“The only way we can break the curse is by overpowering it with white magic. I need you to speak to Delilah, call out to her, and bring her soul back to her body,” Layla instructs me, and I nod.
“Got it.”
“You guys need to be on standby,” she tells the others. “Draining all our magic will render us powerless, and we'll pass out when it's done.”
One by one, my friends step forward to be on standby as the witches begin wielding their white magic to counter the black magic that possesses Delilah. I take a deep breath, my fists curling at my sides as I prepare to get my mate, my wife, out of danger.
Chapter 25 - Delilah
“Gwen! Gwen, can you hear me?!”I call out mentally to the younger woman as I see her walking through the market ahead of me.
We're in Oakland; I recognize the lighthouse in the distance from our visit there, but I've never been to the market.
Somehow, I'm stuck inside Gwen's mind, living out a memory of hers as she strolls through the market and picks up fruits and vegetables.
A sweet tune echoes around me, and I realize it's coming from Gwen's memory as she sings along to a song playing through her headphones. I faintly remember how I got here—I’d been pulled toward the dark magic surrounding Gwen in her kitchen, and I’d reached for her hand on the table, partly because I couldn’t control myself or my movements, but there was a part of my conscious mind that remained alert enough to attempt to get her out.
The only thing eerier than the darkness in her eyes was being swept into a mundane, lighthearted memory in which she’s going about her day without a care in the world.
Something feels off, and an unsettling shiver courses down my spine, straightening me out just in time to see a group of four beautiful, graceful women walking toward Gwen, seemingly oblivious to her existence as they chat and giggle.
My heart stops for a split second when one of the women shoves her shoulder into Gwen, knocking her fruit basket out of her hand. The basket crashes, fruits and vegetables tumbling out and rolling away, and Gwen flies into panic.
The group stops to help her, but then I notice the woman pulling out a red apple from her pocket and placing it on the top of the basket when they're done picking up the things that spilled out.
There’s a sinister glint in the woman’s green eyes as she joins her friends and they continue walking away.
Gwen glances over her shoulder and frowns at the women approaching me. I try stopping them by standing in their way, their faces blurry as I try to note any physical features that will help me track them. But they walk through me as if I’m not even there, reminding me that this is just a memory from Gwen’s mind.
A memory I wasn’t able to see before, probably because it wasn’t significant. Just then, Gwen reaches into her basket and pulls out the very same red, shining apple that the woman snuck in.
“Gwen! No! Don’t!”I race to her, panicking when she lifts the apple to her mouth. She takes a crackling bite, the sound cutting through the faint music playing in my ears, and I try to touch her, try to slap the apple out of her hand, but it's pointless when my hands go flying through her arms.
She chews on the bite of the fruit, her eyes turning from blue to black as that blackness fills the veins visible on her neck. A thunderous, roaring laugh echoes all around us, but it appears I'm the only one who can hear it, and Gwen continues chewing the poisoned apple until her veins are pulsing with black energy.
She'd consumed the dark magic, and that's how it entered Scarborough. Discreetly. Stealthily. It was perfectly orchestrated in a way that would infiltrate the Shadow Fang Pack through me.
The ritual we conducted to prove Gwen’s innocence must have been how the dark magic infiltrated my mind in the firstplace. I was the only one who employed my magic that night, dropped my guard low enough for the dark energy to creep in unnoticed. I was the one who had my hands on Gwen that night to enter her mind, while something else entered mine. The dark lord used an innocent girl to get to us; that's why Arianna's vision led us to Oakland, where we'd find Gwen.
The four women who bumped into Gwen must have been the same witches Arianna saw in her vision, helping the warlock cast a spell on Oakland.
This is what it was about.
The vision wasn't directly predicting the future, as if decisions are purposely being put off or made at the last moment, so that no vision can truly predict the future.
It's as if he knows our next moves, always one step ahead, and even now, the sinister laugh echoing around sounds like the warlock haunting Gwen's mind, haunting me, taunting us because he's always one step ahead.
Suddenly, Gwen and I are sprung out of the market, landing up in Scarborough, in the cottage where our bodies are stuck in trances at the kitchen table. I can see myself standing by her, holding her hand just the way I did before I was hauled into her mind, and that memory of hers in the market.
A dark shadow is cast behind her body, and I call out her name, trying to get her attention.
“Gwen! Gwen, can you hear me?!”I yell at her as she sits at the table, but the dark shadow lurking behind her morphs into an image of her, dark, ominous, frightening, snarling at me with blackened teeth.
As soon as I touch Gwen's physical hand, a black talon from the apparition of darkness grips my wrist, and I instantly fall to my knees, weakened by the dark force.
“Gwen, please! You have to fight it!”I plead with her, realizing that the dark energy has consumed her soul, and it's threatening to take mine. It entered her body when she ate that apple, and now it's draining her light life force, turning her soul into a draining force of darkness that's stealing my light.
A talon wraps around my neck, cutting off my breathing as I'm dragged off my knees, lifted into the air, and facing Gwen's shadow.
