Drowning with Fire #3 ✔

Chapter 9 - Theo

Unsurprisingly, Ember had been pissed after I left her – especially when I refused to give her a reason as to why I ran off. I didn't want to tell her that Kaden was in town, because that meant revealing that Ryder and I had seen him the day before.

Even when we got back to the café, Ember refused to tell us what the symbol meant. She suddenly turned weary.

"Can we please go find this house? I really need to rest... I feel like shit." She admitted, slumping down and resting her head on the table.

"I thought you spent all last night resting." Ryder scoffed; Ember's night was nowhere near as active as ours.

In response, Ember shot him an icy cold glare.

"We're all tired, okay?" Thea stepped in for a change, "So how about we find this house, get settled in and unpacked, then have a discussion or something?"

"Like a pack meeting?" Ryder cocked an eyebrow up at me.

I hissed at him, "You know we're not really a pack without an Alpha. We're technically all Betas."

Glancing at the bill, I left a few notes on the table. "By the way, umm...we're kinda broke."

"We know, Theo. Don't worry." Thea smiled tiredly at me, her eyes barely open.

"C'mon, then." Ember picked up her bags – as we'd taken our bags to the café after leaving the hotel – and she walked out the door.

"You okay, man?" Ryder asked as he walked alongside me, letting Thea go ahead.

"Never better." A let out an exasperated sigh, tone dripping with sarcasm.

He clasped his hand onto my shoulder, giving it a reassuring squeeze.

With our bags slung over our shoulders, we followed the vague instructions Al had given us. Before long, the dilapidated house with peeling cream paint rose up amongst small, pretty and well-kept cottages.

"It's bigger than I thought it'd be." Ryder spoke his thoughts aloud.

I took a quick glance to check no one was watching as Ryder threw his weight against the front door. A curtain on a nearby cottage twitched, or so I thought – my mind very easily could've been playing tricks on me. The roads were fairly quiet; almost as if the entirety of Hopecliffe had been affected by the full moon. Though, of course, it hadn't.

The natural world kept turning whilst the supernatural one was constantly ruptured with tremors and quakes.

"Oh shit, it's freezing in here!" Thea exclaimed from inside the house.

"It's probably not connected to any mains electricity anymore." Ember explained, folding her arms and rubbing them.

Ryder's voice came through, muffled from a cupboard on my right, "There's blankets in here!"

"It'll have to do." I finally stated, the grimness in my voice inescapable.

This was no five-star hotel. But it would have to do.

After deliberating whether to try and reconnect the house to the mains, we decided to leave it for a while; not wanting to draw any unneeded attention to ourselves.

Ryder and Thea sprinted upstairs to claim their bedrooms – separate bedrooms, thankfully. Al was right; there were four bedrooms, all with beds, mattresses and sheets remaining.

The smell of mothballs clung to everything in the house, but I wasn't sure if we could risk opening windows or not. Whilst we were staying in an empty, borderline-derelict house, we'd need to keep our presence on the down-low, to the say the least.