11. Raven
My skin itched with the need to return home to make sure Autumn was safe and settling in.
I couldn’t and wouldn’t do that though. She wasn’t my female and I needed to remember that.
But my protective urges were kicking in strong and all I could see in my mind were her large gray eyes.
Jesus, fuck, but she was incredibly beautiful.
And it wasn’t just about her physical beauty either. Though, that was incredible all on it’s own because she was fucking gorgeous with her colorful hair and all of those tattoos covering her, marking her as different and dangerous.
She was so powerful magic practically oozed out of her pores and she didn’t even realize it.
I scrubbed my hands over my face in an attempt to evacuate her from my mind. It didn’t work, she was there, still lurking at the edges. Like I had a disturbing feeling she always would be.
We were so fucked it wasn’t even funny.
I didn’t like her being home alone with Ariel and Isobel. I knew she was safe enough but those two females were beyond insane and they bought trouble just by breathing.
Autumn didn’t need anymore trouble and I didn’t care that I didn’t know next to anything about her.
“This place gives me the fucking creeps,” Gunner muttered from his place behind the wheel.
“Bad vibes in the air,” Scout readily agreed.
“If it were a building I’d want to burn the whole thing down to the ground,” Mason cracked his knuckles angrily.
Liam just grunted as he stared out the window. He was here with us but his mind was going through all the information we’d been able to find about the tattoos that covered Autumn’s beautiful body.
I knew enough to know they were warnings to the world not to fuck with her. But we didn’t know much else. If Liam had figured anything else out he hadn’t shared it with the rest of us. But he would when he was ready.
You always had to be patient with him. I was used to having patience with him when we’d first met. But I had to learn that everyone worked on their own time and badgering him only served to fluster him and he’d shut down. So I learned to leave him be to work at his now pace.
Rain’s entire coven was in the SUV behind ours and I was glad I didn”t have to ride with them.
Romero was a strange man who very much only tolerated his coven members and his family. Finn was quiet and I hadn’t really been able to get a read off of him when I’d met him before but now he seemed like he was tweaking and on edge.
Rain and Romero had been watching him like he was a bomb waiting to blow.
I didn’t like it, it put me on edge. We were already walking into a place that gave me the creeps and we didn’t need to add anymore unknowns to the mix.
“You want to keep her,” Mason said as he turned around in his seat to stare back at me. There was no accusation in his tone or on his face.
And it was quickly becoming a fact.
“Why not?” Gunner said. “She’s beautiful and she clearly needs a safe place to be. We can offer her that safe place. She should stay.”
I hummed noncommittally under my breath. I had plenty of thoughts but none that I was ready to share with them just yet.
“All female witches need a safe place to stay,” Scout interjected. “It doesn’t mean we should be the one to give her one.”
“You don’t like her?” Liam asked curiously as he turned away from the window.
“I don’t know her,” Scout shot back heatedly, “And neither do you. Just because you’re curious about her doesn’t mean we have to keep her in order to study her. She’s not a pet.”
“No,” Liam shot back angrily in a heated voice. “She’s a powerful witch that’s obviously spent her entire life being abused, doesn’t understand how the real world works, and she could use some people to look out for her while she figures it out. We found her first, so why shouldn’t we be the one’s who get to look out for her while she figures everything out? Yes, I’ll be the first to admit that I’m curious about her, but it’s not just that. I’m sick and tired of coming across these beautiful but broken women and I’d offer up our home to all of them if I could because they all deserve to know how it feels to be safe for once in their lives. I’m sick and fucking tired of it. Enough is enough.”
The rest of the car ride was silent while we digested his words.
Liam very rarely lost his cool and this little outburst was out of character for him. But I completely understood why he was so upset.
We’d seen it time and time again and enough really was enough.
All witches deserved a safe place in the world where they didn’t have to worry about simply existing.
“That’s why we’re here, brother,” Mason finally said in a gentle voice.
I sighed. Yes, that was mostly why we were here.
I was here because I couldn’t get the sight of seeing a naked and bleeding woman tied to a tree out of my mind and there was a good probability that image would never go away. She had to have been terrified. And she still wouldn’t turn her back on them.
It made me sick to my stomach. That kind of loyalty should never be abused in such a way and it made me horribly nervous for her for what she would be like with her future relationships. She would need careful watching over until she came into her own.
“We’re here.”
Fuck.
Time to get my head in the game and focus. My coven needed me to have their back. It’s what a good leader did, they always looked out for their people first and foremost.
And I was going to treat Autumn like she was one of my people. Probably even after she left us. That was how loyalty worked.
I had a feeling I wasn’t the only one.
We got out of the SUV and met up with Rain and his crew.
“So, what now?”
Rain laid it all out for us. Go in soft. Try not to scare anyone. Figure out who was in charge. Try to get them out of the woods and somewhere more stable so they can be under Rain’s watchful eye where he can contain them or set them up with their new lives.
I didn’t even want to know what contain them meant.
This shit was why we needed to establish a new Council, one where the people were an actual priority instead of something to further be abused. People who could deal with this shit so that we didn’t have to.
Rain didn’t bring up Autumn or how we’d found her and I thought maybe that was for the best, even though it pissed me off.
These people were more likely to tell us the truth if we got them to trust us. That is, if they were anything like Autumn because she was locked up tight.
But when we did find out who was behind harming the beautiful girl… I didn’t care about the whys behind it, I was going to destroy them all.
We spread out but still stayed in the line of sight of the person next to us as we combed our way through the forest.
The deeper we got the worse things seemed to get.
There was no noise. No sounds of animals rustling in the leaves. No cool breeze of the wind brushing across our cheeks.
No nothing.
Total silence.
There was a feeling of death that hung in the air. I imagined I could taste the bitterness of decay in the back of my mouth, just teasing my throat and making me want to gag.
And the earth…
The earth was black and charred, looking like hell had tried to rise up and escape.
I had a horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach.
Magic had been used here. An awful lot of it. And it had been used for nefarious purposes.
The smell hit me first. Then I saw the flames in the distance and I automatically started to run.
Something was on fire, the flames shooting up towards the night sky and I just knew Autumn’s camp was burning.
Part of me hoped the people who had hurt her were burning right along with it.
They deserved it.
But there might be innocent people here who didn’t. I just wished Autumn had been a bit more forthcoming so we knew what we were dealing with here.
She couldn’t be blamed for this though, she was a victim after all. I didn’t need to know everything she’d gone through to know that.
Everyone dealt with trauma differently.
I came up short and my breath stuttered out of my chest in short, gasping bursts. The horror of the moment almost took me down to my knees.
The tents were on fire but it was the bodies everywhere that turned my stomach. Children and the elderly, all in piles with their throats slit wide open. There had been no discrimination when picking a victim.
We should have checked on them sooner after getting Autumn free from that tree.
Why had we waited so long to come back here?
“I hated it here,” a thin, reedy voice croaked out. “But no one deserved this.”
I looked to my left in time to see Finn drop to his knees and cover his face in his hands.
I ran his words through my head and something clicked into place for me.
Finn had been here before. That’s how Rain had known of it’s existence.
Did he know Autumn?
Rain knew more about these people than he let on. That would make sense as to why he’d been so intense with Autumn.
What the fuck was going on here?
What had he involved my people in?
“How are we going to clean this shit up?” Romero asked in a cold, detached voice that gave me the fucking creeps.
All of Rain’s people were fucking insane and I couldn’t wrap my head around how someone could be cold and detached about this level of slaughter.
“We shouldn’t be here,” Mason whispered as he stepped up to my side. “It feels wrong.”
“This whole place feels evil and wrong,” Liam said as he joined us.
“They deserve respect and a proper burial,” Gunner murmured.
Scout eyed Finn warily. “We deserve some fucking answers.”
I rubbed at my eyes tiredly. “Who would do something like this to these poor people? All the children. All these poor fucking people.”
And where were the people responsible for it?
“Poor people?” Finn snorted in disgust as he stood up and roughly shook off Rain’s hold on his arm. “Most of these people were fucking monsters and fucked up individuals. They hurt innocent children and raised them all like savages. The only poor people were the children and they’re probably better off dead than they were being raised here in this tragic shithole.”
I turned on Finn, now shaking because I was so fucking angry. His carelessly harsh words were too much for me. “How the hell could you say those things about children? What the actual fuck is the matter with you?”
“Raven,” Rain said in a gentle voice as he raised his hands to me in a placating manner. “Calm down, brother. You don’t know what’s really going on here.”
Yeah, that’s right, I didn’t fucking know because he hadn’t told me. He’d let us walk in here and now my people were involved in this mess and they were likely going to carry the memory of this with them for the rest of their days.
This shit didn’t just wash away.
“I’m not your fucking brother,” I snapped at him. “And you better explain this shit to me right the fuck now because I am done being kept in the dark. Explain yourself. Now.”
“Just calm down, Raven. I’ll explain everything to you later. Now is not the time.”
I didn’t give a shit if he thought now wasn’t the time or that he was probably even right. He had asked for my help and I had brought my people here on good faith because I trusted him.
That good faith no longer existed.
“Fuck that,” Gunner spat on the ground and pointed to the burning bodies. “Explain why we walked into this. Explain why every time we’ve walked into these woods there have been people…”
He trailed off and choked on his words as a little old woman stumbled out of a burning tent and collapsed to the ground. She held her hands up in front of her and they were so badly burned it looked like the skin had melted clean off.
I swallowed down the bile as I stared at her in horror. I stood there frozen, unable to move no matter how hard I tried to get my feet to run towards her.
She needed help and I just stood there, stupidly unable to help her.
Rain didn’t have the same problem. He rushed to her side and dropped down to his knees beside her. “What happened here, can you tell me? I’m going to get you some help, I promise, but I’m going to need you to tell me what happened. Please.”
I didn’t think there’d be any helping the poor old woman. It wasn’t just her hands that had been badly burned but the rest of her looked frail and near death.
She coughed as she curled up into a little ball. “They turned on us all. It happened after the girl disappeared. I tried to tell them to leave her alone because she’s special but no one would listen to me. That poor girl. I don’t know what’s happened to her but I fear she must be dead like all the rest of them. She must be dead if it’s come to this. They did something horrible to her to set this in motion. She was a curse to us all because of her markings. Should have drowned her in the river when she was born but everyone was too afraid of what would befall us if we did. But it’s too late now. It’s all too late and everyone’s dead now.”
My heart dropped down to my stomach. She had to be talking about Autumn. No one else here had any markings on their face.
I had never met anyone before with anything like it. She was one of a kind.
The woman coughed and wheezed. Her body shuddered violently as she drew in her last breath and died right before our eyes.
I was only sad to see her go because I felt like my answers died along with her.
I couldn’t dwell on how her death made me feel when the people responsible for this death were still on the loose and could very well be in these woods with us.
Maybe even watching us this very moment.
“Is she dead?” Finn asked in a small voice.
“Looks pretty dead to me,”“ Romero told him calmly. “They’re all fucking dead.”
“Plume,” Finn whispered, ignoring his psychotic coven member. “She was one of the good ones.”
Oh?
I snorted.
Now there were good ones? What the fuck was wrong with him?
“What do we do?” Gunner asked me and I found all of my boys watching me expectantly.
I drew in a calm, steadying breath as I tried to keep my shit together enough to answer him. “Help them burn quickly so the bodies aren’t here and there’s no evidence. This fire is bound to draw attention somehow. Put out the fires in the tents so we can get what we can from them. And watch your backs because the threat is very real and could still be out here. We need to get this mess cleaned up and get back home. Autumn needs to know about this and hopefully she’ll be able to give us some answers.”
I hated it but she’d have to tell us something.
I pushed her out of my mind because we had a long night ahead of us and I didn’t need any distractions.
I had a feeling our lives depended on it.