Celestial Heartbeat (Book One) COMPLETE

Chapter Sixteen - Salvation (REN)

NOTE: STARTING A MUSIC FEATURE, WHERE IN THE MEDIA SECTION THERE WILL BE A SONG THAT INSPIRED THE CHAPTER WHILE I WAS WRITING IT/FITS THE CHAPTER

ALSO I'M HALF ASLEEP WHEN I'M UPLOADING THIS SO I HOPE IT ACTUALLY MAKES SENSE, I APOLOGISE.

~Ren~

Evie didn’t get it.

I didn’t give two shits about the carnival.

Or her stupid friend Vi, or Chris, or Alex.

Or anything else for that matter.

I only wanted her to come to the carnival opening because I was worried that if she didn’t come she would turn back to that evil book and wind up hurt again, or worse, dead. Showing up to her house and finding her passed out and bloody was a bad enough of an experience to haunt me the rest of my life. I did not want a repeat.

I felt guilty for having suggested that it could help me.

Le Livre des Lunes.

What a joke it was.

It’s pages were the very reason behind what I was today. It was the power from that book that coursed through my veins, causing me to be a slave to the moon. I had been nothing short of naïve for believing it could do anything but hurt anyone who went near it.

Evie had been going near it for me.

And she got hurt because of me.

It made me feel sick to my stomach.

That was the sort of dark magic that I was used to. The sort of magic that left the user battered up, bloody and reeling from the thoughts of death. I’d known a couple of casters when I was really young. My family had rallied up a few willing casters who offered to try break the curse on us. They would try their hardest, spend hours chanting strange words and tracing patterns on themselves, but nothing could undo the horror that the Delaney family had bestowed on us. Those casters, too, had passed out a lot and were always covered in thick black marks that closely resembled tattoos. It made me scared when I was little, and it still scared me now. Watching the Casters as they would chant, their eyes would gloss over as they grew with power, their voices rising, their movements becoming more deliberate until they were screaming and the blood would pour from their nose, sometimes their mouth and ears too. It was like they were possessed and couldn’t even tell what was happening to them.

I hated thinking of Evie falling into that state.

Panic had consumed me all day as I wondered if she’d practiced any more with the book, and whether I would wind up at her house and find her passed out again. Luckily she hadn’t tried anything yet, but that just made me more determined to not let her leave my sight.

“Did you find the book?” I asked her as she sped down the highway, anxiety plastered across her face. My question only made it thicken.

“Maybe.” She hedged, chewing her lip. “I’m not sure if it’s the right one though.”

“Hmm.” I murmured thoughtfully, knowing full well that she did find the book, and that she knew it was the right one. “Maybe I can take a look at it when we head back.”

And by ‘look at it’, I meant ‘hide it from Evie’.

I didn’t want Evie to lose the control that she craved to have over her powers because of me. It was all backwards.

Evie was good.

Too good for me.

Too good for the silly school girl crush on me that she’d admitted last night, not realizing that I was her only audience.