Page 3 of Road To Runes

I licked my lips, a smidgen of guilt joining the cookies in the pit of my stomach.

As Asher's younger sister, Laura had taken our breakup pretty hard. She had becomemysister over the past several years,same as Priya. While I had avoided her a little to try and heal the wounds I had suffered thanks to her no good brother, I didn't want her to think it was because I didn't want to be her friend anymore.

"I'll talk to her," I promised. "Just...I'm not ready to talk about this yet, okay?"

"That I understand." Priya took a sip from her mug. "But I'm starting to think that you going quiet isn'tjustabout Asher."

The hairs on my arms bristled. She was certainly the sharpest knife inourkitchen drawer.

"What are you up to?" she asked. "Hecate isn't exactly spilling the beans, either."

Priya had grilled Hecate, too? My grimalkin familiar kept tighter lips than I did. Hopefully, whatever Priya had bribed her with hadn't been enough to make her crack.

I got up from the table and exaggerated a sigh, complete with a big shoulder gesture. "I wonder what it's like to live with people who have faith in you?"

"Oh, you're such a drama queen-" Priya flinched as an envelope materialised with a crack only a foot above our heads, and it drifted its way onto the table between us.

The muscles in my jaw tightened, sending a ripple of tension all the way down my neck to my shoulders as I registered the wordsBeatrix Bishopon the front. I hated everything about that name; the way it looked, sounded, the works.

The moment I left their house, I committed to purge the name Bishop from every facet of my life. I changed my name from Bishop to Silver as soon as I could, with the help of my new housemates. Even the sight of a chess set had me breaking out in shivers.

I turned the letter over in my hands. I would have recognised that handwriting from the other side of the room. That was thework of my grandmother: Pearl Bishop, the woman who had locked me up for the first twenty years of my life.

Chapter 2

The letter landed an inch from Priya's cup and she immediately pulled it away and held it to her chest. For a silent moment, the two of us stared at it.

"Do you think she cursed this one?" Priya asked.

It wouldn't be the first time.

Despite not knowing where I lived, my grandmother could still magically materialise her letters to wherever I was. When I hadn't responded to the initial slew of letters she had sent not long after I had escaped the family home, she had sent a curse to vent her frustrations. I had avoided it by wearing gloves every time I opened a letter from her, but when Priya had picked the curse apart, we discovered what the dark magic would have done.

My grandmother had designed the curse to shut down every one of my senses, which would have plunged me into total sensory deprivation. I wanted to vomit up the Oreos at the thought. My intense claustrophobia acted out even when I entered a too-small room. Being trapped in my own body withnothing to orient me was a nightmare only she could have dreamed up.

If Ihadsuccumbed to the curse, my only option would have been to crawl back to the Bishop family and beg them to lift it. And I doubted they would have without some serious conditions.

"Why don't you throw this one away?" Priya stared at the letter as if it was Hecate's regurgitated dinner. "Nothing they say to you is worth hearing."

"I know." I pulled my biker gloves out of my pocket and jammed them onto my hands. "But I need to stay one step ahead of them and to do that, I need to stay up to date."

That, and their desperation was mildly entertaining.

The first letters my grandmother had sent reeked of false authority. As if hoping that if she sounded stern enough that I would just traipse on back to her and allow them to lock me up in the basement like they had planned before I left. Over time, the letters had remained stern, but devolved into rage that I would have dreaded to see in person, and then into a sheepish but still obnoxiously expectant narrative.

But they didn't exactly wantmeback. The night I fled with Asher and Hecate, Hecate had activated my power for the first time. In the resulting magical explosion, I had inadvertently absorbed the powers of every person present. The Bishops wanted their powers back. But I had no doubt that they also wanted me to pay for defying them for four years.

"Are you sure you don't want to open that down here?" Priya asked, as I picked the letter up and headed for the hallway.

"No, I'm good." I didn't want an audience to whatever vileness they had sent me this time.

"Okay. Here if you need to talk. Remember that!"

"Got it."

I climbed the stairs, the banister still rickety under my hand from when Edward had slid down it too hard. For all our DIY expertise in this household, we didn't have a woodwork expert.

For that reason, all the runes I had carved into the frame of my door looked like a toddler had drawn them. As a druid, I carved runes into everything of importance. My door frame kept unwanted foreign magic out, and the runes carved into the floorboards under the rug in my room concentrated the power of my spells and rituals. Even my phone case had a rune carved into it to avoid getting lost. A common problem for the likes of me.

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