Chapter 62 Derick gone

Joana waited for him in the center for hours to see and hope if he would come down, or at least, if she could see any sign of him. But no, after waiting for so long, it was now time to accept the truth. Derick was gone forever, and it was all because of her. She got up and began to leave, of all the bad news she had been hearing since yesterday, this turned out to be the worst, and the one that hurt her the most.

She held her hand to her heart and mourned him for a few minutes.

“Goodbye Derick, I’m sorry for what I did, and I love you,” she said before returning to the castle.

She met Dana along with the others in the study, they were all waiting for her. She hoped that Derick might have returned here, maybe might have changed his mind and come back home instead, but she knew it was just wishful thinking.

“Did you find him?” Dana asked. She knew the answer already but still hoped it wouldn’t be true.

“I’m sorry,” she told them. “Derick is gone.”

She began to break down and cry like a baby, she thought they would scold her for what happened to him, they needed to, and she deserved it. But to her surprise, they all stood up, walked towards her and embraced her. Dana continued speaking.

“You’re not the one who told Derick to go and do that to himself, it was his choice. He chose to leave like you did before, and the same way we supported you, we will support him as well, even though this hurts us very much.”

“I’m in love with him Dana,” Joana’s tears clouded her voice but they all understood her perfectly.

“We know dear, we know.”

***

It had been three days since Derick’s death, and Joana had already informed the coven of her decision to remain with them. They were happy about it, but she herself knew that it would never be the same without Derick. Now she had been living in the castle, a shadow of her former self, living with the biggest regret ever. And she knew that for the rest of her life, there would never be a way to erase the guilt.

She had been in her room for those three days, unable to sleep, unable to go out to feed. Edmund and Hillary, noticing this brought her blood from their hunts to drink, she collected it just so they would leave her alone, but then threw it away instead. The blood she used to yearn for like her life now tasted bitter in her mouth after all she’d experienced.

After seeing Andrew with that girl, after seeing her grandmother’s grave, all she wanted to do was yell and scream whenever she thought about it. Becoming human suddenly didn’t matter to her anymore. she had spent over a year in this castle, and she had bonded with Derick more than she ever did than the man she thought was her husband, and now she had pushed him away, he decided to help her, even when she said she was leaving. Suddenly, it felt as if the only people who ever loved her so in her former life was her grandma, and her best friend Sandra. But now grandma Jen was dead, and Sandra’s memory of her had been erased. She had only been gone for a year, and it felt as if things had moved on quickly without her back home. She wished she had visited earlier, she might have been able to see her grandmother for just one last time, even if it were just to say goodbye.

A wave of anger began to flood over her, and she didn’t know when she got up and started scattering everything in her room. This Marylin’s room, that didn’t give her any sign of what to expect, she hated this room, and she didn’t mind pulling it down to the ground. She threw everything around, the drawers, the closets, the shelves, everything. This was her way of venting, and if destroying things would make her feel better, then she would.

On top one of the closets, she saw the indicator, the useless indicator that Mariana the wingless pixie, had given to her, and didn’t knew when she picked it up and smashed it to the ground. The dust scattered all over the floor, and suddenly, it began to glow.

***

Joana remembered what Mariana told her about the indicator glowing whenever it was around her magic. The first diary was on her bed, a long distance from where the indicator glowed, which was near the door. It couldn’t have been the one that propelled the indicator, which meant that something else that carried Mariana’s magic was in this room, around where the indicator was spread. She looked at it but couldn’t seem to find anything that resembled magic on the scattered floor. She began to touch the ground, trying to find what made the indicator glow.

After a few seconds, her hand then bumped into a lid on the ground. Why hadn’t she noticed it there before?

Opening the lid, she found the second diary, and a bunch of other letters Marylin left behind. How come? She thought Dana said Marylin carried the other diary along. So how come it ended up here? By any chance, did she come back to the castle to drop this here? Joana guessed she must have done that before she died, because Dana was certain that she took it along.

She looked at the diary and wondered, there was still a piece of the puzzle that didn’t fit correctly. One of the reasons why she wanted to return home so badly was because of the way Marylin fought to be with John. If Andrew was clearly the wrong man for her, then what happened between Marylin and John? Did they get married and live happily ever after, or did Marylin make a mistake by exchanging her immortality like the council had said? She knew that this diary would hold the key to those answers, and she was going to read it to find out.