Disclaimer: I don't own the Covenant. Duh.
Author's Note: Thank you all for the reviews. I'm sending you good vibes! Hope you like this one:)
"I can't believe we've been here three weeks already," Reid said softly, stroking his thumb against Lilah's spine as she leaned over Hamlet. She was reading it for fun while waiting for Reid to finish his latest French assignment. She'd already finished hers, and refused to go out until he'd completed his without copying anything from hers or Tyler's.
"I know. I would've thought I'd have ditched you by now," Lilah said offhandedly, turning her page and keeping his eyes focused on Claudius' speech. Reid gripped her thigh, making her writhe and gasp breathlessly with laughter. Lilah grinned, turned on, as he nudged her knees apart and propped himself up over her.
"What was that?" he asked, grinning devilishly down at her with those puckered, sculpted lips, raising an eyebrow at her. She smirked and giggled softly, curling a hand over his forearm as he gently pushed his hips against hers tauntingly as he leaned over and kissed that spot right under her ear where the skin was most tender, which he figured out early on made her really horny. He tickled her mercilessly, blowing raspberries on her neck that made her shriek and curl up into him.
"Well, well, well." Tyler's voice interrupted their pseudo-innocent foreplay. "What have we here?" Lilah, head hanging upside down over the edge of the bed, laughed drunkenly and waved as she saw her friend looking reprovingly at them, trying to pull herself up. Reid gave her a hand and she smiled over her shoulder at Tyler.
"Reid's going to finish his homework first," Lilah said sternly, and Reid muttered; 'slave-driver' under his breath. Lilah smacked him and he pouted.
"Oh, well, stop by if you catch up on the semester's workload," Tyler smirked. Reid glared and ground his jaw. "See ya later." Lilah called out a goodbye after him as Tyler closed the door after grabbing his wallet and a jacket and settled back on Reid's bed. She loved lying on his bed; it smelled just like him, that intoxicating warmth and spiciness of boy.
"Can I ask you a question?" Reid asked.
"You already did," Lilah sighed, picking up her book and finding her page, her diamond wristwatch catching the light as it slipped down her slender wrist, resting her cheek against her palm.
"Why haven't you told the guys yet?" he asked. She knew it had been bugging him for a while. Pretty much since he'd taken the heat for someone Using from Caleb. She hadn't been Using too noticeably lately, because she knew Caleb always suspected him. But she knew he wanted to Use; the urge was always too strong, and he wanted her to Use so she could lift the curse on his family. Her father's books had arrived by FedEx last week and Reid had been up until three o'clock every morning reading. The guys thought he was going insane; every time they saw him reading outside of class, the teachers congratulated Lilah for being such a good influence on him. Lilah glanced at him nervously.
"About…?" Well, they already know about us, she thought giddily.
"About you being a witch," he said, frowning. She squirmed on the bed and chewed her bottom lip. She didn't know why she didn't tell the guys. There were references to her being a witch on her Facebook account, where she frequently—every hour, almost—updated for her friends back home, in the coven. Mostly she liked that Reid had her all to himself in that. The guys were always vying for her attention whenever they went out. With magic, she was all Reid's.
"I don't know if they trust me yet," she said softly, and Reid blurted a laugh.
"If Tyler doesn't trust you, then he hates me!" he smiled. Pogue's parents already knew—she'd told him that—that she was in line to be the leader of the greatest—and only—coven in Britain. She'd watched him memorise the family-trees of the coven back to the 1000s, since before William the Conqueror had invaded Britain. And Caleb—well, Reid had suggested that if she explained everything to him after he'd gotten laid, when he was less likely to have energy to get really angry, she'd be fine.
"We all love you, Lilah," Reid said honestly, and he squirmed awkwardly as her intense eyes flickered over him. He'd said that word; love. "I mean, you know we wouldn't do anything to hurt you." She scoffed softly.
"My power is greater than all of yours combined," she said, reading Hamlet's soliloquy, kicking her legs above her childishly.
"And yet you're so modest," Reid teased, resting the weight of his torso over her waist, playing with her long hair, which today was loose and tousled. "No, seriously, I know I've told you about Chase Collins, but he was a threat, I mean he was trying to kill Caleb. You're not trying to kill us."
"Well, not yet, but you haven't pissed me off when I'm PMS-ing," Lilah said, and Reid stilled above her.
"You will tell me when that is, just so I can be prepared?" he asked, leaning closer to her, so she could feel the heat radiating from him. He was always really hot after swim-practice and showers. In more ways than one.
"Trust me, honey, you'll know: I'll be unbearable for four days," she sighed heavily. She decided she'd lull him into that mentality, even though she was on the pill, just so she could be a total bitch when it came for 'her time of the month'. She and Talli—her best-friend since birth, Tallulah Lintott-Sheldon—had started doing it years ago, when they'd both gone on the pill. Pretend you weren't, and you could give everyone hell and skive off lessons because of period-cramps and terrible bloating.
"Good to know," Reid said softly, nibbling tauntingly on her neck. "Come on, will you, I mean—tell them?" She glanced over her shoulder, studied him with her versatile eyebrows, very Roger More-esque in the way she could quip one and not the other—something Caleb couldn't do and it pissed him off greatly, and sighed.
"Alright, I'll tell them soon," she said dejectedly. Just how 'soon' and how she didn't know. "But you're softening them up first. I don't want Caleb trying to test my powers. I might kill him."
"He has his father's share of the Power too, you know," Reid warned. Lilah gave another soft scoff of impatience. Reid finished his French sentences and vocabulary and Lilah ran a stick of lipstick over her lips; poisonous red, with her dark eye makeup and her tousled hair, dressed in her new blue flannel dress over a heathery-grey thermal top, thick warm black cotton tights, and her slouchy suede wedge boots. Reid was giving her his Look again, the one that told him he was incredibly attracted and dangerously turned-on, and grabbed her in a close hug, capturing her lips in a searing kiss as he rolled her over onto her back, sighing softly as she wrapped her hands around his waist, completely melting into him.
In her tights and her flimsy dress, she could feel everything, and it made her hot as he pressed his thick erection against her through his jeans. If she was a tease, he was something much, much worse. Kind of like a girl who offered sex as the wager for a bet and didn't let him pay his debts, Lilah thought. She moaned softly as she wrapped her limbs around Reid and cradled his face in her hands. If he had started undressing her right now, she wouldn't have stopped him. She didn't know how he could control himself when he got so hot—she could read his thoughts, she knew what he wanted—but they had yet to have sex.
"Reid," she breathed, nudging his nose affectionately. Sweet nose, like a button. Glittering eyes like the Caribbean Sea. He grinned down at her breathlessly, gently rubbing his hips against her again. "I've worked it out." She didn't want her Reid to wither and die prematurely, like Caleb's dad had. Her Reid. She liked the sound of that. His eyes flickered over her face curiously. "The counter-curse, the Latin translation, I've finished it." Reid's eyes widened excitedly.
"You've figured out how to do it?" he breathed. Lilah grinned, craning her neck to capture his lips. He moaned and traced her throat with his fingertips, making her shiver.
"You want to do it now?" he asked, eyes lighting up. Lilah grinned, sitting up and making him roll off her, making him groan slightly as she teasingly massaged his crotch. "We'd better do something or I'm gonna ravage you." Lilah giggled as he grabbed her waist and tugged her onto him, hugging her waist from behind.
"Alright, we'll go now," she promised. "I need to get some things first though."
Caleb thought the little shop on Second Street was all nonsense; voodoo, modern conceptions of 'witchcraft' with potion ingredients and spellbooks. But some of the stuff was actually useful; candles, their different representations with scent and colour and power. She could tell Reid was excited; his fingers were trembling with adrenaline, like they did after swim-practice or a particularly rigorous make-out session. He drove them 'downtown' and she hopped back into the Stingray with a brown paper bag filled with little candles. The Tryals of the Banished: Danvers, Garwin, Simms, Parry and Putnam was stashed in her leather satchel. It was the documentation of the coven of the legal trials held within the coven to decide the fate of the five teenaged men who were abusing the Power, how they were condemned and cursed, in intricate detail by narrow, spidery script, the pages yellowed and crackling, how they were sent off to the New World as punishment, banished from the coven.
"We need a sacred place—sacred to your coven," she said, clipping her seatbelt in. "Do you know where it was originally sealed?"
"The Danvers' first colony house," Reid suggested. Lilah frowned, thinking hard. It didn't make sense to use land sacred to the first colonists—the first sinners against the coven.
"What about sacred to your coven, you, Tyler, Pogue and Caleb?" Lilah asked. Reid frowned, hand on his keys.
"Caleb and Pogue both had their Ascension at Putnam Barn, but it's burned down," he said.
"Head for that," Lilah smiled. "It doesn't matter about the building, just as long as we can still access the site." Reid smiled and drove them out of Ipswich, to the land outside the city limits that belonged to the Sons, the land that had made up the original colony of Ipswich. In the dusk, the leaves that were just turning were gilded with dying sunlight, the sky painted blood-red. There was no wind; the leaves were completely still, the clouds did not move noticeably on the horizon, the edges gilt, and the sky promised a good day tomorrow.
She had seen pictures of what Putnam Barn had looked like—up until last year when it was destroyed in a fire. Reid had told her the fire was created by Caleb's duel with Chase Collins—or Chase Goodwin-Pope. The timbre was still blackened, nothing removed from the wreckage on the historical site.
Historical, pah! Notre Dam was begun in 1163! They think this is a historical site! The difference between historical values of English and Americans was marked by what Americans believed to be the beginning of their world, the landing of the Mayflower.
"Do you know whereabouts they Ascended?" she asked, walking with her clinking bag of candles in her hand through the tall grasses to the blackened waste.
"Yeah, it was just over here," Reid said, pointing and guiding her to what was left of a structural column for what was probably the upstairs. "We all decided, after Caleb's Ascension, that we'd come out here too, just 'cause no one else will, so they won't be able to see." Lilah was nervous about all this talk of Ascending. Her Ascension was pending; two months, on November the second at 15:46 p.m. She'd read that it could be anything from a gentle tingling to a splitting migraine only a hundred times worse. Kind of like getting a tattoo. It all depended on the person and how strong they were, Power-wise.
Lilah shook her head of these thoughts and found somewhere to prop her book open.
"We have to make a pentagram with these mosaic tiles," Lilah said, undoing a drawstring bag filled with flattened semi-precious stones imbued with potent power she'd bought from the shop with the candles. Reid marked the five-point star with his heel, dragging it across the charred earth, and Lilah placed the tiles in strategic places, at the joints, closing the pentagram. The light was dying already, here, surrounded by the woods with no streetlights or anything.
"What's next?" Reid asked lightly, but Lilah smiled: she could tell he was nervous. She upturned the brown paper bag and started placing the candles in a circle around the five-point star, completing the pentagram. Mostly they were just for light, but they also served a purpose in the spell too. One this powerful, they needed signs to make sure they were doing things correctly.
"Okay, before I light the candles, walk over the pentagram—just walk over to me," Lilah encouraged, as Reid looked sceptical. He walked over, and she watched; the pentagram, or the air around it, the earth below it, shimmered with visible Power. But only inside the pentagram. It was working so far. It was time to tell Reid what needed to happen.
"Okay, I've translated the procedure and the actual counter-curse," Lilah said, unfolding a piece of scratch-paper from her bag.
"Where'd you learn Latin, anyway?" Reid asked, trying to take the paper. She kept hold of it, giving him a look.
"Everyone in the coven can read it," Lilah shrugged. "It's essential if we want to study the old texts. But we learn it within the coven, not at school or anything."
"Just for fun," Reid smirked mockingly. Lilah gave him another warning look. He glanced up at her coyly, bashful.
"The ritual requires our blood. If it had been our ancestors, it would have needed the blood of the curser and the blood of the cursed," she sighed, shivering slightly. "Since my direct blood ancestors cursed yours, it should work." Hopefully the blood isn't watered down too much, she thought sceptically.
"So, we prick our fingers or something, and you read that?" Reid said, pointing to the paper.
"Yeah, basically," Lilah said dryly, glancing at the paper glumly. "To be honest, I thought it'd be more difficult. But I suppose that's counting your chickens before they're hatched." Reid nodded, biting his thumbnail.
"So what next?" he asked softly.
"Get inside the pentagram," Lilah directed, and took a booklet of matches from her pocket. Stepping inside the pentagram with Reid and the counter-curse, she struck a match and bent to light the first candle. She beamed as each candle lit with the first. She straightened up, feeling Reid's eyes on her ass, and gave him a look. He looked so pretty with the golden lights of his hair picked out by the still flames, the curve of his cheekbones defined, his eyes glittering. She had to try very hard to resist the sculpted curves of his lips. She swallowed and glanced at her writing. She'd written the directions down, and pulled the switchblade out of her pocket. A tremor went through Reid as she flicked the blade out; it gleamed in the firelight.
"Hold this a second," she whispered, offering him the paper. He took it and watched her as she held the knife in her right hand, gripping the blade with her left, looking away from her hand and clenching her eyes shut as the metal seared her palm. This was different to getting a tattoo, much different.
"Okay, now you have to cut your palm," Lilah said, nodding to his right hand. He took the blade, glanced at her, and cut his skin. We could get hepatitis from this, she thought. No, if the counter-curse worked properly, the cuts on their palms wouldn't matter. She stabbed the centre of the pentagram with the blade and left it there, straightening up to offer her hand, palm up, to Reid. He glanced at it and gently took her hand, pressing their palms together. This is so gross, she thought, nauseated. She took the paper, and—knowing English wouldn't work—she read off the counter-curse in Latin.
Nothing happened.
And then, all at once, the candles extinguished themselves. But there was no breeze. Lilah gripped Reid's hand as a crackle of thunder resounded overhead, a flash of lightening accompanying it, illuminating the sky with many forks of brilliance.
"Is this normal?" Reid asked, glancing up warily. "End-of-the-world, apocalyptic-type weather?" A fork of lightening split through the sky and Lilah gasped and was thrown back as the lightening—but it wasn't lightening, the type she saw smiting down trees during storms—struck their joined hands. Reid yelled, face drawn in anguish, as the streak of light connected with his forehead, spreading through his entire body. It's like he's Ascending already, Lilah gasped. But all too soon to study properly, it was over. Reid gasped and slumped to his knees, resting his forehead on the ground. Lilah ran to him and tugged his torso up, steadying him.
"Ow!" he moaned piteously, and Lilah had to laugh at his lameness.
"You okay?" she asked, stroking his cheek affectionately. She glanced at her left hand. "Look at your hand."
"There's nothin' to see," Reid said dully, glancing at his right palm. Lilah stared at hers. Completely smooth, as if she'd never even cut it, no scarring tissue, nothing.
"It worked," she gasped softly, and turned her wide eyes on Reid as she beamed. Her first real bit of magic, and it had worked. She could Use so much power before she had even Ascended. That was proof enough she was stronger than any of the others in the coven—definitely of this little one.
"How can you tell?" Reid asked sceptically, frowning at his palm.
"Do something. Use," Lilah said, shrugging. "Make the car come to us." Reid quirked an eyebrow above his hat—god, he's always wearing that numpty hat!—and glanced at his Stingray. His eyes flashed and went pitch-black. It was actually quite freaky in the pitch blackness of the night to see his eyes like that. The engine of the Stingray started up and rumbled as the headlights flooded the burned barn-site with light, wheels turning decisively as Reid grinned, directing the car over to them, opening the doors with a soft click of the doors.
"Do you feel anything?" Lilah asked. She'd read about the Ipswich witches Using, how they felt an irritation like an addiction every time they Used. Reid glanced at her, and he stared.
"No, I don't," he said wondrously. Lilah grabbed his face and planted a kiss on his lips.
"It worked!" she grinned delightedly. "You can Use now like I do. All the time and you won't age prematurely. Your body can handle the Power now. The curse has been lifted completely." Reid grinned and grabbed her as he stood up, plastering a blistering kiss on her lips, so hot and heavy that Lilah panted as their bodies writhed against each other. Again, they reached that point of equilibrium and had to stop, panting for breath. Lilah was so exhilarated her body was tingling, trembling from the adrenaline rush.
"Come on, we should probably get back to the dorms," Reid smiled softly, his eyes glowing affectionately. "I'll let you drive." Lilah beamed, dancing around to the driver's seat after she'd cleared up evidence of their spellwork. Lilah settled in Reid's seat, turned the key in the ignition, turned up the blaring music—'Renegade', their favourite, pretty much their anthem—and they raced through old Ipswich back to Spenser, bellowing along to the music, careening around tight turns that would knock Pogue off his bike, zipping neatly into a parking space in the car-park behind the boarding-house. Breathless and laughing, they strode back into the dorms, arms wrapped around each other, grinning.
A.N.: Tada! Okay, I'm not pagan, or whatever it is they're supposed to be in the film, so I just made all that up with a little bit of reference to The Craft. Anywho, please review!