A Glow of Stars & Dusk by Eve L. Mitchell

“Stop calling me witch,”I growled at him as I jerked my arm from his grip. “What kind of absolute psycho are you?” I grabbed a discarded tea towel off the counter and held it to my arm.

The blond one stepped forward and tugged the tea towel from my hand. “Dirty.”

“I beg your pardon?” Not only was I bleeding, exhausted and scared, but now I was dirty?

He held the cloth up and pointed at it. Oh. Well okay then. I looked around the kitchen. Green Eyes was watching me, and it was unnerving. Stepping around the blond, I headed to the sink, and the third one stood in front of it, with his arms crossed against his chest. I stood and waited as my blood trickled down my arm to my elbow and dripped on the floor.

“I need to get to the sink,” I bit out.

He looked over my head to Green Eyes, and with a disgruntled huff, he grabbed my arm. His hand encircled my whole upper arm, I marvelled even as he jerked me forward. “Hey!” I protested until I watched him run his hand over my forearm and, like magic, the bleeding stopped.

He stepped away from me as I stared at my arm in wonder. Turning it this way and that, I couldn’t even see a scar. “How…what…um”—I swallowed—“what the hell?”

I looked to Green Eyes. “What are you? Where is Ruairidh? I don’t understand anything that is happening.”

“Why would you?” the one who had healed me asked. “You are merely a child.”

Green Eyes ran his eyes over me slowly before looking to his two companions. His glance to them both made them grin, and I suddenly felt naked.

“Stop that,” I snapped as I pulled my sleeve down and pulled my jacket tighter around me. “Take me to Ruairidh.”

“No.”

I closed my eyes briefly. “Now.”

He tilted his head as he looked at me, and his eyes narrowed slightly. “Tell me, little witch, which part of this picture makes you think you’re in a position to make demands?”

“My name is Star. Not witch.”

“I know your name, Star Elizabeth Archer. Daughter of Jean Archer, father Roy Archer. Your mother was born of Ria Gallagher, daughter of Mary Campbell. Mary Campbell’s mother was Heather Stewart. Heather Stewart’s mother was Elizabeth McClellan, I can go all the way back, Star. Ten generations ago, your ancestor was burning at the stake in New England; a few generations before that, your bloodline was burning in Ireland; before Ireland an ancestor was burning in Toulouse, France. Shall I go on? Shall I tell you that ever since the first of your bloodline breathed her first squawking breath, your ancestors have been burning for their craft?”

“What?” I shook my head in disbelief. “You’re saying that all my great-grandmothers are witches and were burned at the stake as witches? New England?” I looked at him with scorn. “Are you implying the Salem Witches? You need to do your research. The Salem Witches were hanged, not burned. There is no record of burning witches at the stake in Salem.” I tucked my blonde hair behind my ears as I regarded all three of them. “And rattling off my ancestors’ names? Please. Anyone with internet access can use an ancestry website. You want to scare me? Do better.”

“Do better?” His smile was dangerous, and I felt anxious. “What do you think we are, Star?”

“I don’t know.”

“Lie.” The corner of his mouth hooked in another smirk. “Let’s make this easy for you. We know when you’re lying.”

“Whatever.” I looked away from his mocking green eyes. He was suddenly in my space, and I stared at the leather strappings on his upper arms where more knives were housed. Who needed so many weapons? Did he know what year it was?

“We know when you’re lying because we can smell your fear,” he told me softly. His head dipped down as he spoke quietly in my ear. “We can hear your heart, we can almost taste your terror, you can hide nothing from us.”

My hands pushed at his chest to get him to move away, but he stayed firm, and I looked up at him in anger. “Well, that’s not fucking disturbing at all.” I shoved at him again. “Get out of my space, you don’t need to be so close to me.”

He dipped his head again, and his whisper brushed across my cheek, causing my skin to erupt in goose bumps. “No.” A hand trailed slowly down my arm. “Now, what do you think we are?”

“Demons,” I spat out as I willed myself to remain calm.

I felt his smile against my skin before he straightened. “We are the Guard. Don’t ever forget.” He took a step backwards, and I took my first full breath since he had encroached on my space.

“She’s already panting for you,” the dark-haired one said callously.

“It’s called getting oxygen,” I snapped. “You wouldn’t want to breathe in sweat and dead animal either.” I looked him over with as much contempt as I could. “Well, with all that leather you’re wearing, you probably would.” I tried my best to stand tall, although the weight of the confrontation was bearing down on me. “So, you googled me. Big deal. You’ve decided I am a descendant of a gazillion witches. Whatever. This doesn’t tell me anything, and even if it did, even if you want my blood, which is so creepy I’m not even going to go there, you get nothing until I see Ruairidh.”

All three of them turned when another one of them entered the kitchen. His hood was also down, and his light brown hair hung loose around his shoulders. Clear blue eyes met mine with friendliness, and he rubbed his bearded jaw as he took in the tension in the room. “Doing well?”

He was the one who carried me away from Ruairidh. The one who had spoken almost kindly to me. “Where is my friend?” I asked him quickly.

“He is resting.” His smile was as gentle as his voice. “Do you wish to see him?”

“Chaz.” Green Eyes growled at this more likeable one.

“The sooner she sees him, the easier this task will be.” Chaz motioned me forward. “Come, Star, he should wake soon.”

I shoved past Green Eyes and hurried after the long-haired male, following him out of the kitchen. He led me to a room off of the hallway, and with a cry, I raced past him to the bedside where Ruairidh lay.

He was unmarked and looked to be sleeping soundly, but his breathing was shallow, his hands in tight fists on top of the blankets, he looked for all intents and purposes like he was struggling.

“What’s wrong with him?” I asked quietly.

“He fights the healing sleep.” The male stood at the foot of the bed. “It would be easier if he did not.”

“If your friends hadn’t beat him, he wouldn’t need healing.” I ran my hand across Ruairidh’s brow, pushing his hair off his forehead. “He has a fever?” I asked him.

“The weather has not helped. You both swimming across the river didn’t help.” He smiled at me briefly. “He will heal. If he relaxed his mind, it would go smoother.”

“I can soothe him,” I said as I stood and kicked off my boots. I looked down at my clothes, I was still a crusted mud mess. “Don’t suppose you have magic cleaning hands?”

“I’ll leave you,” he said with a smile.

I watched as he walked out the room, closing the door softly behind him. Quickly, I kicked off my jeans and my jacket. I gave a quick perusal of my long-sleeved T-shirt, and then with a shrug, I climbed under the blankets.

“Hey, Ru-Ru, you need to relax,” I whispered as I lifted his arm, pulling it under the blanket and curling up to his side. “I’m here, we’re…safe.” I winced at the lie. “They’re trying to heal you, but you need to relax.” My fingers curled around his, and I squeezed. “It’s okay, big guy, I’m fine. You’re fine.”

As I spoke quietly to my best friend, I heard the soft padding over the floor. Looking over my shoulder, I saw Hound looking back at me. “Should I even wonder how you got through the closed door?” I asked. The hound snorted and lay down on the floor. “Seriously, that mutt has an attitude problem,” I muttered as I curled around Ruairidh once more.

As the three of us lay in the dark room, I heard them moving around. They weren’t trying to be quiet, but still, I noted that they weren’t exactly noisy either. How did this happen to me?

Well, I knew how it happened to me. I had the gift, as my gran called it. I had seen spirits since before I was old enough to know what a spirit was.

When I was four, I scared my kindergarten group when I continued to talk to my imaginary friends. All children have imaginary friends, which the schoolteacher tried to discourage. When I started telling my classmates what my imaginary friends were asking me to pass on, I was removed from school, and my parents were advised to seek professional help for me. Four-year-olds were considered “disturbed” if their imaginary friends were claiming to be dead relatives of my classmates. After months of confusion, my mum sat me down and tried to hide her tears when she told me I had to hide who I was.

“Star, baby, you can’t tell anyone what your friends tell you anymore, okay? You can tell me and daddy, well, maybe not daddy, but tell me,” Mum said to me as she helped me decorate the sponge cakes.

“But they want me to tell them, they have so much to say,” I insisted as I looked up at her. “They talk all the time.”

My daddy came into the kitchen, and with a frown to my mum, he smiled at me and scratched his jaw. “Do they talk all the time? Well, that would be annoying, wouldn’t it? Is there any way you could not hear them, munchkin?” my daddy asked as he picked me up and placed me on his lap.

“But I like hearing their stories, Daddy.”

“I know, baby, but how about I read you two stories every night at bedtime and you promise not to listen to your friends?” Daddy tweaked my nose, and I giggled.

“Roy, no, she can’t switch them off like that, you’ll confuse her,” my mum said to him quietly.

“Two stories and extra hugs,” Daddy said, ignoring Mum.

“What if I want the same story twice? Do I get another story too?” I asked.

“That’s three stories,” my daddy said as he laughed at me.

“It’s only two stories.”

“Four years old and she negotiates like a lawyer,” Daddy said to Mum with a grin. “We’ll see. But you’ll definitely get two stories.”

“Okay.” I smiled at him, and he kissed my nose.

“But you have to promise not to listen, baby girl, for me.”

I nodded as I went back to mixing the icing. “Okay, but they won’t be happy.”

“They’ll get used to it,” Daddy said with a grumpy voice as he set me down off his lap. “We’ll give her a few weeks, Jean, she goes to school soon.”

“I know, but this won’t help.” My mum was watching me drip the icing onto the sponges and catching any of my overspill.

“It will. You have to have faith.”

My friends left me when I wouldn’t listen to them anymore. Some didn’t like it and threw things, but Daddy told me to close my eyes and pretend they weren’t there and think of happier things than my friends being mad at me. After a while, they weren’t mad, and eventually they simply weren’t there.

When I was nine, Steven Carnegie slapped me across the face in a fight after school. He was a bully and a mean boy, and he made Ruairidh cry all the time when he called him Cowardly Carrot. I had decided it was my duty as Ruairidh’s best friend to challenge Steven to a fight. Show him who was a coward. We had gathered at the park behind the school, and with no preamble, Steven slapped me right across the face. I was so shocked and scared that he had hit me, when I slapped him back, he flew halfway across the park. In the stunned silence of the crowd as they all looked at me with fear in their eyes, I had fled their whispers and accusatory hate-filled glares and ran all the way home.

The half-forgotten jibes that had followed me through my early school years came back with a vengeance, and I was once again labelled “the Archer Witch” or “witch freak.”

When Ruairidh got his growth spurt around age fourteen, Steven Carnegie wasn’t so quick to call him names anymore. School for us both was a different experience. By fifteen, I was noticing Ruairidh in a new way, whilst he was noticing every other girl who walked past him in a new way. Ruairidh’s dad was a farmer, so even though he had always worked the farm with his dad, it seemed that almost overnight, Ruairidh developed muscles that the other boys didn’t have. His biceps bulged, and he wasn’t shy in showing them off.

Bonnie Ferguson was a complete and utter cow, I hated her during the latter part of school. She kept the witch bitch taunt up right up to my very last day of school. I was in the rec room having one last look around before I said goodbye to Regent Academy when the bitch full on Carrie’d me. She and her sidekick Steven drenched me in red paint. Ruairidh finally kicked Steven’s arse and burst his nose, but to my fury, that weekend at a house party, he slept with Bonnie.

Too humiliated to go to a party, even if I had been invited, I had sulked at my gran’s cottage. Ruairidh had gone, and when he stonewalled Bonnie for being the bitch she was, she convinced him to forgive her. Meaning she got down on her knees and gave my best friend his first blow job, and about twenty minutes later, he gave her his virginity.

Dickhead.

Bonnie told me personally on the following Monday when I unfortunately ran into her in town, so I had no problem accepting my unconditional offer to St Andrews University when it came, and I left my two-faced, backstabbing best friend behind.

They say time heals all wounds, but I still smarted over Bonnie Ferguson and her whorish ways whenever I was pissed at Ruairidh.

During freshers’ week of uni in St Andrews, I ended up losing my own virginity to a nice English boy called Peter. There was no point waiting anymore. I always thought it would be Ruairidh that would do the deed, but he seemingly had no intention of it ever being me for him. I just needed to accept it. Sex with Peter hadn’t been very good, and no matter how many times we tried throughout the first few weeks of uni, the sex didn’t improve. When I told my best friend I had finally slept with someone, he didn’t speak to me for three weeks.

Hypocrite.

Then suddenly, Ruairidh was in St Andrews and said we needed to talk. We went for a walk through the old cathedral grounds and, standing in the late September sun, as we stood looking down at the cement caskets, my elbow started to itch. It hadn’t itched for so long it caught me by surprise. Looking up, I saw the dead for the first time in a long time.

I had caught glimpses of them throughout my childhood and teenage years but had always closed my eyes until they were gone when I opened my eyes again, like my dad taught me to. On the grass, in the shadow of the tower of one of Scotland’s oldest medieval churches, the dead returned to me.

“Star? What is it?” Ruairidh asked me with a worried look on his face.

“There are so many,” I whispered.

“There are four coffins, Star, calm your tits,” he said as he laughed and pointed at the coffins.

“I’m not talking about the coffins.”

“Oh fuck off, tell me you aren’t re-enacting a nineties movie.” Ruairidh looked around the empty cathedral grounds worriedly.

“They’re everywhere,” I confirmed as I turned slowly to look around me. “My God, Ru, I don’t know how we got so far in with so many of them here.”

“Close your eyes,” he whispered urgently. “Close your eyes and think of happy things.”

I shut my eyes, but I felt the soft whisper of something touching me, and I immediately opened my eyes. That was how I knew my gran had passed. She was in front of me under the arch window of the historic cathedral.

“Gran?” Tears were already streaming down my face, and I was holding onto Ruairidh with a death grip.

“You have to let them in, Star, they need you. We need you. You can help so many people with your power. Open your mind, my lass, the world awaits you,” Gran said to me as her hand reached to touch my face. “You have so much potential, and I was wrong to listen to the wishes of your mum. I could have prepared you for what is coming.”

“What’s coming? Potential for what?” I stepped forward, but Ruairidh held me tight.

Gran glanced at our intertwined hands. “He is not your destiny. Let him go, Star, a much darker one waits for you.”

“But…”

“Listen to your old gran, lass. He is not yours. Never was.” She smiled at me sadly. “You must learn your craft, you need to be ready. When they come, they’ll come in threes.”

“Threes?” I took a step back into the protective reach of Ruairidh. Even as much as I tried to ignore my gran’s blathering when I stayed with her, her warning of threes had stuck.

“Prepare. The cottage has all you need. Your dad will fight to sell it. Fight him harder, your mum will back you.” She leaned forward, and I felt her ghostly kiss. “I love you with all I am, lass. I will be with you when you need me.”

“I need you,” I cried as she faded, and I heard her familiar laughter on the wind.

I had done my degree at St Andrews, while mum had stood firm and refused to sell Gran’s cottage when I told her what Gran had said. The cottage would be mine on the condition I got my education first. I returned to uni, and one night at a party, while half drunk and free from my usual inhibitions, I had told the girl beside me I could see the dead. Which she interpreted as me being a fortune-teller. When I laughed and went to tell her that wasn’t what I was, she offered me twenty pounds to tell her fortune there and then.

What better way to earn some money when you were a student than being a fortune-teller? It’s amazing how much people will tell you when they think you are “foretelling.” Learn to read body language and facial expressions, and halfway in, throw in a relative who was sitting patiently waiting to talk, and you were golden. Over the years, I got better, less nonsense and more truth. By the time I graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Accounts, I headed back to Slate with a job offer to apprentice at an accounting firm in Inverness and a profitable side business as a clairvoyant.

The “talk” between Ruairidh and me never transpired. Nothing between Ruairidh and me ever happened physically. He became my best friend again and occasionally would look uncomfortable when I spoke to some lingering visitors. Ruairidh listened to all my stories and theories about the spirits, and even though he never saw any evidence of them himself, his faith in me was enough to never doubt me.

Of the dead, I was careful. When I grieved for Gran, they overwhelmed me, and it took weeks to convince them to leave me alone until I called them forward. Now, I could summon them at will.

I pressed my forehead into Ruairidh’s arm, my fingers interlacing with his. My ability to talk to the dead and an irritable elbow that was my version of a divination stick, hardly made me a witch. Or a person of interest to a group of demons.

“Seriously,” I whispered into the dark, “I’m in desperate need of an intervention.”

The hound on the floor snorted, and once again I was pretty sure that the hellhound was laughing at me.