Misfortune seems
to follow the Sayers family. Georgia has tried endlessly to
reestablish
normality since her mother died, and she's no closer from escaping her strange
past
when a
mysterious fire destroys the only other high school in her tiny Texas town.
Georgia is
thrown into the
company of Luke, a cryptic senior who brings her face to face with the truth
about
her heritage.
Her loving, perfect mother created her family for the singular purpose of
birthing five
of the most
powerful witches in the world, capable of terrifying magic. While they may be
just
discovering
their past, many others have known about them for a long time, and are
targeting
them for their
own purposes. Now that she knows the truth, can Georgia keep her siblings safe?
Who is behind
the dark cult that's after her family? And does Luke know more about her powers
than even she does?
Hope you like it!
Halloween
“I need to tell you about the Sagestone
fire,” he says, his voice rasping like each word is being scraped out of him. “I need you to know how this started.”
My eyelids are too heavy to open. I try but it’s like two thumbs are resting on
top of them, holding them down. I can’t
do anything but lie there and see the hallway of the old high school emerge
from the fog in my mind’s eye. It
surrounds me, makes me feel like I’m standing there, two months ago exactly. I shiver when he tells me Keir chose the
place because he knew it’d be empty, and he knew how to get in.
“The boy, Matthew Townsend,” he goes on,
“was dead when I got there.”
Every word adds a brushstroke to the
scene until it’s as clear as my own memory.
It’s the spell that’s doing it. I can feel it crouching in the back of
my brain like a gargoyle, watching the vision unfold while I’m powerless to do
anything to stop it, change it, making it real.
I can see the hallway of the old school,
everything washed in the grey darkness of nighttime. His feet, my feet, send echoes circling off the
walls as I follow the faint smell of smoke down the hall. When I stop outside of French room 2B, my
hands reach out and open the door.
The fire Keir started is on the
floor, singeing the slip-resistant linoleum in the middle of a black casting
circle. Desks sit circled around it. Matthew’s body is slung across the long table
in the corner. Seeing him there, so rigid and still, makes my throat close
until I almost can’t breathe.
The door shuts behind me, drawing
Keir’s attention away from the embers.
What
took you so long? he says. He
snatches a knife off the floor and tosses it at me, hilt first. My hands barely manage to snag the handle.
Get
his blood, Keir says, sliding a ceramic bowl across the floor until it
knocks into my shoe. We’ll do you first.
My body draws near to Matthew, and I
want so badly to open my eyes, break through this nightmare. I can only watch my hand guide the knife to
Matthew’s grey-blue skin and split it in a line. There’s fingerprint-shaped bruises darkening
along his neck.
“Keir strangled him before I got
there,” he says. “Just before.”
He’s dead, but Matthew’s eyes don’t seem
vacant yet, like some part of him is digging his nails in, refusing to be torn
out.
The ceramic bowl in my hands catches
the blood that flows down Matthew’s elbow.
His voice shakes when he says, “Lifeblood
had to come from an artery. Keir taught me
that. The heart was best, but I just
couldn’t put the knife between Matthew’s ribs, dead or not.”
My hands hold out the bowl to Keir
and he takes it, mixing a fistful of ashes into it. He holds the concotion over the fire,
speaking in guttural words that don’t sound like any language I’ve heard before. The darkness deepens in the room, as if it’s
being called, clustering in the corners like silent observers.
Keir digs in his backpack and pulls
out a pen, just a regular ballpoint that’s been emptied out of its ink, but it
has a needle on its end. I sit in front
of him, horrified as I gather my shirt up at the back of my neck. Keir goes to work, dipping into the
rust-colored paste and piercing a stinging pattern into my back.
“I knew how wrong it was,” he says. “I knew I was breaking a part of myself that I’d
never fix again. It’s hard to explain. Each puncture kind of felt like there was a
wholeness filling me. Like all my life I’d been half empty, you
know? I couldn’t keep going like that. I’d rather be someone else, and let this
other side take over, than deal with being an unfinished person. I never really thought of stopping. Not even once.”
In the room, Keir works the makeshift
needle down to my lower back.
Almost
done, Keir says, his
voice strained with the effort of keeping his hand steady. The
last mark is tricky.
As soon as he’s done saying it, the fire
in the middle of the room bursts like a mushroom cloud, stretching up in fury
up to the speckled white ceiling. The Mineral
fiber tiles take up the flames like gasoline, and the whole room looses its
breath and starts to choke.
“I knew it was Matthew,” he says, “driving
the fire with all the hatred and anger for us that was too strong to move on,
leave the place where his life had been stolen.”
The pen drops from Keir’s hand,
skittering across the floor. We’re both
on our feet, running for the door. The
handle is jammed, swollen with the heat.
We try the windows, but the metal burns our hands.
“Matthew trapped us,” he says. “His final revenge.”
I grab a chair and break it across a window,
chipping out a hole in the glass the size of a dime. It takes six more tries to smash a gap big
enough to fit us. I scrape my body
through as shards tear at my elbows. When
I’m almost out, still hanging on the windowsill, I turn back to Keir, but he’s
not behind me. He’s running to the body,
refusing to leave it.
As soon as Keir touches Matthew’s skin,
the fire retaliates, eating up every molecule of air left in the room before
exploding out the windows. Heat surges
into my nose and mouth, burning down my throat, as I hurl myself to the grass
outside. After that, I drag my body
across the parking lot, collapsing behind an electrical box.
“Sagestone High,” he tells me, “was gone before the fire
trucks even got there. I didn’t think
there was any way Keir could’ve gotten out.
All the evidence was wiped away by the fire. I thought it was some kind of gift. A second chance almost. I walked away after that. To this day, I’ve never once looked at my
tattoos on my back.”
That’s what he says, anyway. I feel the spell loosing its
hold on me. My vision clears, like a gentle wind sweeping the fog away, and I
open my eyes.
It’s just me now, in my own body, still stuck in my hospital
bed, and him in the chair beside me. He leans
forward, pressing the heels of his hands into his eye sockets like it hurts him
too much to see me.
Something’s just been lost between us. I can feel our
innocence draining from the room, a dark weight settling in its place.
“If you’d told me one day ago,” I
say, “we might have been able to save you.”
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