Chapter 10 Escaping Oblivion #2
“Only it doesn’t exactly look like a plausible escape route, and I’m not exactly down for trying to scale the walls like Spiderman,” I pointed out dryly.
“Well, as handy as a spider demon would be right now, I did mean a window of opportunity.”
I swallowed hard, my gaze flicking once more to the locked door.
“And how exactly do you suggest we do that?”
Bo’s eyes shifted to the shelves lining the walls, something calculating flickering there beneath the fear.
“We improvise,” he said at last.
“And we do it fucking fast,” he added, clearly forming some kind of idea in his mind.
The moment the words left his mouth, he was already moving, his small frame darting toward the towering shelves that lined the walls. His sharp eyes flicked rapidly across the spines of the books, fingers twitching as if he were restraining the urge to grab at everything at once.
“Bo,” I hissed, my voice tight as panic clawed up my throat.
“This isn’t really the time to browse his book collection.” He shot me a sharp look over his shoulder, his expression a brittle mix of fear and determination.
“If I were browsing, we’d already be dead.”
Erh, okay, so I didn’t really know what to do with that, so I wisely kept quiet and let him do his thing… whatever that turned out to be.
Thankfully, at least, I didn’t have long to wait as he was soon wrenching a thick, heavy tome free from the shelf.
The sound of it scraping against the shelf was far louder than it should have been.
My heart leaped violently, my gaze snapping to the closed office door as my body tensed, half expecting it to burst open at any second.
It didn’t, but the sense of being watched still lingered, crawling up my spine like an icy serpent.
Bo flipped the book open with practiced urgency, rifling through the old, yellowed pages until he found what he was looking for. He shoved it toward me without explanation, his fingers lingering for only a heartbeat before pulling back.
“Here.”
I stared down at the page and immediately knew two things. The first was that I didn’t recognize a single symbol printed there. And the second was that every one of them made my skin prickle with unease.
“Erm… okay, so yeah, I’m sure that’s great and all, but not sure what you think I can do with it,” I said with a frown.
As for the symbols, they weren’t anything like the Wicca symbols I recognized from my childhood.
The ones drawn carefully on kitchen tables or stitched into cloth by my mother and sister.
No, these symbols were jagged and layered.
Angular shapes overlapped one another as if they had been written without any concern for whether human eyes could ever understand them. They felt old… wrong somehow.
Heavy with otherworldly intent.
He rolled his eyes at me, the wrinkles around them rippling slightly.
“What do yer think I want…? Now quit stalling and do yer thing before he comes back, and then we are really in the shitter pit.”
I shot him a look that was half disbelief, half panic.
“The shitter pit? That’s not exactly comforting.”
“Yer want comforting, or yer want out?” he snapped.
“Out,” I replied instantly, the word tumbling from my mouth without hesitation.
“Then yer best get on with it then,” he stated, nodding down at the book. My eyes widened before finding his.
“Look, okay, so I get why you think I would be able to do something with… erm… that… but I am sorry to disappoint here but I am not a witch.”
At that, he scoffed.
“I would beg to differ, girly,” he said, dragging a hand down his body to indicate himself, giving it a little wiggle for good measure.
“But I have no idea how I did that?!” I reminded him on a hiss.
“Okay, okay, so baby steps, I get it… right, here’s what we are gonna do. You just need to listen to me,” he said, his tone sharpening before continuing,
“Where do you want to go?”
“You’re saying you, not yer anymore… did you know that?” I asked randomly, focusing on that pointless fact and trying to stall the inevitable disappointment that if he was relying on me to get us out of here, then we were both fucked.
“You must be rubbing off in me.”
“You mean rubbing off on me,” I corrected.
“Look, I will rub it all wherever you want it, just concentrate,” he groaned, making me wrinkle my nose and say,
“Eww.”
“Tell me, where do you wanna be?”
The answer came so fast it startled me.
“Home.”
“Good, now keep that thought in your head. Pinpoint a place in your home, think of an object, the color of the walls, the smell… bring in the little things, bring them into focus and then hold them in your mind.”
I nodded, doing as he asked before saying,
“Okay, so now what?”
“Now put your hands on the page.”
I hesitated, my stomach knotting painfully as I stared at the strange markings.
“Bo…”
“Now, Eliza. Do it!”
I swallowed hard and lowered my hands, my palms hovering for a second before finally pressing down onto the page. The paper was warm beneath my skin, far warmer than it should have been. As though something beneath it were alive and waiting.
“Concentrate,” Bo urged, his voice tight with urgency.
“Don’t think about how. Just think about where,” he said, and since he popped up in my life earlier this morning, I hadn’t once heard him sound this serious.
Not even when he was trying to convince me not to come here.
But now, it felt different, like he was really trying to help me.
Help us get home with whatever power he thought I had.
So, I squeezed my eyes shut, my heart hammering violently as I tried to picture my apartment. The couch. The kitchen. The stupid dish I’d left in the sink that morning because I’d been too nervous about work to bother washing it.
“This is ridiculous,” I muttered, my voice shaking despite my attempt at sarcasm.
“You really think it’s going to be this easy?”
The moment the words left my mouth, the air shifted.
The symbols beneath my hands shuddered, and I gasped as they lifted cleanly from the page, peeling away as though they were made of solid smoke.
Light bloomed from them, sharp and blinding.
Symbols that were now casting fractured shadows across the walls as they began to spin faster and faster in the air between us.
The markings rearranged themselves mid-motion, blurring into something dizzying and incomprehensible.
“Bo, what… what’s happening…?” I breathed, panic and awe colliding so violently that it made my chest ache.
“It’s okay, Girly… just let it happen,” he said, his voice threaded with something dangerously close to wonder.
“Just don’t stop.” The same electric sensation surged through me again, far stronger this time. As if something deep inside my chest had been torn wide open. The room tilted violently, the stone floor seeming to fall away beneath my feet as my balance vanished.
I screamed.
And then the world disappeared with it.
When reality snapped back into focus, it did so abruptly enough to knock the breath from my lungs. I staggered forward, my eyes flying open as familiar shapes came into focus around me, my kitchen counter now directly in front of my face.
My kitchen!
The soft hum of the refrigerator filled the air, grounding me with the normalcy of it. And there on the counter sat the dirty dish from breakfast, exactly where I had left it. The sight of it hit me harder than anything else, my knees threatening to buckle as the shock caught up with me.
I swayed, barely managing to stay upright, just as something small and solid bumped into my shin. I looked down, and there was Bo staring up at me, his eyes wide, his mouth hanging open in stunned disbelief.
For a long, suspended moment, neither of us spoke… until…
“You did it,” he finally whispered.
A shaky, hysterical laugh bubbled out of me.
“I guess I did,” I said, disbelief no longer an option.
However, there was one thought that still clung to me, and I knew it was also one that would, no doubt, continue to haunt me. To chase me in my dreams.
I had managed to escape, but what if there was a next time? And what if, when that next time came along… What if… I didn’t want to escape him?
For a long moment, I simply stood there, staring at the familiar lines of my kitchen as if they might dissolve if I blinked.
The faint ticking of the clock on the wall, even the dull glow of the under-cabinet light felt unreal after the suffocating weight of Oblivion’s office.
It was all too ordinary, too normal, and yet that was exactly what made my chest ache with relief.
Home.
The word echoed through me, grounding in a way I hadn’t realized I desperately needed.
I exhaled slowly, my shoulders sagging as the tension finally began to seep out of my body.
My legs felt weak, my hands trembling faintly as I dragged them down my face and pressed my palms briefly to my eyes.
When I lowered them again, Bo was still standing there, his gaze darting around my apartment as though he expected it to vanish just as abruptly as it had appeared.
“You did that,” he repeated again, his voice quieter now, respectful almost, as if echoing it might help him believe it.
“I don’t know how,” I admitted, my voice still unsteady as I glanced down at my hands.
They looked the same as they always had, nothing remarkable about them at all.
And yet they had just pulled us out of Hell itself.
Or close enough to it that the distinction felt irrelevant at this point. But I couldn’t help but ask myself,
Did that then make Oblivion the devil?
Bo let out a sharp breath and scrubbed a hand over his face.