Storm secrets, p.1
Storm Secrets, page 1
part #4 of Scarlet Jones Series
STORM SECRETS
Scarlet Jones, Book Four
D.N. HOXA
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Copyright © 2018 by D.N. Hoxa
This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. Any reproduction or other unauthorized use of the material or artwork herein is prohibited.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.
Table of Contents
Also by D.N. Hoxa
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Also by D.N. Hoxa
Also by D.N. Hoxa
———————————
Winter Wayne Series (Complete)
Bone Witch
Bone Coven
Bone Magic
Bone Spell
Bone Prison
Bone Fairy
Starlight Saga (Complete)
Assassin
Villain
Sinner
Savior
Morta Fox Trilogy (Complete)
Heartbeat
Reclaimed
Unchanged
Demonic Mage
Nova Unchained
One
My knees gave and I hit the ground hard. Lightning, like a charge of electricity, slithered all the way up to my chest like a snake. My hand vibrated as the handle of the lightning whip buzzed with energy. I couldn’t see anything anymore. The rain poured heavily, the sky throwing its own lightning at the monastery grounds, the thunder unable to reach my ears. I couldn’t feel the air filling my lungs, but I must have been breathing because I was still awake. Barely, but awake.
Come on, Scarlet, I thought to myself. Get up.
The demons could still be here.
There had been a lot of them coming in after Jane Dunham, Elisa’s sister, broke the gates surrounding the monastery, and every protection spell we’d put around it. Protection that we foolishly thought would hold against anything.
Well, it didn’t. Jane had broken through them like they hadn’t even been there. She searched for her sister, but Elisa had disappeared the second she’d felt her. And when Jane couldn’t find her, she disappeared, too, and left the gates wide open for the largest number of demons I’d ever seen to come right in and attack us. The only reason I was still alive was because of my dragon. The dragon that used to only ever turn into a sword before, had somehow taken the shape of a whip when the demons knocked me to the ground and almost killed me. The weapon had sensed the danger, like a live being, and it gave me the means to make sure I survived. I’d spun that whip made of lightning strikes around and reached demons from twenty feet away, but had I killed them all?
I didn’t think so.
So why wasn’t anyone coming for me?
Breathe, I thought, and focused on dragging in air to my lungs. On feeling it slip down my throat, until finally, the dark veil in front of my eyes began to fade. It faded and I saw.
I was in the middle of the front yard, in front of the three buildings of the monastery where I and all the other Storm witches seeking refuge lived. Ahead, a crowd of people stood perfectly still in front of the third building to the right, which used to be a chapel. My mind was all over the place and for the life of me, I couldn’t focus long enough to count them. All I could notice was the way they looked at me: wide eyes, open mouths, terrified.
As the view cleared more and more, I found myself wishing for darkness again. Because I began to see the bodies, too. And the pieces of charcoal, no longer engulfed in flameless fire. The leftovers of the demons I’d killed. And the bodies of the people they’d either killed or left unconscious. I was really hoping for the latter.
But the darkness didn’t return. Instead, the lightning coming from my hand dimmed. The more the whip shortened, the stronger I felt. Good thing, too, because I needed to get up. I needed to go see just how much damage the demons had caused—damage Jane Dunham had caused. Getting to my feet was easier than I thought. Just as I did, the lightning disappeared completely. The whip was no longer there, but it shaped itself back into a dark green, miniature dragon. This was the first time I was seeing it transform back, but I didn’t have it in me to be impressed.
When I began to move forward, the people did, too. I saw Grover and Cade running to me, soaking wet just like the rest of us, but even the rain hadn’t washed the blood off their skin completely.
“Ax,” I whispered before they reached me, just as I spotted his back in front of the chapel doors. He was holding something in his arms—a body. Maddy’s body.
“We need to put up protection, right now!” Grover shouted. He was right, of course, but I couldn’t focus on that. All I could do was run to Ax as he walked into the chapel with Maddy’s body in his arms.
The girl was pale, her eyes closed and her mouth wide open. Ax put her on one of the benches. My ice-cold fingers were on her neck the next second. A cry escaped my lips when I felt her pulse. It was strong; her heart was still beating. She was breathing—just unconscious.
With a deep sigh, Ax stood up and turned to me, grabbing my face in his hands and looked down at my body. But he didn’t need to. I was perfectly fine. Physically. His eyes had lost all color, and he breathed heavily. I squeezed his hands to reassure him.
“We need to get everyone inside,” I whispered, too scared to even think about what we’d find on the ground.
“Are you okay?” Ax asked.
“I’m fine. Fine,” I repeated, as if I wanted to reassure myself, too. “You?”
“I’m okay,” he said without missing a beat. “Let’s go.”
Everybody still awake helped us drag all the bodies inside the chapel. Fallon had come out of the dormitory building. She’d been taking care of Luca, who had been badly injured while coming to find us in the monastery and was healing very slowly.
“We need spells,” Grover said, standing in front of the open double doors. “We need them right now!”
Terrified that he’d seen something outside, I searched for Calvin Stone. He was a Storm witch, too, with a very wealthy daddy, who gave us food, clothes, spell stones and training equipment in return for a seat at the “leadership” table for his son. I’d seen him in the chapel at one point, and he seemed to be the only one who wasn’t helping us carry everyone inside.
I found him sitting behind a U-shaped desk we’d put at the end of the room to serve us for meetings. He was just sitting there, looking ahead at nothing, completely still. “Calvin! Where are the spell stones?” My voice echoed in the high ceiling. He flinched at the sound of his name.
“I don’t have any,” he cried. “We used them all.”
He wasn’t even lying. We’d used all the spells his father had brought us, and Elisa’s sister had gone through them without breaking a sweat. Better yet, Elisa had left, so we didn’t have anyone who could conjure a spell, either.
Except the Spellmaker.
“Ezra,” I breathed, reminding myself of the eleven-year old boy who could create spells. I’d found Ezra in my room when we returned from a very long and painful trip to find him. We’d seen his house blow up and thought he was dead, but the kid was healthy as a mule. He’d seen a vision that had warned him, told him to escape even before a gang of werewolves attacked his house in hopes of capturing him and making him create spells for them. As if werewolves can even conjure.
But they hadn’t caught him. Now, the whole world thought he was dead, but Ezra had been with us for ten days, and he’d created ten spells for us—none of them for protection. In those ten days, we’d built a small hideout whichever way we could behind the monastery, deep into the woods surrounding it. We’d protected it with the strongest spells we had, in case something went wrong and we needed to keep him safe.
In case the demons came.
Well, the demons had come, and Ax had taken him and Sienna, our leader, to the hideout, before returning to the fight. Now, he needed to come with me to get him back.
“He’s safe,” Ax said from across the room near the benches on the right. Sometimes I wondered if he could read my thoughts.
“We need to find him.”
“We need to make sure these people are safe first.”
The people. Out of a hundred and thirty-one of us, sixty-four were still standing. The rest were lying where we put them in the chapel, on the benches and on the floor.
“He’s dead,” someone said. My heart stopped beating for a split second as I turned to the girl towering over a man lying on the ground. My body shaking, I rushed to her side and put one hand on the man’s chest, the other on his neck. He was cold, very cold, and he wasn’t moving. At all.
“She’s dead, too!” another girl cried, pointing at a body on the bench.
“She, too.”
“And he.”
Tanya, Lois, Mark, Alice, Vern…twenty-one people. Tw enty-one Storm witches were gone for good.
As the people cried and hugged each other, I went to check the vitals of every person in the room once again. The number didn’t change. Twenty-one. Darkness spread inside my chest, and I wanted to scream until I passed out, but I bit my tongue and tried to focus instead.
Impossible.
I tried to think of a plan.
There was no plan.
Could people come back from death?
No, they could not.
So…
“What now?” The words left my lips before I realized. Ax and Grover were by my side, looking at the ground, shaking their heads. They could have been crying, too, or their faces could have been wet from the rain outside.
“We really need protection. They can come back,” Grover whispered, hating every word he said. But he needed to. We all needed to focus on what to do next.
Dragging my feet at first, I pushed past the nausea and the dizziness, until I reached the desk where Calvin was sitting. He was scared. So scared he looked like a little boy who’d peed his pants and was trying to hide it. He didn’t want to tell us that he kept us fed and clothed anymore. He just wanted to get the fuck out of there and never look back.
“Call your father,” I said, holding onto the desk until I gathered a bit more strength. “We need spell stones as fast as he can bring them. Can you do that?”
Calvin’s eyes zeroed in on me as if he just realized I was in front of him. I didn’t want to pressure him now, but what other choice did we have? Elisa was gone. We had nobody else who could conjure a spell, which further proved why we needed other witches with us at all times. Why we needed people like Jeanne Dubois—the witch we'd found hidden from the rest of the world in the woods near a river, stuck in a magical prison she couldn't break out of. Because Ezra couldn’t come up with spells the way I thought he would. He couldn’t make them up on the go whenever he pleased—or we needed one. They had to come to him. The process took time. Time we didn’t have.
“Okay,” Calvin finally whispered, and shaking so hard he almost fell off the chair, he reached for the phone in his pocket.
I turned to Grover and Ax. “I’m going to Ezra.”
“I’m coming with,” said Ax with a nod.
“Fallon and I will keep watch. Don’t take too long,” Grover said, walking backwards to the front of the room where everybody else was—the dead witches, and the living ones, mourning. Looking at their faces, it was clear that none of them had seen horror such as this before. None of them had faced so many demons at once before.
Angry demons. Demons who killed instead of just sucking our magic.
Pearl Houston, the vampire leader of the ECU, came to my mind.
On our way back from the trip to find Ezra, we’d been taken in for questioning by the ECU. They’d wanted to make sure that we had nothing to do with the attack of the werewolves on Ezra’s house. At the time, all of us had been convinced that the Spellmaker was dead, so they got nothing out of us.
But we got something out of them, something we didn’t think was very important at the time. The vampire leader told us that the demons had gotten more violent. That they were now attacking other paranormals, too, not just Storms. She hadn’t been exaggerating, it seemed. The demons never killed us before. They left us unconscious but never snapped our necks or used physical force against us.
Maybe that was because they were never met with resistance. We were never able to do anything to them. Now, we had spells. Now, the others threw fire at the demons, and that must have gotten them angry.
Trying to understand them meant losing my mind in a different world, so I resisted and focused on the present. With Ax right behind me, I ran out of the building and to the garden in the back. Climbing the fences in the rain was much harder than it needed to be, especially since we’d already nailed pieces of wood here and there to help us up, but the more time passed, the bigger the danger Ezra and Sienna could be in. That was one hell of a motivator.
I lost count of how many times I fell on my face while running in the dense woods, where the grey light of the angry sky couldn’t reach through the branches and leaves. I had the way memorized, and it would have normally taken us about five minutes to get there, but in these conditions, it felt like an eternity before we saw the little cabin constructed in between two large tree trunks. The spell stones protecting it were placed all around them. I felt their magic when we stepped in front of the door, shaking with fear instead of cold. Pushing the door open, I held my breath and stepped inside, expecting to see the worst scenario possible—Ezra and Sienna gone.
But they weren’t gone.
They weren’t fine, either.
“Help him!” Sienna shouted, pointing at Ezra, sitting on the ground in front of the tiny fireplace, his eyes half open, looking ahead at nothing, and his lips moving furiously as he chanted in Latin.
“What happened?” Ax asked, shutting the door while I kneeled in front of Ezra, terrified to touch him. I moved in front of his eyes, but he didn’t see me. They were glazed over, as if his mind wasn’t working, but it should have been because the words he was chanting were spells. Dark magic spells. And he never even stopped to take a breath.
“He fell asleep, and a minute ago, he just sat up and began to speak. I tried waking him up, slapping him, shaking him—it’s not working,” said Sienna, struggling to catch her breath.
“Ezra,” I said, slowly moving my hand over his leg. He didn’t react at all, just continued to chant. “Ezra, look at me.” I raised my voice, but he didn’t care. His face was pale, his shoulders perfectly straight, his hands on the ground by his sides. It was like…like he was possessed.
The thought of losing Ezra made me forget that he was just a kid. I grabbed his face in my hands and pulled him toward me.
“Ezra! Wake up!” I shouted with all my strength. “Wake up, Ezra. Look at me!”
“Stand him up,” Ax said. He put his hands under the kid’s arms, but the second he did that, Ezra’s chanting grew louder. His voice was strong, sharp, completely transformed. And the ground began to shake.
“Ezra, please,” I breathed, but he couldn’t hear me through the sound of his own voice.
“We have to take him out!” Ax shouted, pulling Ezra up by his torso. I grabbed his legs and stood up. That cabin was weak. It wasn’t meant to be shaken to the core, and that’s exactly what it felt like in that moment. Like a piece of the earth was falling. The wood wasn’t going to hold, so we took Ezra out and sat him on the wet ground, rain pouring on his pale face.
“Ezra, can you hear me?” I shouted close to his ear. I’d rather leave him deaf than lose him for good. “You have to stop! Stop it!” The ground continued to shake. The wood of the cabin groaned. “Ezra!”
But Ezra didn’t stop spilling those awful words. The ground kept on shaking until the cabin fell, completely destroyed in a matter of seconds. I didn’t know what else to do, so I just grabbed him in my arms and hugged him.
“Please don’t,” I whispered in his ear, hiding his face under my neck. Please don’t die. Please.
Maybe it happened right away, or maybe it took time, but the boy finally stopped chanting abruptly, making me second-guess my senses. The ground no longer shook. The silence that stretched in the woods was broken only by the raindrops falling like they were in a hurry to get to us. Neither of us moved for a long second, until Ezra pushed away from my arms.
His eyes were open wide, focused on my face now. His brows were raised as he looked me over, confused as hell. Tears streamed from my eyes as I moved away to give him some space, but it was impossible for anyone to tell because of the rain. He looked behind him at Ax and Sienna, and then to the side at the broken cabin.
“What…what happened?” the boy whispered, his hands shaking. I grabbed them and pulled him up to his feet, desperately needing to make sure that he was okay. And he was. He stood on his own without trouble. Thank you, thank you, thank you, I prayed to whoever had heard me.
“Nothing. The cabin broke,” I whispered, putting my arm around his shoulders. “We need to go.”
Ax and Sienna widened their eyes at me. Maybe they wanted me to tell Ezra exactly what had happened, how he’d chanted, and how it had caused an earthquake that had broken the cabin down. But I kept my mouth shut. For now, he didn’t need to know. Enough waited for us back at the monastery, and I didn’t want him worrying about anything except how to make a protection spell for us, one strong enough that even Jane Dunham couldn’t break through. Silently and with my head down, I led them back as fast as I could, trying not to think about all the bodies we needed to bury. All the people who had lost their lives today. Trying not to blame myself.
