Chapter 30

The raven took over for a long time. I couldn’t tell you how much time passed while I was waiting to be free. I was too weak to fight it or watch what was going on for days or maybe a week at a time before I would fight for control again or Alizya would have some new potion to try on us. Each potion or spell held me down harder than the one before inside my mental space while the raven in control seemed barely affected by the magic unless it singed our feathers or made us lose what we ate.
It put me into a mental fog of struggle that I couldn’t seem to get out of until the day that Leo knocked on the door shouting for Alizya to let him in.

I watched through the raven’s eyes as Alizya opened the door timidly and Leo burst through demanding to know where I was and what she had done to me. He pushed past her attempts to settle him and searched the house. He could sense that I was there but he couldn’t find me because I wasn’t in the right form.

“Leo!” I called out in the mental space but I couldn’t get control of the body. “Please, just let me have control for a minute! I need to tell him that I’m still here!”

“You aren’t ready, little one. You need to trust me.”

Leo came toward where the raven had us perched. I could see him analyzing what I was but I’m not sure that he came to a conclusion.

“Raven?” he wondered aloud.

I screamed for him from the mental space I was in, fighting with everything I had to get to Leo. I had control for a moment and forced my form toward him but lost control in the next moment only for the raven to fly up and perch on Leo’s shoulder. He eyed me nervously but stood still so that we didn’t have to leave his shoulder.

“She’s in there, I just can’t seem to get her back to human form,” Alizya explained.

The raven croaked at her from Leo’s shoulder then nuzzled his neck.

“She’s definitely in there,” Leo laughed as he pet the raven cautiously.

I screamed again in the mental space and fought until it was all I could do to keep my eyes open and watch as they all interacted without any idea that I was stuck there inside the raven.

“What happened to make her like this?”

“Her brother injected her with something. I’m working on getting him to tell me what it was but he’s upset that she didn’t just die.”

“What?! How did you let him inject her with something?”

“She paused time around them so that he could do it without me being able to stop it. She let him do it to her.”

Leo looked at me and I cried in my mental space. I wanted to be with him and I wanted to be human again but I wasn’t strong enough to get either of those. All I could do was watch as they spoke about me while Leo occasionally stroked the raven. I hated not being able to hug him.

Then he walked out of the house with the raven on his shoulder. I hadn’t been paying attention to how Alizya allowed that so I was surprised that he was taking me with him. I wanted to ask him how he pulled it off but I couldn’t. All I could do was watch while he took me to his car.

Leo drove us to the Nest and he went in with the raven on his shoulder.

“What are you doing with that bird Leo? This isn’t a zoo,” Kris sighed when he spotted us in the lobby.

“Come to my office and I’ll tell you,” Leo hissed as he looked around cautiously watching for anyone who might be listening to him.

Kris rolled his eyes but followed Leo up to his office and shut the door behind him while Leo let the raven hop down to the desk that stood in the middle of the room.

“It’s Raven,” Leo spoke. “The raven is her. Something happened and she was turned into a raven and Alizya is working on trying to get her back.”

Kris didn’t look convinced. “How is that even possible?”

The raven croaked at him in protest, causing Leo to stiffen for a moment before reaching down to stroke the raven’s feathers in an attempt to calm us both.

“It protests like her, I’ll give you that,” Kris added, “But what the hell happened?”

“Alizya said it was her brother, the hunter. He injected her with something and disappeared. She’s working on finding a cure but I decided to keep her with me while the witches work on it. Raven never should have gone into witch territory in the first place.”

“Don’t start. You know that we did it to keep her safe and you know how trapped Alizya had us with her blackmail. We didn’t have a choice.”

Leo looked at the raven who was eyeing him suspiciously. I didn’t know that Alizya was blackmailing them. I wasn’t even sure I could understand how she would. What did she know that I didn’t know?

“Keep her out of the way and near you. If my brother figures it out we’ll be in trouble.”

Leo nodded in agreement.

“Raven, listen to Leo, and don’t do anything stupid,” Kris warned staring down the raven on the desk. It clicked its beak at him in response while Leo couldn’t help but laugh.

We went everywhere together that day and I grew depressed as the day wore on. The raven understood what Leo was saying and was useful to him in finding a vampire on a rampage. In our vision from the sky, vampires glowed red against a black and white world. Or at least mostly black and white because when we looked back toward witch territory there was a vast wall of greens and golds swirling like a mist up into the sky. We didn’t look up to see how high it went but I guessed that it was a dome of protection like the shields I had been taught to perform by Alizya during my witchcraft training.

“I missed you, Raven,” I heard Leo say when we came back and put a foot on the map he had laid out in the spot the vampire was in.

My heart ached that I couldn’t actually be with him the way I wanted to be with him.

“Soon little one,” the raven told me, but I didn’t believe it.

I wasn’t sure that I would ever get back to Leo or back to normal form.