Page 8 of Dancing With Darkness

Heartache was all too familiar to me. I didn’t blame my heart for wanting to run away from me. Sometimes I wanted to run away from me too.

If the others felt what I was feeling they didn’t show it. They simply kept trudging on in silence. So I did the same. Though, every step I took felt like walking with weighted down legs.

The moment we stepped out of the trees and into the clearing the feeling of something truly evil slid down my spine and wrapped itself around me.

“There,” Finn shouted as he pointed at something up ahead of us on the ground. He took off running, leaving both Rain and myself to curse him out. With no other choice, we took off running after him. He was fast.

We stopped and stared down at the black backpack on the ground. Not far from it, in the dirt, the cracked screen of Isobel’s cellphone stared up at the sky.

There was no Isobel in sight.

Finn picked up her phone while Rain went for the backpack. Neither were of use to me, they couldn’t tell me what happened to her or where she’d gone off to from here.

I stepped around them and my eyes scanned the clearing. They caught on the hole in the ground. My throat constricted and my vision blurred.

She’d been down there, chained up and beaten.

She’d drowned down there, who knew how many times.

Her wanting to come back to this place all by herself made a whole lot more sense to me now. As far as I knew this would have been her first time returning to this spot since Rain had pulled her out. Closure was a heady thing and perhaps something she went looking for before starting her new life with her rightful coven at her side.

She never spoke of her time down there and only Rain really knew the true extent of her nightmares.

Still, she should have obviously brought someone with her and not gone it alone.

“There’s blood on the grass,” Finn whispered and I closed my eyes to beat back the horror I heard thick in his voice.

I did not want to see Isobel’s blood smeared across the grass, confirming my worst nightmare. It was proof that something horrible had happened to her here.

Again.

“We’ll call the others.” Rain’s voice came out sure and steady. For Finn’s benefit, I was sure. “I want every inch of the Council’s land searched. This reeks of them.”

It was either them or hunters. Honestly, I couldn’t think of which one would be a worse fate for the beautiful woman I had fallen in love with.

“I thought all the Council members in this area were dead,” Finn whispered in a voice that shook. He was not taking this well at all.

I was sure most people thought that. Just as I was sure most people were dead wrong.

Like most cockroaches, they survived pretty much everything.

I stood there, seeing Isobel in the back of my mind. She stood in the open clearing in front of me, staring at me with those dark, fathomless eyes of hers. For once they weren’t twinkling with mischief. Instead they were beckoning me, begging me to help her. Her long, black hair blew out in the wind at her sides before wrapping itself around her like a cloak.

A strong gust of wind blew through the clearing and when it left it took the image of Isobel with it, scattering her through the air as if she were nothing more than ashes.

One thing I knew for certain, down to the very bottom of my blackened soul, Isobel was very much alive and she needed me now more than anything.

“Did… Did you just see that?” Finn croaked out. “See… her?”

Rain growled like a wounded animal.

Correction, she didn’t need me more than anything. She needed us.

Just as we needed her.

There’d be nothing to us without her. No coven. No lovers. No happily ever after.

We’d all just be the fucked up, half empty, used up shells of the broken men we were before she stormed her way into our hearts.

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