ghost [k. parker]

• CHAPTER 9 •

CHAPTER 9: last wishes

THE MOMENT ROMA HAD LEFT THE ROOM, she made a beeline for the kitchen. If she didn't have her knife then she had no magic and no means of defending herself. If she carried a kitchen knife on her person though, then she would only be missing magic. Though she didn't know for certain, she could make a wild guess that if she died, the magic died with her, meaning one of the lives within the knife had been used up.

The way it worked was that the blade was a strong, magic-siphoning object and if a witch was to die by the blade, their magic would be drawn into the blade, hence the name the 'devorantis' blade ('the devouring blade'). The owner of the blade would be the sole person to handle it, and would also gain the years of the lives taken. To anyone else, it would be nothing more than an ordinary knife. The blade was one of the oldest artifacts in the supernatural world and contained the lives of thousands of witches; and only Roma could harness the power of them all, essentially making her invincible in some way.

Roma did not want to be invincible. She just wanted to kill Joshua Parker then live the rest of her merry life, handing the blade onto some vengeful youth when she felt she had lived enough in prime, then living the rest of her numbered days in a gite or something. The whole prison world really was a damper on her plans. Kai Parker even further so. Roma could only pray that the boy didn't feel the need to stalk her so she could leave the house and go search for Bonnie's blood in peace. There wasn't any resistance as she left silently through the kitchen door so she took this as a good sign, making her way through the woods with haste.

With her eagerness to escape, it didn't take long for Roma to arrive at the clearing where the hole had been dug. She couldn't see a Zima bottle but she assumed that if it hadn't broken, then it probably would've landed on the large pile of dirt that Damon had shovelled. She sunk to the ground, scouring through the dirt, trying not to wince at the feeling of mud getting under her nails. The bottle was found quickly but no relief came to her when she shook the bottle and the blood remained stationary. It had dried. She held the bottle upside down just to be sure but there was no doubt. Bonnie Bennett's blood was useless unless she could somehow liquefy it.

Roma peered down into the hole, her eyed searching for the Bennett grimoire- witches like them did strange things like liquefying people's brains, right? Luck seemed to have deserted her as the book was nowhere to be found and she could probably take a decent guess to say that Kai had taken it with him. But speak of the devil and he shall appear. Roma should've taken more precautions and known that he would follow her from the house- they were the only two in this prison world, he had no other forms of entertainment. As the girl was looking down into ground below, he tugged Roma's hair harshly, making her fall back from the edge of the hole. The back of her head was now leaning against his shoulder, with his tight grasp around her throat.

"What's an innocent girl like you doing in the woods by her lonesome? Rumour has it that there's a wolf in these trees and he is ready to tear you apart."

Although his voice was close and whispering into her ear, Roma could barely register Kai's greeting. All she could hear was the sound of a Zima bottle smashing on the rocky ground of the tunnels below and her last hope withering away. How could she have let Kai startle her like that? How could she have been so careless? Her hand slipped and now she was stranded on a desert island with absolutely no way of getting off.

"Shit," she muttered, allowing one hand to cover her face in her moment of panic. "Oh my god, shit."

"I didn't realise you cared so deeply about the environment."

She couldn't help but let out a sharp laugh at that (she was basically on the verge of insanity). It was ironic, Kai's desperation to escape and his destruction of their escape; he didn't even know what he had done.