by Katie M John
“Go on, hit me? Would that make you feel better?” Daniel asked.
Jeremiah eyeballed him. Part of him felt hitting him was exactly what he wanted to do. He felt his hand itch as it flexed in and out of a clenched fist. The anger was sliding into a simmering, cooler feeling of hate.
“I think it would be better if we sat and talked. Shall I pour us a drink?” Daniel asked walking towards the decanter.
“I don’t want to talk. There’s nothing to say,” Jeremiah replied before turning and heading towards the door.
Daniel called after him, “Jeremiah, stay away from the Meadowsweets. Things are not done yet.”
Jeremiah turned and flashed him a dark look of defiance. “I mean it, Jay,” Daniel continued. “Whatever is between you and that Meadowsweet Witch, pack it up and lock it away. It will come to no good.”
*
If his uncle said more, he didn’t hear it. Jeremiah had already left him behind and was making his way up the stairs. Paulina was sat on the top step waiting for him. He stopped and smiled at her, “Hey, you.”
She stood and reached out her hand to touch him on the arm in a display of sympathy, but now he knew Paulina was not of the living world, his mind no longer played the physical trick and it passed right through him. It returned sadly to her side. Her face fell with the understanding she’d never be able to offer him the warmth of human compassion again.
He left her standing on the stairs and walked on. They each had to bear their own losses. When he glanced behind him, she’d faded away to wherever it was she went when she wasn’t manifesting. He hoped it was not to the horrors of The Rookeries.
Closing the door behind him, he headed to his desk. He was exhausted but the last thing he wanted to do was sleep. He knew that as soon as he closed his eyes, the images of the night would replay themselves in an unending nightmare. If he’d thought he’d escape them by staying awake, then he’d been wrong. Images hit him rapidly like the bullets of a machine gun.
Snow and strange lights.
Fire and sliding shadows, like demons dancing over the walls.
The baby, impossibly held in a shimmering, iridescent bubble.
Thalia’s sister, charging at him. The force of impact. The feel of her hard body under his, and her hitting her head so that she passed out.
Then there had been the sound of Fox screaming and he’d been running, running faster than he’d ever ran before. He had run towards the flames and the realisation that amongst the flames, was Swan Meadowsweet – and she was burning.
But she didn’t die.
20
Wren sat down at the kitchen table. She was exhausted. The kitchen was dark except for the small, warm light above the cooker, and it gave the familiar space a sense of otherworldliness. She had been up all night tending to Swan’s burns, nursing her daughter’s skin in the hope her attentions might lessen the ugliness of the scarring sure to result. Of course, there was always the option of magical intervention – but the price of beauty was high. Vanity involved Dark Arts, of the oldest kind – and it never ended prettily. No, her beautiful daughter would have to endure her scars for the rest of her life, and wear them as experience in the same way most people have to carry their scars on their heart.
Wren felt tears creep down her face. She would do almost anything to smooth those burns from her daughter’s face and place them onto her own. That was a mother’s love. She had done all she could, placing the cooling herbal balsams over the skin, stopping the fire from eating deeper into flesh. She’d laid hands, and uttered incantations, sang lullabies, and wrapped her firstborn tenderly in bandages, reminding her achingly of when she had swaddled her as a baby.
The sound of the kettle reaching temperature diverted her thoughts. The whistle sang and she knew she had to move because if she didn’t stop to deal with it there was nobody else to.
Times like these highlighted how lonely the life of a Witch really was. When she had been young and living amongst her sisters, she could never imagine a time when she would have to deal with things alone. Then there had been the, “accident,” when their youngest sister had died. When the accident had happened, Wren thought she would literally die from a broken heart. The pain was made worse by the guilt. She had never accepted she wasn’t entirely to blame – and neither had her older sister; after all, it had been her fault they’d opened up the portal.
They’d been foolish, barely more than curious children – but The Ancient Ones didn’t care about that; all that mattered was the conduits were powerful enough to keep the door open for them and they had been – once the sacrifice had been made – once their baby sister had been pulled into the portals of Hell. Their mother and aunts had arrived just moments too late. They sealed up the portal and sent the two remaining sisters home whilst they “dealt with the mess.” Wren’s sister ran away at the age of sixteen and neither her or the ‘accident’ was ever spoken of again.
After that fateful night, Wren had never returned to Heathmoor Cottage or the moors that surrounded it. She’d made a solemn vow never to use her magic properly again, and until tonight, she had kept that vow.
When Thomas had arrived and swept her off her feet, giving her three beautiful daughters, she thought maybe she could finally move on and put an end to the Meadowsweet’s Witchcraft legacy. She married Thomas in St. Ursula’s Church; a Meadowsweet woman had never married before, not alone taken part in any form of church service. She changed her name to his, becoming Mrs. Weston. She’d tried to break with tradition in every way, much to the further heartbreak of her sister, who unable to stay at Meadowsweet Cottage with all its ghosts, had moved to May Hill into Bramble Cottage, breaking the ancient inheritance line.
Wren had even put the cottage on the market, as Thomas had not been keen on the low ceilings and thatched roof – but nobody wanted to live in a house with so much superstition surrounding it. The girls followed swiftly after their wedding, and then it was as if Thomas’ role had been played out. He died the night after Bunny was born.
He had been returning home from the hospital in his battered red Fiat on the nort road when he swerved to miss an animal in the road. He was killed on impact. Some in the village believed he was a victim of the Highwayman hauntings. Wren knew better. Thomas’ death was punishment for her childhood curiosity – it would seem it was an endless debt.
She shook the memories away; they were too painful, even now, and certainly too much to think on tonight. She poured the tea and watched the steam curl and twist. It made her think of potions; the kind her mother had taught her before Wren had foolishly thought she could deny her blood, and lost her way making cosmetics for rich women who wanted to buy their spirituality in a bottle. But now, darkness was beating its wings and evil had already touched her daughters. It was time to visit The Sanctuary and dust off the cauldron. It was time she gave her daughters a proper education.
21
Jeremiah Chase stood at the window and looked out onto the white grounds of Coldstone House and to the woods beyond. The events of the evening had shaken him to the core. He no longer knew who he was: he no longer wanted to know. He was afraid of what he might learn.
He looked down at his hands and pulled them closely to his face for examination. How could it be that his very touch could kill somebody? He traced the outline of his lips with his fingertips and sighed sorrowfully. Those lips would never now kiss Fox Meadowsweet, and there was nothing more he wanted to do than kiss her. Out of all this madness, one thing had become perfectly clear – he had fallen in love with her.
22
Fox pulled the duvet up over her head. She wanted to nestle down and block out all the horrors she’d seen. She knew she was in shock; the events of the evening had been traumatic enough to shake the most steely of hearts. She also knew she should cry it all out, but the tears wouldn’t come because they were held back by too much anger.
The sound of Swan’s cries floated through the walls and under the door adding
to Fox’s own pain. Fox reached over and grabbed her earbuds from the side table. She wanted to escape it all; the image of Swan burning, the panther tearing at Violet’s throat, the minion shadows, and Jeremiah… she especially wanted to escape thoughts of Jeremiah.
She desperately wanted to phone Will but he had his own troubles and now really wasn’t the time to make demands on him. Even though her head reasoned all of this, her heart wished he were here beside her now, wrapping her safely up in his arms.
Her phone beeped alerting her to an incoming message. Her heart rose with the hope, through some kind of Witchcraft, Will had felt her need for him. She flicked onto the messages and her heart sank again. It was Jeremiah. Her curiosity outweighed her principles and she pressed the envelope. It flipped open to reveal three simple words,
I love you.
She threw the phone to the end of the bed – out of the way of temptation. Then the tears came, and they burned.
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Read on for the preview chapters of The Forest of Adventures (Book One of The Knight Trilogy) which is free on Amazon Kindle.
THE FOREST OF ADVENTURES
Book One of The Knight Trilogy
PREFACE
SLEEP IS FOR the innocent. For the guilty, the night is a time when we are fearful prisoners locked tightly behind heavy eyelids. We look asleep but we’re not – we’re living in nightmares, and it leaves us exhausted and half crazy. This is the punishment for our crimes.
It always starts the same, with the thick scent of wildflowers and sun-warmed earth lulling me into a false sense of peace. It doesn’t last. Too soon it fades, replaced by the sinister iron-stench smell of blood blending with mud and the sweeping sounds of sharpened metal striking the sky. On hands and knees, I crawl forward. My palms slip on the grease of the rain-soaked earth and my dress is so heavy with rain, that I’m dragged even lower; sliding serpent like towards him.
He looks at me with his cheek half-buried in the earth. His eyes stare blankly. I can’t tell if he’s dead or still dying. I think I hear him whisper my name and I stretch out a hand but I can’t quite reach. Death breathes on my bones. Flowers of red-ice bloom over my heart. I wake, gasping for air as if I’ve been drowning.
The pain is exquisite, the pain is love.
1. BEGINNING
Blake Beldevier started college on the first day of the January term. He arrived with the snow. Perhaps looking back this should have served as an omen: a warning to anybody foolish enough to fall in love with him that they ran the risk of having their heart turned to ice.
Nothing could have prepared me for the first time I saw him. He walked in to the common room, took a seat and started reading The Times. It wasn’t for this weirdness that I noticed him – although it would normally have been enough – but because of his breath-stealing beauty. It was the sort of beauty that snaps a secret part of you to attention and reduces you to the beast you are at heart. It was a rough and rugged beauty; a colouring of the skin, a face that had been hewn from a remote and wild cliff face; a darkness of the eyes full of latent storms and solitude. He was more beautiful than any other boy I’d ever seen in my seventeen years.
All of this I saw in an instant but it was enough. A sickening current swelled in my stomach. I felt dizzy and stars erupted in front of my eyes. It was as if I’d been hit by a force of freezing ocean air that physically knocked the breath from my lungs. The book I was holding, a thing of exquisite and private joy previous to this moment, flapped limp in my lap, revealing itself as the faded and battered thing it was. Now, here in front of me, sat something more divine than anything an author could create.
By the time I’d managed to regain the appearance of someone who was actually sane – flicking through the pages of my book to give the impression I’d been reading and had hardly noticed him – he’d gone to his lesson.
Sam, who’d been sat at my side throughout all of this, was completely oblivious to these seismic shifts. He was too busy scribbling down the last two answers of his Math homework. As I got up to leave for my lesson, he took hold of my right hand and kissed the well of my palm. His love was solid and reliable. It was for its purity and simplicity that I loved him. Sam was clear waters and instinctively I understood that Blake Beldevier was the swirling waters of a deadly current.
The sense of treachery I felt as I walked to my literature class was as overwhelming as the force that had been the meeting of Blake. It felt as if I had an iron scarf wrapped around my throat, and where Sam’s love usually offered a warm contentment, for the first time in the two years we’d been together, his love felt like it was choking me.
The English block was at the far side of the college grounds, and for this I was unusually grateful. The biting wind and the ice-rain that spliced my skin seemed a fitting punishment for the torrent of fire Blake had caused in me. Perhaps it was a taste of the pain that all of us would come to feel.
The English classroom was on the third floor and almost empty when I arrived. Condensation streamed down the windows of the overly hot classroom, which melted the view into the flat, dull, grey of the winter sky. It was comforting to look at something bland and unexciting. The classroom filled without my notice, but this escape didn’t last for long.
“May I sit here?” he asked in a hushed tone, clearly embarrassed that he’d arrived late to lesson.
My heart quickened. I reasoned with myself that this seat, one of several available, had been chosen because of its closeness to the door, and was in no way related to my existence. After several disappointing minutes, I realised my reason was right – he hadn’t even registered me.
The English teacher, Mr Dwell, was a flamboyant creation; a relic of some previous age of leather volumes, cream teas and cigars. He reminded me very much of my own Uncle Josef and so whilst others took delight in mocking him, cruelly impersonating his slight lisp and his portly walk, I felt an affection for the old man and loved the time I spent in his slightly out-of-sync world.
Literature was my favourite subject and the lessons normally held my entire attention. But unlike other, more ordinary days, today the close scent of Blake’s warm body caused my thoughts to bounce all over the place and the words on the page to blur.
“Miss Singer, is there a problem?” Dwell’s soft Scottish voice filtered through as if it were travelling through water.
By the time I’d resurfaced, the moment had passed and the class were searching through their copies of Hamlet to find where we’d ended last lesson. Whilst I had been dancing around in my own little daydream, Dwell had selected people to read. Thankfully I wasn’t one of them. The ‘To be or not to be?’ passage was now being read by an unfamiliar voice.
Hamlet’s words sat easy in Blake’s mouth, giving the impression he was reading from memory, or like an actor who had learnt his lines. And rather than murdering Shakespeare’s verse, like we normally did, his voice fitted the iambic pentameter with ease. It created intensity to the language that until this moment, I’d struggled to understand. I lost myself in the music of the reading, jolting back to the room when he suddenly faltered and become unsettled in his movements. He turned to me, his eyes flickering with something like recognition. I noticed with embarrassment that my arm was touching his. There was something terrifyingly captivating in the fact that I couldn’t feel him; as if he simply didn’t exist.
The creepy thought t
hat maybe he didn’t jumped on me. I looked around the classroom, desperate for somebody else to prove he wasn’t a figure of my overactive imagination. An ice-spider took a leisurely crawl across my spine. Blake’s eyes locked onto mine and looked right into the heart of me. Moving a finger to his lips, he motioned me to silence, as if I had just stumbled across an impossible secret. A smile flitted across his mouth. At that moment, the strongest impulse to kiss him grabbed me and if it hadn’t been for the sound of the bell, then maybe madness would have won out.
Before the bell even had a chance to finish ringing, I’d packed as speedily and clumsily as a frenzied criminal about to skip the country. I wondered how it was possible to lose your sanity in the space of an afternoon. All my instincts screamed at me to run, to get away. But something else, something deeper, richer, sweeter, wanted me to stay and move closer. And even though a siren was wailing through my head telling me that this boy was dangerous, all I could think about was kissing those lips.
*
Thankfully, Sam’s class had been released early for good behaviour. He stood outside the English block, car keys swinging in one hand, two paper bags containing a late lunch in the other. He greeted me like a dutiful puppy, falling into step by my side and sending the sandwiches on a perilous flight as he swung his arm around my shoulders.
“What’s up, Sweetie-Pea? You’re white as a ghost!” Sam’s voice was full of concern.
“Nothing,” I lied unconvincingly. “I think maybe I’m going down with something. Look do you mind if we rain-check this evening? I need to get my head down and rest.”
