27. Jax

27

Jax

Her scream cut right through me, but her hand was still in mine. "Anna?" I tried to pull her closer to me. The smoke continued to billow around us, but nothing was touching us or hurting us.

"Run," she shouted. "We have to run!"

The smoke receded, and the forest raced by us. Ahead of us, a wolf snarled and paced, constantly looking over his shoulder at us. It felt like we were running for our lives.

But our legs weren't moving.

Next to me, Anna breathed hard. "Don't let go of me, Jax. We have to keep moving. I don't want to lose you."

Her eyes were glazed over with fear, and her head jerked around as she studied our surroundings. It took me a moment to realize that she actually thought we were running.

"Anna, look at me," I said in a calm voice as I walked right in front of her.

"What are you doing? We have to run!"

"Look at me. We're not running. You just think you are. This isn't real, remember?"

The trees screeched to a halt, and she sucked in her breath. "Whoa. Trippy."

"Very. Are you all right? You've got a hold of things?"

"Yeah. I think so. That was very strange. The wolf. That's…"

"Yeah. Dear old dad. But he's running as a wolf which means you're probably running as a wolf too." Cautiously, I walked around the area. Unlike the house, there were no clear boundaries of this sector of her memory, but it had to have an end. A wall of some sort. Something to keep us trapped here.

"My mother isn't a shifter. Which means she's not…"

"She just ran!"

Anna and I both jerked around at the sound of Dirk's voice. He was human again and holding something invisible in his arms. "I'm telling you; they're doing something to her. Andrea cries every time she comes back. We're not going back, Katherine."

He was quiet for a moment, and then his face relaxed. "It's okay. Don't cry. We're going to figure it out. We need someone who can help us. Another pack isn't going to do it. They won't accept me while I'm bonded. We need witches, but ones that you trust. Really trust."

"Katherine," Anna whispered. "That was her name. How is it that I couldn't remember her? You know what, that's not important now because she did this to me. We can't wait for the darkness to take us again. We need to find our way out."

The trees started moving again, and I sighed. It was going to make me motion sick. Already, my stomach was feeling a little queasy. Lunessa had said that there might be some side-effects, although she wasn't all that specific about it. Since I wouldn't be connected to my body anymore, I had to remember that they were just like phantom pains.

It didn't feel phantom.

"We're moving again. At least the damn house was stationary. Do you feel the urge to panic?"

"I do, but you're kind of anchoring me somehow. As long as I'm holding your hand, I can remember that you are real and this is not. Tell me something tangible. Something that happened out there. Saul must have found a way to fix the mutation. Makayla too?"

"I'm fine. Everyone's fine. Turns out that your blood was the key." Focusing on her, I ignored the shifting scenery and caught her up on everything that had happened.

"Saul is so damn smart," Anna said with a smile. "I was worried about you."

"Well, now we're all worried about you. It's always something." The scenery stopped, and I shuddered. "Thank God that's over with. Wait, I know this place."

Looking around, Anna frowned. The reason that we knew it was because we were here recently. The vegetation looked a little different, and Dirk stepped awkwardly around certain plants, as if someone was giving him instructions.

Helping him avoid the spell traps. "Jax, this is…" suddenly, her face whitened in terror. "Run. Run!"

I let her pull me away, and behind me, I heard strange faint growls. Turning my head, I caught a glimpse of something dark in the woods. Not shadows closing in but something tangible with strange antennas and red glowing eyes.

She was right. She believed that there were monsters in the woods.

"Anna, it's not real, remember. Whatever it is we're running from, it's not real." I didn't stop her from running, but I made her slow down a little. "I'm the only thing here that's real."

"It hurts."

With a grunt, I closed my eyes to avoid watching her chest covered in blood again. I had no idea what that was about, but it was freaking me out.

"It's not real. The monsters aren't real. Take a look at them. A nice long look. I won't let them hurt you."

"Jax, I can't do that."

Stopping, I pulled her close and wrapped her in my arms. "They have antennas, sweetie. Weird tentacles and bug eyes. And they're not even moving. They're just looking and blinking and making noises that aren't real. They're monsters but from the imagination of a five-year-old. You've seen them before. Have you been here before?"

Slowly, she pulled her head back and peeked around me. Her head flinched, but she continued to stare, and slowly, she relaxed. "They're not real. They're not even scary."

"To a five-year-old, I imagine they're terrifying, but mostly, they look like something out of a cheesy horror movie."

"The Fly," she said with a hoarse laugh. "I snuck in when my mom was watching it. It gave me nightmares."

"I feel strange saying this, but your dad was right. Your mom has a problem with the horror genre. All right, so you knew that they were here. Did you sense them, or have you been here before?"

Intertwining our fingers again, she wrinkled her nose and looked around. "I've been here before. I think I might be in some kind of loop, but I don't know what comes next. I go to sleep, and when I wake up, I'm in a nightmare and I'm running in the woods. We stop back there, and I see the monsters. I run, but I'm alone. It's the first time that I'm not alone."

"Okay, so the house is real. The woods are real. Back there is definitely real, but this isn't. I think something is trying deliberately to scare you away from the memory. To keep you from seeing it. We need to go back."

I had a damn good feeling there was a reason she didn't want to go back. Part of me was worried, given whose magic was funneling me in here, but when we walked back, there was no mistaking it.

"The den of the Darkwyn Coven," she echoed. "They came here. They brought me here. My mother must have known them."

"Come on. There's no one here, which means they're probably inside. This isn't real, so no matter what you see, we need to keep moving forward," I said grimly.

I was expecting all kinds of horrors, but nothing stopped us. Hell, the door even swung open for us. That little display of monsters was the only deterrent, which was strange. Like someone had just put up a sign that said detour, but in a way that would make a young child understand.

In front of us, Dirk stood, one hand down by his side like it was closed around something, and his other hand planted on his hip. There were three women standing in front of him.

"The Crone," Anna whispered. "She looks the same even though she'd be twenty years younger."

"Look at the former Maiden. She does look twenty years younger." Jax was referring to the Mother, or at least, the witch I knew as the Mother, standing quietly by the door. In between the Crone and the Mother stood a stranger.

Relief swept over me. At least it wasn't Lunessa, but if this was a memory, it meant one horrifying thing.

"They knew," Anna said angrily. "They knew who I was, they knew who my father was, and they knew who my mother was. All this time, and they've never said a word. How could they not say anything?"

Could Lunessa see what I was seeing? It didn't matter. "Maybe it's because their intentions are not as pure as we'd like to think."