Chapter 14
Despite the fact I was the witch and the only one who really knew what was going on, Jacob took the lead.
And just maybe I let him. As he walked through that door, his whole body tense as his head turned from left to right, I was right behind him.
Though I had seen my hallway many times, as I looked on at it now, it was like another place.
With the storm roaring outside, the dappled light that made it in through the window above the door seemed to make the shadows grow.
Or maybe the shadows were growing on their own.
I sucked in a scared, quick breath.
“What is it?” Jacob said through such a clenched jaw his words were barely discernible.
“Get up the stairs, get up the stairs,” I placed a hand on his back and pushed forward.
If I were any judge, soon those shadows would grow into something a little more damaging than a lack of light.
Jacob did not suddenly put his head down and sprint to the stairway. Instead he stopped where he was and let out a little growl. “We can't keep running. Where are they? What are they?”
Yes, we could keep running. Deciding I would make a show of how it was done, I went to jostle past him. But I didn't get very far; he grabbed at my wrist and held me firmly in place. “If you don't let me know what we are dealing with, how am I going to protect you?”
Protect me. That had never been part of the deal. I was very much not the damsel in distress here. I was only standing behind Jacob because his back was so large.
Maybe he saw that moment of sweet indignation on my face, because he growled even deeper. “Have you forgotten where we are and what's going on? Where are the enemies?”
I turned back to the shadows. How I had managed to shift my attention off them, I didn't know. There was something about Jacob and his petulant sense of arrogance that could make me forget the most desperate of situations.
They were gone.
The shadows that I had sworn were growing, lumping together like raindrops collecting down a windowpane, just weren't there anymore.
In their place was... my hallway. Exactly as I had left it before this whole thing had begun. The pot plant was still there, that broken chair was still in the corner, and apart from the sound of the wind and the rain and the lightning outside, it was almost... pleasant.
I took an enormous swallow.
“Is there anything out there?” Jacob repeated again, speaking through a locked, hard jaw.
“We’re okay for now.... Let’s just head to the stairs and up to the attic as quick as we can.”
Again I tried to take charge, but Jacob was still holding onto my wrist, and apparently he wasn't going to have me rush ahead.
“I'm the one with the gun,” he said coldly, letting go of my wrist and taking several steps forward. His chest was actually puffed out, his head held high, and if he’d had the time, no doubt he would have slapped some oil on his muscles and posed for a photo. I'd never seen such a macho show.
It made me want to snigger. Then I heard a little, light, crumpling sound from behind me, like glass breaking.
I gave a yelp and ran forward.
“Why don't you just advertise where we are?” he quipped, finally increasing his pace as we reached the stairs.
“Just hurry up,” I pushed him on the back.
“Keep doing that, and you’ll find out how I will react,” he offered in a low, threatening voice.
“Just hurry up, I think I can hear something behind me,” I turned around, still keeping a hand on Jacob’s back, telling myself it was only to ensure that he was moving fast and not because the trace of warmth through his shirt made me feel safer.
My eyes searched out the hall below. It felt and looked different again. It were as if someone had clicked their fingers, and in the blink of an eye the place had changed. It no longer looked familiar. Though academically I recognized the floorboards and the walls, the pot plants, and the various pictures, they all had a foreign, terrifying sense about them.
Then I saw something. Quick, like a flash, heading from the lounge room into the library by its side. It made me yelp yet again. As a witch I fully understood that the best way to get yourself attacked by a dark creature was to appear pathetic and to act like an easy target. Add to that the tendency to make loud, obvious noises, and you'll soon find yourself stabbed through the heart by a skeleton with a sword, or tugged through the wall by a daemon covered in scorpions.
“It's fine, come on,” Jacob turned, latched onto my shoulder, and tugged me up the stairs. He was a lot quicker at moving me than I had been at moving him. In seconds we were up on the second floor.
The second floor was my grandmother's domain, the third was my own, and the fourth had the attic. Suffice to say whenever I headed down or up the stairs, I always made a point of ignoring the second floor. While I kept the kitchen and the library and the bathroom and the lounge room as clean as I could, it was a never-ending battle to do anything to my grandmother's realm.
“Is that a stuffed giraffe with pins in it?” Jacob secured a hand on the banister and turned around to survey the junk in the corridor and the rooms sprouting out from it.
“It's zoo voodoo,” I managed, breath stuck in my throat as I peered back down the stairs, expecting something dark to chase its way up them at any moment.
“Zoo voodoo?” he repeated pointedly. It was obvious he was trying to make a joke, or something like it, despite the situation. What kind of a man did that? This was no laughing matter. There should have been no time to pause, point out the comical stuffed animal with the pins hanging out of it and let off a little snigger. There should only have been time to race up the stairs, pile ourselves into the attic, and close the door behind us.
This guy really was full of himself, I suddenly concluded. “Can we move on? Or do you want to invite the denizens of the dark to feast on our souls?”
“Feast on my soul, you mean; you’re a witch, you don't have one, right? You've already made a pact with the devil or something like that, lost your dignity and meaning by dancing in the forest naked and summoning evil, right?
I started to go pink, very pink. Dancing in the forest naked? Selling my soul? “Excuse me,” I began.
“But we really need to make it up to the attic. Stop distracting me. You really have no idea how to keep yourself safe, do you?” he goaded as he turned around, proceeded to ignore all the weird and wacky junk on the second level, and headed up the next flight of stairs.
I'd seen some weird things in my time. Especially living with my grandmother. Jacob Fairweather was turning out to be the weirdest. People didn't react like this, did they? Real people, from the real world, had real reactions of fear when faced with a situation that was as scary and dangerous as this. There should be no time to make jokes and quips and insults. There should only be time to run like hell until we got to safety.
I knew Jacob had seen the skeleton in the kitchen, and I knew he had pulled that bony hand off my throat. There should have been no doubt in his mind that he was dealing with something frankly terrifying here. And yet he was managing to joke. It was like we were in a movie, or a play, because, god dammit, real people didn't react this way.
It took me until we had reached the third floor to realize that I wasn’t reacting normally either. Instead of being terrified out of my wits, I was spending all of my mental energy wondering just what Jacob Fairweather's problem was.
“This must be your grandmother’s floor. She’s got good taste,” Jacob nodded, this time not pausing too long to point out the decor or find another excuse to belittle me.
Unbeknownst to Jacob, he’d just offered me his very first compliment.
“Actually, this is my floor. And thank you, I do like to keep things clean and nice.”
“It was a joke. It's ugly,” he said automatically.
Ugly? Ugly? I'd put my heart and soul into making this place beautiful. I had picked everything from the c
arpet to the drapes to the paint to the pictures. It had been a labor of love over many years to acquire all the vases and cushions and throws.
He wasn’t just arrogant, Jacob Fairweather was far more than that. He was like a playground bully. Like your first crush who would come up to you in the yard, push you over, shove worms in your mouth, and run-off.
But at least it kept me distracted. Until we finally made it to the attic, that was.
Unlike most houses, there was a set of ordinary stairs leading to our attic. You didn't have to pull anything down from the ceiling and grab a ladder; you just had to make your way up the last flight until you reached the door. A suitably ominous door, because this was the house of two witches. It was old and creaked something menacing, and the surface was chipped and scratched. Yet it could withstand a mortar from a tank, I was sure.
Because behind it was something special. Years and years and years of Sinclair family history. Books, photos, stories, letters. All of it was up there in boxes and stacked on bookshelves. Squeezed between magical books and objects were teddy bears and old albums, wedding dresses and toys. Every type of memorabilia you could think of.
“Are you sure it is going to be safe behind there?” Jacob hesitated, clearly not wanting to reach a hand out to touch that door.
I was damn sure. To demonstrate this I shoved my way past him and went to open it.
I latched my hand onto the handle and tried to muscle it open.
Except it wouldn't work. The handle was stuck. Feeling a touch embarrassed, I tried to tug harder.
We didn’t have a lock on this door, so there was no reason for it not to open. Unless the rising damp from the storm had shifted the house on its foundations and the door was a little stuck in its frame, there should have been no reason for it to get stuck like this.
Bearing my teeth, putting my shoulder into it, I tried again and again.
“You really are pathetic,” he shoved me off. He didn't ask me to move aside so he could have a go; he actually shoved me away. He put a hand on my shoulder and pushed, not hard enough to make me tumble back down the stairs and break my neck, but hardly gently either.
It confirmed my suspicions that he was a playground bully. No doubt if I delved into Fairweather's past, I would find many girls who had been pushed over in the rain, many children whose lunches had been stolen at recess, and a whole bevy of disgruntled, frustrated teachers.
Before I could be too embarrassed at not being able to open the door, I realized Jacob couldn't either.
“Where's the key? Is it locked?” he tried to wrench it open, but to no avail.
“It can't lock.”
“Well then I've got news for you, witch, it's not opening.” He stopped trying to open it, letting his hands drop, and turning over his shoulder to check down the stairs. “Great, we’re trapped up here. Fantastic plan. We can't get into the attic, and if we head down the stairs, we’ll be an easy target. Is this your idea of going somewhere safer?”
I ignored him. Instead I reached a hand out and nestled it onto the wood. “Come on, open,” I said under my breath.
“It's a door, it’s incredibly hard to negotiate with. I've got a better idea,” Jacob grabbed my arm and pulled me back.
There was no asking me to move to the side, there was no waiving me on, there was only him moving me around like you might a piece on a chessboard.
Before I could snap at him to respect my personal space, he took a step back, raised his gun, and no doubt got ready to shoot.
I jumped in front of him.
“What the hell are you doing?” he shouted.
“You can't shoot this door! You'll make the whole house angry. It will try to kill you,” I shook my head, bringing my hands up and waving them about.
“Don't jump in front of somebody's gun, are you mad? Do you want to die?”
“You can't shoot the door,” I didn't move from where I was.
“Fine, but don't jump in front of my gun again. As irritating as you are, I really don't want to kill you,” with that he turned around and stared back down the stairs. “Can you hear that?”
“You mean the storm?”
“I mean the patter of feet. Sounds like there's a whole army down there,” Jacob slowly straightened up, resting one hand on the railing as he kept the other firmly gripped on his gun.
A whole army, great. And no, I couldn't hear it, which meant Jacob was either pulling my leg, or once again he could sense things I couldn't.
It was one thing being the witch in this relationship, it was another being the lesser magical creature. Because if my grandmother was right, then Jacob seemed to have a natural talent to see things beyond which I could. And hell, I'd been training for years.
It just wasn't fair.
“You might want to wipe that pout off your face; we have to head back down there. Can we make the lounge room safe? Or is there somewhere else we can go? What about your bedroom, would that be safe?”
I slapped my hand on my chest, blushing the color of magma. “My bedroom? Why do you want to go into my bedroom?”
“Don't get too excited,” he said sarcastically. “Presumably anywhere you have a lot of your magical books or junk or whatever is safe. So I just concluded, considering your character, that your room would be full of all of this magical trash. But answer the question, would it be safe?”
Feeling my heart thumping through my chest and vibrating my hand, I was suddenly distracted by how tall and broad chested Jacob was. If you got past the arrogance, he really was handsome. Now was not the time to think about that. Now was the time to come up with a new plan.
“Would you stop blushing; it was no compliment, just tell me if it would be safe?”
Ha, no.
Staring up at him coldly, I shook my head. “There is nowhere here that is safe. If we can't make it into the attic....I guess we have to leave,” the thought came upon me at once. As soon as I said it, I realized how true it was. There was no longer anywhere in this house that could protect us. If I wanted to see this day and night through, I had to get away from here, take my chances elsewhere. I could head to my Auntie Tessa’s, beg her to stay in the office, or head back to her own house. Presumably it would offer me a great deal more protection than I could receive here. Plus, Tessa was such a bulldog that I doubted most evil magical creatures would bother trying to take her on, even if I was up for grabs.
I nodded to myself.
“Care to share? I'm not sure if you've forgotten, but you, through you're careless actions, have gotten an innocent man involved in this situation. Now it's up to you to see the both of us get out of here safely.”
I screwed up my face at the term “innocent man.” Jacob wasn’t innocent; he was a jerk, but unfortunately he was right. I did owe it to him and myself to get us both out of here safely.
“We have to get out of the house. It is not going to be easy, especially when we get to the yard, but if we make it to my car.... We could properly go and see the rest of my family. We’d be better off there.”
“We? If we manage to get out of the house, you're on your own,” he nodded my way.
For some reason that startled me. Though I had spent a good part of the last hour thinking about how arrogant Jacob was, he didn't seem... to be the kind to leave somebody in the lurch, especially when that someone was in as much danger as I was.
“Surprised?” he challenged me.
I glowered down at him. “Not really; you're a jerk. It’s exactly what I would expect you to say. Now unless you want to become fodder for the damned, follow me,” feeling a rising anger take hold, I pushed past Jacob, and managed to stay ahead, despite the fact I knew he would take any opportunity to grab at me, push me behind him, and make another arrogant quip.
Well I wasn't going to have anything more of it. I wasn’t going to hide behind this man anymore, and I wasn't going to let him bully me.
I started to tug up my sleeves. And it felt... good. Don't get me wrong, a spa
and a nap on a sunny bed would have felt better, but at least I was taking charge of my own fear.
I settled my senses back into the situation. I tried to understand the peaks and troughs in the magical currents around me.
I could feel how much had crammed itself into this house. Underneath it was the same sense my home had always given me, but at the edges, on top, like a stifling blanket, was the dark side.
I'd never been particularly good at distinguishing magical creatures, and it wasn't that much of a surprise that Jacob was better at it than I, even though he was untrained. But I knew enough to know what was dangerous.
I could sense something clambering up the stairs towards us. Yes, clambering. It felt like it had many legs, and if I strained my hearing, I could discern each one of its pattering footsteps.
The sense of it... was dark. Darker than anything I had ever experienced. The type of dark that had never seen light and never would.
I snapped my eyes open.
“I don't think we can make it out the front door, we are going to have to...”
“Jump out a window?”
Before I could turn around and offer him a snide reply, I stopped. Because that seemed like our only opportunity. If we couldn't make it down the stairs, then yes, it sounded as if we would have to jump out a window.
“Wait, you're serious. We can't jump out of window, we’re on the fourth floor.”
“Just trust me,” I snapped, and with that threw myself down the stairs.
Though the fear was still there, though it was ever present and ever threatening, I pushed through it. Or against it more like. With every step I took forward, with every breath I managed, I faced it. The more I faced it, the less frightening it became.
Was this the power my grandmother was talking of? Was this why you always wanted to face every situation with as much force as you could? The less frightened you became of a situation, the more power you took back from it, the stronger you could stand, the longer you could last.
We reached the third floor, and without thinking I turned and headed straight for my bedroom.
“Where are we going?” Jacob asked from behind me.
I had no intention of answering. The man was taking up too much of my time and energy. I was acting less and less like a witch and more and more like a disgruntled little girl who kept having her lollipop stolen. Jacob was distracting me in all the wrong ways.
Not even hesitating, I grabbed open the door to my bedroom and ran in.
The bad was a mess; I’d had a rough night, after all. In fact the whole room was not as clean as it usually was.
I heard him snigger from behind me. Yes, he sniggered. Ordinarily, real, nice men did not snigger when they entered a woman's bedroom for the first time.
Jacob was none of those things. He was also something I was determined to ignore for the time being.
“Is that a teddy bear on your bed?” He walked over to it and picked it up.
Though I was hoping to ignore him, I couldn't ignore that. I whirled on my foot, walked over to him, and snatched back my teddy.
Because yes, it was a teddy, my favorite teddy. It had been with me since childhood. It had had been given to me by my great-grandmother, and it was a family heirloom.
A family heirloom... I suddenly stared down at it.
“You aren’t going to hug it, are you?” Jacob gave a short laugh as he walked over to the door, closed it, and muscled my chest of drawers in front of it.
“No, I'm taking it with us,” I suddenly concluded as I turned it over and over in my hands. If I were going to head out into the real world beyond my house, then I had to take things with me that would keep me safe.
As a child I had invested much time and energy into hugging that bear, into taking it wherever I could, into confiding my secrets to it, into letting it console me. It had been such a symbol of safety.
I was a witch, I practiced influence magic, and I understood the import of this straightaway.
If there were one thing that could protect me out there in the real world, it was my teddy. So I brought it up, patted its head, and tucked it under one arm, much to the surprise and humor of Jacob.
“You're serious, you're taking your teddy bear outside... to protect you from the demons and the skeletons.”
“Yes,” I answered, and thankfully my tone was even, my chin was raised, and my stare was unblinking. “It's a lot less arrogant and talkative than you are.”
I turned around and headed to the window just above my bed. Leaning towards it, I glanced down into the yard.
The day outside was still dark, perilously so. Though a brief glance above revealed a swirling, tumultuous mass of clouds and lightning, it did not account for the gloom.
Only magic could.
“How the hell is it so dark out there?” Jacob walked up and stood beside me. A little too close; his arm brushed against mine.
“Use your imagination,” I shot back.
“Do you need to take a blanket out there with you? So you can hide under it with your teddy when the going gets rough?” He crossed his arms and sneered down at me.
What kind of a man crossed his arms, sneered, and insulted a woman when they were just about to climb out the third-floor window and throw themselves into a yard full of ghosts and trolls and everything wrong with the world?
I was starting to get the picture that Jacob Fairweather was disconnected from reality. Maybe he really was on drugs, or maybe the potion my grandmother had given him had wiped away his common sense and replaced it with the kind of dry humor you always got in rotten comic books and TV sitcoms.
Ignoring him, I slowly pulled back the latch on the window and opened it.
A blast of wind slammed into my face and pushed me back, plastering my hair over my cheeks, and bringing with it a hail of rain and leaves and twigs.
“How exactly are you going to climb your way down the side of the house? Or are you just going to jump and hope for the best?” Jacob nodded at me.
“There's a storm pipe just down the side,” I leaned into the window, against the brunt of the wind, and pointed to the left. There was the storm pipe. I would not be considering clambering down it for one minute if it weren't for the fact there was an army of dark climbing up the stairs ready to eat me.
“You'll slip and die,” he pointed out. He hadn't said we would slip and die, just me.
“What do you care?” With that I planted my hand on the windowsill and got ready to climb out.
I didn't get the opportunity. He stopped me by grabbing hold of my arm. This time it was a light move. It didn't feel like he was about to tug me around or push me over. He was just stopping me in place. “Think about this. It'll be slippery, it'll be cold, and the wind is going to...” He nodded at my dress. “Play havoc with your clothes. If you really have to go out there, shouldn’t you change into something more sensible?”
He had... a point. Because I was still wearing a summer dress. And it had a terribly flouncy skirt. All it would take was one gust of magical wind for me to be pulled off the drainpipe and sucked up into the sky.
Reluctantly I clambered back into the room and patted down my clothes.
Not answering I walked over to my chest of drawers and started to fumble around.
“You'll need sturdy pants, something with long sleeves, and maybe a sweater, considering how cold it is,” he suggested needlessly. It was needless, because I knew how to dress for a magical storm. I was the witch.
“Just turn around,” I snapped.
“You think I care?”
“Turn around,” I said with a far more deadly tone.
I turned to check that he wasn't still staring my way, and then started to fidget into the clothes that I had chosen.
Well, wasn't this awkward. Here I was changing in front of Federal Agent Jacob Fairweather, who had turned out to be more of a pain in the ass than I could have ever imagined. The idea that my grandmother had clapped eyes on him and conclu
ded that he was the man of my dreams was terrifying. Did she know so little about me? For her to think that a man like this would be someone I would want to spend the rest of my life with, was further evidence that she really was going insane. I didn't want to spend the rest of the day with this man, let alone my whole existence.
I tugged my jeans on, buttoned them up, and finally unzipped my dressed, pulling it over my head. But I didn't get so far as to take it off; at that moment something slammed against my bedroom door, forcing the chest of drawers forward.
I screamed, fell back, and landed with a thump on the ground, my dress still somewhere over my head, my arms trapped inside.
“Jesus, get up, move,” Jacob pulled me up.
“I thought I told you to stay turned around,” I said in a high-pitched voice as he pulled me to my feet.
“Like I said, I don't care, just put the top on quick,” he brought his gun up and pointed it at the door. It was still shaking as if something were wailing on it from the other side. Probably because something was wailing on it from the other side, something that sounded like thousands of fists.
I imagined even it if I screamed at him, Jacob would not turn back to the window. Which left the rather uncomfortable fact that I now had to change in front of him. Turning, I tugged off the dress, sidled over to where I’d dropped my top like a crab, and pulled it on with a muffled, weird sounding whine.
“Is that a butterfly tattoo on your back?” Jacob nodded my way after I'd finally finished dressing myself and had turned back to him.
“Just watch the door,” I snapped at him as I grabbed my teddy and headed back to the window.
“You don't strike me as the kind of girl to have a butterfly tattoo,” he grinned.
“And you don't strike me as the kind of guy who would be interested,” I replied coldly, finally making my way out the window.
It was nicer now that I wasn't dressed in the summer dress. I’d chosen a sturdy pair of jeans, a long-sleeved top, and a thick woolen jumper. It might not be the most stylish garb, but at least it was practical.
As I thought that, a little voice in my head popped up and repeated my grandmother's warning from that morning. If you wanted to be powerful, you had to appear powerful, which meant you had to dress powerful. And a woolen sweater with a reindeer on the front wasn't usually associated with force. I'd never seen a commanding general waltz onto the battlefield in his grandmother's finest knitwear.
....Still, it was too late to change into anything else. It would have to do.
It appeared I would face the rest of this adventure with Santa Claus and a reindeer emblazoned on my chest. So be it.