The Survivors: Point of Origin (book 2)

Unraveled, pt. 1

            

We caught the latest flight out of Boston back to Seattle, where Mark and I said very little. Each of us was so frustrated. He was, I'm sure, frustrated with himself for quite literally sleeping with the enemy.

            "Mark... I'm sorry she..." I tried.

            He put a hand up, signaling me to stop. "She wasn't the first. She won't be the last." And that's all he said about her.

My frustration ran deeper. I began making a list in my notebook of all the things Parker had done to lead us up to this conclusion that, unfortunately, blindsided us. How could I have not seen this? She was weird from the moment I met her. In her lynx form, she'd maimed me, sinking her teeth deep into my flesh with some kind of concoction that kept the wound from healing itself. In her human form, she was awkward, fidgety, and unpredictable. She had been the one who didn't want us to go into the hidden houses outside Pickering. She had been the one who weirdly volunteered to go with Mark and me to Salem. She disappeared all the time, and not just out of sight, but out of trackable range—which, for me and Mark, was the same as disappearing entirely. She was a shape-shifter, and I had mistakenly assumed that she could shift only into animal forms. But the symbols on her wrist and her ability to disappear led me to believe that she had been impersonating Peter at least since the battle at the Canada house. But for how long? And where was the real Peter?

            But what unsettled me the most was why Sam had come with us. As Raven's sidekick, was she sent to find me? Was Raven was looking for us? Or had he found us? Did it mean that, all the time I was looking for Raven, Raven had been looking for me?

I sat on the plane and gathered as much evidence as I could from the literature I got in Salem, about who Raven might have been, about what role he could have played in Salem, what role he might be playing now. Once I read everything carefully, the evidence screamed at me from the pages.

In 1692, many of the accusations had dealt with accounts of signing the book of the devil or meeting a Man in Black. The stories of the Man in Black were very consistent. They all stated that he'd asked 'victims' to sign away their souls or invited them into witchcraft. In return, he promised a kind of salvation. And they always knew, just by looking at him, that he was magical, which, to them, meant something terrible.

You could look at any of us—me, the Winters, the rogue Survivors—and see that we were magic too. People doubted it because they doubted the existence of the supernatural at all. But something was off about each of us who was less alive than we were dead.

Witches—ancient ones, those thought to exist in Salem, even Wiccans and various others today—often referred to a Man in Black as their leader, specifically over multiple covens.

In a collection of non-fiction narratives from Salem Village in 1692, Deodat Lawson gave first-hand accounts of happenings during the Witch Trials. Often these accounts included readings of or references to bible verses from the book of Revelations, which Lizzie had used in many of her spells. Most notably, Lawson told of an account in which an afflicted person was read Revelations 5:9, which read, "And they sang a new song: 'You are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals, because you were slain,
and with your blood you purchased men for God
from every tribe and language and people and nation.'" I couldn't help but think of our mysterious Raven in this case who, I had already been able to tell, had had his hand in evil doings from many tribes and languages and peoples and nations. I wanted very badly to know, then, what they—an unknown they—had done in his eyes to purchase men for him. He surely saw himself as a kind of god. Even Berkant had said he thought of himself as a messiah.