Tales of Aradia The Last Witch Volume 1 (35 page)

“I bet,” said Xan as he
and Mr. Dayton joined them.

Roy stood up, planting
himself between Aradia and the growing group of
vampires.

“It’s okay, Roy-Boy,”
Aradia said, tugging on his shirt to make him sit again.

“That’s right,” Xan
agreed. “Down, boy. Good dog.”

Roy rose again,
angrily, but Aradia tugged even harder on his shirt. Very
reluctantly he sat.

“Xan, leave us,” Mr.
Dayton directed his son.

“What?”

“Need I repeat myself?”
Mr. Dayton asked without turning to look at his son. Xan did not
reply again, but instead left the room in a huff.

“I apologize for that
treatment,” Mr. Dayton said to Roy. Roy, not sure what to make of
the exchange, merely nodded.

After that, none of
them said anything until Dax’s father finally blurted out. “We know
what you are.”

“What? You do?” Aradia
cried out, hastily sitting up again in her eagerness and, again,
grunting in pain. Mr. Dayton nodded in response.

“How is that possible?”
Ross asked suspiciously.

“Let’s hear the man
out,” said Liza.

Roy didn’t speak, but
he was closer to Mr. Preston’s mindset. He did not trust the look
on Mr. Dayton's face.

“Well?” Aradia
demanded. “What am I?”

“Impatient,” Dax
muttered under his breath.

Mr. Dayton cleared his
throat and said, “The truth, Ms. Preston, is that for quite some
time, we have not had anyone around here like you.”

“Isn’t that obvious?”
Roy pointed out sarcastically.

Aradia ignored him and
stared at Mr. Dayton. She was enraptured by the thought that she
would finally have the answers she was looking for.

“Right,” she replied.
“So where did I come from?”

“After analyzing your
blood, my associates and I have definitively identified you as one
of the hidden race.”

“Her blood?” Ross asked
furiously.

Aradia touched his arm.
“Later, Dad. Mr. Dayton, didn’t we already know I was a
hidden?”

“Not necessarily,” he
replied. “You can do things, yes, but you could have been a human
aberration. A second evolution of the hidden line, so to
speak.”

“But I’m
not?”

“No, and we were
confident of that from early on. You share genetic markers which
are common to virtually all hiddens, but are absent from the human
line. That was where our initial successes ended. Comparing your
blood to samples of all documented hidden races, we found no
matches to any of them.”

“So you don’t know what
she is?” Roy spat venomously.

Mr. Dayton shook his
head and said, “We thought not, at first. But as a matter of fact,
I now do.”

Roy raised an eyebrow
skeptically.

“Fortunately,” Mr.
Dayton continued, “the head of the hematology department at NSMC,
Dr. Krostenial, is an old friend of mine in the most literal sense.
He has lived more than four thousand years. For four millennia, he
has been an enthusiast and advocate of medical science. For our
task, there exists no greater resource. He has gathered and
preserved blood and tissue samples from other members of the hidden
races throughout his years.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Dayton,
I thought you said you made those comparisons, but found no match?”
Liza asked.

“As it is, he has in
his possession samples from not just extant hidden races, but also
from those which have long been extinct. It was only upon comparing
your DNA to those lost races that he found a match.”

Aradia waited
eagerly.

Mr. Dayton said,
“According to our analysis, Aradia, you are a witch.”

Roy's mouth dropped
open, as did Dax’s.

Aradia, on the other
hand, looked disappointed.

“That’s all? I’m a
witch?” Aradia asked, stunned. “So what? We’re in Salem. There are
witches everywhere.”

Roy shook his head and
said, “No, Aradia, those people are members of the human race. They
are known as pagans or witches by the humans, but that’s not what
Mr. Dayton is saying about you.”

“So hidden witches are
different than human witches?” Aradia asked.

Roy nodded. Dax said,
“Yes, Aradia. Quite. The human witches Roy mentioned are
practitioners of Wicca, a sort of belief system which arose around
witches of the hidden race. The witches as a people, your people,
were something quite different.”

“Were…” Aradia said.
This conversation was so overwhelming, so unexpected, it was taking
some time to sink in. She heard Mr. Dayton’s words again:
which have gone extinct…

Aradia opened her mouth
to speak, but then she heard her cell phone ring.

Ross looked at Liza.
“Oh!” she recalled, and fished for Aradia’s phone in her purse. She
explained, “We were home when we got the call from Mr. Morales. I…
thought you might want your phone.”

By the time Mrs.
Preston gave the phone to Aradia, it was no longer ringing. Aradia
looked at it and didn’t recognize the number. Almost immediately it
started ringing again. She didn’t want to interrupt this
conversation, but she worried it might be important. Aradia flipped
open her phone and said, “Hello?”

“Hey baby, what’s
up?”

Aradia’s face
blanched.

She glanced at the
others quickly, and without even bothering to give them an excuse,
she walked over to the bathroom adjacent to the kitchen.

She locked the door and
asked, “What do you want?”

“Your head on a
platter. For starters,” Dereck replied.

“Yeah, well, besides
that?” Aradia snapped.

Dereck chuckled and
said, “You know the old abandoned manor in the woods near the top
of Warlock Hill overlooking the old Salem village?”

“Yeah, why?”

“In twenty minutes, you
are going to meet me there, alone and unarmed.”

Aradia scoffed and
replied, “Sure. I’d be happy to. Wait, no, hold on a sec, I think
we watched a video on this at school once… oh yeah, I’m
not
supposed to
commit suicide. Why in the hell would I volitionally meet you
again?”

Maybe I’ll just call
the cops
, Aradia thought,
give them an anonymous tip on where the Vampire
Murderer is.

“Because if you don’t,
I will kill both your parents.”

Aradia's mouth dropped
open in shock and fear.

After a few seconds of
gasping for air, she finally managed to sputter, “You’re... you’re
bluffing!”

“Am I? Keep in mind I
attacked you at your house. I know where you live. I know where
your parents work. You can’t protect them all the time, and the
police will never find me. Eventually I’ll get my opportunity. So
ask yourself, is it going to be you or them?” Dereck asked. “If it
has any bearing on your decision, I’ll take no pleasure in their
deaths.”

Aradia's heart seemed
to stop. She found the strength to ask, “If I do this you will
leave my parents alone?”

“You have my word,” he
responded.

“How do I know you
won’t break it?” Aradia snapped.

“Why would I?
Everything I’ve done has been for a reason. You and the Hitzig boy
ruined my original plan. The only reason remaining for me to kill
anyone is to entice you to meet me. Do this tonight and your
parents will be safe. Don’t, and they’re dead. Even if you don’t
believe me, are you willing to take that kind of a
chance?”

She said nothing. For a
few moments there was silence.

“Oh, one more thing. At
the first sign of red and blue, I’m out of there and the deal’s
off,” he added casually before he hung up the phone.

Aradia breathed heavily
as she snapped her phone shut. This was obviously a trap. No, it
wasn’t a trap, because a trap implied the victim didn’t know about
it. She would be intentionally walking into an ambush, practically
sacrificing herself. But if her parents were in danger, she knew
she had no choice but to give herself up.

A knock came at the
door and Aradia jumped in surprise.

Gathering her wits and
composure, she said, “Um, occupied.”

“It’s Roy. Are you
okay?”

Aradia inhaled deeply
and replied, “Yeah, I will be out in a minute.”

She unlocked the door
and said, “What’s up, Roy?”

“Rai Rai, are you
okay?” His face was filled with concern.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” she
replied and pushed past him, not looking him in the eye.

She returned to the
living room where Dax, Mr. Dayton, and her parents still were
seated, chatting.
That’s just a weird
sight
.

Mr. Dayton opened his
mouth to continue his explanation of what he thought she was, but
Aradia preempted him, saying, “Look, I’m really sorry, but I have
to go.”

“What?” asked Dax.
“Why?”

“Look, I just got to,
okay!” Aradia moved towards the front door but Roy had moved to
stop her.

“Rai Rai, be honest
now, what’s going on? I can help. We can help.”

“Look, I’m sorry, Roy,
but I can’t explain. I have to go now!”

“It’s fine, candy
cane,” her father said. “We’ll take you home.”

“No,” Aradia replied.
“No, you stay here. All of you. For a little while.”

She turned back to Roy,
who still stood between her and the door determined to stop her.
Aradia looked him right in the eye and said, “Get out of my way,
Roy!”

“No, Aradia! Not like
this.”

“Either you get out of
my way willingly or I will make you wish you did!”

Dax clasped his hand to
his forehead anticipating what would come next. Without a moment’s
hesitation, she grabbed Roy by both of his arms and hoisted him
right in the air. Stunned, Roy struggled to free himself from
Aradia’s grasp.

She winced at the
effort. Holding him up wasn’t a problem, but her arms and back were
a mess.

“I’m really sorry about
this,” she said, looking at him sadly. “You should have listened to
me.”

She then threw him back
into the Dayton's living room. He landed safely on the couch, but
with such force that it caused the entire sofa to flip onto its
back, Roy and all.

“Aradia,” Dax spoke.
She turned to him. “‘She who fights monsters must see to it that
she herself does not become a monster. When you gaze for long into
the abyss, the abyss gazes also at you.’”

She hesitated a moment,
considering the words. She hesitated only a moment,
though.

“Don’t follow me,” she
said to her parents and the Daytons. She ran out of the
house.

Chapter
Twenty-Eight

As Aradia hurried out
to the meeting place, she concluded that of all the bad ideas she’d
had in her life, meeting a murderer in an abandoned manor
completely isolated from town in the middle of the night had to be
the worst. However, if Dereck was willing to kill her parents
instead of her, she decided that she did not really have much of a
choice.

Breathe,
Rai
, she told herself.
This won’t be like last time. You’re ready, and
you know what you’re facing. You’re calm. You’re in
control.
She summoned a fireball. The
flame came to her and obeyed her command.

Of course, you’re
also going in wounded, you’re on his home turf, and you know from
experience that he can kick your ass.
The flame fizzled out.

It did not take her
long to find her destination. What slowed her down was seeing to it
that Roy and Dax wouldn’t follow her. She’d intentionally doubled
back on her path, taken a detour along a stream, and abandoned her
jacket in the woods to keep them from tracking her
readily.

She stared up at the
dark and crumbling manor looming over her. Aradia sighed as she
thought to herself,
could this situation
get any more frightening?
As if God, or
more likely the other guy, had heard her, cold, fat raindrops
started to drip onto Aradia.

“Of course,” she said
aloud and with a shrug of her shoulders.

She tried extending her
presence into the structure to see if she could get an idea of what
she was walking into. She had no luck. She had to connect to the
warmth of a place, and this was a cold, dead house.

She then braced herself
for whatever was going to happen, pushed the double doors open, and
let herself into the house confident in the knowledge that whatever
the outcome, her family at least would be safe.

It reeked of decay, and
little mice scampered around like shoppers at the mall on Black
Friday. It was dark and chilly, causing Aradia to shiver all up and
down her battered spine. Then again, considering what she was about
to face, maybe the cold had nothing to do with the
shivers.