The House In The Forest

Chapter XX

Chapter Twenty

We spent hours looking at those books, somewhere along the line we all ended up falling asleep. I don't know when, or how late we stayed up. We didn't seem to find anything that'd be useful, some books spoke about the Dae, or the dark things, or some third name I couldn't remember. But none of them were particularly interested, half the things Sasha said weren't even true. Since he seemed to act like he knew everything, everything but to kill them it seemed. Unless he was hiding that from us, but that thought was just deprived from my jealousy of the man.

Misplaced jealousy I guess, he didn't love Giselle, he loved Beatrice. Well, so he said. Yet he had no problem cuddling up to her and being so attached to someone he called by her real name. I wasn't sure what to make of it really, watching him call her the name I wasn't allowed to. Giselle this, Giselle that, he seemed rather addicted to that name. For a man who claims to be Beatrice's soulmate. Naturally, he got on my nerves. Not that he meant to.

"What time is it?" Marlowe asked, yawning. She grabbed her phone off the table, staring at the dark screen. "My phone's dead, Amber."

Amber rolled off the recliner, picking up the colorful phone that was laying on the ground. "It's eight, in the morning."

"I knew it was in the morning."

"We found nothing, after all that," Elias sighed, leaning his head on the coffee table.

Sasha leaned back on the sofa, glancing at Giselle, who was still asleep next to him. "Did you really think there'd be a method to deal with them written in a book? If there was, they'd already be dead by now."

"Not necessarily, most people think they're just a myth, who fights myths?" Damian asked him.

"Well," Elias started, stopping when Damian glanced at him with that 'stop talking' look.

Sasha sighed. "I suppose you tried, didn't you?"

"Don't belittle me, we tried really hard," Damian told him with a sigh.

"I wasn't, I truly commend you for trying something, most people can't even get to that step," he spoke with a strangely warm tone, but naturally he ruined it. "Failure is normal, it's no reason to get upset."

Amber hummed though. "True true, my great grandmother says things like that often, mainly when she's trying to teach me new crochet patterns."

"Hattie, right?"

"Yeah, you knew her too?"

He chuckled, a look on his face I couldn't place. "Yeah, I knew them."

"Them?" Amber asked, tilting her head at him like she did.

"She was always with Silas, it's strange not to refer to them together," he spoke rather genuinely, before ruining it as always. "I shouldn't burst your bubble, but you are aware how dangerous these creatures are, aren't you? You can't expect to be able to fight them as normal humans."

"We know that," Damian spoke, "We didn't intend to really fight them, more like find their weakness that would, like, banish them or something."

Elias sighed. "They've been here for so long, wouldn't the priests have banished them already if they could?"

"Maybe they weren't as strong back then, maybe they've slowly been gaining power over time," Amber spoke like it was the plot to a movie she was trying to unravel rather than our actual living problem we were dealing with.

Sasha stared at her for a moment like he was suspicious of her but then Giselle woke up so he turned his attention to her, naturally.

"Oh, I didn't mean to fall asleep," she spoke with an apology, pulling her hair over her shoulder to try and smooth it out. "Did we find the key to taking down our enemies?"