Magic Unborn - Red Moon

Chapter 4

4

Orla swayed and tried to hang on to her consciousness. She should have known. What had she expected, coming back to the land of black magic, to the place where she’d grown up, where she had been trained and where she owed a debt?

She hadn’t been practicing for years. Her knees buckled. She heard Maeve calling out for her and felt her hands on her shoulders. Her best friend could help. Aunt Siobhan was a white witch, and Maeve practised white magic. She wasn’t part of the clan, and she was Orla’s only hope. They had been communicating in their psychic minds for years, and she was sure her trip to the Daimon Gate wouldn’t have broken their psychic communication channel.

“Help me!” Orla managed. She couldn’t get many words past her lips, but she remembered mind reading was one of Maeve rare gifts. “Read me!” She reached her hands out and tried her best to clear her mind to communicate with Maeve. She felt Maeve’s cool hands grabbing hers and a slight energy passing through her body. The warmth of the energy helped.

“Concentrate,” Orla told herself, willing the muddy clouds from her mind. The scene of Lorcan and the woman at the riverbank flashed back into Orla’s mind. As much as it hurt her, she forced herself to analyze the situation. Someone was using the black magic on her. Someone was trying to break up her relationship with Lorcan. Someone wanted her to resent him.

A sharp pain pierced through her brain, and Orla suddenly slumped to the ground, breathing heavily.

“Hold on, Orla, keep thinking. I’m with you,” said Maeve.

The resentment grew quickly into hatred. Orla could read her mind like an outsider and could see her conscious mind was leaving her. “I want to hate Lorcan.” The words were demonic. It came deep from her throat and from her soul.

“What are you talking about? You confuse me, Orla. Your mind is confusing. I can’t get hold of it,” Maeve cried in a panic.

Orla’s head was throbbing. She was losing it. She gasped for air as tears streamed down her face. She summoned a last thread of hope. “Someone is trying to get me to curse Lorcan from hatred. Please don’t let me . . .” She groaned in pain, breathing heavily and trying to shake the thought from her head, but the mud was getting in again. The clarity was leaving her. She thought of Lorcan again, which was probably not a good idea. She almost lost control of her mind.

“Black magic!” she whispered. Lack of practice was doing her no good at the moment.

“Don’t let go, Orla. I’ve got you.”

She heard Maeve’s voice in the distance. Everything seemed blurry.

“Tell Lorcan I love him.”

“No, you tell him yourself.”

Blood trickled from her nose. “Lorcan betrayed me. He kissed that woman.” The words coming out of her mouth weren’t hers. Tear streamed down her face, and her self-awareness slipped in and out. “He kissed that woman. I . . .”

“Don’t say that, Orla. You’ll put a curse on him, and you’re going to regret it. You’re strong. You can control it,” Maeve’s voice echoed in from a distance.

Orla cried. Her mind wandered back to the apartment she and Lorcan shared in London. She walked into the living room. She could sense him. She could hear his laughter. She saw him fumbling with the coffee machine, trying to fix it so the sharp lever wouldn’t cut her next time she used it. He smiled at her. She loved his beautiful blue eyes. She smiled back .

The bed had blankets on it, and the pictures of them on the wall were hanging askew. Some of their pictures had fallen to the floor. Glass was everywhere. “Someone broke into our apartment! That woman—she stole him from me!” Orla yelled.

“You’re hallucinating, Orla. Concentrate. Don’t let it get to you. I can’t help you if you let it take over your mind.”

Her heart lurched painfully in her chest, thinking about how happy she’d been in London with Lorcan, but now all that filled her mind was Lorcan and that other woman. Rage began to build inside her, and she was beginning to feel a dull throb behind her eyes.

“It hurt!” Orla whispered.

“I know. Come on, Orla, look at me.”

“It hurt so much,” she said out loud, and once again, the words weren’t hers. “I hate Lorcan. He’ll pay for what he did to me.”

“Stop, Orla. Stop!”

She heard Maeve yelling at her, but she couldn’t stop. She drifted back to the apartment again. Looking at a picture of the two of them together was the last straw. She reached up and yanked the picture off the wall so forcefully that the nail behind it bent. As she threw it onto the ground, breaking the glass in the frame, the pain in her head grew worse. She tore through the room, ripping everything that reminded her of Lorcan off the walls.

At the graveyard, she could see herself hitting the stone marker and ripping weeds out. She saw Maeve trying to hold on to her. But then her mind slipped off again. The world became empty, and she burned with a desire to destroy.

“He has to pay for what he did to me . . .” She began to chant a curse while tears streamed down her face. The last drop of self-awareness was slipping out of her. Images of Lorcan flashed on and off at the back of her mind. “I curse . . .” She hadn’t finished when a hard blow on the head put her out.