The Ministry: 1894 by Stephen Croft

Author:Stephen Croft [Croft, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-08-30T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

Maria snapped awake. Flinging her body over the side of the bed, she vomited into the bin next to her. Her face was pale, and her forehead was glistening with sweat. Her damp clothes were sticking to her fevered body. Charles was sitting on his bed across the room from her. He stood up and approached her. “Are you alright?”

“Does it look like I’m alright? What happened?” She asked, clumsily reaching for the mug of water resting at her bedside.

“Well you almost killed the both of us. The cellar was clearly a trap, and you stupidly decided to trigger it with almost no warning. You were knocked out with some sort of poisonous incense or gas from the candles, and the pentagram had some sort of spell on it. I was able to get you out, but the entire house burned down.”

“I don’t know what came over me. You’re right, that was incredibly stupid. It was like the pentagram was calling out to me, nearly felt like I had been hypnotized to tamper with it. I wonder if when I first touched it I released a spell that clouds judgement.”

“Well next time you get an idea like that, tell me. You would think a vicar as knowledgeable as yourself would take a bit more than a second to think before tampering with the pentagram of a witch that’s as powerful as you say she is. Leave the stupid decisions to me from now on at the very least.”

“I know, I’m sorry. It won’t happen again. What about those books? Were you able to save any of them?”

“No, unfortunately not.”

The vicar winced, her partner’s response clearly stinging her ego. “Damn. We should go back and see if we can salvage anything,” Maria said, wicking away the sweat from her brow with her sleeve.

“I already checked Maria, they’re gone. Forget the books, how are you feeling?”

“I’ve been worse,” she groaned.

“Good, rest up a bit. It seems Virginia could still be close. Not sure if she paid a visit to her house before she disappeared or if she set up that trap beforehand, but we have to be vigilant. She wouldn’t have had the house trapped for no reason. Either she didn’t want us to see something, or it was an effort to kill us, knowing we would continue to hunt her.”

“So now what?” Maria began to stand up before she yelped instinctively and immediately sat back down on the bed. A pain erupted in her abdomen like a hot knife stabbed into her navel. She slid off the side of the bed to the floor and fell to her knees before vomiting into the bin again.

“You just rest. It seems the poison in the incense may have taken a bit of a toll on you. I need you to be at one hundred percent if she comes back. I can handle things myself for now. I’ll keep watch, and I’ll be hosting some lessons for the town.”

Refusing to look up from the bin under her chin, she spit into the bucket after clearing her throat of bile.

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