Spellbound

Chapter Eight

There were very few things that could surprise me, and Gyn knowing how to drive a car was very high on the list. Up until Tuesday night, I had a strong belief that she still rode a horse around. But when I got to the farmhouse, she was waiting by the side of a red Toyota. Dressed in a green and black hippie dress and sandals, and a tan sun hat, even in the rain. I climbed out of Nathan's car and thought about how different we looked. I wore black boots that came up to my shins, and black skinny jeans, a purple knit sweater, and a black sun hat. Two witches, one coven, two so very different looks.

"Hola." She said, smirking at my shock to the fact that she climbed into the driver's seat.

"Hey."

Gyn wasn't a talker unless she had something to say, and even then, she usually kept it to herself. So the ride was quiet. The coven we were visiting was called themselves the valerian coven, everything had a meaning, but that didn't mean I knew what that name meant to them.

At the end of the road stood a large gate, iron bars with vines and roots growing up into it. When we approached Gyn waved her hand out the window at something I could hardly see, and the gate opened. Metal grinding against itself, branches snapping, vines unfurling from around the gate. The door slammed behind us. The road we took was lined with thick forest on either side, the forest so dense I wasn't sure we were still in New York. We had definitely crossed into Pennsylvania. After a few miles of the winding road, signs began showing up, dead-end signs, no trespassing, army force grounds, private property. These witches had not moved around like us.

"Frightening," I muttered.

"The Valerian coven has never moved, this place is bound to keep humans out, like our safe house, but they have more adult witches, so they can cover a bigger space," Gyn said gilding the car around sharp turns.

"Handy, do you think that they will ruin their seclusion to help us?"

"The valerian have always believed that hiding kept them temporarily safe. They've thrown their fair share of hunters out on their asses."

I frowned. "You mean they've had conflicts with the hunters before?"

She nodded. The trees following the road stopped suddenly and the car slowed, there was an opening in the forest ahead, buildings built around the trees on the edges of the clearing caught my eye, they were camouflaged into the wilderness. They were made of wood and stone that made them look like part of the landscape. In the center of the clearing, sat a water fountain, carved from stone standing over twenty feet, a woman, hands outspread, palms facing the sky. When looking at it, I could see the peace in her eyes, the calmness... As the pole, she was bound too burnt, flames carved from the very same stone licking her body.

The trials.

The trials were the reason we fled and never reveal ourselves to anyone. There had been bad witches then, those who sacrificed lives for dark magic, and power, witches that tried to take the balance we all had upon themselves to try and become the most powerful. Magic like that came with a price, and they didn't care. They began inserting themselves into colonies, and towns, causing trouble for not just the humans. The other witches also were being ruined with a bad reputation, and the dark witches were throwing off the balance of our world. So the witches sought out good humans, humans that were capable of hunting down the bad alongside the good. And when the bad witches fell, either being entrapped or having their powers bound, there was no peace like the witches wanted. The new group of humans that hunted the witches decided that no which could be all good, that having that kind of power was dangerous to trust they would not become evil.