Eye of the Coven

by Larissa Ladd

  I loved him too.

  I leaned into him and kissed him. I knew it had been a mistake to read his mind, it was almost too much to know that he loved me. What really caught me off guard was the fact that I felt the same.

  It wasn’t hard after that. I knew what he felt and knew what I felt, and I decided to follow through on it. He was a great guy; he made me feel like a great woman, and I liked who I was around him. I tried to see him more often and he seemed happy with the way things were going. He agreed to see me whenever I asked, and he surprised me with sneak visits on the days I thought I wouldn’t.

  Devan was what they called a ‘boyfriend’ when it came to people. He was my boyfriend, and I liked the sound of it.

  Chapter 8

  It was my day off from work. I lay on the couch and watched old musicals. It was the kind of way I loved killing time. Kitten came closer to me than usual, sitting close to my head on the side table, and licked her paws. I’d just had the best cup of coffee I’d made in ages, and Devan was coming in about an hour. It was perfect, I was happy.

  Kitten started mewing but I’d already fed her and filled her water bowl.

  “Go outside, then, if you don’t like this,” I said to her.

  She carried on. After a while she got up and trotted out of the room. It was strange for her to do anything faster than a slow saunter unless she was scared, which she often was of me. I shrugged.

  The light in the room changed. At first it was slight, I almost didn’t notice the difference, and I wrote it off to clouds in front of the sun. As I watched TV, it became more and more dark, the light slowly fading and whatever came in through the curtains not strong enough to light the room up anymore. I frowned and stood up to switch on the light, but that did nothing either.

  That meant only one thing; it wasn’t the light that was the problem. I was feeling it again.

  The room got darker and darker, and it changed from black or grey to browns. The atmosphere kept on varying and I struggled to gauge where it was coming from. It felt like it was everywhere, and it felt like it was trouble. I hadn’t felt trouble like that in a long time, not since I was too young to do much about it, and it scared me. That was all so strange.

  It didn’t take long before the whole apartment was dark. I could still see, of course, but my senses were overwhelmed with something, and I didn’t know what to do. I ran through the house, looking out the windows in every room, but I saw nothing.

  I picked up the phone. I was about to dial Devan. He was the only one I could think of, but when I picked up the receiver, I suddenly realized why I hadn’t been able to feel where it was coming from before.

  They were all here, surrounding my apartment, standing where I couldn’t see them. The entire coven had come, the closer they got, the easier it was for me to tell who was who just by feeling. It wasn’t good. The whole coven out to do something, in broad daylight, together? It wasn’t good at all.

  The buzzer rang and I picked it up, talking over the intercom.

  “It’s Marlena,” the voice crackled through the speaker, “open up.”

  Marlena didn’t know where I lived. No one did, only Devan. For a moment, fear gripped me that something had happened to him. If they had found me through him, it meant that he was either dead or severely hurt. The buzzer rang again, yanking me back from the daze. I pushed again.

  “You can’t try to fight us, Cherry. Just open up and it might not be as bad for you.”

  I was breathing hard. My heart was hammering against my chest and my palms felt sweaty. I had been very confident when I’d thought about taking on the whole coven, but now that it was actually happening? I didn’t know if I had what it would take to fight them.

  I didn’t have much of a choice.

  After about a minute of thinking what to do, a window in the kitchen broke. They were here; my thinking time was up.

  I stood with my back to the wall and waited. It was Rebecca who walked into the lounge.

  “Cherry, hiding already? I’ve been waiting for quite some time to do this,” she giggled and started mumbling to herself, a spell that I thought I recognized, but my mind was too muddled to figure it out.

  Another window broke somewhere in the direction of the bedroom, and when I moved toward the TV, Rebecca opened the front door.

  They all wore hooded black cloaks that hung from their shoulders and covered their heads. It looked so gloomy, and if I weren’t the target, I would have laughed at them. I hated all the formalities and had gotten rid of my cloak ages ago. But seeing all of them together dressed like that scared me.

  Nema stepped forward. Of course.

  “If you just surrender now, it doesn’t have to turn into a fight. You know that. It’s gone on long enough, this game you’ve been playing.”

  “How did you find me?” my voice was thin and it didn’t sound like my own. I was usually so confident, so defiant.

  “It took your sister a while to scout you out, but she’s not your sister for nothing.”

  I breathed out in relief. It wasn’t Devan then; he was unharmed. They still knew nothing of him, or so I hoped. The fact that Nema hadn’t mentioned him yet gave me a bit more confidence. They weren’t using him against me.

  “So, now you’ve all come together because you’re all scared to challenge me one-on-one; is that it?” my confidence was slowly returning, I was starting to work on a plan, and if I could keep Nema talking long enough, I could work it all out before the games started.

  “We came together because you’re never at the cave long enough. This is part of what it means to be in a coven, standing together. If you even paid half the attention to being a witch as you do to being normal, you would know, and you would understand. But you’re constantly refusing to do what is expected of you, and you leave us no choice.”

  “I have told you over and over again,” I rolled my eyes, “it’s not like I’m trying to do anything against you or the coven by not leading it. I just want to try and live my life as normal as possible. Why won’t you understand that?”

  “Because you’re not normal, Cherry. Because you’ve never been normal and you’ll never be normal, and the sooner you realize it and accept it, the quicker you’ll be the witch you were born to be.”

  I shook my head slowly so I could keep my eye on her, on all of them. I knew I was backed into a corner. My living room was very small and most of them were in it now, the few who weren’t I guessed were either standing watch outside or in the other rooms. This apartment was never built to have thirteen people at once.

  It happened quickly. Daemon, a witch I had little to do with, threw something at me from the side. It was a spell and it didn’t do much, but it blinded me for a second and it distracted me long enough so that Rebecca could come past at her lightning speed and scratch me more times than I wanted to count right then.

  Everything was burning, my arms, my legs, my chest. I still thought it was childish but I had to give it to her, the girl was fast and she was good. She could take any human out that way. Daemon threw another spell but this time I was ready for him and held my hands up, moving it in strange patterns to block him. I felt my arms sting as I used the muscles, but that had to wait.

  Daemon carried on with the spells, throwing them at me with a speed I hadn’t known, and Marlena helped him, her hands moving almost as fast as his. I could block the spells but not when they came that fast. My ears started ringing, I couldn’t see much and I felt extremely tired. It felt like despite my power I was doing nothing. All the while, Nema was talking. Half the time her words drifted through the spells and the physical attack, and I realized the others, if they weren’t doing something too, were talking and chanting, but I had my hands full and it was hard for me to concentrate on what they were saying and doing.

  Nema was trying to tell me something, the others were working at strengthening the few who were working together against me, and I was feeling it. I felt the power drain out of me slowly, and I
felt weakness overtake me at almost the same speed, slow but it was definitely there.

  It was an attack on my mind more than on my body, which was hard to believe, considering the constant physical attacks I got, but I could feel their tendrils reach in and poke at my resolve not to do what they wanted. Nema was in there too, but mind-reading wasn’t her forte and her tendrils were weaker. I felt them trying to reach every corner of my mind, felt them working me over, finding all the pieces of me that didn’t want to be a witch, didn’t want to be a leader, didn’t want to be their slave, and I felt them trying to change it.

  But I was powerful, wasn’t I? I was the strongest, that’s why they were here, trying to change who I was, trying to fight me. Well, that was enough. I had gotten sick of them, the people I was meant to work with, the people I was meant to call my family, treating me like I was the enemy.

  I kept my hands up to block as many of the spells as I could and pushed them out of my head one by one. I could feel them leave; I worked on blocking every corner of my mind until there was nothing left for them to touch. I felt their fine tendrils of mind-control withdraw until it was just me inside my head again. It felt good to be alone in my mind again.

  Then I mumbled a few words, and built the same kind of wall I did for Marlena on the day of the move, and when Rebecca hit it, she flew backwards into the wall and crumpled to the ground. I’d forgotten she wasn’t as strong as Marlena, but at least her scratches and punches and whatever else would stop now.

  Then I mumbled a last string of words, words that I knew but had never used before, and pushed my hands forward with the last of them, pushing them all out of my house and out of my life. The force of my words pushed most of them back. Some flew out of the door, some back out the living room windows. Nema stood strong, but had to lean against it as if it were a strong wind and if she did nothing, she would blow over.

  “Get out!” I shouted with all the strength I had left, “get out and don’t ever, ever, come back and think you can call yourselves family again!”

  Most of the witches fled.

  “Cherry…” Marlena was one of the last to leave. She stood at the door with Nema.

  “You too!” I shouted. “You have no business being my sister. What would Mom and Dad say now? I’m not the disappointment here, Lena, you were supposed to be my sister.”

  I saw the words hit her, but I didn’t care. She hurt me. She came to fight against me, and that was something family, blood, never did.

  When they were all gone, I sank to the floor. It was getting darker around me, but the threat was gone. My body ached everywhere and I felt like I was blacking out. Kitten came into the room, mewing and mewing, and I tried to touch her, but she was out of reach, as always.

  The last thing I saw before it all went black was Devan, walking through the door. I only saw the black of his pants and his shoes as he rushed over, heard him swear and then say something that I didn’t catch, before it all sunk into the blackness and I let it wash over me like a warm wave. He was here now; it was okay.

  Chapter 9

  I opened my eyes and frowned. I was surrounded by white. White walls, white ceiling, white sheets. There was a smell in the air that tickled my nose in a bad way and I squinched my face. I tried to move but found that my body ached in a lot of places when I did, so I laid my head back on the pillow.

  Devan appeared at my bedside and smiled at me.

  “Hey beautiful,” he said and his voice was the best thing I’d ever heard, “how are you feeling?”

  “I’m okay,” I said, feeling everything but okay, and my voice came out in a crackle, rather than the smooth, confident hum it usually was.

  “You gave me quite a scare there,” he said, and sat down, placing a cup on my bedside table, “I brought you some water. Depending on how you feel, you can eat, but the doctor said definitely a lot of fluids.”

  I frowned and closed my eyes, trying to single out the areas of my body that hurt the most and block them out. It was hard work and my mind felt tired, almost like I had been concentrating for a very, very long time.

  “It looked like you were attacked by a wild animal, so many scratches and bruises,” he said, his voice dropping and I could both feel and hear the pain behind it.

  “How long have I been sleeping?”

  “Almost three days. The doc said you would be alright, you just needed to gain strength, but I was scared.”

  I nodded, my eyes still closed.

  “The police said it was probably burglars, especially when I told them about the broken windows, but I was through your flat yesterday and nothing was missing.”

  I didn’t answer, just sighed. How could I explain it to him? It wasn’t really something I could tell him about. Oh, hey baby, guess what? A coven of witches attacked me. No.

  The doctor came in not long after that.

  “Miss Blake, how are you feeling?”

  I just nodded. The doctor glanced down at his chart.

  “There’s nothing wrong with your stomach, so if you feel up to eating, the meal will arrive in about an hour. Other than that, I need you to stay here one more night so we can be sure you’re alright. You gave us quite a scare,” he glanced at me over the top of his glasses, “looking the way you did. I’m surprised you didn’t lose more blood.”

  That was the other thing I wouldn’t be able to explain. I was a witch, which meant that I bled, but only enough to make it look real. We didn’t bleed more than we needed to keep our secrets; a wound could be however deep and it would still only trickle when it came down to it.

  I nodded.

  “You know how to call a nurse when you need anything. I hope you’ll feel better soon; you still look a bit pale.”

  He left the room after that and I tried to reach for the cup on the bedside table. Devan jumped up and gave it to me when he saw the scowl on my face. Rebecca had done quite a number on me. I hadn’t realized she’s gotten so strong. She wasn’t nearly a match for me yet, but she was getting there, her strength increasing as she kept on training. Nema must have been training her herself, it was the only explanation.

  “I’m going to leave you to sleep a bit. I’ll be out in the hallway,” Devan said to me, and when I looked at him with pleading eyes he stroked my hair and added, “you do look pale, and I think you need to recover. I won’t go far, I promise.”

  When he left the room I felt how tired I really was. It wasn’t one thing that had gotten to me, it was everything at the same time: the mind-control, the spells, the physical attacks, everything. And then the emotions fluctuating on top of it when Marlena had been against me, and the relief afterwards that Devan had come to save me. It had all taken a lot out of me.

  If it were up to me, I wouldn’t have come to the hospital. I was strong and I would have been able to get myself back to health within a few days, without any help. But finding me unconscious wasn’t something Devan would just take lightly, and I supposed it wasn’t the worst thing in the world that he’d brought me here. It’s not like they would find much, even if they did tests. The biggest problem was explaining myself to Devan. But it worked for me that he’d come to his own conclusions. I didn’t have to lie to his face, he did it all for me.

  I drifted off to a dark and dreamless sleep, laced with the aches and pains of my body.

  When I woke up, Devan was next to me again, looking worried, but he smiled despite himself. I didn’t think I would ever get tired of that smile, and I felt butterflies in my tummy despite how I felt. The room was a dim grey.

  “Hey, are you okay?” he asked. I nodded.

  “You’ve slept for so long, it’s way past lunch, in fact it’s almost nightfall. It’s time for me to go home.”

  My eyes widened. I didn’t want him to leave.

  “I’ll be back soon,” he said when he saw my reaction, “I just wanted to be sure you’re alright. I’m not allowed to stay overnight; I tried the first night,” he chuckled and I couldn’t help but smile.
>
  “Devan, before you go…” I felt awful that he didn’t have the right story. It was gnawing at me while I was asleep, and I decided that if he wanted to be with me long term, which he sort of already was, then he would have to know some sort of truth at some point. He looked at me and pulled a chair closer. I loved that about him, the fact that he knew when it was serious.

  “It wasn’t burglars who attacked me,” I started, “I wanted you to believe it because it was easier that way.”

  “But you said—“

  “I didn’t actually say anything. You did all the talking, and put the pieces together yourself.”

  He closed his mouth and let me talk.

  “I’m sorry I let you believe otherwise, I just didn’t have the courage before. But now…” I swallowed hard. How much could he take?

  “It was your family, wasn’t it?” he asked before I could carry on. It seemed safe. In a way it was, and he knew my family was crazy in a way; they didn’t like what I did, and wanted me to do things differently.

  I nodded slowly, and he nodded as if confirming something to himself.

  “I just had a feeling,” he said.

  “I… well I didn’t know how to say it to you. A lot of people have crazy families but none that would actually attack them. I didn’t know how to say it; it just sounded so stupid.”

  “Don’t worry about it. It’s about high time you found yourself a new family. After everything you’ve told me, I don’t know why you don’t write them off completely. They sound awful, and I want to get to know them less and less. At first, I really wanted it because they were part of you, you know? But now, I hate them because they hurt you.”

  I would never have been able to tell him the truth after that, so I closed my eyes and nodded again. My head ached slightly and my chest was heavy.

  Devan started fumbling in his pocket, but whatever he was trying to pull out was stuck and he was tugging. I didn’t dare look into his mind to see what it was. I had a feeling, and it made my mouth dry and my hands sweaty. It made my heart hammer against my chest and it made the scratches on my neck flare up again.