Ravensborough Read online

  There was no answer. Aradia sighed and hammered on the door harder. Still no one came to the door. She kicked the bottom of the door with her boot so hard that small blue flakes of dried paint floated slowly to the ground. There was the sound of steps from within. And the door was opened wide. A familiar looking guy was standing in the doorway. He was naked to the waist, and he was wearing a pair of sweatpants that had obviously been slept in. His hair was glossy black and stuck up in rakish angles from his head. His eyes were dark and he was glaring at Aradia.

  ‘Did we get you up?’ she asked sweetly with her head on one side. ‘I’m sorry’.

  And then I recognised him. Standing right in front of us was Gethan Ellis.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I’d never really believed in fate before, but this was freaky. If I was of a romantic persuasion – and if I was single – I could imagine that this was the universe’s way of throwing me together with someone. But I needed to get real here. Apart from the fact that I was with Sam, it also looked like Gethan was with Aradia, although he didn’t exactly look thrilled to see her. Maybe they had one of those tempestuous relationships where they were at each other’s throats all the time.

  Gethan leaned against the door with one arm outstretched. ‘You’re early,’ he said dryly, raising an eyebrow at Aradia.

  ‘Somebody’s got to get you out of bed’, Aradia said ducking under his arm and entering the house. She walked through a doorway behind him, out of sight. He had a tattoo on the inside of his forearm, but in the gloom I couldn’t make out what it was.

  Gethan flicked his eyes over at me. I didn’t know what to do. These two looked so comfortable together that it made me feel like an intruder.

  Gethan looked at me with sleepy eyes. ‘Sorry, I’m half asleep. Come on in.’

  I walked inside and he closed the door behind me. He looked at me closely. ‘Correct me if I’m wrong, but have we met before?’

  I nodded. ‘Yeah, at the protest at Guinevere Plaza.’

  He smacked his hand against his forehead. ‘Of course! You’re Scarlett, right? Newly arrived from Ireland?’

  ‘That’s it. And you’re Ethan?’ I don’t know why I pretended to forget his name. It was almost like I was making a play for him, and that was so far from the truth.

  ‘Gethan,’ he put out a hand for me to shake. For someone who was half naked, he was surprisingly formal. I took his hand. It was dry, strong and warm. He stepped back, allowing me to enter the house. ‘Kitchen’s straight through that way’, he said inclining his head towards the doorway Aradia had disappeared through. ‘I’ll be down when I put on some clothes.’ With that, he ran upstairs.

  The decor in the house was dated. Floral wallpaper adorned the walls, the edges peeling away slightly. All the pieces of furniture were mismatched-it looked like everything was bought from second hand stores. Despite this, the place had a warm and homely feel to it.

  I walked through to the kitchen where Aradia was making a pot of coffee. She located the ground coffee, opening the cupboard doors with the confidence of someone who was comfortable there. She shrugged off her coat, revealing a dark black wool jumper that clung to her like a glove, and emphasised her pallor. ‘Do you drink coffee?’ she smiled at me, the elfin angles of her face creating shadows in the little light that came through the small kitchen window. The room was furnished simply and sparsely. The pine table that was pushed against the far wall had just two chairs pushed against it.

  ‘Yeah, I do.’ I sat down awkwardly on one of the pine chairs and leaned my head against the wall. I was sure my hair was in a mess from the wind. If I’d known that we were going to visit Gethan I would have made more of an effort with my appearance, at the very least I would have braided my hair so that it wouldn’t have been thrown everywhere. The realisation that I wanted Gethan to find me attractive made an unwelcome appearance in my head. Unsettled, I tried to push the butterflies I felt in the pit of my stomach to one side. Why did it even matter? I was in a relationship with Sam. I'd be seeing him after Christmas. Why was I here, in a part of town I shouldn’t be in, with a girl who believed she had magical powers finding myself lusting after someone who may very well be her boyfriend?

  I heard a sound like an elephant falling down the stairs and Gethan strode into the kitchen. If I’d hoped another look at him would convince me that I wasn’t attracted to him I was sorely disappointed. He was wearing navy coloured cargo pants, heavy boots and a dark green hoodie, which brought out the deep golden colour of his skin. His hair had been brushed into something halfway normal.

  He took a cup from the draining board and poured some coffee into it. He sat down on the other chair opposite me.

  ‘So, Scarlett’, he said leaning back on his chair and looking at me appraisingly, ‘How did you meet Aradia?’

  ‘Actually, she’s family,’ Aradia said as she placed my cup on the table in front of me.

  Gethan looked disbelievingly at me and then at Aradia, obviously taking in the differences between us. Her hair was dark, smooth and glossy as a raven wing, her skin almost translucent and she was almost as tall as Gethan himself. I on the other hand, had deep red hair that had a life of its own. My skin was almost as pale, but was interrupted by clusters of freckles which no amount of concealer could reduce. And height wise, I leaned towards the shorter end of average. We bore no resemblance to each other at all.

  Aradia seemed to notice this and crossed her arms across her chest defensively. ‘She is family. She’s my cousin.’

  Gethan raised his eyebrow at me. ‘Cousins?’

  I was secretly delighted that Aradia had taken to me so much in such a short space of time. ‘My mother is engaged to her uncle’, I explained, ‘So we’ll be step-cousins fairly soon.’

  ‘Uncle Rupert, hmmm? So you live in the suburbs?’

  ‘Yeah. Chesterfield.’

  Gethan whistled under his breath. ‘I knew he had money, but not that he was that wealthy. He must have chilled out a good bit if he’s letting you hang around with the angel of darkness over there.’ He nodded in Aradia’s direction.

  Aradia rolled her eyes at him.

  ‘Actually, he doesn’t know I’m here’, I admitted. ‘Aradia said she wanted to give me a Pagan field trip.’

  Gethan gave me a searching look. ‘Funny, even though I know you’re Irish I get a feeling you’re connected with Scotland...’

  ‘Kind of,’ I said, surprised. ‘My dad came from there.’

  ‘He’s not here though, is he? He’s passed away.’

  I nodded reluctantly. How did he know?

  Before he could say anything else, Aradia interrupted him. ‘You needn’t try to impress her with your psychic, nay psycho, talents Geth. What we have before us is a sssceptic.’ She hissed the word, emphasising the s sounds. ‘Instead of being overwhelmed by your top-of-your-class ability to delve into people’s energetic frequencies, she will believe that you have a stalking ability of the type usually found only in serial killers. Added to the fact that nobody knows where she actually is, she’s probably beginning to feel fairly uneasy right now. Am I right Scarlett?’

  When she said it like that, the whole situation did seem kind of dodgy. I mean, yeah I liked Aradia. There was something about her that I found endearing and magnetic. Apart from Mei, she was the only one I could talk to easily, without watching what I said. And Gethan, Sam or no Sam, was one of the hottest guys that I had ever seen. I wanted to spend the rest of the day with them, and didn’t want to offend either of them, but the whole magic/psychic thing was just too unreal to countenance. Cat’s explanation of Aradia’s eye change was probably the correct one. And although Gethan’s pronouncements had seemed scarily accurate, in reality he hadn’t told me anything that couldn’t be discovered by checking my Facebook account. But they were nice people, if somewhat deluded. I decided that I was perfectly safe.

  ‘More worrying to me is the fact that you call a trip to somebody’s house an educational field trip’, I
said to Aradia. ‘No offence intended’, I added to Gethan, who inclined his head indicating that none had been taken.

  Aradia rolled her eyes. ‘Excuse me, did I or did I not show you the way into the Pagan quarter? Did I not then show you around the lower part of it? Besides, the field trip part is coming later. Gethan is going to drive us, just as soon as he has his morning cup of coffee He doesn’t function so well without caffeine.’

  ‘I’m ready now’, he said finishing the last dregs of his coffee and standing up. ‘Shall we?’

  Gethan’s car was an old battered jeep. ‘Battered’ being the operative word, it looked like it had been in several accidents. I said as much to him.

  ‘All done by the previous owner,’ Gethan said cheerfully. ‘That’s why I got it so cheap. I don’t have the money to repair it, unfortunately.’

  Gethan sat in the driver’s seat Aradia sat beside him in the passenger seat. ‘I hope you don’t mind sitting in the back’, Aradia said apologetically. ‘But it’s better if I sit in the front to help with the map reading.’

  ‘This is a very big car for Ravensborough,’ I said. It must be a nightmare navigating the cramped medieval streets.

  ‘I don’t really drive it around town,’ Gethan said as he drove up a hill so steep it made me feel nauseous. At any moment I was ready for the jeep to go hurtling backwards, adding yet another dent to the bodywork. ‘I only use it when I’m going long distances or further up into the mountains. You need big wheel treads and a strong engine up there.’

  I was silent for most of the drive into the mountains. It was my first time venturing this far away from Rupert’s house since my arrival in Chesterfield.

  The mountains were rocky, with plenty of wild flowers adding a degree of softness to the otherwise harsh landscape. As we climbed higher and higher I could feel the air getting thinner. My ears began to pop. Gethan and Aradia were busy bickering in the front of the car. I envied Aradia’s easy manner with Gethan. She was so quick and witty and completely absorbed his attention. Everything I said to him sounded hopelessly flat, boring and two-dimensional. I couldn’t possibly hold any interest for him, I thought despondently. And again I wondered why I cared.

  After about half an hour we pulled into a car park we pulled into the side of the road.

  ‘We’re here!’ Aradia trilled unbuckling her seat belt. She jumped down onto the ground. I followed her unenthusiastically. It was freezing cold, and the sky looked like it was holding a fair amount of ice and rain, ready to drop it all at any time. I followed her over a wooden stile into a wide field. A large sign from the Avalonian Historical Trust told me that this was the site of a ring of standing stones. The Morrigan stones.

  'They brought me all the way up here for this?' I thought incredulously. I’m sure they were really proud of their heritage, but I’d seen plenty of old sites like this back in Ireland. Even though I loved archaeology, I wasn’t really sure that it merited an entire trip by itself.

  The three of us walked towards the centre of the circle. I stumbled a bit over the uneven terrain. I shoved my hands deep into my coat pockets in a futile attempt to conserve body heat.

  ‘Dad discovered these a couple of years ago’, Aradia shouted to me over the sound of the wind. ‘See the way they’re stained with earth? They were completely covered with soil. Dad brought a class of his up here for a trial dig in this field, and they discovered this. That was one very excited bunch of students!’

  ‘So this is what you brought me up to see?’ I asked looking around. I couldn’t see anything else of interest anywhere else.

  ‘Well yeah, sort of. But mainly I want to show you that Gethan and I are not crazy. Magic exists. This seemed like a really good way of doing that.’

  Maybe I’d been a little hasty in assuming that I was totally safe with these two. I was miles away from the nearest town, with two nice, but delusional, people who wanted to prove to me that magic spells were real. Oh. My. God. Every horror film I’d ever seen flashed before my eyes.

  Gethan walked over to the centre of the circle and placed a rucksack down in the centre of it. Out of it he pulled a bottle of water, three bowls, some incense, charcoal discs and a box of matches.

  ‘What are you going to do exactly?’ I asked Gethan.

  ‘Aradia is going to call a circle and cast a small spell. You and I are going to watch.’ He poured some water into one of the bowls, and placed some earth in another. In the third he lit the charcoal discs and placed them in the bowl. He added a cone of incense. It took him a few attempts to light the four candles that Aradia had bought in the heavy wind, but eventually he managed it. He placed them in jars to stop them from blowing out.

  ‘What’s all this for?’ I asked him.

  ‘The four cardinal points, north, south, east and west, are represented by different elements. North is earth, south is fire, east is air and west is water. In order to call a circle traditionally you have to put a small piece of each element on each of their corresponding points.’ He handed me the bowl of earth and the jar holding the green candle. ‘Can you put that between those two stones there?’ He pointed them out. ‘That’s north over there.’

  I went over to the spot he’d pointed out and gingerly placed the bowl down, wondering what Rupert would say if he knew what I was doing right now. If he hadn’t wanted me and Aradia to be alone together, I could only guess what his thoughts on me participating in a Pagan ritual would be.

  I went back to the centre of the circle to get another element, but Aradia grabbed me by the sleeve. She pointed away into the distance. You could see where the mountain ranged fell down to meet the sea. The ocean was a beautiful dark blue and stretched out to the horizon. It felt like we were a million miles away from the city.

  ‘Do you see the light house on that rocky island out at sea?’ she asked

  I nodded.

  ‘Well do you see the tower near that, on that bit of land?’

  I squinted into the distance, trying to find it. Eventually I spotted it. I nodded again.

  ‘That’s the Western Watchtower. It marks the most westerly point of Avalonia. It provides the energy needed for magical rituals and is a sort of gateway for the spirits of air to enter this world. And to leave it.’

  Okay, I thought. It’s started. The crazy talk. But I just nodded as if I agreed with her and that what she was saying made total sense. I hoped that this wasn’t going to take long. I’d feel a lot more secure once we got back to civilisation. I was beginning to feel very exposed and vulnerable.

  ‘The reason that I’m casting a circle is so that you can see what happens to the watchtower during a ritual,’ Aradia continued. ‘Then maybe you’ll see our side of the equation. Why you just can’t ignore what’s in front of you, no matter how much you might want to.’

  ‘You better be convinced after this,’ Gethan shouted as he placed the final element down. ‘Otherwise I’ll have given up my Saturday morning lie-in for nothing.’

  He strode back into the centre of the circle and picked up the rucksack from the grass. Reaching inside it he pulled out a long knife. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up in a way that had nothing to do with the cold. Suddenly the harmlessness had seemed to wear off proceedings. Cat and Rupert’s anti-Pagan stance might be a more sensible idea than I’d originally thought.

  Gethan handed the knife to Aradia. He must have seen the wariness in my eyes because he placed a hand on my shoulder. ‘It’s not for anything sinister, Scarlett. It’s just to cut through to the astral plane. It’s a ceremonial tool. The edges of it are actually quite dull.’

  ‘Oh. Ok.’ I tried to inject some enthusiasm into my voice but the words came out flat.

  ‘If this makes you nervous we can stop now,’ Gethan said squeezing my arm gently. ‘But really, it’s harmless. Aradia isn’t even going to cast a spell. She’s literally going to cast the circle, and then dispel the circle. No more, no less.’

  I nearly laughed out loud. He thought that I wa
s actually scared of their mumbo jumbo. In reality, the only thing that had me worried was that knife. I saw from looking at it, though, that Gethan was right, it might cut through butter and the astral plane but it would cut through very little else. The thought that I’d be frightened by their hippy religion was ridiculous. I bit my lip though, to keep a laugh from escaping. I didn’t want to offend them.

  Aradia took her place in the centre of the circle. ‘I’m going to cast the circle myself’, she shouted over to me. ‘Usually more than one person casts it because it takes so much energy. Gethan and I thought it would be better to have you with one of us so you wouldn't be alone if you got freaked. I decided to do it because you know me better, so you might trust me more.’

  ‘Mmm hmmm’, said Gethan smirking. ‘That’s the reason. It’s got nothing to do with the fact that she needs the practice.’

  Aradia made a face at Gethan. ‘You can be really irritating, you know that? Ok Scarlett, when I invoke the guardians of the watchtower of the west, I need you to look towards it. Ok? And please do it exactly when I say it because I really doubt that I’ll have the energy to do it again.’

  Gethan linked my arm through his outside the circle. ‘I’m not that scared, you know’, I said trying to act cool and like the feel of his body pressed against mine wasn’t a big deal.

  ‘Oh I know,’ he said conversationally. ‘But I am that cold.’

  ‘Pay attention you two! Ok.’ Aradia went silent and held herself very straight. She stretched the fingers of her hand that didn’t hold the knife, and shook her hair back from her face. She closed her eyes and composed herself.

  ‘Blessings be upon the guardians of the watchtower of the north, powers of earth and sustenance. I call you to protect my circle, in perfect love and perfect trust.’

  Nothing happened. I sighed and shifted my weight from one leg to the other. It was so cold out that I couldn’t feel my toes, and I was here for this? I really should have just headed into the city with Mei and Catalina. Then slowly something began to change. I watched amazed as the ground beneath the earth offering glowed with clear white light. Aradia turned east, raised her hands above her head and said: