The Second Covenant

Next came the pounding footsteps of the Trengereid men. I grabbed up the knife and did a trick I call Smoking. Poofed myself from inside the circle to my spot on the bar in a cloud of smoky power. The knife was rinsed off in the water and replaced, my magic hid my bleeding arm and the towels I had used to wipe the red liquid off with were now ash in the garbage.

Druex, Declan and Donovan came flying down the stairs. “Cherish, you okay honey?” Druex demanded and I nodded, my hand clasped in my lap, right where they’d left me. “Good, no ghost upstairs, you ready to go?” I lifted my brow at him slowly, something bad had happened upstairs and he didn’t want me to see it. “Dax okay?” I asked softly and all three of them froze. “Why wouldn’t he be okay?” Declan asked me calmly, but there was a muscle in his jaw ticking. I nodded and got down off the bar, feeling another kind of power rolling down the street towards me. “My dad’s here, you don’t have to take me home.” I kissed Druex on the cheek as I passed, not meeting his eyes. “Call me if you need anything.”

My father was getting out of the car when I came out the front and I shook my head subtly at him, flashing my eyes black in warning. He smiled at Druex and Declan and waved as I slid into the car. His smile lasted until we rounded the corner. “What the hell was that? Tyler called me, everyone is meeting us at the colony house.” I nodded. “Oh good. Cause we have a big, big, big problem.”


Everyone wasn’t really everyone. Just me and the dads. If there wasn’t such a big bad nasty out there, I’d be a little intimidated. The Sons of Ipswich. So strong it made my hair rise up to be in our place of power. They had this way of just filling up a room with their power, sucking all the air out of it. Uncle Tyler was the first to notice my bleeding arm. He jerked me over to him and ripped up my sweater sleeve. “Mother Fucker! Cherish, what did you do?” He hissed, but I caught his hand before he could use his power to heal me. “It’s fine. Look, already healing. I had to do a very impromptu spell.” My father waved his hand and clean rags came floating down the stairs.

The four of them glared at me, but took their seats on the four stones where countless sons of our line had sat before them. I stood beside my father. “Something happened tonight Cherish, it woke us all up out of a sound sleep.” I nodded at Uncle Riley. “I’m sure. When I ascended, there was something watching,” I looked at Uncle Tyler. “You felt it, you all did. It’s been here for I don’t know how long, watching me. Us. And I felt it tonight at Druex’s bar.” They all stiffened and I’m sure jumped to the same conclusion I had already made and passed. “It’s not Druex or his cousins. There wouldn’t have been a way to hide that kind of magic from me. I touched all of them.”

I looked around the fire lit circle, at the men who were my teachers. “I gave blood to make the corner stones of the bar into ward stones.” Their jaws dropped and everyone gaped at me. “You shouldn’t have been able to do that by yourself.” Uncle Pogue said to me and I nodded. “I know. The thing, we’ll call it the Shadow because mom might wash my mouth out if I said Asshole in front of her.” Reid’s lips twitched. “Probably so.”

I stood with my feet braced, hands behind my back like I was at attention. Don’t know why, but I always do that when we’re down here. “I had a dream two weeks ago. This Shadow thing sent me some kind of dreamscape. It didn’t have to cross or breach the wards to do it either.” Tyler stretched his legs out in front of him, his eyes narrowed shrewdly. “That’s not possible.” I shrugged. “Apparently it is. It was projecting fear to me, reading me like a freakin book. It wanted me to choose between Druex,” I looked at Uncle Pogue. “And Peyton.”

His lips thinned and his eyes flared black. “In the dream,” I put emphasis on dream, “I refused to make a choice and it killed them both. So whatever is going on, it’s about me. I already told Peyton.” My father put his hand on my hip. “Honey, you should have told us first.” I looked down at him and nodded once. “Probably, but at the time I thought it was just a bad dream. If I came running to you guys every time I had a bad dream, we’d spend most of our lives down in here.”

I sighed and looked over at the shelves with all our books, all the knowledge we’d gathered and not one page had anything about my powers. “In the bar, we were closing up, I had a sprite and when I went to drink it, the liquid was red. Blood I think.” I frowned as I moved closer to the shelves. “I could smell it, I could feel the malice from the Shadow, scraping up my spine, freezing cold.” I opened my hand and ran it over the books, hovering over the air, feeling…something. A draft?

“I knew it wasn’t there for Druex or his cousins, but I could feel pain radiating from the ceiling above me. Druex has an apartment with a back entrance up there. So I had them go up, all of them. Made some dumb excuse and the Shadow came down, hovered in the dark corners.” There, again, a draft. “It was laughing at me, actually spoke this time. It said my circle wasn’t strong enough to keep him from me, that the circle wasn’t complete without my coven.” I touched the spine of a thick book, darker magic. Ick. “But you weren’t casting a circle.” I smiled at Uncle Tyler’s observation. “No, I wasn’t. I cast it out, and Druex and his cousins came back down. They were trying to hustle me out of there pretty quick. So something happened, but I know that Druex had nothing to do with the Shadow.”

“And how do you know that?” Reid said, tonelessly. I gripped the thick book and pulled it out. “He has some kind of power, yes, but it doesn’t taste right.” My father made a choking sound. “Excuse me?” I smiled back at him. “Taste in the way that Uncle Tyler can separate the feel of Riley or Tristan’s magic, the way it’s different from yours or Uncle Pogue’s.”

I looked back at the empty space the book had sat in and frowned at the paw print, like a dog’s paw, etched on the wood. “What’s that? I’ve never seen it before.” I pointed to the scarred wood and Tyler, being the closest stood up and looked. “Don’t know, it’s been there for as long as I can remember. The paw print.” He told the other’s and sat back down. “Why?”
I shrugged and touched my fingers to it. “I feel a draft. Like there’s something back here.” Tyler came back and touched the mark after me. “I don’t feel anything sweetie.” I smiled at him a little absently. “And yet I do.” I don’t know exactly what prompted me to do it, but I swiped my finger over the blood on my arm and touched it to the mark. The wind that blasted me, I knew Uncle Tyler felt. “Well shit.” He said and a portion of the bookcase slid away like some spy movie.

The room was small and there was a smell to the place, something familiar I couldn’t put my finger on. It was a bedroom. A rough metal frame, with claw marks over the flat surfaces. But there were touches that said someone had lived here, been cared for in here. A fire place with a few decaying books on the shelves, and a carving that made my eyes water.
A wolf.
A wolf howling, it’s nose turned up to the cave like ceiling.

There was a rug in front of the fire, also decaying, but hand woven, lovingly woven. It was like a prison, but had touches of love everywhere. “What the hell is this?” Uncle Pogue asked, touching his fingers to the claw marks. Tyler looked at me and nodded. “Touch something.” I frowned but lifted my hand over the wolf, sometimes I could get a vision off an object from touching it. Usually foggy memories and snippets of conversation. Like looking through a dirty window.

But when I wrapped my hand around the rough wood, that window was crystal clear. The room was painted green, forest green and a woman sat rocking a young boy on her lap. “I don’t like it down here.” He said and the woman kissed his head. “I know my love, I don’t like it either. But when the full moon comes, you know we must to stay away from the rest of the colony.” The boy nodded, but I couldn’t get a good look at his face. Their dress put them somewhere around the mid seventeen hundreds, settlers. My ancestors? “Why can we not go back to the forest mother? Why can‘t we go back to the others?” She smiled a lovely smile and sighed. “I made a blood oath with the witches. They keep us safe, and in return, we keep their young safe. We will survive.” She looked up, almost right at me an my breath caught.