The Woman in the Woods (Saul Silva x OC)

Chapter 8: Old House

Minutes before the car swung off the highway, the three of them were already tense, constantly looking out the window for any burned ones. They knew that it took time before the creatures could detect where the baby was, but there was still a small possibility of early sniffers, and just one was enough to kill all of them. At the same time, they needed the burned ones to follow their scent so that they would leave the residents of Aster Dell alone. If only they had figured out much earlier that they were after the baby...

"You're sure it would work?" Daphne, holding the child in her lap, asked.

"It will," said aunt Kira, driving steadily toward Alfea. Just a few hours more.

"I've been trying to get a hold of my parents, but no one's answering," Daphne went on.

Aunt Kira gave Sasha a look, the both of them thinking the same thing, that maybe the threat to Domino, which had been developing for the last few weeks, had finally come. Still, it didn't help to worry the girl. So, Sasha said, "Just send them a text. Maybe they just ran out of batteries."

It didn't look like Daphne believed her. She looked down at the baby on her lap, contentedly playing with her hair. "I just don't know. She's so young."

"It's only temporary, Daphne. We'll lift it as soon as we understand why the burned ones are after her," said Sasha.

"We need to do it," aunt Kira chimed in. "The burned ones will eventually find her and we're all done for."

"But wouldn't the barrier in Alfea be enough?"

"It can fail. And even if it doesn't, placing your sister there would endanger the students and teachers there."

Just like it did Aster Dell, but she didn't say that.

Daphne still looked undecided, staring at her phone while holding her sister tighter. In front, Sasha turned the radio on just to have some noise. She didn't want the girl to hear what she had say to her aunt.

"You think it's wise to tell Rosalind we're coming?"

"She's the headmistress of Alfea. We had to."

"Yeah, but to tell her we're witches..."

"We're gonna do a ritual that only witches can do. And we're gonna use the Stone Circle to do it. Rosalind has to be aware. Besides, she's an educator. She's not some backward-thinking idiot who believes that we still follow the kind of witchcraft from the middle ages."

"But aunt," Sasha said, not quite having the confidence that Kira did, "she called us blood witches."

"Well," she paused, also looking troubled but ignoring it. "We do use blood."

Yes, they did. But later on, as Sasha laid on the grass, staring at the black sky with her guts exposed and blood soaking her dress, she would think how ironic that she had all this blood gushing out of her and can't use it because it wasn't just blood that they use, it was also energy, which she no longer had.

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The house was not as dilapidated inside and had a few furniture. Aside from the couch, there was one table in what should be the kitchen/dining room with four chairs around it. The kitchen counter had a few rusty and blackened pots and pans not fit for anything but killing cockroaches that probably crawled these walls. The house was a bungalow so Maja could only assume that the doors to her left were the bedrooms and they were probably as empty as the living room. All the windows were either curtained or blocked off with cardboard and planks.