They will come hunting

They couldn’t find me here, they couldn’t. I didn’t know what they would do to me if they did, I just knew I didn’t want to find out. My mother’s warning ‘they will come hunting’ echoing in my head. I knew I had to be strong, but right now I was scared.

I could hear their voices through the trees in the bush. The one good thing I could say about this situation was that I was glad I was on a hike with places to hide and not out in the open.

“Come out, come out, wherever you are”

“We won’t hurt you little witch….. well mostly”. Witch? How did they know? They really were hunting me just like my mother said.

“We just want to talk”

“Mellllllllaannnniiieeeee” he said in a melodic voice.

Shit, how did he know who I was? What was even happening right now? I don’t know how I managed to get into this position. The spell that I cast with Annabelle was supposed to protect us both.

I pulled out my phone to call Annabelle to see if she was ok and to warn her, but I hesitated. I could almost smell the sweat of the men around me, looking for me, hunting me. I had myself hidden in a log that I had found, but I didn’t want to risk them hearing me call her. I was terrified of what they would do to me if they found me. So i decided to text her instead.

MELANIE: Annabelle, are you ok? It didn’t work. They are after me. You need to run

I saw the three dots appear like she was typing. Then my phone started to vibrate as I saw her call coming through. I panicked and hung up on her.

MELANIE: I can’t talk. I was hiking when they came and I’m hiding. I can’t let them find meANNABELLE: What are you talking about? Is this some kind of joke???

Some kind of joke? Is she serious? Why would I joke about something like this.

MELANIE: What? No. I’m serious. I need help. I don’t understand, the spell was supposed to stop this, but they know who I am. They said my name!

ANNABELLE: What? Crap. No this can’t be. I’m at home and it seems safe here. I even saw my neighbour a few minutes ago and he didn’t even blink at me. I’m pretty sure the spell worked. Let me have a look what I can find, but no one is after me.

Ok breathe, i just had to breathe…. which was easier said than done right now. I was afraid to breathe…..what if they heard me? I heard the crunch of a stick near me and saw a shadow at the end of the log I was hiding it. If he moved any closer he was bound to check in here.

“Find anything?” I heard one of them ask. Shit there were two of them near me now. I could feel my heart racing, I was definitely on the verge of a panic attack right now. Calming thoughts Melanie, calming thoughts….. I closed my eyes and just wished to myself to be anywhere but here.

“Melanie?” I heard a familiar voice ask. “How did you get here?”

I opened my eyes and I was in Annabelle’s lounge room sitting on her couch, just the same as I had been sitting in that log.

“Ummmm”

She was staring at me in shock like she needed an explanation. One that right at this moment I couldn’t give her. Yes I was a witch but I wasn’t powerful enough to transport myself. Did Annabelle find a spell? By the way she was looking at me, something told me that was not the answer either. She seemed to know how I got here just as well as I did. If she wasn’t trying to make it happen then she wouldn’t be looking at me like I suddenly grew two heads or some other unknown phenomenon.

“Melanie, what is going on right now?” She asked again, this time I could tell she was trying her best to be calm. Did she even sound a little frightened of me?

“Honestly, I have no idea. I don’t know how I got here. All I know is the men were closing in on my hiding spot so i closed my eyes to try to stop my panic attack and wished to be anywhere but here.”

“But that doesn’t make any sense. You don’t have that kind of magic. I don’t even know if that kind of magic exists these days”

We were both relatively new to magic and being witches. Our mothers were best friends, and when mine died a few months ago she left me a letter. It was a letter that changed both of our lives.

My dearest Melanie,

I know that if you are reading this, then the worst has happened.

I want you to know how much I love you, but right now I need you to be strong.

There is so much that I want to say to you, and I hope that I got to say it to you while I was alive, but I always knew that there was one thing that I couldn’t ever tell you and that you would have to wait until now to know.

I hope in time you can understand why I made the decision I did and it was one that I struggled with right up until the moment you were born. Once I saw you and looked into your beautiful innocent eyes starting up at me I knew what needed to be done.

The truth is you are a witch.

I didn’t ever want to tell you this, but you now need to know. With my death the spell that I cast when you were born will be broken. It will be broken for you and Annabelle too. I hope her mother tells her and you don’t have to be the one to do it. Katie asked me to do the spell on her as well because we didn’t want you girls to grow up the way that we did. Being a witch is a painful life. If you use your magic, and your powers grow they will come hunting.

Be safe Melanie.

I love you.

Always,

Mum xoxo

I remember reading that letter and having so many questions. I turned it over so many times hoping that there would be more. There had to be an explanation about all of this. What did she mean that they would come hunting? Who would come? At the time I didn’t even think witches existed, they were just a fairy tale and made for some good TV. So many books were written about witches but even the history books of the witch trials didn’t make them real, they were just stories of people who didn’t know better not actual real life witches. I also had to be the one to tell Annabelle as well. She didn’t speak to her mother and didn’t even know how to contact her. We weren’t going to get any answers from Katie about this.

I gave the letter to Annabelle to read and her reaction was similar to mine, but she wasn’t scared of the warning mum gave, she seemed excited.

“We have to find out how to use our powers! We are witches! This is incredible Melanie!” she said to me at the time like a giddy school girl. It’s funny when I think back to our reactions. Mine was shock and fear. Hers was shock and excitement. Maybe because it had been a letter from my mum so close to losing her but I couldn’t find it in me to be excited, but I tried my best to go along with her crazy ideas when she decided that we had to research everything there was to know about witches. I wanted to know more too, but I think we had different reasons.

We found some basic information and decided to try some easy spells, and to our shock they worked. Basic stuff like lighting candles without a match or a lighter, and moving a jar on the table ever so slightly. It was exciting, scary, but also exciting. I started to feel a little of that excitement as well. So we kept playing around with it and we got better. That was when the trouble started.

Annabelle had this creepy neighbour, we tried to stay away from him, everyone around the area did. He was just known as the crazy old man, except one day as we were walking in her front door he came over to us, and he wasn’t his usual crazy self.

He looked at us with the calmest of expressions but his eyes weren’t focused and said “We are coming.” “The more you do, the more you feed us.” “You can’t hide from us.” There was a pause between every sentence, like as if the words had to travel, then he just walked away like nothing happened.

We were terrified, so we went searching for something to help, which is why we did the spell to protect us, we told each other that we would stop doing magic after that, at least until we knew more.

“Melanie??? Earth Melanie” Annabelle said snapping her fingers in front of my face.

I broke out of my memory and looked at her startled remembering how I ended up in her lounge room again. “Yep sorry”

“Ok good, because we kind of need to figure out some stuff like what the hell happened, and why are people after you because if your texts weren’t some crazy prank, then people are after you, and think your a witch, which all seems way to convenient timing to not be terrifying” I nodded, picking at the sleeves of my jumper.

After being chased terrified didn’t seem to be enough to explain how I was feeling.

“Well given that everything I said was real and they even used the word witch when coming after me, I think they are coming for us, what happened to the protection spell? Did it not work?”

“It should have, and no one has come after me yet. I’ll do some research. Are you ok though? How about I made you a tea and you stay here tonight”.

As Annabelle went to make me some tea, I stood up and looked around her apartment. Her desk that was nestled in the corner of the room, was messy as usual and covered in books. It blended into the rest of the room though with her dark bookshelves that I always admired. I went over to look at what she had open, she mentioned getting some witch books and I was curious. As much as being a witch terrified me, I also found it alluring, I loved witches growing up my favourite movie was The Craft and favourite TV show was Sabrina the Teenage Witch, I just was scared of it being real. I had no idea how Annabelle managed to get witch books, I figured she would find stuff online and we would have to do some trial and error to figure out what was real and what wasn’t. Whilst everything we tried didn’t work straight away I was surprised by our success rate.

On her desk there was a book that didn’t have a name and looked old sitting under some old takeaway wrappers with a page bookmarked. My curiosity got the better of me and I opened it to have a look.

“Here you go” Annabelle said as she walked in with my tea but the moment she saw me she stopped and the mug shattered on the floor. She jumped back “Shit”

“Are you okay? What happened”

“Nothing” she stammered and just kept starting at me.

“What are you doing looking through my desk?”

“What? What do you mean? I was just having a look, seeing if you had any new books. You mentioned you got some witch ones so I was curious? I didn’t think you would mind”. I was so confused. We shared everything, I would always look at her books. It was one of my favourite things to do when I came to her place.

“Oh nothing sorry. I think I’m just rattled that about how you got here and everything you told me” she smiled. She seemed more composed now like everything was normal. Weird…. but ok.

“I probably didn’t need the tea anyway but let me help you clean this up”. We cleaned up the mess on her floor, grateful for her hard floors while we cleaned up the milky tea and broken mugs.

I was so tired from the day and everything that happened that I decided to have a lie down on her couch. I didn’t intend to fall asleep but when I got up again everything was dark. I checked my phone and saw it was after 2 in the morning so Annabelle must have gone to sleep. I got up and went to the kitchen for a glass of water. As I walked back I had this feeling like I needed to go back and have a look at the book on her desk. I don’t know why, and it felt wrong to do it when Annabelle had gotten so weird earlier about it, but something drew me to it.

When I got to her desk the book was still there, but it seemed to be buried some more. I thought it was gone at first but then I saw the corner of it peeking out at me, like it was calling me. I opened the book to the bookmarked page and turned on the torch light of my phone to get a better look. I relaxed a little when I realised it was just the protection spell we had used, I hadn’t realised that not knowing what was there had me on edge. Annabelle had written out the details and we did the spell outside at night so I never got a look at where she got it from. As I looked at the page all of it appeared normal except there was more information about what it did and how it worked.

This was information Annabelle did not tell me.

I would have said no.

This wasn’t just a protection spell, like I thought it was. This spell protected through transference. It would only protect one of us truly, by transferring power. The spell that I thought would protect us both put a target on my back instead. I had not only my power but Annabelle’s as well. That’s how it protected. It protected her but the consequence was that I had to fight for my protection.

How could she have done this to me? I didn’t want to mess with the power in the first place, I only did it for her.

When I looked up i saw Annabelle standing at the foot of the stairs watching me.

I was fighting back tears, “How could you?”

“I had no choice”.

She was calm.

Too calm.

“What do you mean you had no choice”

“There is something I need to tell you” she took a deep breathe and continued “Mum and I still talk, we are actually quite close but when I started messing with magic it meant they started coming after her too and she doesn’t have any power left to defend herself. Our blood is the connection, we are linked. When they come to hunt us, they hunt everyone in the bloodline. I didn’t know it when I started, but when we got that warning mum reached out to me and it was like she had never left. I needed to keep her safe and the only way that I could keep us both safe was to sacrifice you”

I just stood there in shock, I didn’t know how to respond.

“This house is protected because I’m protected, that’s why no one has come for you, but when you leave they will come. You can’t hide from this Melanie, your only choice to survive is to fight. I didn’t think they would come so soon, but based on how you ended up here your powers are impressive. You are strong. You just need to fight and win.”

“I don’t know how you could do this to me. They will keep coming. Even if I fight can I ever win? You read mum’s letter they don’t stop coming that’s why she bound all our powers” My voice was shaky as I said this. I knew what this now meant for me.

“I know” she said with a look of sadness on her face. “This is what your mum did to keep you safe. She didn’t bind your powers or mine, or theirs, she transferred them. The only reason any of us are alive right now is because your mother subjected others to the same fate. It was the same spell she used on us. It’s the only way to be truly protected”

“No” I cried out. This couldn’t be true. My mother wouldn’t do that. Until I remembered who my mother was and there was nothing that she wouldn’t do to protect me, to protect Katie and Annabelle.

I was now doomed to a life that would kill me, by my best friend.

“I’ll help you try to fight, I just didn’t have a choice, there was no one else”

I looked at Annabelle as she said this and knew that I no longer had a best friend. I also knew nothing about my powers or how to fight so I just told her “I understand, help me fight”.

What choice did I have?