Raven Saga 01 - Raven

back, adding, “why are you doing this? Where is Gabriel? And where is my father? If you've hurt either of them, I swear to god I'll...”
    “You'll what, Lilly? You'll kill me with your bird's claws? I don't think so, my darling. A little raven isn't going to kill me. I'm one of the greatest witches that ever lived,” she announced.
    “If you're so great, then why do you look like an old hag?” I asked.
    “How dare you!” she yelled back, slapping me hard on the side of my face.
    “You hit like an old hag,” I said with a glare, knowing I was hitting a nerve.
    “Get her and bring her in here,” she ordered Charlie, who grabbed my arm roughly and pulled me after her. The entrance to the cave was small, but inside it proved to be a lot bigger than it first appeared.
    “Throw her in there,” she said, pointing to a huge bird cage in the centre of the cavern.
    As I was pushed into it, it dawned on me that Vivian had no idea about my true self. She thought I had the ability to transform myself into a raven, but she knew nothing about the mountain lion. I began to think that I could use it to my advantage.
    “What are you going to do to me?” I asked her, watching as she read from a large ornate book that looked centuries old.
    “I'm going to take your blood and your hair... not that you've got very much of that these days... and use it to make me young and beautiful again.” She said it as if it was the most natural thing in the world.
    “Is that what you did to my father?” I asked, hoping to find out the truth.
    She ignored me, instead standing up and walking over to a large shelf that had been created from an old log, similar to the ones I had seen on the beach at Powell River. On it were a number of vials filled with all kinds of creepy looking things. I recognised a few of them. They were just like the vials in the black room in London.
    “Is that my father's blood?” I asked.
    Again she said nothing, ignoring me as she continued to search through the little bottles. Her eyesight was clearly failing her and she had to hold things up close to identify their contents.
    “Talk to me, Vivian. Oh I forgot. You never talked to me before did you? Years of no conversation. And you think you raised me,” I said, hoping to irritate her enough so that she'd tell me more.
    “What happened to you? Why are you old and ugly, Vivian?” I continued.
    “Old... of course I'm old. I've been alive for hundreds of years, what on earth do you expect. Why do you think I became a witch in the first place? Eternal youth, of course. Don't you know anything, girl?” she shrieked like the old hag she'd become.
    “I can't believe I thought you were my mother. You're nothing like my mother. She was absolutely beautiful and so was my sister. No amount of my blood and hair will ever make you beautiful. You'll never be beautiful, Vivian. Never.”
    “Damn you, Lillian!” she yelled, throwing a vial at the cage. The glass bottle smashed and I was spattered with blood. Whose, I didn't know.
    “Is this my father's blood?” I asked again.
    “No, it is not your father's blood. He's all out of that,” she answered with an evil smile.
    I gasped. Did that mean he was dead? I felt as if my heart had been ripped out of my chest.
    “When I ran out of your father's blood, this is what became of me, if you must know,” she said as she looked at herself in a large cracked mirror that had been hung on the wall. She touched her face gently, sadly.
    “He gave me beauty and then he took it away,” she whispered.
    “Is... is he dead? Vivian please tell me what happened to him. I need to know,” I asked, hoping that she might have just a tiny amount of compassion in her, somewhere.
    “Dead... dead? Does it matter whether he's dead or not? It doesn't matter any more.”
    “It matters to me!” I cried, tasting a salty tear as it fell down my cheek onto my lips.
    “I don't believe that Jack is dead. Not entirely anyway,” was all she would say.
    Although it wasn't what I wanted to hear, it did give me a glimmer of hope. I just needed to know where he was so I could try to save him.
    “Where is he? Is he here? Please Vivian. Tell me where he is.”
    She shook her head and looked at me, “I can't tell you.”
    “Please, Vivian, please,” I begged as I shook the bars of the cage.
    “Lillian I can't tell you because I don't know where he is,” she answered finally. “He disappeared in London. I tried to find him but he just