Chapter 16
She stood motionless in the living room, a cold sweat running over her whole body.
She knew.
She knew the minute she had tried to call Lorna back. Nothing had gone wrong with Lorna’s phone. She had trusted her. And she shouldn’t have.
She looked out the window, scanning Clarence Drive for any cars pulling up. Surely they wouldn’t be that quick. It had only been a couple of minutes. They’d have to be close by.
But even if she ran, where would she go? Out into the street? They’d catch her easily. Clarence Drive was a straight road with nowhere to disappear.
She paced the living room, racking her brains, but her mind wouldn’t get into gear. The thoughts came in fragments. Disjointed. Useless.
She forced herself to stop. Breathe. Slowly.
Okay. Calm down. Think. It might be innocent. Lorna’s phone might have cut out. She might have gone under a tunnel. A dead spot. It happens.
But even as she thought it, she knew she was lying to herself.
She thought of the coven. How would she tell them? She could call Elspeth who was closest.
“I’ll send a voice message,” she said, rushing to pick up her phone.
She needed to get everything out at once, and then she needed to get out of the flat.
She opened the WhatsApp group and hit the voice record button.
“Girls, I’ve fucked up again. I trusted Lorna and told her everything …
I told her it was me that set off the beacon.
That I kissed Callum. And now she knows.
” Her voice was steady but her hand was shaking.
“When I was on the phone to her, as soon as I told her, the line went dead. I tried to call her back. Couldn’t get through.
And I know – I know for sure – the Council are coming for me. ”
She paused. Took a breath.
“I’m leaving this message just so you know, I’ve not disappeared. Well, I probably will have disappeared. But you know what to do. Track my energy signature and track the phone. Both. You’ll find me.”
She was about to hit send when a crack split the air and reverberated around the flat.
The front door.
“Shit.”
“Rowan Kerr!” A female voice. Clipped. Irish.
Rowan’s thumb hit send. The phone slipped from her hand and landed face-up on the floorboards.
The living room door opened and two men came through fast. Big. Practised. They were on her before she could move.
Rowan hit the floor chest first and gasped as the wind was knocked out of her completely. She tried to scramble forward but one of them grabbed her ankles and the other hauled her up by the arms.
She reached for her magick. instinctively, desperately, the way she'd reached for the Veil every morning for twenty years.
Nothing came.
She reached again, harder. The earth-energy she pulled up through the soles of her feet every morning — gone.
Cut off, as if she were standing on glass.
She tried the connection to the Veil itself, the long thread she'd run between herself and the fabric over Glasgow every single day for two decades.
It was there. She could feel it. But she couldn't get to it.
She tried to read the men holding her. Two strangers gripping her arms, and she couldn't feel a thing. Not even the silence she felt with Callum. Just nothing. A void where her own ability used to be.
Panic flared in her chest. She forced it down and tried again, this time reaching for the simplest thing she knew. The candles in her sacred space, ten feet away. She'd lit a thousand of them with her energy over the years. Just a flame. Just a single flame.
Nothing.
Her magick was there. She could feel it deep inside, humming the way it always did, the warm thrumming centre of her. But something was wrapped around it, tight and suffocating, like a hand clamped over a mouth.
She looked up. Danu was standing in the doorway of her own living room, one hand raised slightly, palm open. She was holding the bind in place.
“I suspected it was you, Rowan,” Danu said. “But I couldn't be sure.” She lowered her hand a fraction. “Now I can.”
Rowan stared at her. She refused to give her anything. No fear. No plea. Nothing.
“I gave you the chance to walk away from this,” Danu said quietly. “You didn't take it.”
“Put her in the car,” she said to the two men. They nodded.
“Shall we sedate her?” one of them asked.
“No. As long as she doesn’t resist.”
They pulled Rowan to her feet and held her between them, one on each arm, pressed tight against her so she couldn’t move. She tried to pull away and felt the grip tighten. There was no give at all.
They walked her down the hallway of her own flat, past the coat hooks, past the mirror she checked herself in every morning, and out through the front door.
The tenement stairwell was cold and smelled of stone. They moved quickly, their footsteps echoing off the tiled close. Danu walked ahead, her cream coat catching the light from the stairwell window.
They pushed through the main door and out onto Clarence Drive.
The street was quiet. Morning sun on sandstone. A delivery van parked further up the road. The Magick Wick was right there, twenty yards away, its front window dark.
Then she heard her name.
“Rowan!”
A voice, high and desperate, from further up the street.
“Rowan!”
She twisted hard and broke free from the man on her left. For a second she was half-loose, turning, her eyes searching the street.
Elspeth. Running down Clarence Drive. Full sprint. Her glasses bouncing on her face. Her mouth open, shouting.
The man grabbed Rowan again and pulled her back. The car door was open. She was being pushed in, head first, and she fought it, bracing her hand against the roof of the car, trying to hold on for one more second.
Something sharp in her neck. A coldness spreading fast, rushing through her veins and into her chest and down through her legs.
She could see Elspeth’s face fading.
Hand over her mouth.
Elspeth was getting smaller.
Can’t think.
Cloudy.
Fuzzy
Then nothing.
THE END