“Will you stop pacing around already?”
Anya stopped abruptly, forcing herself to slump onto a chair. Her legs started trembling, so she stood up, before sitting down again. And then a slender hand touched her shoulder gently.
“Jon’s a smart man. He’ll be fine.” Lucy gave her a warm smile. “Besides, he’s quite literally invulnerable. I don’t think anything can even remotely come close to hurting him.”
“I have a bad feeling about this.” Anya shook her head. “There are too many loose ends, too many unanswered questions. I’m afraid he’s walking into a trap.”
Lucy’s expression darkened as well.
“You’re not alone. I feel it too…” she whispered. “I have a sinister feeling about all this. It’s so odd; I’ve never felt a hunch like this before.”
A cold breeze wafted in as Angus opened the door from behind them, holding a tray of bottles.
“A cell has been prepared for Morevia Wright,” he stated matter-of-factly. “We will decide what to do after she has answered all our questions. So until then… Drinks, anyone?”
“Are you even old enough to drink?” Anya uncorked a bottle of liquor, laughing slightly.
“Technically, I’m over eight hundred years old.” Angus was drinking straight from the bottle. “Don’t let this eighteen-year-old body fool you.”
He offered another bottle to Lucy, who refused it with a small pout.
“How very considerate of you.” The vampire poured out the alcohol into a glass instead, her voice laced with sarcasm. “These bottles are made of silver.”
Anya glanced at the bottles, finally realising that Lucy did not have a reflection on any of them.
“My bad…” Angus chuckled dryly.
The supernatural beings’ voices faded into the background as Anya shivered again. It was right in the middle of summer and they were deep in the middle of a building. Where was this wind coming from?
Her hand grasped the empty air in front of her chest absentmindedly, before falling back into her lap. God, she felt so vulnerable without her magic necklace. It didn’t help that the Witch Market needed two more weeks to make and deliver another relic to her.
A voice whispered in her ear.
“Did you guys hear that?” Anya jumped out of her seat, turning around frantically. She glanced at Lucy and Angus, who had also stopped drinking.
“It wasn’t a hunch…” Lucy breathed as fangs popped out of her gums.
“It’s real. Something else is here.” Angus stood up, colour fading from his irises and white diluting his hair. Wispy traces of bluish-light magic peeked from underneath his skin.
The wine bottles exploded without warning.
Lucy yelped, stumbling back as a large piece of silver lodged itself in her chest. Wind howled as though a category five hurricane was tearing through the room. Anya’s heart raced with fear; she recognised this.
“Who goes there?” Angus roared, although his voice was barely audible over the sound of the wind.
His body swelled to twice its size as long, silvery hair draped over his now scaly body. All hints of blood fled from his complexion. Every trace of humanity retreated from his youthful looks as magic thundered down from his face, coating his body in a turbulent bluish glow.
Anya’s third eye flashed in warning.
“Angus, behind you!”
— Was what she would’ve screamed, but something had frozen her in place. Her eyes flitted down. A paralysing coldness washed over her body as her shadow quite literally crawled up her legs. Anya screamed silently in discomfort again; it felt like an army of spiders was crawling over her whole body.
A blue beam of light narrowly missed her. Angus was throwing out magic beams at some kind of spirit visible only to a third eye. But it was darting around at an alarming speed, and the fae’s magic only seemed to be able to move in a straight line. Anya could only watch on in horror as it dived into the bottles on the table.
Alcohol leaked onto the ground, accompanied by the piercing sound of shattering silver. A few of them found their way into Lucy’s body, incapacitating her as she clutched her side in pain.
Fire burst from the alcohol, which had already formed a circle around Angus somehow. The fae screamed in pure terror, shrinking away from licking flames.
What the hell? It knows all their weaknesses—
Anya hissed in pain as a silver shard flew in her direction, leaving behind a deep gash in her wrist. A dull pain stabbed at her again as she felt a small icy cold appendage on her wound, as though a finger was digging through it. Blood flowed out, following an invisible trail of sorts to the ground. The woman squinted her eyes, trying to make out the blood message forming on the floor—
Fog encroached on her mind without warning, and everything faded to black.
~ ~ ~
Jonathan almost dropped Morevia in shock when the sight of the devastated room greeted him. The first thing he noticed was the amount of paranormal medics he didn’t know the Immortal Association had. The first thing he cared about was Anya’s disappearance and Lucy’s painful-looking injuries.
“Lucy!” he yelled, almost slipping over the mopped floor as he rushed to the bandaged woman on the bed.
“Keep your voice down, boy. You’re in a hospital,” Angus said. He seemed to be unharmed, except for the soot stains on his face and some glowing blue streaks on his skin that looked suspiciously like burn marks.
“What happened while I was gone?” Jonathan asked. “Someone attacked you?”
“You have the wrong person…” Angus muttered. “Either that, or Morevia Wright isn’t the only ‘Ghost Of Glasgow’. We were attacked by some sort of spirit. A poltergeist, I think.”
“Are you saying the Ghost Of Glasgow is an actual ghost?” Lucy’s voice echoed in Jonathan’s head as the pieces of the puzzle began to settle into their place.
He cast a look at Morevia Wright again, who was being hauled away by the Minotaurs. She did not struggle as expected, but a deep knowing sadness was apparent on her face, almost as though she was regretting something.
Jonathan paced the room, deep in thought. His memories, the brandings, the sudden change in killing method… They were all linked somehow. The only question left was, what triggered the Ghost Of Glasgow to come out again? If she really was going after her ex-husband’s new lovers, how did she find out who to look for?
“You were lucky we realised that the true monster was someone else.” The inspector tilted his head, remembering Anya’s words to Morevia—
And then it all clicked.
There was only one culprit that fit everything in the puzzle. Morevia taking the fall, his weird memories, Natasha’s involvement, Baba Yaga’s fear, the Saint Nicholas branding, the reason why the Ghost Of Glasgow started to use soul extraction magic to kill her victims…
If only he had seen it earlier.
“Jonathan, there’s something you need to see.” A centaur trotted over, showing him a picture of the blood message written on the ground.
‘I pledge my love, devotion, faith and honour as I join my life to yours. Though death do us part, our love endures,’ it read.
Jonathan bowed his head. This whole saga had been nothing but a tragedy. And he was the only person who could end this.
“That must be where that poltergeist has taken Anya,” Angus mused, looking over his shoulder. “But what does it mean?”
“The grave of Nicholaum, where he was burned to death,” Jonathan said grimly, ignoring the confused stares. “She’s calling him to be with her.”
His eyes hardened as Angus left his bed to question Morevia Wright as well. No more running this time.25Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡilbNeICGIj
