KAI

"Wakey, wakey," I greet the girl in the car trunk. "Come here." I haul Bonnie out and she stumbles around before finally regaining her footing. She tests the tied rope around her hands.

"How did I-"

"Get so lucky to arrive here on a private flight piloted by yours truly?" I finish for her. "Oh, you would have been super-impressed with my flying skills, but I'd already knocked you out with painkillers." I grab a backpack out of the trunk and drop it on the ground.

She squints at me. "Where are we?"

"Portland, Oregon," I answer. "Stomping grounds of Courtney Love, Tonya Harding, and tons of other awesome people." I fish the pocket knife out and flick the blade out.

She raises her eyebrows. "You could have brought me anywhere in the world, and you took me to Portland?"

"This is where I grew up." I saw through the rope binding her wrists, accidentally nicking the skin on her wrist.

"Ow!" she exclaims, rubbing her wrists.

"I've been counting eclipses since I was imprisoned on this empty planet, and according to my running tally, I've been here for 6,771 supernaturally repeating days, so in the real world, which we'll never get back to because you sent your magic away in a teddy bear, today's my favourite day of the year."

"And what's that?"

I grin. "Thanksgiving. I'm cooking you dinner."

I slide the backpack I make a start towards the pathway leading up to the house, announcing my arrival to nobody in particular. "Home, sweet home," I call. The sound echoes through the vast grassland surrounding the house. It's strange - during almost all of the time I had lived here, I was always surrounded by a hoard of little siblings running around and making a racket. Now, it was desolate and stood solitary and proud. I'm so glad those little demon-spawns are dead.

"Ah, memories," I sigh wistfully as I walk up the stairs. "Pitter-patter of little siblings' feet, witchy-woo chanting in the air, mom and dad calling me an abomination-"

"Why did you want to come back?" Bonnie asks.

"Because I can finally show it to someone," I say. "My coven goes out of their way to make sure nobody finds this place, but since they're not here to be paranoid freak-shows," I raise my hand and gesture to the house. "Mi casa es su casa." I bite my lip, grinning at her. "Come on," I say, opening the door.

I usher her into the kitchen. She looks blankly at me. "Well, don't just stand there," I say. "Sit down." She takes a seat at the table, shifting uncomfortably. I pull open the fridge door and peek in. I groan. Seriously? The shelves of the fridge are sparse with food, and there's certainly no turkey.

I pull out an array of ingredients and start getting out the utensils I need. "Do you ever wonder how Athena and Damon are doing on the outside?" I ask, chopping up the food on my board. "Wait, I think I know it. Damon's girlfriend has broken up with him and he somehow has gotten into an awful accident which has resulted in him being decapitated." Bonnie narrows her eyes at me, tilting her head slightly.

I continue my predictions. "Oh, and Athena. How could I forget about Athena? So overrun by her woe that her hot bad boy crush was left behind, she's dedicated all her time to finding me. She's decided that she wants me more than anything so she's decided to slaughter Damon and his best friend Enzo since I never liked them, anyway. Meanwhile, she's also planning to welcome me back from the dead with an insanely great lap dance."

She crosses her arms over her chest and leans forward, shaking her head at me. "You honestly disgust me."

I make a start for the door. "I'm going to get wine," I tell her. I go into the cellar and look at the wall of bottles. I study the assortment before pulling out a bottle of vintage claret. White wine. I need white wine. My eyes fall onto a bottle of bourbon on the far left. Athena.

Regardless of how weak it makes me sound, I never realised how good it was to have her around until she was gone. She actually talked to me, for one, and we actually had conversations that weren't about me killing my family.

Was she trying to get me out? I doubted it. She had probably went back and started her life again. I feel around in my pocket for the slim metal device. I press the button on the top and look at the bright screen with my face on it. She had left her phone behind and as soon as I had got my hands on it, I had changed her phone wallpaper to myself. Why the hell not? It's much better than her last one. It had taken me hours to figure out how to do even that and I hadn't figured out how to do much more with the phone.

I put the phone down and take out the bottle of bourbon. I don't want it. I don't want Athena. And most of all, I don't want to feel for anyone. I slacken my grip on the bottle's neck and let it fall to the floor. The bottle shatters against the floor, bourbon flowing out from the broken glass. I take a deep breath. That felt good.

I take the bottle of white wine and head up to the kitchen feeling like a weight has been lifted off of my shoulders. I walk over to the stovetop, setting the bottles down onto the table on my way through. I lean over the pot and lift the lid, inhaling the scent of my wonderful cooking. "Ah, smell's great," I say. "Not exactly a turkey dinner, but it's what my family had in the fridge on May 10, 1994."

Bonnie ignores me and picks up my pager from the table, studying it and fidgeting with it curiously.

"Don't touch that," I say.

"Your pager? Why?"

"Because it's brand-new, looks cool, and I don't want you to bust it," I point out matter-of-factly. I put down what I'm holding and head over to Bonnie, plucking the pager from her hand and stuffing it in my pocket.

Bonnie looks up at me. "Listen, Kai. My magic's gone, which means we will be stuck here forever.
Why don't we just divide the world in half and go our separate ways?"

I sigh. "I get it. I knocked you out, kidnapped you against your will. Can't you see I'm trying to apologise?"

She leans over the table, eyeing me suspiciously. "I will never trust you or like you or enjoy your company for so much as one second, so just quit trying. Just let me leave here unharmed."

I keep my eyes fixed on hers. "Fine," I say. "Can we at least have one last dinner conversation before my eternity of aloneness resumes?"

"So you agree?" she presses on. One last dinner, and then we peacefully go our separate ways."

I feel the corners of my mouth tugging into a grin. "In the spirit of Thanksgiving, I'll even let you take my car."

She puts down the bottle she was looking at and gets to her feet. "How can I help?"

After dinner is prepared, Bonnie and I sit down at the table. I start my meal, going extremely slow as I eat it. "So, Bonnie," I say. "What was going on in your life before you died and came here?"

"Why do you care?"

"It's our final dinner together," I say. "At least let us talk about something interesting."

"I was in freshmen year at college, I was the anchor of the Other Side, I was in a happy relationship with my boyfriend."

"Ooh, exciting. What was his name?"

"Jeremy. Jeremy Gilbert," she says.

"Hang on, wasn't Gilbert that Ella girl's last name?"

"Elena."

"Same difference," I say. "How scandalous, Bonnie. You dating Elena's brother. Now this is getting interesting."

She ignores my remark. After a while she says, "What about you?"

"Me? Well, I was born as a witch, but the only time I had powers was when I siphoned them from another source. My parents called me an abomination and I felt like a freak for my whole life.

"In the Gemini coven, a pair of twins is needed to lead the coven. My twin sister was named Josette and I needed to merge with her to become leader of the coven. Only the strongest one would survive. I was stronger than Josette and my parents knew that if we merged, I would kill her and become leader of the coven.

"But, no, my parents thought I was a too freaking crazy and tried for another pair of twins. I found out just before my twenty-second birthday and tried to kill them."

Bonnie is silent for a long time after that. A while later, me still on the same piece of food as forty minutes ago, she finally speaks. "Really?" she says. "You've been eating that same piece for forty-five minutes."

I scowl at her. "Is it a crime to want to savour our last meal together?"

"I had Thanksgiving dinner with you. Now you keep up your end of the deal and give me your car keys."

I tilt my head slightly. "I should probably teach you how the clutch works - it's finicky."

"Quit stalling and give me your keys."

"Fine," I admit, shrugging. "I'm stalling."

She raises her eyebrows. "Mmm."

"But don't you want to hear how my story ends?" I goad, getting up and starting to walk to the door.

"I've read the newspaper. You murdered your siblings, and your coven sent you to live in this prison world."

I open the door and walk outside. "My family sent me to this prison world," I correct. "My father, the great coven leader who treated me like crap for twenty-two years and then locked me here. It's like his like his kids didn't even matter. Coven always came first no matter what."

And so I tell her my story.

After I had killed the rest of my siblings, I had still been bent on killing Olivia and Lukas. After all, weren't they the ones that were the real problem. "Olivia, Lucas? Olivia? Lucas? Come out.
Come out wherever you are," I called, trailing my baseball bat along the floor.

Josette had come out, still clutching her gut from the wound I had given her before. Her breathing was heavy and pained as she spoke. "Stop!" she had said. "I'll do it. I'll merge with you. Just don't hurt anyone else."

Bonnie interjects. "So Jo agreed to the merge?"

"Well, we needed a celestial event, so the plan was to use the power of the eclipse happening the next day," I explain. "She even gathered our coven to help."

Jo had taken me to the spot in the forest where the power of the eclipse is focused and has been since that day. "The power of the eclipse will merge us as one," Jo had said. "You know what to say?"

I grinned. "Been practicing my whole life."

I had grasped her hand and shut my eyes, chanting the spell. "Sanguinem desimilus, sanguinem generis fiantus."

I opened my eyes, furrowing my eyebrows at Jo. "I don't feel anything," I said.

I tried again, clutching at my twin sister's hands and chanting loud and clear. "Sanguinem desimilus Sanguinem generis fiantus."

When I opened my eyes again, Jo had a sly smile playing on her lips. I knitted my brows together. "Josette, what did you do?" I pleaded. "Why can't I feel your magic? And why aren't they saying anything? They should be saying something. They should be saying something, right? We're merging. This should all be a bigger deal."

And that's when my father showed up to imprison me. "Sanguinem filio, sanguinem effurgarex perpetuum. Sanguinem filio, sanguinem effurgarex perpetuum," he chanted, approaching with a determined look on his face.

All of a sudden, it felt as if my brain was being smashed to a pulp. Every cell in my body felt like it was screaming. My legs fell from beneath me and I crashed to the ground, the shock coursing through my body in vibrations.

"Phesmatos filio, phesmatos effurgarex perpetuum," my father kept chanting.

I was thrown to the ground, my arms sprawled out across the ground and an invisible force holding me down. A bright light showed up above me. All I could remember thinking was that there was no way out of this. That this is the end of me and it was at the hands of my own father. And then the world dissolved into white.

"They tricked me good," I conclude, strolling across the front yard. "Instead of using the power of the eclipse for the merge, my dad used it to send me here, and where'd Jo's magic go? You know, it made zero sense. Magic doesn't just, like, disappear, but then you made yours disappear when you hid it in Ms. Cuddles, and it hit me."

I peer into the tree stump and rummage around in the leaves until I produce the iron knife in my hand, holding it up to Bonnie. "My sneaky little twin sister hid her magic in this."

"It's still there," she says in awe.

"Still here and still full of magic," I say. I can feel the magic from the knife thrumming through my veins, immediately making my powers stronger. "Well, it was. I just sucked it out." I pull my hand away, leaving the knife to levitate in the air just above my palm.

"You have magic again," Bonnie remarks nonchalantly. "Good for you."

"I also have the Ascendant," I point out.

"Doesn't matter," she protests. "You need a Bennett witch to do the spell."

A slight smirk plays at my lips. "About that. I've watched you do the spell twice now. I don't think I need a Bennett witch to do the spell." I pause. "I think all I actually need is Bennett blood."

And I drive the knife into her gut.

Ω Ω Ω

Hello loves!! I'm so sorry for not updating, I have my end of year exams coming up and I've been studying like crazy!! I hope you enjoyed this chapter and as always, feedback is greatly appreciated!

Xx Georgina