☾❝His eyes consumed me. I was swimming in their sea of green and brown, maybe even drowning. I did not fight to stay above the surface. If this was what drowning felt like, I welcomed it. My lungs were burning but I was alive. All this time I had si...
The forest looked foreign when it was bathed in sunlight. The trees still covered the sky, but rays of light were scattered through the gaps of the canopy above me, highlighting things that even I had not noticed before, like the colourful wild flowers surrounding the bottom of the trees and the infinite shades of green covering the tired branches. The leaves glimmered against the light, still covered in raindrops from yesterday's rainfall. Birds sang high above me, and the stream was no longer a murky brown but crystal clear. It was unusual to see my forest in a new light. I had grown accustomed to the grey clouds drowning out the things I could see now. It was even more beautiful.
"Lilah," Anna smiled warmly as I entered the clearing, the lake shimmering in my peripheral vision. "We thought you weren't coming."
"I didn't realise I was late," I explained apologetically, choosing to stand in between Leah and Calum. I ignored Ashton's eyes on me though my heart was racing under his gaze. "Sorry."
Anna looked taken aback by my sudden willingness to interact in a way other than simply rolling my eyes, and I wondered if I had really become somebody who shocks people when I am actually pleasant. My chest felt heavy at the thought. I was a horrible person.
"Anyway, I wanted to talk to you all about something," Anna began. "I think there's another coven in town."
Everybody widened their eyes but me, and Ashton shuffled awkwardly. I wondered why he was so uncomfortable at Anna's words, but then remembered that he was new here and probably took Anna's words a lot more seriously than the rest of us.
"What do you mean?" Luke questioned, his brows
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"Well, I'm not a hundred percent sure, but I keep having this feeling like I'm being watched. And there's this kind of coppery smell around town, like the one that I can smell when I use my powers."
I rolled my eyes at the absurdity. We were going to assume there were other witches in town because of a smell? I knew the scent that Anna was talking about, I had smelt it when Michael had shown us his ability to create electricity, and when Anna created a force field. It was a bitter, metallic fragrance but it was faint and only noticed if it was to be pointed out. Sometimes I could even smell it after I had made it rain.
"Okay, so we're all going to panic and get paranoid because you can smell copper?" Calum's voice was full of suppressed laughter, a smirk painted on his plump lips.
"I don't know," Anna sighed. "I just have a feeling. I suppose I am being a bit paranoid, but I just have a funny feeling about it."
"Well, we'll keep an eye out," Leah assured Anna, her fingers laced with Michael's. A pang of jealousy shot through my stomach at the sight of it. I could never have a relationship like that, because I couldn't allow myself to. For the first time in my life, I realised how much I was holding myself back. Even if Leah and Michael were to get their hearts broken eventually, they had each other. They had somebody that they could talk to about anything and everything, and a part of me wanted that too. I glanced at Ashton and found he was already watching me. He smiled gently at me and I averted my gaze quickly, pretending to listen to whatever it was Anna was talking about now.
