20. Chapter 20
Chapter twenty
SAGE
Luca was going to kill me if this went south, but desperate times and all that. My obsessive research and harassing of the locals had finally turned up some information on Marsden Argent, the high priest of the Dark Moon Coven. I’d burned a few more bridges than I liked in the process, but I couldn’t be worried about consequences at a time like this.
The man my mother knew as Mars had been born in Eastbend, but he wasn’t from a well-known ancestral line like mine. His mother was a low-level witch in a mundane coven and his father was a complete unknown. He’d only lived in Eastbend until he was ten before they moved out of town with a man his mother was dating. No one heard from Marsden after that, but there were a few who recognized him when he returned fifteen years later with more power than he should’ve had.
It was a damn good thing witches tended to grow roots because tracking down elementary school classmates wasn’t an easy task and expecting them to remember anything from that long ago was asking a lot. But since a childhood friend returning to take over all the covens in the city might make an impression on a witch, I tracked them down and asked anyway.
In the end, only one witch was reluctantly willing to talk, and it was only because my grandmother once saved her sister’s life. That debt was now repaid, and the bridge burned, though I wasn’t sure how helpful the information I got was.
Marsden didn't have many friends when he was young. He wasn’t bullied as far as the witch knew, but he had something to prove and an attitude to match, so the kids naturally kept their distance. But there was one girl he was always kind to. Her name was Cassandra, and her family was the head of a far more powerful coven called Circle of the Sacred Rose. They were a strict and exclusive coven and while Marsden and Cassandra were friends, her family would never allow her to associate with someone of his status outside of school.
The witch wasn’t sure how true the rumors were, but she’d heard that he’d gone to her house to see her when he learned he was moving, and he’d been set straight by her grandmother in a rather blunt way. Sacred Rose held its status because of their pristine bloodlines, intense focus on practice, and unwavering faith to their rituals. It wasn’t just power that held them in high regard, they viewed themselves as the standard all other covens should hold themselves to. While few covens were interested in being so strict, they still held respect for Sacred Rose.
Appearances were everything to them, so obviously their esteemed heiress couldn’t run around with some nobody with muddied bloodlines of unknown origin and little power to speak of. Her image would be permanently tainted. Or at least, that was what they believed.
In the end, Mars moved away and Cassandra was buried in lessons to become the next leader of the coven. Eventually her husband was chosen for her and rumor had it that it wasn’t a happy pairing, though it was a powerful one. Maybe that was why Mars was able to sway her over to his side when he returned with far more power than he’d left town with.
When the fight between the covens happened, it was assumed that Cassandra was one of the witches that stayed with Mars when he was chased out of town. Soon after, every remaining witch in his coven was found dead in a what appeared to be a spell gone wrong. The only two missing were Mars and Cassandra.
The part that didn’t make sense was that he went missing at all. Sure, they were injured, but so was everyone else. Once he’d all but taken out my grandmother’s coven, there was little standing in his way. So why didn't he return to finish what he’d started?
The witch I’d spoken with didn’t have those answers. They hadn’t joined his coven and weren’t there when the fight happened. The best they could do was give me the name of another witch who’d abandoned the Dark Moon coven after the fight, and while that witch had been rather tight-lipped, her reluctant information was what led me here.
The witch pointed me to the ruins of an old, abandoned temple with good spiritual energy that Mars used for his more powerful spells. The same location the bodies of his remaining coven were found when he disappeared, but it wasn't the same as it was all those years ago. A huge house now sat on the land with a pile of old crumbled stone in front of it. Even without magic, I could feel the energy in this area and the staticky feeling brushed over my skin, making my hair stand on end.
Mars was inside, I was sure of it. But there was no way he didn’t have wards on this place and without relying on a demon who seemed to have only one move, there was no way I could take him on. And if the demon inside of me did decide it needed to take over, I may never get the chance to question Mars at all. Kinda hard to get answers from someone who’d been sliced to ribbons.
An image of my blood soaked clothes after I escaped the hunter facility flashed before my eyes and I immediately pulled my attention back to the problem at hand. There was no time for another panic attack over the blood I now knew was on my hands.
I’d picked up a few spells when I headed out this morning, but I wasn’t sure if any of them would be strong enough to break the wards on a place like this. And since I could barely sense magic, I didn’t even know what type of wards he had. Did he place them himself? Hire a mage or a sorcerer to do it? Use dark magic or powerful magic items? There was no way to know without a magic user of my own. And Ollie’s usual ‘smash now ask questions later’ method only worked when you had a plentiful stock of strong spells and no fear of alerting everyone to your presence.
Normally witches placed barriers on their homes using magic items and renewed them periodically, relying on their ancestors and rituals for protection. As with anything, the stronger the witch line, the stronger the barrier. Mars didn’t have a strong witch line, but this place was filled with enough spiritual energy to more than make up for that.
Who knew how long spells and rituals had been performed on this land? Magical energy like that always left something behind and it built up over time. Depending on the kind of magic, sometimes that something was protection, sometimes it was destruction. I had no way of knowing what I was dealing with here, but the eerie sense of danger in my bones told me it was the latter.
“Fuck.”
The hair raised on the back of my neck a second before a familiar voice scared the shit out of me.
“Need a hand?”
“Luca? What the hell are you doing here? How did you even find me?”
“More importantly, what are you doing? Who’s… castle is that?”
The house was pretty strange. It was clearly newer, but not at all modern. Pointed roofs, stone facing, turrets. It was like he was declaring himself King of Eastbend.
“I think it belongs to Mars, the high priest of the Dark Moon Coven.”
“Do you mean the guy who almost killed you?” he snapped.
“That was a long time ago. It’s not like he’ll recognize me.”
“Sage! Why the hell would you come here? More than that, why would you come here alone? You could have just responded to any of my texts!”
“This isn’t about the hunters, it’s not about Eastbend, it’s personal. I don’t want to drag anyone else into it.”
Luca crossed his arms over his chest. “This might be more about Eastbend than you think.”
“What’s that mean? Do you know something?”
“I’m actually here looking for someone else. A woman named Leanna.”
“… Oh.”
Luca was out in the middle of the night looking for some woman? I quickly wiped any feelings from my face. I was the one who ran off in the first place and left him behind. Whatever he was doing with this Leanna person was none of my business.
Luca shook his head. “Whatever you’re thinking right now, stop. I ran into a fox shifter being forced into a van while I was out looking for you.”
“The hunters are out again? So either the facility wasn’t the only reason they were picking up non-humans, or they’ve relocated their operations. Still, a fox shifter seems kind of ordinary for the hunters to have much interest, so why would they go after her?”
“Maybe she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. But the reason she was out was because she was looking for her friend Leanna, a wight who’d gone missing.”
Some of the tightness in my chest eased. “A wight? That’s definitely more up their alley.”
“Right, so Elliot ran a tracking spell and it led me here.”
“That doesn’t make sense, Mars is a witch, not a hunter.”
The pieces started to come together in my head and my hands itched for my note covered wall. Could Mars have been connected to the hunter’s attack on Eastbend? There was only one way to find out what was really going on here.
“I’m going in there.”
“No, I’m going in there,” Luca argued. “We’re going to have to break the wards and it’s going to alert him to our presence. I’m faster, so I’ll go take a look and grab Leanna.”
There wasn’t a chance in hell I was letting him go in alone, but it wasn’t an argument we needed to have at the moment. Once he went racing in, there was nothing stopping me from getting a look myself.
“Let’s circle the perimeter and figure out the best place to go in,” Luca decided.
Luca could have circled the perimeter in no time on his own, so what he really meant was ‘let me scope out the best place to leave you behind.’ What he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him, so I followed along quietly until my foot hit something hard and I stumbled forward.
Luca caught my arm before I could face plant, but my knee still cracked against the stone beneath me.
“Is that a headstone?”
“What’s left of it,” I confirmed. And it wasn’t the only one. Most were flat stones in the ground with faded words that had worn away over many years. The few that had once stuck out of the ground were mostly broken away to nearly nothing. And now that I was looking, this graveyard actually looked huge. While there weren’t a ton of the older headstones, even the grounds beyond the ward appeared to have been dug up and mounded over in multiple places like a field of nameless graves, some old, some not even completely recovered with grass yet.
“So you ran off to challenge a serial killer on your own,” Luca said dryly, obviously coming to the same conclusion.
“So did you.”
“With the intention of calling Silas in for backup if needed.”
“Let’s just keep going,” I grumbled, watching the ground a little more closely this time.
Luca paused mid-step and a shiver worked its way up my spine.
“The magic smells different here.”
The energy took a sudden dark turn that made the door on the tavern feel like it was made out of rainbows and happiness. Icy black resentful energy so thick it made me choke stirred around us and I reached for Luca, already knowing it was too late.