47. Cori
Cori
S tealing his car was never part of the plan, but desperate times called for desperate measures. She had awoken in a cold sweat, still naked and entwined in his limbs. When she slipped away from him, her mind had churned with the nightmare that had awoken her.
With panic in her heart, she pulled out the tattered notebook and opened to the back cover where the picture of her father had been safely tucked inside.
Still there.
In her dream, the photograph had been drifting on the wind, down the side of the rocky cliff toward the sea below. She hugged the picture to her heart.
She tucked the photograph back into the safety of the book’s binding, as she turned to her most recent tally mark. Her eyes blinked in the candlelight as she read the date on the page, pulling out her phone to look at her calendar to compare.
She hadn’t made a tally mark in over a week. For the first time in over three thousand days, she had forgotten to count. Her pen scratched the marks on the page as guilt washed over her. Somehow, she had gotten so swept away in this place, that she had forgotten to count the days .
Days until she would be reunited with her family and the prophecy could be considered a memory. Ten days.
Her hand stilled, the pen frozen over the hash marks. What would her life look like at the end of those ten days? Would she be leaving Maine and moving back to California? Reuniting with her mother and her brother? One person who had lied to her, another who had tried to kill her.
Adrian’s tall body was too long for the sofa, but his arms and legs draped over the sides limply, as if he was fully at peace. She gripped the notebook in her hand, a countdown to the moment she would leave him.
She swallowed hard, pushing down guilt. Her bags were packed before she realized she was packing them. Low tide rolled away at six in the morning, allowing her to pass through the cove. The Airstream was quiet, the lights quelled, as she turned the engine of the truck over. She didn’t know where she was planning to go, but she started driving south.
She drove for about an hour before she realized Lionel’s truck had been trailing her. Her fingers drummed against the steering wheel as she devised a plan. She turned sharply off the road at the next exit.
One turn. Two.
No car trailed her as she pulled into the parking lot of the gas station. She pulled the truck into the farthest parking spot from the road and turned off the engine. She twirled the string of her sweatshirt in her fingers as the air in the truck grew colder. Adrian’s coat was draped over the back seat. She pulled it over her shoulders, shrugging her arms into it.
Damn, it smelled like him .
Another pang dripped down her throat as she breathed deeply, inhaling his scent.
A sudden rapping on the glass of the window stopped her heart as she nearly jumped out of the seat.
Prudence glared at her, her hands on her hips, shivering in the cold outside of the car. She arched her eyebrows expectantly at her. Cori rolled down the window. “You’re not wearing a coat. ”
“I’m not. I had to jump out of bed and chase you frantically down the highway,” Prudence returned, her lips drawn into an angry scowl.
“You didn’t have to chase me anywhere.” Cori shrugged innocently.
Prudence narrowed her eyes, “Where exactly are you trying to go, Cordelia?”
Pru had used her full name. Like she had been a teenager sneaking out of the house. Cori winced. “Salem.”
Pru pursed her lips before an exasperated sigh escaped them. “By yourself?”
Now that Prudence was saying it aloud, she had to admit it sounded reckless.
“Do you want to explain what happened that made you want to run off to the scene where an entire team of dark witches is actively trying to kill you? Alone.”
Cori didn’t want to explain. “Adrian and I had a fight.” It was a simpler answer, but it was the truth.
“Adrian loves you,” Prudence said simply, arching her brow at her. “He’s fated to you for Goddess’s sake. He will not want you to be anything but happy. For the rest of his life.”
She swallowed deeply. “I feel like I’m being pulled in so many directions, Pru.”
“I’ve been following you for a long time, Cori.”
“Creepy.”
Pru’s face was serious as she crossed her arms. “You need to let people in. You were at Yale for four years of undergrad. Two years of grad school. It took you three years to complete your doctorate. I never saw you make one friend.”
Her words stung. “I let him in. I’ve been dreaming about his face since I was a child. He gets so worked up over Enzo. It’s like I can’t have Adrian and my family at the same time.”
“Come back to the campsite, Cori. The solstice is ten days away. We can figure this out.”
She shrugged. “I doubt it. But I’ll try.”
“Good. I didn’t really feel like driving all the way to Massachusetts.”
Cori had convinced Prudence to find a place to eat breakfast before they drove back to the campsite. She ignored the frantic text messages from Adrian, turning her phone upside down as they ate eggs and hash browns at a small diner on the side of the highway, as though they were two old friends simply meeting up for brunch.
Adrian was pacing on the outside of the Airstream when they returned. She pressed the keys to the truck into his hands as through she had had simply been out to run an errand, avoiding his eyes.
It was even more difficult for Cori to recount her father’s prophecy to Pru and Zion than it had been to tell Adrian. Pru shook her head heavily when she learned that Paolo had committed suicide to save his children. Zion listened patiently, his hands rubbing his temples as he digested and processed this new piece of the puzzle.
“Makes you wonder how many other Celestials have had to do the unspeakable,” he said heavily.
Cori swallowed hard. She had wondered the same thing. If she ever foretold the death of someone she loved, she could not overcome that.
Nonna had told her so many times. The Giver only shows us what we are strong enough to handle . After what she learned about her father’s sacrifice, she did not doubt his strength.
“Cori,” Pru asked nervously, picking at her fingernails. “Do you think Enzo knows about your father’s prophecy?” She raised her eyebrow, a thoughtful look on her face.
“He doesn’t know,” she replied. “Why do you ask?”
“What your father did not only saved you, Cor, but it makes you completely untouchable,” she explained, thumbing through one of Zion’s books. “To Enzo at least. ”
Adrian raked his hand through his hair. “But it doesn't prevent one of the other scumbags in the LARC from trying to kill her,” he said, seething anger in his voice.
“That’s true, but Calvin wants Enzo to be the one to kill Cori,” Zion explained hastily, jotting down a few notes.
“What makes you think that?” she asked. Her stomach turned over.
Prudence flipped the pages of an old book with a thick leather cover and turned to an illustrated page. “Aha, found it!” she said triumphantly. “Remember when my father went to the meeting about the prophecy the LARC hosted in September?” she asked, jabbing her finger onto the page and turning it toward Cori.
The page was illustrated with the picture of a hanged man, his blood dripping grotesquely to the floor as another man, the wielder of the rope also bled into the same puddle. Bile rose in Cori’s throat as she read the caption. “The Blood Bond of Death?” She pushed the disturbing illustration away.
“Way to be sensitive, Pru,” Zion said, rolling his eyes. Pru shrugged apologetically at her. “This is a medieval text of dark magic. I’ll read what was presented at the meeting to you,” Zion cleared his throat. “ If life is to be taken from another witch by means to end their magic, their magic will be returned to the Other if taken by thine own blood. If the blood of the dead and that which took life were to mix in the Earth, the magic of the dead will be erased and restored to the Other by their death .”
“So, if you are killed by someone who shares your blood, your magic doesn’t just die with you. It gets transferred to the Other?” Adrian asked.
“Exactly.” Prudence nodded. “They want to kill you, Cori. But they also want to make sure that your prophecy dies with you. If Enzo is the one who kills you, your magic—and your prophecy— will return to the Other. Everyone who takes part in the ritual will be strengthened by your magic. When you make the prophecy part of the Other, it can never come true. Not now. Never. It’s an extremely dark way to kill another witch.”
Cori remembered what Nonna said. If their intention was to kill her magic, her prophecy would die with her. Calvin wanted to leave nothing to chance in her death. She realized that this must have been the reason they recruited Enzo in the first place. All the pieces of her father’s prophecy fell into place, and at the end of the line was her murder.
“We think this is why Calvin Hanson asked your brother to be the one to kill you. This book is studied heavily by the LARC.” Zion explained, as though reading her mind. “If the magic of your prophecy returned to the Other, it would seal fate. The prophecy could never come true.”
“So, killing me would end the prophecy, but Enzo killing me is like an insurance policy that it could never come to be,” she rationalized.
Prudence and Zion nodded solemnly.
Adrian stood, his hands clenched to fists. “If this is how they wanted to kill her all along, why send her that fire?” he asked angrily.
“We don’t think the fire was meant to kill her, just injure her, and locate her so she could be captured. We intercepted two witches snooping around the fire right after it happened. The fire made it possible for them to locate you with magic. I think they expected to find you, injured and weak. Instead, they found Fern,” Zion explained, the corner of his mouth tipping up. “After she was done with them, they didn’t even remember their names. She tied them up and tortured them. Then she put them on a bus headed for Canada after convincing them they were escaping a cult.”
Cori couldn’t help but laugh. “Lesson learned. If you don’t want to be tortured or brainwashed, don’t mess with Fern.”
“Or her friends,” Pru agreed, fighting back a smile.
Fern was possibly the scariest witch Cori had ever known. She had no pity for those who were on the receiving end of her wrath. Thanks to her, her location was still a mystery, and all the witches in Farley were safe because of it. Cori made a mental note to give Fern an enormous hug the next time she saw her but had second thoughts when she remembered Fern wasn’t a huge fan of physical contact.
“On to the next order of business,” Prudence said with authority as she rose from the dinette. “Lionel needs to pack us up and get the Airstream ready. I need to call Alfie and tell him to rally the troops.”
Cori ran her fingers over the grotesque images in the book. She would be there, looking Enzo in the eye when the moment of the solstice passed. She would get her life back, but so would he. Thick leather creaked under her fingers as she slammed the book closed. “We need to get to Salem.”