Once upon a Midnight | BOOK I

Twenty-one

I was angry. No, I was furious. I paced back and forth, muttering curses underneath my breath and thinking up ways to exert my revenge.

"Kim, you need to calm down," Mikoto said softly. "You'll be able to think clearer if you relax."

I scoffed. "I should calm down? How dare she? I don't bloody care if she's my mum's sister. Has she gone mental? I'll teach her a lesson she'll never forget," I ranted, my eyes blazing with fury.

"How?" Mikoto raised an eyebrow and her lips thinned.

"Well... I'll... Maybe... I could... I don't know," I finally admitted. I slumped on the bed and looked to the wisps floating on the ceiling. How did things get this bad? Well, let's take a quick rewind to an hour before now. After the trial, I wasted no time before I went back to sleep. I was woken up by Mikoto who came to sleep in my room. I couldn't blame the poor girl. She killed a twelve year old and watched her come back to life. While I and Mikoto were discussing, Midnight limped into the room. His fur was burnt all over, one of his legs was broken, and he was extremely weak. I hadn't even noticed his absence before. I know, I don't get the medal as best owner of the year, but I was too worked up to notice.

I realised that was what Auntie Hilda meant by my cat attacking her. It would explain the burns Midnight suffered, and the claw marks on Auntie Hilda. There was a sheet of paper in Midnight's mouth, and when he gave it to me, I realised that it was a page from Irfan Yusuf's journal. Mikoto helped me with a few healing spells for Midnight, and the cat had been resting since. I, on the other hand, wasn't going to rest until I had my revenge.

"What's all this about anyway?" Mikoto asked.

"Well..." I took my time explaining everything about the journal and Sofie to Mikoto.

"So, you're saying my name was on this list of black-eyed children?" Mikoto mumbled something in Japanese. "We have to know how Hilda found out the book was with you."

"Nicolas mentioned something about surveillance demons..."

Mikoto shook her head. "No. There are no surveillance demons in rooms. Just the hallways and other public places," she said. "But we can summon our own surveillance demons to monitor Hilda. We might discover something."

"Won't she be able to detect them?" I asked.

"I know this cloaking spell. But to use it you'll have to use..." she trailed, observing me for a second, "...shadow magic."

"Oh," I said. That was definitely neither what I was expecting nor what I wanted to hear. I'd been trying to avoid the use of shadow magic even though I always had this longing towards it. It's as if the more I used it, the more I wanted to use it. Like a kind of slowpaced addiction. But if that's what I would need to monitor those around me, then I had no problem with it. "Where do I begin?"

Mikoto smiled. Half an hour later and I was sitting in front of a bowl filled with goat blood. The bowl was placed gently on two sigils. One was a summoning sigil, and the other was the sigil for the cloaking spell. Believe me when I say I had no idea how Mikoto got the blood. She gave me the necessary spells. They were both in Latin and I had to go over them a few times before finally deciding to cast the spell. When I was ready, I closed my eyes and reached out to the shadows. It took a little over five minutes before I was finally able to summon them on command. I felt the light around me dim as the shadows rose. Then, the shadows left the walls of the room and wrapped their cold hands around me. Like a jolt of electricity moving through me, I absorbed magick from the shadows, and began to cast the spells.

When I was done casting the spell, the surface of the blood rippled and a spider crawled out of it. Shadows oozed off the spider like smoke, and it was soon followed by dozens of spiders that came out of the blood too. As the spiders came out, they vanished, leaving no trace of magickal current behind.