A Wicca's Tale Book One: Beautiful Magic

Through the Woods

Chapter Eight: Through the Woods

I went back to the room as fast as I could without tipping the man in the grey robe off. My chest was tight and I could feel a clammy sweat on my skin. My only thought was to get out of here and go away, so far away that they could never find me.

I made it back to the room without collapsing. I entered quickly and slammed the door loudly. I turned to sew Luna look at me from the bed, shrieking slightly and covering herself with a pillow. She’d been undressing, and all that she had on were her underclothes. I barely had time to register that information before my face turned crimson.

“Jeez Gabriel!” she said blushing worse than me. “Knock first will you? It wouldn’t hurt once in a while to---.” She broke off midsentence staring at my face. I knew she had sighted the fear in my eyes. “What did you see?” she asked. Not caring about how she looked anymore she ran over to me and repeated what she’d said, “What did you see?”

“The Fraters,” I gasped out, trying in vain not to look anywhere but her face, “They’re here, in the tavern.”

“How many?”

“I just saw one, but they travel in packs.”

“We need to leave,” she said walking back toward the bed to put her clothes on.

“Yeah, that thought hadn’t occurred to me surprisingly.” I said.

“Just shut up and pack,” she replied pulling her shirt over her head.

We paid off the man who owned the inn and left as fast as we could. Luna did her spell in the woods to find which way we needed to go, and we began to travel to the east. I knew it was a bad plan to begin traveling so late in the day, but we needed to get out of there as soon as possible. The more Fraters that showed up, the more we were in trouble.

“How, can it be that they’re everywhere?” Luna exclaimed frustrated. “I mean, they can’t have the power to be in multiple places at once!”

“We knew they were there to begin with though,” I said. “You said yourself that they were the ones that probably removed those records from the Hall. We had a risk of running into them anyway.”

“Still,” Luna said, “Is there any place they aren’t? I mean, we’ve traveled halfway around this country, and there hasn’t been a single place, so far, that they haven’t been. I didn’t know that their organization was this enormous.”

“I don’t get how they’re rallying all these supporters,” I said, “They must've needed ferocious negotiating skills to convince everyone in your town that you were evil.” Luna stopped suddenly, and I almost ran right into her. “Watch it!” I said worried that I might've hurt her, “I nearly hit you.”

“Maybe they don’t need ferocious negotiating skills,” she said acting like I hadn’t spoken. “Maybe they just need ferocious power.”

“Huh?”

Luna glanced up at me looking slightly scared and started walking again. “When I was first attacked by them,” she said, “They chased after me shooting arrows and wielding swords. Maybe they scared the villagers into hating me with their weapons.”

“Makes sense,” I said thinking about it, “My village is full of hardheads, but not very strong hardheads. It would’ve been easy to ‘convince’ them that all the witches in my town were abnormal.”

“But now the question is: where is Dominus getting all the people to ‘convince’ others?” she said.

“Dominus?” I asked never having heard the name before. “Who’s that?”