When she returned from school, Mari's first order of business was to shield the new house. She had to make sure her family remained safe and oblivious. The rest of the family was in the dark about their ancestry and powers, and Hyacinth had instructed her second-eldest daughter to keep it that way for as long as possible.
"Keep them safe, cucciola. Protect them." Even on her sickbed, the safety of her children was the Lane matriarch's number one concern. "Changes are coming for you all. Keep them from the truth for as long as possible."
That'd been the last time Mari had spoken to her mother, her mentor, her best friend. Hyacinth had passed not ten minutes later, while Mari was in the bathroom. She returned to the room just as the doctor pronounced a time of death, and she'd immediately began to sob heavy tears She hadn't even called her siblings. That had been the work of the helpful nurses on the floor. That had been a long and terrible night.
So now Mari respected her mother's wishes and cast protections around the property. First she set a circle of salt around the house's perimeter and placed quartz crystals by the cardinal points, followed by hammering three iron nails into each exit doorframe. Her last touch was burning sage and wafting the smoke through the house.
Although her siblings might have seen her casting as just an eccentricity picked up from their mother, Mari was still glad to be the only one home. Jon had stayed behind for a tryout with the soccer team, Cammy had stayed for a tryout with the Scholastic Decathlon team, and Blue wouldn't return from her first day at her new law firm until much later in the evening. Mari had decided to skip cheerleading, at least for the season. She told her siblings that she just wanted to give herself time to adjust to the new setting, which was the truth but not exactly the whole truth.
When she finished with the enchantments, she decided to explore Beacon Hills for the first time. Her Google search of the town hadn't told her much, so the only way to get the lay of the land would be some good old-fashioned exploring. Mari had walked home from school, explaining to her skeptical twin and younger sister that she'd stay on the main road, which she had. But now, she decided to duck through the forest that seemed so out of place in this small California town. She had always assumed that California would be a giant desert, but everything she'd seen thus far had proven to the contrary.
The forest was not as dense as she'd assumed, plenty of light filtering through the canopy, but it was still rather creepy. Mari prided herself on being made of fairly strong stuff, especially after all of the things she'd experienced while in training, but these woods set her on edge. Every sound made her flinch and frantically scan her surroundings, eyes wide and left hand clenched around her black tourmaline pendant.
Each of the Lane children had been gifted with a black tourmaline token, among other things, in their mother's will. Blue had received a ring, Mari a pendant, Jon a pair of earrings (he'd always expressed a desire to get his ears pierced and had taken the gift as a sign to go ahead), and Cammy a bracelet. None of them had removed their token since they'd received them, out of respect for their mother, but only Mari knew that the tokens were meant to ward off negative energy. Hyacinth had been clever like that.
After about fifteen minutes, she could see what looked to be downtown through the tree-line. Exhaling a sigh of relief, she picked up her pace, eager to escape this place where the flora seemed to release unnaturalness rather than oxygen. But a sliver of black at the corner of her eye startled her and caused her to whip her head around. The shadow from the previous night was standing in front of a tree about thirty feet away. Somehow, it was much even more menacing in the daylight, when a shadow of that size and solidity should be nearly impossible.
When she made eye contact with the shadow (or as much eye contact as one could make with an eyeless being), it began to drift towards her. Its pace was slow, but Mari refused to take any chances. Snapping back to reality, she took off like a bat out of hell. Breaking through the forest, she ran towards the nearest building, a warehouse or factory that seemed to be abandoned. There was a door on this side of the building, and she made a beeline towards it. Not looking back, afraid the shadow would be right behind her, she felt a brief moment of relief when the door proved to be unlocked.
Pulling the door open with as much strength as she could muster, Mari threw herself inside. As she barreled in, she grabbed the interior handle and took it with her, the door letting out a massive THUD as it slammed shut in her wake. She could hear her heartbeat in her ears as she slumped against the door, fairly certain that the shadow would be forced to remain outside. Creatures like that were unable to phase through anything made of iron, such as the door she was leaning on. As she inhaled and exhaled deeply, trying to return her pulse to a respectable level, she bitterly thought of the wish she'd made prior to leaving Italy. "I know I asked for Beacon Hills to be exciting, but this isn't what I meant."
When she had finally managed to calm herself down, Mari decided to explore the dilapidated building. Over the years, many people had told her that her curiosity was going to get her in trouble one day, a claim she didn't doubt in the slightest. But her natural response was to become even more curious, seeking trouble out before it could hunt her down.
Dust and cobwebs coated the steel-and-stone hallways, and she estimated that it'd been at least ten years since the building was last used. But there was something off about the space, something that told her there was more to this neglected structure than met the eye. She snapped her fingers, hoping to send a breeze to sniff the place out, so to speak. But the air here was stale, although she could detect some small pockets of fresh breezes no more than a week old.
Someone had been here recently. Maybe the shadow had chased them in here, just like it'd done with her. But a creature like that was unlikely to choose an average Joe or Jane as its prey. It would want a supernatural, like her. Which meant...
"There's other supernaturals in Beacon Hills." This theory was confirmed by a flick of her wrist. When the new breezes had come inside, they'd been accompanied by four supernaturals and a halfie. Enough supers to be a coven or a pack or a clan, any of which could be extremely dangerous if they had negative intentions. And they probably would have negative intentions if they discovered an undocumented super had moved into their territory without their permission.
Mari muttered a rather colorful - and decidedly non-magical - Italian curse under her breath. Blue had chosen the location of their new home, and of course she'd accidentally picked a town with a group of potentially ill-willed creatures already inhabiting it. If her older sister hadn't been so pigheaded and had allowed the others to give their input...well, they might have still ended up here, but Mari would've been prepared to encounter other supers and she would've asked their permission to move in. Granted, Blue didn't know that any of this was important to take into account when choosing a new city, and that was partially her younger sister's fault for keeping her in the dark. But said younger sister maintained that this shock could've been avoided if their new living situation was a democracy rather than a Blue-ocracy.
She was startled out of her thoughts by a sudden influx of new air. Another flicked wrist confirmed that people had entered the building. But this time, it was a much larger group than before. There were ten of them: eight supernaturals, a halfie, and a human. Mari could even hear their footsteps with a little effort, which meant that either the ten were much closer than she thought or the structure had excellent acoustics. She knew that she didn't want to find out the answer.
Even in her jet-lagged state - because of course her body would choose now to spring this on her - she was able to spell herself with a dampener. Her footsteps silenced, she retreated the way she'd come, hoping upon hope that the shadow had gotten bored and disappeared. Otherwise she was stuck between a rock and a hard place, a position she had never really enjoyed.
Luck was on Mari's side, thankfully, and the shadow was nowhere to be seen when she got outside. However, her jetlag came into effect when she forgot to dampen the door, and it let out another harsh THUD behind her. There was no way the supers didn't hear that, there was no way they wouldn't investigate, and there was no way in hell she was sticking around for them to find. Deciding to take her chances, she sprinted back into the forest and didn't slow down until she reached her own front door.
A/N: 'Cucciola' is an Italian term of endearment, meaning "puppy."
This chapter sort of just burst forth from my fingers, to be honest. I was sitting on the train on my way back to school and I got inspired, and an hour later I had about 1000 words written, which make up the first part of this chapter. The first paragraph of the second half was typed up on my phone in the middle of the night, and the rest of the second half was typed on my phone while I was walking around at work. I'm so happy that I managed to get this chapter to be as long as I did, and I really hope y'all enjoyed! Please leave a review, because it would really mean the world to me!