Haven

The sun had barely started to peek above the horizon when he’d slipped out of the tangled sheets. Nicky padded through the dark apartment, his bare shoulders and back still damp from the grip of the dream that had guaranteed he wasn’t gonna get in another hour. He’d never been one of those kids who’d bounced out of bed at the crack of dawn, Darce hadn’t been for as long as he could remember either. Mandy’s middle of the night hungry shrieks had broken the pattern for a while, by then, though, Darcey had moved into his own place with Lorna. Close by, but not close enough to be clamping the pillow over his head every time their sister’s wails filled the house.

Nicky glanced at Mandy’s bedroom door before he slipped into the bathroom. These days the three of them were lucky they weren’t waking each other up. The dreams had to be thick as fleas on a dog’s back for all of them. His weren’t even burdened heavier by how Lorna had been taken from them. That had happened while he’d been blithely drifting around this bloody country, instead of being on the other side of the pond where he might’ve been able to do something to help rescue his brother that hadn’t cost his sister-in-law and their unborn child their lives. Not this time, he had crystal clear memories of every moment of terror and fear he’d felt as they’d desperately tried to track Mandy down. The anticipation of bursting through that front door to find Mandy already cold and stiff as marble. The relief of her throwing herself at her brothers and rushing Mandy and Maeve out of the shattered remains of the mansion’s front door. That bit was never in his dreams though, that would’ve been far too comforting.

Soap and hot water washed the funk of the fear sweat away, left his skin glowing faintly pink as he stepped out. Neither one of them had been woken up by his dawn ablutions. Hopefully they’d both get a little more sleep – peaceful sleep at that. Usually he’d have lingered over a cup of tea before he left for the shop, but this morning he went straight from getting dressed in the gloom of his bedroom to slipping out the door. A note on the fridge in his neat hand told Darcey and Mandy he’d gone to the shop early. Maybe one or the other would show up later, both if Darce refused to let Mandy out of his sight. They’d managed to shatter the spell on Mikaelson’s little witch trapping toy, but the man himself was still out there.

There was no sign of Mikaelson or anybody else on the streets as he walked the short distance to the shop. You wouldn’t have got an entirely empty street in London, not at any time of night. Mystic Falls wasn’t London though, he didn’t feel as though his roots ran through the streets here. The shop was as close as he got to a patch of home this many hundreds of miles away. Add a little more tat to what was clustered in the front room, some moth eaten fur coats and chintzy china and it could’ve been a mirror image of it.

He opened the front door, slipping a hand up through the gap to grip the bell and lift it out of the way – in case Maeve heard it a floor above. Even with her magic back she had to be on edge. She was still in a foreign country with the man who took her just a matter of miles away. Later he’d knock, maybe see if she wanted to venture out for lunch somewhere – he didn’t relish the idea of her leaving Mystic Falls, but surely at some point she’d want to go home to her family. Nicky felt something in his gut tighten at the thought. She’d been a light in their lives, no matter how brief, or how faint it’d been to start with. Lord only knew they’d needed that.

Slipping behind the counter, he headed for the back room and the kettle. On instinct alone he slipped past the curtain, moving easily in the darkness. In an hour or so the sun would be high enough to flood over the rear wall of the small yard out back of the shop and through the glass in the back door. For now the watery light barely illuminated the space – the small table and its surrounding scatter of mismatched chairs. The small stretch of counter with the fridge whirring under it and the kettle sitting on it. The long low shadows of the drawers and shelves that held the things that were far more valuable than what was aside. The tumble of blonde hair that twitched as he stumbled in the thickly shadowed dark and went grabbing for the counter. ”Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” Nicky cursed. He had a hand out in an instant. ”Post tenebras speco lucem!” The spell spilled out quickly, a ball of light swelling in the palm of his hand like a miniature sun to fill the room with light. ”Cassie? What the ‘ell are you doin’ ‘ere?” Nicky frowned at her, drawing a bit of power from the spell so he wasn’t blinding her like some prick with his high beams blasting on a dark road.

Tagged: CASSIE LUANNA * Word Count: 900