The Beginning Of The End

Chapter 24

The next day, Jaylon, Thalia and I sat in the circular room with the twelve doors around it. We were seated within a ring of white candles, for protection in case anything were to go wrong. We were close enough that our knees were all touching, and Jaylon had warned us not to break the little circle. The Bloedzoeker Stone was right in the centre, sitting between the three of us.

"So we're looking for Lucas first," Jaylon said. Thalia and I both nodded. "So I'll do this," He said. "You two don't touch it, just watch."

I watched as he took a small, shining knife and, after a moment of hesitation, ran the pointed end of the blade across his palm. Blood beaded across the cut, and he turned his hand over above the Bloedzoeker Stone. A few droplets of blood dripped onto the stone, and then he lowered his hand and pressed it over the milky white surface.

I watched his face, full of concentration as the milky white started swirling together with the red of his blood. After a few minutes, minutes that felt like an eternity, he lifted his hand away. I handed him a hand towel and he wrapped it around his bloody hand with a grateful nod in my direction.

We all stared at the now red and white surface of the Bloedzoeker which was changing, shifting, morphing into something. A map.

The map that formed on the surface of the stone was the red of Jaylon's blood. The deeper red was a tiny dot in the whole world, but as we watched the map zoomed in. Further and further it zoomed until it changed completely. An image formed, and we saw a young man. A young man that looked very much like Jaylon.

"Lucas," Thalia breathed.

Lucas was walking along a street, and I saw the sign for one shop that read Banana Pepper Cafe. He was looking around as though he were searching for something or someone. As we watched, a hand reached into the image from behind him and grabbed his shoulder. Lucas spun around just as the hand retracted, making a sweeping motion beside his head. Lucas' eyes went wide, and then they shut, and he fell to the ground.

"No!" Jaylon yelled, reaching forward and grabbing the stone. It was too later; even as he pressed his bloody palm against the milky white surface, it stayed just that. A milky white, smooth surface with smears of blood, but they didn't mix. No map or image formed again.

"What happened?" Jaylon whispered, my eyes flicked from Thalia, frozen in shock, to him, panicked and scared as he turned to me and shouted angrily. "What happened?"

"I-I don't know," I stuttered, my mind racing. I had seen that sign, Banana Pepper Cafe, I knew that place. "I know where that was though," I added hastily as Jaylon became clearly distressed. Both of them jerked their heads towards me, staring for a moment, eyes wide, and then Jaylon was leaning across the circle we had created, gripping my arms tightly.

"Where?" He demanded. "Where is my brother?"

"I-he's in the city," I said, pulling my arms back a little. He was gripping my arms so tightly that I could feel little stabs of pain from each of his fingers. "Jaylon, I'll take you there, please let go, you're hurting me."

He released his grip at once and stared for a minute at the marks left on my arm, then he leapt to his feet.

"Come on," he said, waving a hand to put out the candles. "Thalia, stay with the others. Louisa, you're driving."

"You're not leaving me!" Thalia exclaimed, leaping to her feet as I did. "I actually know him. I'm sorry, I know he's your brother but you haven't seen him in over a decade!"

"Fine, but we can't just leave them on their own," Jaylon said, rushing out of the chambers. He was summoning things, seeming to pull them out of the air as he gathered what he needed.

"Hey," Noah said, coming out of the kitchen, his mouth full of food. "What's going on?"

"Plan!" Thalia exclaimed suddenly. All heads turned to here. "I, uh, have a plan," she said in a quieter voice.

Twenty minutes later, we were back in the car. Thalia, Jaylon and I. Me driving.

"Oh gosh, I hope they'll be okay how we left them," Thalia said, staring at the house shrinking into the distance.

"They'll be fine," Jaylon said, though I could tell he wasn't paying attention to her.

"How'd you leave them?" I asked curiously. I hadn't been with them for the last little while they were talking to everyone. I had been preparing some food and things we would need for the long car drive.

"Well, we can't have them getting into the top floor or anything magical or, you know, dangerous," Thalia said when Jaylon remained silent. She was leaning forward from the backseat so that her head was between mine and Jaylon's in the front. "So we may have used a spell to trap them all in the Jacobson family section. Noah, who we know shouldn't get up to anything on his own, is the only one who can get in and out. The spell will wear off in a week if we don't come back for any reason."

"Why wouldn't we come back?" I asked in alarm, turning to look at her over my shoulder.

"Well, something did happen to Lucas," Thalia said. I thought back to the image of him in the Bloedzoeker, which was right now down the bottom of the bag I had packed to bring with us. Someone had done something to Lucas, and he had fallen to the ground and... and what? We didn't see anything after that. Was he okay?

We drove in silence for a while, and then I spoke up again.

"We know he was in the city, but he won't be by Banana Pepper Cafe anymore. How do we find him?" I was looking to Jaylon for my answer, but he didn't even seem to hear me.

"We may be able to do some sort of locator spell," Thalia said when it became clear Jaylon wasn't going to answer.

After that, we barely talked for the rest of the drive. Jaylon spent most of the time sitting back, staring out of the window. Thalia was on her phone, which I suppose she was happy to do seeing as she hadn't been able to use it since phones didn't work in the Silver Coven house. And that left me to drive.

I knew where I was going. We skirted around the edge of the town I grew up in where we had gone to fetch Charlie and found Thalia and her family, and then we were back on the highway heading towards the city. The same city I had run away to when I was sixteen, with a guy I barely knew who I was convinced was going to be mine forever.

When I started to become happy with Jaylon and accept who I was as a witch, I had wanted to never come back here. My 'forever' boyfriend had turned out to be some idiot that drank too much and played video games in all his spare time and couldn't even keep a job. Why I had stayed with Adam, I had no clue, I only knew that once I had gotten out and found what I could really have, I knew I never wanted back in.

Yet here I was.