Silver Eyes

Hunter Becomes the Hunted

"You know, he's helped me get my grades up." I told my mother over dinner, referring to Jack. I thought of the time he helped me with citing on a paper I was working on and another when I couldn't figure out a math problem on a homework assignment. She just looked away darkly and changed the subject. Our dinner was pretty quiet and I felt solemn as I tried fruitlessly to picture my father whom I had never met. I knew my mom never wanted me to get curious about him and go looking for him and that's why she rarely brought him up and only gave me vague details about him. She had told me he was in a gang and it was too dangerous for me to know about him because others would use me to get to him. I guessed he was in the mafia or something, but I kept picturing some fat Italian mobster and I was pretty certain I didn't have any Italian in me, but I didn't really know where my ancestors were from. I knew my mom had some German and some Swedish or Finnish. My brown hair was much darker than my mother's dirty blond which she bleached to be brighter. My aunt had blue eyes and blond hair and my uncle had a light brown before he went grey, I thought. Maybe my father had dark hair? I guessed.

As I tried to picture my father, I ended up picturing Jack and then all I could think about was Jack. I wanted him to be waiting for me so bad and I went to my room thinking about how to magically lock my door and make my room sound-proof. I wondered if I could look up a spell and do it myself or if I needed Marnie and Scarlet to help. Marnie had showed us a few websites with some real spells on them and I found a spell that could work.

I searched in vain for the things I needed for the spell. I only had one grey candle and I looked down at the silver and gold candles in the set I had gotten and wondered if they would even work. The candles were small because I couldn't afford much and I only had tiny amounts of the herbs I needed as well. The cheap box set had plastic wells with little bags of finely ground herbs. I used only tiny pinches of the herbs I needed and I put them in the blue glass ash tray that I had bought for when Jack was over. I lit the grey candle and put a salt line on the inside of my door. I knew putting it on the outside as well would be more effective, but I couldn't have my mom thinking I was nuts doing a spell in my room. As an afterthought, I lit the red candle, hoping that would add strength to the spell. I had my laptop open and read the Latin words quietly as I mixed the herbs in the ash tray. At the bottom of the page it said, the spell would last longer if the herbs were put into a bag and placed near the threshold so I decided to split them into two bags and put them on either side of my bedroom door. I was surprised when I finished the spell by putting the grey candle in the salt and it went out like the spell said it should. The air in the room was still and I had breathed in preparing to blow it out like the spell said to do if it didn't go out on its own.

As I swept up the salt with a dust pan and decided to put it outside my window for some added protection or some crazy placebo effect, I realized I was actually feeling drained of energy. I wondered if I had done the spell wrong by adding the red candle and I blew it out with furrowed eyebrows. After tossing the salt out my window, I decided to get something to eat. I shook the thought of finding a person to eat out of my Lycan head and went speeding swiftly through the woods. I took a detour out of my territory when I smelled blood and I couldn't resist following my nose to it even though I knew it smelled human and could be some innocent person who tripped in the woods and cut themselves on a branch or something.

I froze when I saw him. It was Cyrus, Luther's coven member and he was lying on his side with his leg caught in a metal jaw trap, bleeding out onto the forest floor. A rope around his arm and neck was pulled taught and hung from a tree. His red eyes looked at me in fear and it helped me make my decision. I could smell that the rope was hawthorn because Marnie had showed me what it looked like after Alaina had been killed and I knew the trap was probably silver.