The young human sat down at his desk with the oil-burning just enough not to dim out as he poured oil into it regularly so that he could complete the task that was given to him by his senior councilman, Damien Quinn.
Since the time Kreme had entered the council, he had been put under the pureblooded vampire to work with who was as quirky as one could come to be. Though in the beginning, Kreme had decided that he wouldn’t be able to survive for more than a month with the man, it had now been almost a year and he had come to learn how to work with Damien. Though the man was odd, he had niche ways of pulling out information from people and finding it out on which the council depended on when they were in a rut of closed walls.
He had thought there was no case to work on and had gone to sleep after drinking in the local pub of the village to only be woken up by his senior who had come with work. Though he didn’t know who this woman was and the case they were working on right now, he started to sketch her face one after another until a pile started to form on his desk.
There were more than forty to fifty parchments that were available in the house and he needed more. Going to the library in the village he lived in which was as small as a room of a poor man, he bought more parchments before continuing to work. By the time of next morning, Kreme had finally completed drawing enough copies of the woman all by himself. Repeating the features over and over again until he had memorized the woman’s features.
Kreme then took the drawn parchments which were labeled with the bounty of two hundred gold coins on the person. The bounty was usually placed to alert the other creatures who lived around and would come to keep an eye if they were to see it.
Walking to the center of the village that had a bulletin board, he took the first sheet of parchment and nailed the picture there. He continued to go around the village, taking the task himself in nailing every picture of the woman in and around the village before starting to spread out, moving from a village or town until he covered the whole of Bonelake. When the drawings fell short, Kreme sat down to draw more and then nailed them where people could see.
The council did his job of posting and the word started to spread out on how a bounty had been placed on a woman’s head.
By doing this, Damien wanted to pull the woman out from her hiding so that he could find out where she was and finish her once and for all. The woman had been causing nothing but trouble and if he didn’t stop her she wouldn’t stop until Penelope was dead. But at the same time, he had provoked the woman who was still unaware of her face being put under spot by putting up her picture on trees or walls of the building.
Laurae had her hood on her head, her body completely cloaked as she traveled in search of the lost book. The book she had been handed by Sabbi, the blue-eyed black witch who was going to kill her if she didn’t catch hold of the book. She roamed in the village, days passing by but she found nothing. There was not a whiff or whisper about the book.
Walking into a house, she raised her hand whispering spells to stop the woman who was working in the kitchen to freeze her.
“I hope you don’t mind using your kitchen for today,” said Laurae pushing the woman aside. Taking the utensil and adding the ingredients she had been collecting after she had lost the book, she pulled her knife and slit the woman’s throat who she had frozen. The woman fell down dead while the black witch continued to mutter curse spells.
Trying to tap into the forbidden magic that had turned limited. While the white witches could access a range of forbidden magic, a black witch couldn’t do it as they were already turned to the final product after the use of the forbidden magic.
She looked into the pot that was boiling with a thick murky liquid in it, “Where is the book? The book of Garlic,” she said waiting for the boiling liquid to her and she said, “Where in Bonelake?” She wanted specific details but when she continued to ask she never received the answer for it.
Out of sheer anger, Laurae threw the hot boiling vessel that had it splashing its contents across the wall. Her eyebrows frowned when her eyes fell on the wall and she walked closer to it.
“What is this?” she murmured under her breath.
Pushing the dead woman aside, she said, “The stars that have crossed, my dear daughter…did you steal the book from me?”
Laurae gritted her teeth by the thought of it.
There was no way, Penelope knew about the existence of the book! She thought, glaring at the wall and walking out of the house while she left the body without bothering to cover her tracks. A black witch’s track could never be tracked as it would lead to multiple other witches.
Laurae had brought up her daughter without letting her know she was a witch’s daughter and every time the girl questioned more than necessary, she cleaned her daughter’s mind over and over again that once Penny had forgotten who she was when she was small.
It was time she stepped back into the land of Bonelake to retrieve the book which was stolen from her and with that thought, she got on the carriage with a bag of money she had taken from the people in the inn she had lit up in the fire.
When the black witch arrived at Bonelake, she stood there staring at the wall that had her picture pasted with a bounty on her head that read ‘Dead or Alive’.
Laurae couldn’t believe that it was her face that was being posted up here, her blood boiled further for what her daughter was trying to do. If she was trying to get rid of her, she was her mother. The woman would put Penny out of the picture before the girl would even think about killing her.
