12. Chapter 12
“Oh no. No, no.” I knelt down next to Allison and brushed the hair from her face. “Help me get her up, we have to get her to the hospital.”
“Not the hospital.” Bronwyn pulled Allison’s sleeve down and looped her arm around her shoulders to help her sit up. “We have to get her back to her coven.”
“Are you crazy?” I asked. “What will her coven do? She needs medical attention from people who know what they’re doing.”
“They don’t know what they’re doing,” Bronwyn said. “Nobody at the hospital has cured anyone of this illness. If we can get Ali back to her coven, they can do to her what they did to me.”
“What did they do to you?” Adrian asked.
“They encased me in a tree to keep me safe,” Bronwyn said. “Or at least, their ancestors did.”
“She’s right, Maeve.” Kira helped steady me as Bronwyn and I heaved Allison to her feet. “If we put her inside a tree, the illness might stop progressing.”
“Might?” I asked, fixing an arm around Allison’s waist to support her.
“At the very least, preserving her inside a tree will slow it down,” Bronwyn said. “And the longer we dawdle, the less time she has. Can we go, please?”
Gritting my teeth, I helped Bronwyn walk Allison along the beach back toward the scuba centre. Of all people, it wasn’t fair that Allison had to suffer this.
***
It wasn’t until Kira and Allison’s taxi disappeared down the road from the scuba centre that a dark thought struck me. Was that the last time I would ever see Allison?
To preserve her in a tree was one thing, but I couldn’t even visit the place they would keep her. Not since the forest covens had banned outsiders from their territories.
Ben pulled me into his arms, but I continued to stare at the road over his shoulder as I squeezed him tight. We said nothing to each other. What was there to say? Nothing could have convinced me that Allison would be okay... or Dad, or Ben’s grandfather. Maybe Adrian was right. This really was it. The end of the line of borrowed time.
“We’re fucked,” I muttered into Ben’s shoulder.
“Don’t think like that.” He stroked my hair and squeezed me closer.
“Why not? It’s true.” Tears spilled down my cheeks, soaking into his already damp collar. “We’re never going to get out of this.”
Ben kissed my cheek, interrupting a tear on its journey. “Come on, let’s go.”
“Where are we going?” I murmured.
“You’ll see.”
Ben called for another taxi, and when it arrived, all four of us got inside. He ordered the taxi driver to drop Adrian off at the hotel they were staying at and Bronwyn down the road from my house. Once the two of them were safely home, Ben asked the driver to take us to the Everhart manor.
“What are we going there for?” I asked, cuddling up to him on the back seat.
Ever since the explosion that had torn it apart and almost killed Ben, the Everhart manor had remained a wreck. With every industry at a standstill and manual labourers refusing to work because of the food shortages, the manor would probably stay that way.
“I told you. You’ll see.” Ben kissed the top of my head.
A numbness had overcome me since watching Kira and Allison go. Maybe my body and mind had agreed that my reservoir of hope had dried up and closed itself off to feelings. Everything had felt too much lately. It made sense that eventually I would call it quits.
I clung to Ben for the sliver of comfort he could provide until we got out of the taxi outside the gates of the Everhart manor. Ben paid the driver and led me through the ajar gates.
The timber skeleton of the manor stood blackened and splintered around piles of rubble. Weeds sprouted up among crumbled bricks and rusted iron rods, with the tire marks still pressed into the gravel driveway from the police presence the night of the explosion.
I peered between the wooden frame to where the hallway on the first floor had caved in. I had thought Ben had died when the bomb went off. The memory of him motionless and bleeding on the ground floor still burned into my mind, and sometimes even my nightmares.
Ben led me around the edge of what remained of his old home and to a shed at the back of the property. A shiny padlock embedded with crystals hung from the latch, and Ben whipped out a key from his pocket and unlocked it.
“Don’t tell me you guys have a secret sex dungeon out here,” I said as I followed Ben into the gloomy shed.
“If I had a sex dungeon, I’d have taken you there ages ago.”
“I knew you were kinky.”
Ben snorted and kicked at a rug in the middle of the shed, rolling it up with his foot. Even in the dim light, the glint of a trapdoor handle caught my eye.
“Still going to hedge my bets it’s a sex dungeon,” I said as Ben grabbed the handle and pulled the trapdoor up.
“Well, there’s only one way to find out.” Ben gestured to the hole in the floor.
With a weak smile at him, I sat down on the edge of the hole and swung my legs in, wincing when I remembered I didn’t have any panties on. I climbed the ladder down into the darkness and my bare feet eventually found the concrete floor.
“There’s a light switch on your left,” Ben said as he clambered down after me.
I felt around on the wall for an electric light switch, but my fingers found a smooth, cold patch of something else. The moment I touched it, flames burst to life in the candles fixed into brackets on the walls.
A whole concrete corridor lit up, stretching off into the distance, lined with doors.
“That’s very old-fashioned,” I said. “Using magic for lights.”
“It’s an old-fashioned place,” Ben said, jumping down off the ladder. “My great-uncle came back from the mainland in the sixties raving about nuclear warheads and had this bunker built. He died from the curse not long after he finished building it. My dad sometimes comes down here for some peace and he found provisions that my great-uncle hoarded back then. He wanted me to do a stock take, and so-” He laced his fingers through mine, “-I figured this might be a nice, quiet place for us to decompress.”
“And what exactly does that entail?”
Ben whirled me around into his arms and pressed a kiss to my lips. “Seeing if the shower works, for starters. Care to join me?”
We explored the bunker hand in hand, finding an assortment of bedrooms and a living room kitchen. The entire bunker was a time capsule of green and brown hues, wooden furniture, and floral prints. A huge yellow rug covered the floor of the communal space, so fluffy that if I stepped on it, I didn’t think I’d be able to see my feet.
We picked a bathroom adorned with brown tiles printed with white flowers.
“Is this entire place run by magic, or are we about to freeze under a sixty-year-old human boiler?” I asked as I threw off my dress.
Ben’s gaze flicked over to me and roamed my body as he reached over to touch a crystal button in the shower. “We’re about to find out.”
Water gushed from the showerhead, and in a few moments, steam billowed into the bathroom. Even the sight of it warmed my bones.
Ben and I jumped into the shower and allowed the hot water to wash away the salty aftertaste of the day. Reality still stayed rigid, like a ball of iron in my belly, but the comfort of warmth and Ben’s touch wrapped my troubles in a silver lining.
Once we had showered and dried, we went in search of fresh clothes and, sure enough, the wardrobes were packed with clothing that had gone out of style, back in, and out again since they had made their debut. I threw on a pale green dress that reached all the way past my knees, and Ben could only find trousers and a shirt that looked like his grandfather’s Sunday best.
Finally comfortable, Ben raided the kitchen to discover a healthy stockpile of canned goods while I sat on the counter watching him. My energy levels were in the gutter. It was all I could do to sit upright.
“Peaches?” My eyes widened when Ben took a tin of them out of the cupboard. In syrup.
The last time a piece of fruit had arrived in our rations packet was at least a week ago.
“Peaches that have sat here for sixty years.” Ben grabbed a can opener out of a drawer and held it up with a grin on his face. “Want to risk it?”
“I’d risk a hundred-year-old can. Is it crystallised?”
Ben picked up the can and inspected it. A row of crystals lined the bottom of the can. At least someone had magically preserved it. I didn’t know how humans trusted tin cans that just... sat there for years.
“Looks like it.” Ben opened up the tin and handed it to me, along with a fork.
I stabbed a peach slice and extracted it from the syrup, which dripped off it deliciously thick. With little thought for its age, I popped it into my mouth. Flavour exploded across my tongue and my eyes rolled back a little.
“Try one.” I handed Ben the fork, and he shovelled a piece into his mouth.
He moaned. “Too good.”
For a few minutes, we dug into the peaches until the fork hit the bottom of the tin.
And just like that, my woes enveloped me again like a shawl made entirely out of sorrow and itchy wool. Funny how a simple can of peaches stood between coping and spiralling.
Ben pushed the tin aside and parted my knees, coming to stand between my legs. I wrapped my arms around his neck, brushing the hair out of his eyes.
“When was the last time you got a haircut?” I asked.
“Like a month ago. My barber isn’t exactly open for business right now, and I am not taking my mum up on her hairdressing services.”
I snickered. “Would she give you a bowl cut?”
“That’s not funny because she actually would.” Ben sank into me, and I clutched him tight, luxuriating in his scent. “Sometimes I think she wants me to be five again.”
“Days like today, I want to be five again.”
“Yeah. Shame we don’t have a way to turn the clocks back on this whole thing.”
Something about the way he phrased it had the puzzle pieces in my mind shooting into place as if suddenly magnetised. I stiffened in his grasp as a plan formed with such effortless synergy that I wondered why it hadn’t come together before.
“What?” Ben asked, prising himself away to search my face.
“Do you think... we’ve got enough mental bandwidth to try one more long shot?” I muttered.