Chapter 43
NOW
Jake drove along the road, angry at himself and yes, still angry at Violet.
But the anger towards Violet was tempered with the fact that he wanted to protect her.
He didn’t want that dream to become a reality: to find her body at Coventina’s Well in the middle of a snowstorm, and to know that he could have prevented it.
Was there even any future in it? If she was obsessed with this witch and this place and this Ollie to the extent that she was willing to trudge back to that bloody Well in this sort of weather, what was he even trying for?
Perhaps he had been more invested in the relationship than she had.
Perhaps it was just a fling, something for them to both get their ex-partners out of their minds.
But fuck it, he liked her. He really liked her, and very, very obviously was trying to save her life.
Even if neither of them had seen it quite like that earlier…
And if he was to walk away, then he would bet that Ollie Brent would swiftly move into the space Jake had left in her life.
He really disliked that guy. The more he thought about him, the more the anger grew.
He was so fucking entitled – just because some fucker from his family tree had lived in a big house, he thought he was better than anyone else…
‘“He’s doing some research on his family tree. Roots in Newbrough, he thinks. His family owned Milburn Hall of all places!”’ Jake scowled, repeating the words Violet had said the one and only time he’d met Ollie Brent. Some people just didn’t deserve privilege.
He blinked, and grasped the steering wheel more tightly. The reasonable, pretty laid-back part of him was appalled at where that thought had come from; he was very much live and let live normally.
But the deeper he got into this area, the more he felt that part of him slide away and all these unreasonable thoughts come into his head about Ollie.
Because all he wanted to do was to be with Violet.
He honestly felt that he wouldn’t be able to breathe if she wasn’t in his life.
He’d never, ever felt anything like that before about anybody…
and being here, being so close to her yet so far – because he knew she was in this area somewhere – almost felt like it was destroying him from the inside out.
He wanted to find her. Badly. Before anything terrible happened to her.
And although Jake liked to think the boundaries were pretty clear between this world and the next, what if, just if, he had seen the future in that dream?
Violet had been odd and distant since Christmas, but he thought that they’d started to reconnect over the last few days and even more so after that trip to Hexham. He gave himself a mental shake. It was time for Reasonable Jake to try and think rationally.
Why should a few cross words stop him from making sure she was okay? The snow was starting again, and the thought of her out there, in that pink padded jacket, had his stomach in knots…
Jake was so hung up on all of that, that he realised he’d overshot the mark completely. Brocolitia was behind him, the entrance to the car park hidden by the sudden onslaught of the latest blizzard.
Jake stopped the van so quickly that there was a clatter from one of the cupboards behind him; no doubt that was a mug or a jar that would emerge in pieces when he next opened the damn door.
He peered out of the semicircle on the window that was filling up with fat, fluffy snowflakes just as fast as it was clearing, and switched the wiper blades on to a faster speed. It was bloody bleak out there.
‘Oh, to hell with it!’
He rammed the van back in gear and made a 180 on the military road.
He needed to go back.