bad happened,” she said. Her voice was growing higher in pitch, alerting me that something was very off—that her anger could soon grow into its full-on, torrential form.
I had only seen this level of anger from her once when she had first come to live with us. She had gotten into a terrible argument with my mother and I still never found out what it was about till this day. But it felt like weird shit was h
appening more and more recently.
The first, of course, had come immediately after my parents were killed.
Suddenly, Aunt Maria reached into a cabinet beneath the sink and drew out a large, fuzzy towel. She marched toward me and wrapped it around my shoulders, rubbing at my upper arms. Her eyes were serene, calm, as she tried her best to warm me. I inhaled slowly, trying to calm my racing thoughts.
“Come on. Wipe your feet here, and then go on up to bed, baby,” she whispered. “Don’t worry about me. I just—I was outside looking for something and got a bit side-tracked is all. You know how I can be, so scatter-brained, just like your mother.”
My mind felt all fuzzy from sudden fatigue. My lips parted. I felt hungry with a desire to ask her what had happened when I had touched her wrist. My head, yanking back, my mind filling with hundreds of images I didn’t understand.
But there was no point. I had learned that when it was time for Aunt Maria to spill the beans, she would. If we were ever going to have that conversation, I knew it had to happen on her terms, not five minutes after the fact in our kitchen.
I trudged back upstairs and slipped out of my soaking pajamas. I heard Aunt Maria still rustling around downstairs. I expected that she wouldn’t head back to bed. I stretched my pajamas out on the edge of the bathtub. The hundred-year-old bathtub had these fancy, golden carved feet and a deep belly. I stuck my feet inside and soaked them with water, scrubbing them even more. They looked fresh and clean, after so much mud and dirt and grass. My mom had told me once that I had actually been born inside this bathtub. Although sometimes, the images of it were beautiful — me, drawing up from whatever world I had been in before, splayed and crying on my mom’s breasts. Another image flashed through my mind, now.
One of a basin, filled with bright red blood.
I shivered and returned naked to my bedroom. I found an old t-shirt from my time at Hillstone Falls Middle School. It hung down to my knees. Then, I crawled back into bed and stared at the ceiling, listening to the wild patter of raindrops that continued to slam against my window pane.
The Forbidden Oracle Page 1
