by D. N. Hoxa
Then, we waited.
The only silver lining to all that waiting was that the panic and fear wouldn’t let me even breathe properly, let alone pass out. We waited for three hours. Every possible scenario assaulted my mind with very violent images, in which the ECU, or the demons, or both had found the guys, and now they were all coming for us, too.
But when we heard the footsteps behind the door, all the concern was washed away. We stood perfectly still, Elisa and I, right by the door, and watched the knob turn. Grover’s face was the first I saw. My feelings got the best of me, and before I realized it, I was wrapping my arms around his wide shoulders, hugging the heck out of him.
Relief settled on my very core, taking away all the bad feelings of the past few weeks for a second. And when I saw Ax, my legs almost gave up on me.
They were both tan, their hair longer than the last time I’d seen them. They looked good. Ax looked perfect. The tan of his skin gave his eyes color, turning them from grey ice to indigo. I hugged him, too, only because it would be awkward not to, but feeling his body against mine made my heart want to permanently leave my chest. Dammit, I’d missed him too much. Too much more than I was supposed to, but here it was. I couldn’t deny it, and for the life of me, I couldn’t stop trying to figure out if he’s missed me as much.
“Thank heavens you’re alive,” Elisa said, laughing. She was very happy to see them, too. It was obvious that she really cared about this. About us.
“You, too! And great touch with the ad! It’s all over the city,” Grover said, looking around the room, but there wasn’t much to see. Eddie’s men had already closed and locked the door behind them. “What’s that whole Storm is coming thing about?”
“Oh, didn’t she tell you?” Elisa looked at me, grinning. “Scarlet came up with it. She named you Storm witches.”
Ugh. The reminder of the green-eyed man was one I could have done without. That name had been his, and in the craze of a moment, I’d thought it smart to tell everyone about it. Now, every time someone said it, I’d have to think of him, then stop myself before he walked through walls to come meet me.
“Storm witch?” Ax asked, raising his blond brows. I’d even missed the confused look on his face, it seemed. And he didn’t make it any easier by never looking away from me. My cheeks heated like he’d pressed a freaking button. “It has a nice ring to it,” he finally said, making my stomach do all sort of crazy things. “You look good.” Then he looked at Elisa, too, as if he just realized what he said. “You both do.”
“You do, too. What took you so long?” Elisa said.
“We had to hire a private plane because airports aren’t exactly safe,” Ax said.
“Are these the pictures?” Grover had sat on Elisa’s mattress and was looking at the screen of the laptop. “Fuck, yeah!”
“Yep. Just don’t touch anything, okay?” said Elisa, a bit panicked.
“What are you doing here? Who are those guys that brought us in?” Ax said, taking half a step closer to me. “What’s going on, Scarlet?” Ah, the way he said my name…
“It’s kind of a long story,” I said reluctantly. He was going to be pissed off about a lot of things.
“It’s not,” Elisa said. She’d sat down on the mattress next to Grover, probably to see to it that he didn’t touch anything he wasn’t supposed to, and expose us to the ECU. I wasn’t very tech savvy, but Eddie must have had some serious protection in place, protection we were not to mess with. “Scarlet didn’t go to Florida. She stayed behind to help me with something, and then we saved the witches those demons kidnapped.”
My eyes almost fell out of their sockets. Was she kidding me?
“What the fuck?” Ax whispered. I could feel the warmth of his skin from two feet away as his anger and panic grew. Even Grover was looking up from the screen now.
I looked at Elisa. She was going to pay for this, the asshole. Not that I was going to lie about it, but I’d have been more gentle in telling them.
“What?” she said to me with a shrug, as if she couldn’t figure out why I was trying to sew her mouth shut with my eyes. “She helped me, I helped her get them out, but then we had to separate because the ECU were all over the place. The guy in charge here, Eddie, is after Scarlet’s dragon, so we’ve been taking advantage of that while he tries to take it off her. It’s why we’re hiding here—because he won’t let Scarlet out of his sight.”
When Ax stepped in front of me, our noses barely an inch away, his eyes were red with anger.
“You went behind our backs,” he accused me. I suddenly felt so…small.
“I did what I thought was right.”
“All alone? You could have gotten yourself killed!” he shouted so hard, he blew my hair back.
That pissed me off.
“I wasn’t all alone! I was with Elisa. And I didn’t get myself killed, did I? I’m right here!” I shouted back.
“Holy potatoes, girls. You’re pretty much my fucking heroes right now,” Grover said, laughing. “Did you really get everyone out? How many were there?”
“Heroines,” Elisa corrected, while Ax and I looked at each other angrily, like we wanted nothing more but to start a fight.
Or kiss…
“We got twenty-seven witches out.”
“Twenty-seven?” Ax and Grover said at the same time. He was no longer looking at me like he wanted to kiss me. Dammit.
“Yep. They helped us get out of there, too. And you know the guy we first met when we went into the ECU with Oscar?”
Ax thought about it for a second. “The guy with the glasses, yeah.”
“Well, that’s Eddie, the guy in charge. You’re not going to believe it when you see him, but he helped us a lot,” I said, stepping away from Ax. It was good to have him close because of the whole passing-out situation, but not that close. I did need to breathe, too.
“Eddie is in charge around here?” It didn’t sound like he believed me, but I didn’t blame him.
“Just and wait you’ll see for yourself,” I said. “What about you? How did you keep under the radar? Did you find anyone?”
Their faces alone said that they had no good news to share. “We learned to block ourselves, or at least we think we do. Nobody found us so far,” Grover said.
“Turns out, finding others like us without Luca’s sense is very difficult, but a couple found us on the first night there,” Ax said.
“And?”
“They were happy with their lives. Didn’t want to leave it behind. The ECU has yet to start killing people in San Francisco, it seems.”
“Because there are no demons there,” Elisa whispered.
“So why are they only here? How is that even possible?” It made no sense, when apparently, witches like us came from all over the country—probably the whole world.
“They’re learning. Adapting,” she replied. “It’s my best guess.”
“We did tell them that the ECU could strike at any time, but they said they’d find us if that ever happened,” Grover said with a shrug. “Nice people.”
“Maybe we should all move to San Francisco,” Elisa said. It was meant as a joke but it sounded plain sad instead.
“And leave all these people here to die?”
Once upon a time, I’d craved action in my life. A purpose. Well, now I had it, and though it got too much too often, I couldn’t back down. Not after seeing all of those kids, more than half of them driven out of their homes by their own families.
“Well, that’s all we have to say. It’s your turn to tell us everything. I want to hear all the details,” Grover said, setting the laptop aside, the ad no longer very interesting to him.
I let Elisa do most of the talking. She told them about how I’d helped her get away from “an old enemy,” meaning David, and how she’d helped me in return to get the witches out. All the ways in which Eddie helped us—until the day he locked us in that basement room made of concrete. All the while, the guys said nothing but wat
ched us, afraid and excited at the same time.
“Now, what we need to do is wait for the Carnival. Everyone who saw that sign is going to be there. It’s your moment,” Elisa ended with a satisfied sigh. We were both happy to get that story out of the way.
“You think it’s smart? From what I’ve heard, the Carnival is held out in the open. The demons?” Grover said.
“It’s possible that they show up, but there’ll be too many others. The ECU has soldiers and every witch around New York is going to be here,” Elisa said, but she didn’t sound too sure.
“The ECU had soldiers in their facility, too. That didn’t stop the demons from coming,” Ax reminded us.
“Look, we need to put a stop to this hunting, and this is the only way to do it. They can’t keep killing us every chance they get, or we’re going to go extinct before the world even knows we exist.” It was all a matter of priorities. And if the demons did show up, I’d still have the dragon to fight them off. Doug and Tammy weren’t going to be able to take it off me anytime soon.
“You’re right about that,” Grover said.
“We heard about the killings,” said Ax, pulling his hands into fists. “But the demons—”
“Let’s just focus on one thing at a time, shall we?” Elisa cut him off.
“If the demons come, we’ll fight them. Everyone will fight them—they’ll have no choice. But we’ll only get this chance once. There’s no other event where we’ll find everyone together in one place—the ECU members, the coven and pack leaders, and the public.”
“How exactly are we going to stop them from hunting us, or even killing us right there on the spot?” Grover asked. Ax was looking at the floor, seemingly lost in thought, and a bit paler than a second ago.
“We’ll protect ourselves with our magic, and find a way to make them listen. We’ll tell everyone about how the ECU is hunting us down and killing us for no reason, and when they see how many we are, they’ll have no choice but to back down.” I hoped it, wished it with all my heart.
“I don’t want to be a dick, but it sound like a whole lot of wishful thinking,” Grover said with a flinch.
“Yeah, it is. It’s the only thing we have to start with, otherwise we’ll be stuck right here.” Every impossible thing had started somehow. If they believed we were doomed from the get-go, we were in deeper shit than I thought. I looked at them again. Grover kept his head down, Elisa watched the laptop screen, and Ax didn’t even seem like he was listening to us. He was completely lost in his own thoughts.
“I just don’t want us to die, that’s all,” Grover said, and Elisa nodded.
“But we’re not going to live if we don’t stop them. Or try to. Yes, it will be hard, but I’d rather have a hard time right now, and live the rest of my life the way I want to. If we run, we’ll just keep on running, and it will be a little less hard until we die.” Maybe I was a fool for believing it, but I wanted to fight to live, not run to exist.
Elisa shrugged. “When you put it like that…”
“There’s no other way to put it,” Ax suddenly said. He surprised me both because I thought he wasn’t listening to us, and because we seemed to agree on something, which didn’t happen very often. “I believe the time has come.” He gave us a curt nod. “We have to get to Iowa.”
“Iowa?” Elisa said. “What the fuck’s in Iowa?”
A visible shiver washed down his back. “Sienna.”
Sienna was the girl who’d grown up on a human farm with human parents—or she said she was. When we found her, she claimed she had no idea about being a witch, let alone a witch like us, so we’d left her behind with Ax’s godfather when we went into the ECU. It was for own protection. She had no clue how to use her magic, or how to fight.
“What does Sienna have to do with any of this?” She was perfectly fine, far away from here. Nobody was going to go looking for her on a farm in Iowa.
But Ax was unusually pale now, and he sat down on the ground in front of us. Licking his lips, he took his time before he spoke, getting us even more anxious.
“After we left Manhattan, I went back to Mathias’ house to check on her because we couldn’t steal a disposable on our hurry to leave the city, but she had already left. Mathias had taken her to the bus station when he heard about us, and she’d gone home. On our way out, we met Mathias’ friend, a Bone witch. He started to tell us something about a dream he’d had…”
The blood in my veins turned to stone. Karim’s face materialized in front of me. Oh my God…
“He said he saw me fighting against the dark or something, and he spoke about a woman who was raised away from our world, but was going to die in it.”
The silence that followed his words was deafening. Suddenly, the air became too thick and the walls seemed to close in on me.
“Scarlet?” Elisa breathed, but I couldn’t look at her. My unblinking eyes were stuck on Ax. It all made sense. Karim’s words made sense now.
“He said that when the time was right, we should find her, that she would lead us. I think that time is right now,” Ax ended. He might have moved away but I didn’t notice.
Of course it was Sienna. Raised away from our world? Maybe she was really raised in a human family. Maybe she didn’t lie at all.
“Holy shit, Ax. Scarlet spoke to the same guy! He said the same things to her, she just told me yesterday,” Elisa said, her voice dripping fear.
“He did?” Grover said, his brows shooting up, while Ax held his breath. “What was his name?”
“Karim.” The Bone witch’s small, brown eyes and that fake smile were all I could see in front of me now.
Another loaded silence stretched in the room. How could I have not seen this before? How could I not have known that it was Sienna he was talking about?
But how could Sienna be our leader, when she had no idea that witches even existed before she met us? How the hell was she going to be able to lead a bunch of people without knowing shit about the world they belonged to?
“We have to go to Iowa,” Ax repeated, his voice strange, like somebody else was speaking through his mouth.
“We can’t. Eddie won’t let Scarlet leave here,” Elisa whispered.
“So how are you going to go to the Carnival tomorrow?” Grover asked.
“Good question. If he doesn’t let us go, we’re going to have to escape.” And it sounded like Elisa had a plan. I had one, too. Ask to use the bathroom, blow the guards against the walls until they lost consciousness, and then figure out how to get the hell out of the building—preferably while Eddie was away at the ECU. I was going to leave a note for him and everything, promising him I’d be back as soon as the Carnival was over, and everyone was safe.
“You go,” I said to Elisa. “He doesn’t need you to be here.” Hopefully, that wasn’t too much to ask of her.
“I would, but I’m not like you. Chances are she’ll have her doubts about coming back. With you guys, it might be different.”
“What else can you offer him?” Ax said. “If he’s a supplier, he’ll want everything he can get his hands on.”
We all looked at one another but nobody said anything, because none of us had anything else left to give to Eddie.
“So escape. I’ll stay behind to clean up the mess,” Elisa said. “It shouldn’t be too hard.”
“Iowa is what, half a day’s drive away? Assuming we even have a car, we’ll never make it there and back on time.” The Carnival was tomorrow.
“The plane,” Grover said. “Jushko might still be here.”
“Who’s Jushko?” Elisa asked.
“The guy who operates the private plane that flew us here,” Ax clarified. “Assuming he’s still in New York, maybe he could give us a ride, but we’d have to pay him. A lot.”
Now that sounded like hope. I looked at Elisa. “How much do we have left?” We were paying the people ten dollars for every picture they sent. So far, we had two-hundred and seventeen of those.
“A
bout five thousand and some change,” Elisa said. “But what if we need it for something else?”
“Wait, how did you pay the guy to get here?” I asked Ax. As far as I knew, they had no money with them when they left Elisa’s house.
“Grover took care of it,” Ax said, and Grover grinned.
“A golden watch was all he wanted,” he said proudly. So he’d stolen. Good for him.
“Five thousand isn’t going to cut it, but I can get us the money from Mathias, I think,” Ax said.
“No!” I shouted. Just the thought of Oscar the werewolf covered my flesh in goosebumps.
“He’s okay, Scarlet,” Ax said calmly. “He had nothing to do with it.”
“But we can’t risk it.”
“Risk what?” Elisa said. “You’re already planning to come out to the world about who you are.”
She did have a point. “I guess you’re right.”
“Is this secure?” Ax nodded at the laptop.
“It is, but I’ll do all the typing.” Elisa took the laptop in her hands.
“We need to talk to Eddie first. I want to ask him to let us go before we try to escape.” I’d given the guy my word and I didn’t want to break it, unless I absolutely had to.
“He’s not going to want to hear it,” Elisa sang.
“I’m still talking to him.” And I’d be as persuasive as possible.
One thing was for sure, though. With Ax there with us, the chances of passing out had lowered drastically.
Now, we needed to move.
Twenty-one
Eddie didn’t want to hear it.
I think he already knew I was going to try to run away. I could see it in his eyes, the pity, which made the entire thing even harder on me. I didn’t want to have to run away but what choice did I have? Letting Ax and Grover go by themselves made me physically sick. I needed to be there, too, in case we were attacked. Not that they couldn’t handle themselves, but three was better than two.
