Scorched: Book 1 of the Scorched Trilogy, page 21
“Why are you doing the binding again? How often do you have to do it?” These questions seemed easier to deal with than everything else they were saying.
Munro stopped his work and looked at me, but I couldn’t interpret the mixture of emotions I saw in his stare. It was like he’d closed himself off after what had happened tonight, and I was looking at a brick wall. The lack of emotion made me want to shiver, and I hugged my arms around myself, regretting that I’d taken off Munro’s coat in a pouty huff.
“Once you know someone has bound your magic, it weakens the spell. It’s like a pool with a leak, slowly the protection will drain away until you are left vulnerable and exposed. Before, when you didn’t know about it, we only had to do it every six months. Now that you know, it’s likely that we’ll need to do it every week?” Munro said the last while looking at Ryan questioningly. Ryan nodded and turned back to look at me.
“Your mother was like family to me. We’re here to help you, Annie, to protect you, and teach you how to protect yourself. I'm sorry we didn't know that Hattie has been here this entire time. She has accumulated a lot of power over the years. We are not completely equipped to fight her,” he said, the words like an admission that left a bad taste in his mouth.
My pulse stopped for a moment before stuttering violently and thudding a quick succession of beats to catch up. If they didn’t feel we could beat her, what hope did I have to keep my magic from her and stay alive?
“Are you saying I should just give my magic up to her?”
Munro slammed down the bowl in his hands, cracking it in half in his anger. “Absolutely not!”
He was fighting a rage I’d never seen in him before, and I felt a thrill at the fierceness of his response. Especially since he’d been so cold since we’d arrived at their house.
“Never. We will never let her have your magic.” His eyes burned into mine while he made that promise, but the fire flamed out quickly as he looked down at the broken pieces of stone on the counter.
He moved to grab another bowl from one of the cabinets almost robotically while Ryan looked at him with concern.
“Annie, we’ll bind your magic and get you home. Hattie won’t be able to do anything until you can freely access your magic.” He came around the counter and placed a comforting hand on my shoulder, looking down at me with sincerity shining in his eyes.
“We are going to protect you. We will figure out how to deal with Hattie. I promise.” He squeezed my shoulder before he moved back over by Munro to help him finish getting the ingredients ready for the spell.
As if entranced, I watched them work, none of us speaking. I don't know if we were all in shock, or if they were afraid I'd go off on them if anyone started talking. I wasn't sure I wouldn't. A larger part of me was fascinated with what they were doing. So far in all my magic lessons with Munro, we hadn't cast spells or gathered ingredients to create potions or whatever the hell this was they were doing.
There was so much to learn about my magic, and I had missed years of knowledge. A pang of resentment at my mom for keeping this from me seared through my stomach, and I instantly felt guilty. I knew she had been trying to keep me safe, but if I had known would any of this have happened? We could have been prepared for someone like Hattie or I could have controlled my magic, so I wouldn’t have flared out?
Ryan looked up at me and worry creased his brows. It was as if he sensed my thoughts were trailing off down roads that would do me no good to linger over.
“Hey, I’ll get you home. Munro doesn’t need me here for this, and you don’t need to fall asleep watching us prep this stuff.”
Part of me wanted to stay and watch while they did the spell but that need fought with utter exhaustion. My shoulders drooped like someone had stacked invisible bags of sand on them. My body was oddly achy like I'd been beaten up physically tonight instead of mentally.
I nodded at Ryan. “Yeah, that’s probably a good idea.”
Standing up I faltered, not knowing how to say goodbye to Munro. The night had been such a mindfuck. One instant Munro was desperate to kiss me, and the next I was finding out he’d been keeping this massive secret about his mom from me. Now his head was down as he continued to work on his spice rub or whatever the hell it was for the spell.
With a shake of my head, I pushed back from the counter and said goodnight quietly. I headed to the door where Ryan was waiting for me with keys in hand.
“Wait,” Munro grumbled out, his voice clipped and commanding. It made me bristle with the need to ignore him and keep moving. I tamped down the instinct and stood there.
“Yes?” I asked, my tone cool enough to form snow.
Munro dipped a finger into his mixture and came around the counter to stand in front of me. He kept his eyes lowered and avoided looking at me as he grabbed my hand. The electric pulse that always accompanied his touch was a dull imitation of how it usually seared through me, and I wondered if my anger was suppressing the response. He brushed his finger over the palm of my hand and murmured a few words I couldn’t make out before he moved away without even saying goodbye.
Feeling like a fool I stood in place, hurt lancing through me. He was treating me as if I’d done something wrong. I wasn't the one who’d lied or lied by omission or whatever the hell excuses they wanted to use. Gritting my teeth together, I pulled in a fortifying breath and steeled my shoulders, giving Munro my back without another word as I headed toward Ryan. I'd been through a lot worse than a cold shoulder from a boy I had feelings for. Screw him.
Ryan held the door open for me as we left the house, and I shivered as a sense of foreboding ran down my spine. Something inside of me was telling me not to leave things with Munro like this, but my brain was overflowing with information and emotion. If I had been connected to a power grid, I would have exploded the damn thing. Besides I couldn't change his behavior, only my own. I pushed all those thoughts and feelings rampaging through my heart down like I was squishing down an overfull garbage can.
Ryan started his car and cranked the heat up all the way, which is when I realized how hard I was shivering. It was like my mind had dissociated from my body, and I could no longer feel anything.
Closing my eyes, I took stock of everything I’d learned tonight and everything that had happened over the past few months. More and more questions were coming to mind, and I blurted them out in a rush as soon as Ryan buckled up.
“Why is Hattie doing this?” I asked Ryan the one thing I’d never asked Munro.
Ryan sighed and pulled at his collar like it was choking him, and I had the very real understanding that this was his sister we were talking about.
“Did Munro tell you anything about his dad?” Ryan finally responded, and my forehead furrowed as I tried to recall what Munro had shared about his dad.
“Um, just that his dad was killed for his magic and after that, his mom took off.” I swallowed thickly as those words took on new meaning. At the time I hadn't known his mom was Hattie, the woman who murdered my parents and stolen my mom's magic.
“Did she kill…” My words trailed off because what was I going to ask Ryan. Did your sister kill her husband? Geez.
Ryan spoke when he pulled up in front of my house to drop me off. “Ask Munro again. He’ll tell you.” He paused, trying to collect his words. “He’ll want to be the one to tell you.”
I took in the pained look on Ryan’s face and realized there were so many lives that had born the painful impact of knowing Hattie. Nodding at him, I moved out of the car with a whispered goodnight and made my way inside.
The house was dark. Sara was probably asleep, and Maggie must have still been out. Without another thought, I headed upstairs and got ready for bed, going through the motions as numbness smothered all feeling, in my body and mind. I fell into bed and closed my eyes, letting the numbness shadow me as I went to sleep. Until my nightmares consumed me.
Chapter Twenty
The dream assaulted my senses like always, choking my lungs with smoke and doubling me half with painful nausea that stabbed through my stomach. My door was open, and the heavy smoke was rolling across my ceiling like a vicious snake. Crawling as quickly as possible on my hands and knees to get to my parents’ room, I burnt my hand grasping at their doorknob, crying out in reaction to the pain.
Using my t-shirt wrapped hand to open their door, I saw my parents and fought the urge to get sick, knowing that if I stopped moving, I would die. Crawling to the edge of their bed, I reached across their bodies to grasp my father’s hand and touch my mother’s cheek, weeping and coughing as the reality of what was in front of me registered. The hole in her chest where her heart had once rested was gaping with a violent vacancy. Emotion erupted from inside every cell of my body, unleashing my rage and panic in the visceral scream that tore from my throat, shredding it with the force. Flames burst around me, licking the walls and ceiling angrily, pulsing in time with my broken heart.
Stumbling away from my parents, my lungs struggled for oxygen, and my vision began to blur as I tried to crawl back to the hallway. I couldn’t get in a breath without sucking in dark plumes of smoke and ash. My body was racked with rough coughs, and my vision started to dim. Just before I lost consciousness, a shadow passed in front of me, and every hair on my body stood up as though electricity charged the air. I was on my hands and knees like an animal, gasping for every breath, knowing I was going to die here just like my parents.
With great effort, I lifted my head with a prayer for help in my eyes as I took in the woman in front of me. Blonde, petite, and hair barely mussed despite being in a house that was completely engulfed in flames. Hattie. She stared down at me with a desperate need in her eyes. There was blood smeared over her chin and a sickening connection to my mom's missing heart had me retching as my body tried to expel anything it could from my empty stomach.
Hattie bent down and moved to touch my face, but a violent swell of anger consumed me and magic gathered inside of me swiftly, the pressure climbing and condensing until I unleashed it with unmitigated rage. It swept over Hattie, over the house and out into the universe.
The force of it threw me from the house, and I landed on the lawn, crumbling as I hit the ground, miraculously not breaking every bone in my body. The pain, both physical and mental, caused my body to shut down protectively, sinking me into darkness. Time was nebulous, and I didn't know how much had passed before the steady hand of the ENT worked on me, placing the oxygen mask over my mouth and nose. Turning my head, I saw my home, the only home I'd ever known, in a blazing inferno with my parents' bodies inside.
A desperate ache, different from the one formed by all this loss, tugged at my heart, and my eyes tracked over the chaos of the yard in search of the reason for the pain. Lights flashed blindingly from the ambulances and firetrucks while firefighters fought the blaze and the paramedics tended to me. Neighbors had come out of their houses and were staring, dumbstruck, at the fire.
I didn't know what this fierce need was inside of me, I just knew that there was something else wrong here, something I was missing. And then I saw Munro cross the lawn and head straight toward me. Even in my dream, I knew this hadn't really happened, but there was some message I needed to understand. Something important I needed to figure out.
The people and noises around us disappeared along with the burning house until it was just me and Munro. He lowered himself to the ground, laying on his side facing me. I turned to him, mirroring his position and locking my eyes on his gray ones, neither of us speaking. Munro’s face was still as stone, giving away nothing as he stared at me. Then for the briefest moment his face morphed, and it looked like he was shaking his head wildly, crying out in a violent, but silent scream. Then the mask was back, and his eyes shuttered once more. I didn’t know which face was more terrifying.
I bolted upright in bed, soaked with sweat and shaking as the full memory of that night returned to me. Even though Munro and Ryan told me the night before that Hattie was responsible for everything that had happened, I still hadn’t remembered anything beyond small bits and pieces. Somehow knowing the truth had unlocked the memory and now I almost regretted knowing the true horror of that night.
I ran for the bathroom as bile crept up my throat and heaved, emptying the contents of my stomach into the toilet. Hattie had eaten my mom’s heart. My hand shook as I pushed back the damp tendrils of hair that clung to my clammy forehead and neck. To think I had been in this woman’s presence so often over the last two years. My stomach roiled again, threatening to bring up what little was left in there.
Breathing in deeply through my nose and exhaling out my mouth, I tried to calm myself; focusing on the breaths instead of thinking about what happened. Until I thought of Munro. I knew he hadn’t been there that night, that his addition to the dream was some subconscious message I was failing to understand.
I pushed myself up to stand on shaky legs, grasping the edge of the vanity counter to support myself. Avoiding looking in the mirror, I splashed water on my face and brushed my teeth, feeling like the inside of my body needed to be scrubbed clean, but I would have to make do with just my teeth.
Exhausted and shaken I slowly made my way back to bed, knowing I wouldn’t be able to sleep again, but not sure what else to do in the middle of the night. Curling up under the covers, I closed my eyes and tried to block out the memories that were burning as brightly in my mind as the fire had flamed that night. Somehow, maybe with magic, I fell into a dreamless sleep before my next breath could be exhaled.
***
I moved through the next day like a zombie. Once Maggie woke, I had no problem distracting her with questions about the dance and the after party they'd gone to. With expertise that was almost alarming, I dodged her questions about our early exit and kept her talking about Sam. Laying on the couch like I was nursing a hangover, my stomach did a somersault when my phone dinged with a message. Looking down I saw it was from Munro.
Munro: We should talk
No apologies, no how’s it going, just straight to the point. A war of contradicting thoughts played through my head, and I was tempted to ignore him. Let him come over here and force me to talk to him. But then I remembered Ryan’s face the night before when we’d talked about Munro’s dad, and my empathetic side edged out my anger.
Me: Yeah, we really do
Munro: I'll come to get you in an hour
Looking down at my pajamas I saw that they were sporting an embarrassingly large jelly stain on the shirt and I knew my hair looked like a family of weasels had taken up residence. I scowled and pushed myself off the couch. I was going to have to shower, and the thought made me irrationally mad to the point where I started laughing. I may have been looking for every excuse to hold on to my furious anger at Munro. Not that he hadn’t earned it with his lies, but in some way, I understood why he’d kept things from me, but that didn’t mean I forgave him.
After a quick shower, I dried my hair and pulled on a pair of jeans. I threw on a warm sweatshirt over an old baseball tee and was ready so quickly that I spent almost twenty minutes pacing the house, picking up the kitchen and sorting through a bin of hats and gloves from the front closet to waste time. Munro didn't even have to turn his car off because I was out the front door so fast Maggie didn’t even finish saying goodbye before the door was closed behind me.
Munro nodded his head when I murmured a hello as I got in the truck. All the times we'd spent together it had been easy to be with him. Yes, he made me nervous at times and my palms may have sweated once or twice in his presence, but there was always a feeling of comfort in being with him. A rightness I sensed the very first time we sat down next to each other, and a gravity that pulled me into his orbit. But today felt different. That pull was muffled and strained, and it had me questioning whether the tension between us was the reason?
I could feel my muscles clench and tense and had to command my body to relax as Munro drove us in silence. We crossed the bridge spanning the Mississippi River and into Illinois and drove for twenty minutes until we reached the outskirts of Galena, Illinois.
I hadn’t bothered asking where we were headed since I knew he wouldn’t answer. Instead, I looked out the window at farm fields whose crops had been cut down and were now dusted with a thin layer of snow.
The sun was shining brightly, but the temperature was frigid. I’d underdressed in just my sweatshirt, but I’d been too distracted when leaving the house to realize how cold it was outside. Thankfully the heat blared from the truck’s vents, but a chill still settled in my bones that didn’t seem to want to warm.
We pulled up in front of an old abandoned brick warehouse. It looked like there had been landscaping around the building at one point, but now any shrub, tree, or blade of grass within a fifty-foot radius of the building was a brittle, brown remnant of something once living. One side of the building was painted with a sign, but it was so faded and peeled it was difficult to read. I thought I could make out the word sewing on the sign and wondered if this building had been a sewing machine factory. That was as far as my guessing went because an unpleasant feeling started to creep under my skin.
Munro produced a key to a padlock that was hanging on the front door and pulled it free with a loud click.
“Side business venture?” I raised an eyebrow and kicked away a pebble near the toe of my shoe.
My nerves were starting to get the better of me and my smart-aleck mouth tended to take over when I was uncomfortable. Munro didn’t look amused and didn't bother answering.
The sun was blindingly bright, but my breath was puffing out in little smoky bursts in front of me. I hugged myself, grasping the tops of my arms tightly and wishing again that I would have grabbed a coat. Goosebumps covered my arms, and I rubbed them with a shiver as if I could expel the uncomfortable feeling with a brush of my hands.
As we walked into the building the chill got worse, though I wasn't sure if it was because we were out of the sun, or just the general bad vibes the warehouse seemed to emit.
