“What about when you grew up? Never woke up for a glass of empty water?” Alexander was fiddling with a metallic wire that he had found in the room to unlock the door.
The no response from the white witch meant the sleeping routine continued and they never came to find out the truth.
“Did you know my mother?”
“I did. I had the opportunity to speak to her. She was an admirable woman,” answered Caitlin, looking at the man again. She wondered if he knew…”Did your mother ever mention this family?”
“I don’t think so,” Alexander stood up after bending down for several minutes, his back straight and turning to the woman.
Caitlin opened her mouth to only close it back again, wondering if she should drop the information. Taking a different approach, she said, “My mother was very fond of your mother. Lady Isabelle was the one who appointed uncle and aunt here to work.”
“Looks like it didn’t go well with what she did,” came the clipped response from the man, “If she wasn’t so giving she would have been alive today,” Caitlin stood up and asked,
“Do you mind?” she asked opening her palm. Alexander dropped the wire on her palm and walked around the bas.e.m.e.nt, the light of the lantern flickering to let them know that it would soon come to diminish. Caitlin walked towards the door, sitting down to start working the wire on the lock. As her hands worked, she said,
“It is sometimes the ones who feed get their hand bitten. Like my mother, I believe your mother was a remarkable woman. Woman like her is hard to find and I think the next person whom I see with that much potential is Penny, my niece who has taken the genes,” her words were quiet as she said it, letting the little information sink in the room they were in surrounded by darkness.
Alexander was quiet as he heard about it.
“Lady Isabelle had a brother, though the brother didn’t live, he had fathered a child and that child grew up to be the mother or father of another child. I wouldn’t have believed but our father turned out to be the person who was related to Lady Isabelle by blood,” she turned around to see if Alexander was listening as he hadn’t spoken a word of surprise on it.
Alexander was looking at one of the skeletons in the room by raising the hand and checking the bones in it.
“I have known about it since Penelope arrived at the Delcrov’s mansion,” Alexander said, not wanting the woman to think that he wasn’t listening to her. It was interesting how the theories they had drawn out were indeed right.
After Penelope had deduced the writing to tell that only the same blood kin could read it and she being the only person who could read it, hearing about it hadn’t come as a shock as much as finding that the woman in the room was also related to him. Witches marrying witches or humans, or black witches…it had created offsprings leading to the last one being Penelope. That is if her father was the only child to his parents.
Caitlin who had gone back to play with the fire finally heard a click, “The door is open!” and at the same time, the light that was emitting from the lantern had extinguished itself turning the bas.e.m.e.nt completely dark.
Alexander and Caitlin made their way out, and back to the ground floor to find Damien there, “Where is Penny?” asked Caitlin seeing her niece, not with Damien.
“She’s is in one of the rooms. She needs some rest.”
“Everything alright?” Alexander asked his cousin who gave him a nod.
The three of them went in search of the Artemis couple who had sacrificed the first human they had been keeping their house. It was the time to finally run the ritual that they had been working on for more than two months that had been planned decades ago.
Both Mr. and Mrs. Artemis started to use spells and magic that belonged some to the black magic while some using the forbidden magic as they started to form an invisible circle forming around the villages with marks taking place without anyone having to draw them.
The trio started to look for the elderly witch couple and when Alexander went to open the main door to step outside, Damien stopped him by placing a hand on his cousin’s shoulder to say,
“Don’t go out. Once you step out you won’t be able to get back inside,” Damien now understood it was so as to stop intruders from finding out about what was going on in here. The spell lifted itself up at the rise of the sun and fell back on after a certain time.
After a while, they finally found the couple and they wouldn’t have stopped if it weren’t for Caitlin’s presence that shocked Mrs. Artemis. The woman’s concentration broke and she waved her hand for her husband to stop.
“You are alive,” Mrs. Artemis commented, seeing her niece after many years who had gone missing. They had hoped for the person to be dead but here she was still breathing, “You never came back to us.”
“So that you could kill me?” Caitlin asked for her aunt to smile, “We considered you our family, both of you and you sold us to the black witches,” it was them who had brought her sister-in-law as well as her so-called fiance to marry.
The anger she felt coursing through her veins by her presence, she wanted to kill them with her own hands. Once the Artemis had overcome the shock of her presence in the room, Mr. Artemis said, “You should be fortunate that we gave you home and roof, if not you would have been one of those witches who die early out of the wrath of humans.”
“I hope you rot in hell when all this is done today,” Caitlin didn’t hold back her words on her relatives.
