Chapter 28
TWENTY-EIGHT
Several floorboards now stacked against her bed, Morana was dusty and covered in grime.
The particular floorboard she needed to remove would not budge, and she wished she had a crowbar to just rip it up.
Instead, she lay flat on her stomach and reached her hand into the dark space that was probably filled with hundreds of tiny spiders that would scurry up her bare arm at any moment.
She held her breath as she felt around praying that the sight of her arm had terrified any spiders or roaches that might be living under her floor.
She caught hold of the envelope with her fingertips – it was thick – and tugged it as hard as she could.
The corner came loose and she freed it, letting out a little whoop as she snatched her arm back out of that dark, dusty space, a grubby, once cream-coloured envelope clutched in her hand.
Excited, she tore it open. There was no writing on the outside to say who it was addressed to.
She looked inside and held her breath. Inside the envelope was a stack of dollars.
Tipping them onto the floor she stared in amazement at the wad of hundreds as they fanned out.
There was a lot of them. Lifting them up to the light, she tilted a few of them to make sure they were genuine, and they were.
Morana giggled and picked up all the bills and threw them onto her bed.
She counted them into stacks of ten until she reached twenty.
She shook her head. She had twenty thousand dollars on her bedspread.
All this time she had been struggling to make her rent and this wad of money had been underneath her feet.
It must have belonged to whoever lived here before her.
Then she felt bad, that was a lot of cash, she should probably return it to its rightful owner.
A little voice in her head whispered, the only rightful owner is you, nobody knew it was there.
You wouldn’t move out and leave it sitting down there for anyone to find.
That money is yours, you worked the spell and it repaid you.
Picking up a handful of bills, she laughed again and decided that the voice was right, this was hers.
She had cast the spell, she had asked for cash, and she had found it.
Besides, it could have been down there for years, and whoever it belonged to may have died.
Scooping it all up she tucked it back into the envelope then looked for someplace safe to hide it.
Twenty thousand bucks wasn’t a life-changing amount of money, but it sure as hell would help her get on her feet.
That grimoire was incredible; so much had happened with two spells and she couldn’t help but imagine what else it could do. Grinning like a lunatic, she walked back into her living room and paused, why was it so dark in here? She flicked the light switch.
Nothing.
A swirling black mist seeped from a corner of the room.
A chill ran down the back of her neck, making it break out in gooseflesh, and the tiny hairs that were too short to tie up in a high ponytail prickled.
She had seen stuff over the years, shadows out of the corner of her eyes that she’d dismissed as figments of her overactive imagination, but this was different.
They swirled as if trying to form into human shapes and that made her heart race because the tendrils of mist looked like long, pointed, bony witch fingers.
‘Get out of here. What do you want?’ she said into the darkness.
There was a stillness that filled the entire apartment.
Morana could hear her heart pulsing inside of her head.
The spine-tingling fear was all too real.
It was her and the black thing trying to form in the mist and she was scared to move.
Her feet were stuck to the floor as if someone had poured wet concrete on top of them.
A loud crack at the window made her jump, at the same time releasing whatever had held her in place, and she sprinted to throw open the blinds, only to find it was that damn crow pecking at the glass.
She pushed the window up and it hopped inside, balancing on the ledge. Staring at her, full of attitude she didn’t need right at this moment. Turning to look for the mist, she was relieved to find it was no longer there.
‘Hey, can you live here for a while maybe? I don’t know what is going on with this place, but you are kind of like my good luck charm. How did you know I was in trouble? Do you know what the hell that was lurking in the corner of my room?’
The bird shook its head then hopped around.
‘Trouble, you’re in trouble.’
Morana couldn’t believe what she was hearing. It could talk!
‘Gee, you think so. I kind of figured that out, although it’s not all bad.’
She still had the envelope clutched in her fingers.
‘Money doesn’t buy happiness.’ The bird cawed at her, and she gasped.
‘I don’t agree, but what the hell is happening here? Do you have a name?’
It hopped up and down, nodding. ‘Hades.’
‘Hey, Hades, I’m Morana.’
‘Trouble.’
She laughed. ‘No, Morana.’
‘I don’t agree.’
She laughed even harder. ‘Only I could befriend a pet crow with more sass than I have.’
She sat down on the couch and tucked the envelope down the side of the cushion.
She needed to get the money to that crazy woman, but she’d told Kim she was ill so she couldn’t go into work, although this town was so small she was bound to bump into Lauren, Codie, or Kim herself.
What was happening to her? Had she lost her mind or was her life taking a turn that the most gifted psychic in Salem could not have predicted?
She certainly couldn’t have predicted it.
A talking bird, a spell book that actually worked, a hospitalised neighbour and a windfall of cash had not been on her bingo list for 2026…
yet here she was. It was weird how life worked out. She wasn’t complaining about it though.
That black mist-like thing with the weird pointy fingers was a bit of a worry, but it had disappeared. At least for now.