(FREE TO READ) Bad Moon

chapter 38; protection

Jaylin heard her all night, speaking in his ear yet sounding a million miles away. Like a ghoul, she had nested in his head, he couldn't get her out. He laid in the bed she'd given him, in the heat of a woolly duvet, and he thought. He couldn't stop thinking, he just thought. He thought about all the things she'd told him over dinner, tried to remember all the gentle conversation that had passed him by while he'd sat in some kind of other-worldly fog. To be in her presence was like a fast drop from a hard drug. Nothing registered and still, even with her gone, he felt foggy.

But there was something else too. Something that tugged him away from all the will he had to follow this stranger. Something like a second mind, stuck in his head. Telling him to go back to where he'd come from. He hadn't known who it belonged to—not until he dreamt of Anna.

She was tall and beautiful, slender and naked in the ever white. She tucked her hair behind her ear, fingers wet with icy snow. She held out a delicate hand and Anna led him through the fur trees, over roots and stone and mountain. She led him to a blizzard that froze him down to the marrow of his bones. And through that blizzard, she led him to the clearing, the cold, snow-clad earth, bald of frozen evergreens that he'd dreamt about so many times before.

Sitting so beautifully in the flurry of white petals was a Yukon wolf. It didn't move—it was frozen, not by the wind or the cold or the snow, but by time. He knew by its eyes and the sunrise in its coat that the wolf was Quentin, but when Jaylin turned to ask why she'd brought him, Anna was gone, a patch of blood-red snow in her place.

It was when he woke that Jaylin knew he had to leave.

-

"Sadie."

"Sadie, pull back now. We're done."

Sadie woke to the darkness. It hadn't been dark when they first started.

She didn't remember much but setting the kyanite stone in the center of the candlesticks. Gazing into the cerulean colors and thinking she saw faces in the deep, endless recesses of blue and white. Faces in the sky; the sky in the stone.

Now it was like hours had gone by in the minutes she'd been resting her eyes, chanting the words along with Alex. Words she couldn't remember now. Something about the elements. Something about fire.

"Did it work?" She winced as the bedroom light shot on and what once was a flickering circle of ethereal candlelight became Alexander's room again.

Alex was above her, looking pale and holding his stomach, clutching feebly at the door frame.

"I—" he heaved a sudden breath, then he was cupping his mouth, rushing from the room.

Sadie tottered to her feet and followed after him, socks slipping against the slick floorboards. She reached the bathroom door half a second after Alex had shut it, and from outside, she could hear him retching.

"Alex?" She knocked at the wood with her knuckles. "Are you okay?"

He was silent inside, but for the sound of his hacking and the flush of a toilet. Then he was using the sink, probably washing the taste out of his mouth.

Sadie jumped as the door swung inward and Alex was in front of her, wiping a hand up his clammy, blanched face. "I don't know," he said, "I think it worked. I hope so."

"If it makes you this sick, how come you did it?"

"I wanted to help," he said. "And anyway, I know what I'm doing. Like I told you, anyone can practice spells. It's just that some people are born to do it."

"So why not a real witch? Couldn't we call someone?"

"The witch thing—it's complicated. Anyway, they don't really like werewolves, so we don't know any. I mean, besides you."