Stone Cold

Chapter 65

Remember It is mentioned in chapter 32 that the curse has two parts. The eye color changing part and our favorite one, “What the hunter takes, the hunter shall return.”

Ruth’s shop is mentioned in chapter 22.

“Ugh… I’m so getting an earful from Henry.”

She said it out loud to herself as she started dragging her feet away from the accident site. All the lectures Henricus Christensen had given her after she turned into a vampire were running wild inside her head. He would give her a short lecture every other night on the chaos occurring if the world came to know of the powers that vampires possessed, and his most favorite topic to drill inside her brain was the value of vampire blood. That man would go on and on and on about the responsibilities vampires had regarding their blood, and how their first priority should always be to never share this preciousness with a stranger.

‘I have spent too much time as a human suppressing my dormant vampire side. It is affecting my decision making capabilities; well that is if I have any.’

Letting out a small sigh, she stepped away from the thinning tree line and started walking towards a familiar looking shop. As she inched closer to it, the words written on the glass door became more and more prominent, “House of Hope.”

‘How long has it been since I was last here?’

After fumbling with her back pocket for a few seconds, she took out a small key and used it to unlock Ruth’s shop before stepping inside.

A few days after returning to their castle in England, Henry informed her of the news that Ruth had left her shop in Faith’s name. Keeping Eve alive, disguising her as Ares’ beloved with his venom, casting a spell on Faith’s blood to create a pull between her and the stone-turned Ares, causing Faith to time travel to save Ares from dying mateless, she still failed to understand what drove the witch to do so much for someone who was not even her own blood.

All of this combined with Felix’s death had made her unable to hold her head high especially whenever the mother or son’s name was brought.

Due to this reason, she hadn’t had the courage to visit Ruth’s shop immediately after coming back from Romania. But, sooner or later, something had to be done about it. She could not leave the shop that Ruth had left to her in ruins.

‘Maybe I should just sell it.’

She thought as she cast a glance on all the scattered papers, weird looking jars and countless unidentifiable items.

‘It is going to take a lot of time to clean all this mess and get rid of all these… things.’

The train of her thoughts stopped as her gaze settled on the table she had once shared with Ruth. Everything was as she had left it; the white paper, the broken onyx, her mother’s picture, nothing had changed.

With a bitter smile on her face, she bent down to pick up her mother’s polaroid picture from the table. Just as her fingers grazed the top of the picture, she saw something glimmering from the corner of her eye.

Something was glinting on the surface of that peculiar white paper that Ruth had taken out of her rusty looking box.

“Huh?”

She remembered when Ruth had cast a spell on her to send her back in time; she had taken a blood drop from her and dropped it on this page. As she cast a spell on Faith, glittering words had appeared on paper. She didn’t know what happened after that as she had gotten thrown into the medieval era before she could read that for herself.

‘Why is that paper shining again?’

With a bit of hesitance, she grasped the side of the white paper in her hand, lifting it up to see it up close.