by Jayla Kane
My mother’s garden. I kicked a bramble and remembered her cool expression, her pursed lips. She hadn’t believed me, pure and simple. I told her first, but I should’ve told Anna. My father was worse; he did believe me, but he said that Lucas probably had good reason. And as if he heard what they said, Lucas got worse—like they’d given them permission.
The worst one was that night—the night Raven happened to be here. Lucas only beat me every once in a while, after I turned ten or so; I think my father got a phone call from school, and god forbid the Warfields become the source of local gossip. But something got into Lucas that night and he beat the ever living shit out of me. He liked to use a belt; he’d use anything, of course, lash out with his hands, one time he even bit me—but he liked the belt best of all. I’ll never forget how tightly she held me. How good it felt to have someone finally believe me. To give a damn.
Lucas beat Tristan too. He even beat Morgan; I think that’s why he’s been gone. Mina must have sent him away. She’d never leave Lucas’s bank account, but Morgan had to be saved. I had no bitterness—I wouldn’t wish Lucas on anybody, and as terrible as he was to me, he wasn’t my father. I can’t imagine how badly that would fuck you up.
But Tristan fought back, so he got it even worse than me sometimes. I fought back too, eventually, of course; we were both taller than Lucas by the time we were thirteen. Tristan was always gentler in temperament than me, but he fought Lucas like a tiger, especially when he was old enough and found out the bastard had laid into me again.
It made me not want to tell Tris, because Lucas would really lose it then. He’d beaten Tristan so badly once he couldn’t walk for a whole day. I had to roll him on to a sheet and pull him to the bathroom, and even then, he had to lay in the bathtub while I turned on the water just so he could piss. It was red at first, and then ran clear by the end of the day; he wouldn’t let me tell. He could stand the next day, but that first day…
I’m not sure what was wrong with my parents. I looked around at the ruined garden and wondered how someone could turn a blind eye to that.
My mother was wonderful in almost every other way. She was a great story-teller, and a gifted singer. She was funny, in a dry, silly way. She loved us very much—even with all that, I knew she did. She showed it in a thousand ways, big and small, from the food she requested from Anna—always our favorites—to the clothes she bought for us to the time she spent taking us to libraries and soccer and baseball and museums three hours away… She was a good mom. A loving mom. But for some reason, she just didn’t seem to see or understand what Lucas did to us.
It’s true that the worst of it was saved for when my parents traveled. We would beg them not to go. And then when we were older we would either run off or bring the girls here, hoping it would stop him. But that night, it hadn’t, and then… My parents died.
That should’ve given Lucas carte-blanche, but he stopped. He never came back. Never showed up at one in the morning, drunk and hissing about some toy I left in the hall that he’d supposedly tripped on, dragging me out of the bed and stripping me naked so he could whip me with a belt until I bled. Nope. Never again, and I certainly wasn’t going to ask him why.
When I got bigger I would push him if I walked by him in the hallway, I would key his car and wait for him to see it, grinning, hoping he would try to throw a punch. But I rarely saw him, and most of the time when I did he was with Mina. I didn’t want to fight him in front of her—I knew she’d call the police, and I guess some shred of decency in me imagined she didn’t know, somehow, or that it would be wrong for me to shame him in front of her. To shame my family in front of the community. That’s a head trip, huh? Fuck him, right? And her. But…
I tucked my hands in my pockets and sat down on the edge of one of the empty fountains. Maybe having an unwelcome walk through Raven’s mind was bringing all of this to light in my own, or maybe I was already courting the crazies. We had no idea how much power I needed to use to stay sane. I could be fucking imagining Anna and eating chalk instead of biscuits for all I knew.
I rubbed a hand over my face and stared at the statue in the center. It was a little satyr, the kind my mother liked to say would sing me a song if I brought him a glass of wine and poured it into the fountain. I looked at the empty pool around it and thought we both could probably use a drink.
I cracked my knuckles and stood up. Leo’s words of caution bothered me—if I wasn’t trained, as he said some people in covens were, was it really safe for me to be out here by myself, doing fucking magic like goddamn Harry Potter in the middle of my backyard? I had no training. I just caused the occasional cataclysmic natural event, like an indoor snow storm, or an earthquake.
I wished I could call Hunter. But I’d be damned if I got him involved in all this—as of yesterday, Hunter was officially off of Society business. He was getting a degree from the Institute, a good job, and the fuck out of town. I couldn’t tell him anything.
And I couldn’t call Raven because… I couldn’t. I’d checked in with Hunter about her before I ate breakfast and he said she hadn’t come out of my dorm. I hoped she was working on an essay or something, preoccupied with anything besides… Me.
Alright.
So…I knew I could make it snow. I looked up at the sky and furrowed my brow, trying to remember what I was thinking when I had—and then abruptly abandoned that avenue when I did. Fine. Maybe not snow… Rain isn’t that different. Could I make it rain? Right here in the fountain, the way I had contained the snow to the office?
I closed my eyes and poured back into my mind, using the strange trajectory I’d followed with Raven and her abilities the day before to focus. I would never have been able to tunnel so far into myself without that experience, but it was easy to look at the surface of my mind and begin to pull on certain… Emotions. Feelings. Sensations. Ideas. And then… Something splattered on my forehead, and when I opened my eyes I looked at a perfectly round rainstorm, hovering exactly above the statue, his eyes suddenly more vivid as water ran over them. I sucked in a breath, and the rain became mist; I blew it out, and lightning sparked in the sky far overhead.
Easy peasy.
Too easy, I thought.
This is way too much power for one person to have. It didn’t make sense. If there had ever been another Game Master—excuse me, Magi—like me, history would have recorded it, I was sure. In the form of natural disasters and weather anomalies and probably a bunch of terrible shit, as absolute power corrupts absolutely, or however the hell that saying goes. And if the Ashwood Coven had been around since 1700 something, then one of those fuckers would have gone rogue. At least one.
So either I was the first Magi to be a descendent of two magical dynasties—that phrase still made me crack a smile—or the Coven had some way of controlling them. Had to. Because this could get bad, fast.
I stopped making it rain once the water was about a foot high, moving my hands as if I were turning a faucet to make it fall harder or turn it off. I thought about taking my shoes off and putting my feet in the fountain like I had when I was a kid, but it didn’t seem like fun by myself; it just made me miss Raven.
Then again, what didn’t?
I flicked my finger and watched as a spray of water arced over the pool, landing with a splat. Then I twisted it into a curlicue, drawing it into a constantly moving loop, surrounding the little statue in the center of the pool; I had to concentrate hard, and when it exploded I realized I’d been holding my breath. I started again, making more elaborate shapes with the water, arches and circles and winding lines like snakes floating through the air, and then, I realized I could probably freeze them—so I did. Shards like arrows darted in and out of the pool, sinking below the surface and melting away to nothing; I fanned them out like the jets of the Bellagio and froze them at their highest point, splattering them across the surface with a wave of my hand. It was fun. More fun than I expected. But to control the weather required more than just cold, right? To make
rain, you needed water, air, and heat. So then I evaporated the entire pool in one blast, the steam so hot I had to jump backwards, falling on the ground to prevent myself from getting scalded. Clouds of misty steam floated in the cool air, and I brushed them away with a blast of cold wind, the leaves on the overgrown bushes shivering as they were suddenly coated in ice.
Intoxicating. I felt slightly drunk as I collapsed back on the ground and stared up at the sky; my raincloud was gone, the blue unblemished. A perfect fall day. I hoped I’d done enough practicing for now, because I was fucking starving.
But before I went back to the kitchen, I reached down and pulled up some of the weeds; I wondered if I could move earth deliberately, instead of just in a frenzy, and bit my lip concentrating enough to yank weeds from the ground with the same invisible hands that had tossed miniature ice spears into the air for me. Dirt was harder to move, I discovered; the feelings inside of me were harder to reach. But I worked at it, gripping my fists until my fingers cramped as the tiny pile of unwanted roots grew bigger, one by one, the earth churning and spitting them out in clumps. I stood perfectly still, watching things move around me, the very earth itself roiling, and wondered how the hell this was the cure. I sure as fuck felt crazy.
But when I was finally done, my whole body drenched in sweat, my hunger a raw tug in my belly… I felt good. I felt the same way I did when I won a particularly difficult rugby match by a single point, high-fiving Hunter in victory and giving the other team a legitimate nod of respect. My muscles ached. I’d been out here for two hours. But I… I was content.
Moments like these were few and far between for me. I stood for a minute, satisfied with what I’d done, and turned back to the house. I felt like I might tear Lucas in half with a quick flick of the wrist if he looked at me wrong, and I’m not going to lie—that felt good too.
But halfway to the house my phone beeped, and when I looked down at the text I stopped moving altogether. “Hunter? What happened?”
“Something bad,” he said. “She’s fine—but I don’t think she can stay here. And neither should you.”
“Bring her to the house,” I said, and he hung up. Hunter didn’t need me to defer to him, and I trusted his judgment implicitly. I shoved the phone in my pocket and jogged back to the house, running up the servant’s stairs and back to my suite; I needed to shower before she arrived, move some stuff around to make room for her books and clothes, try to slow my heartrate down enough to make sure I wasn’t over-reacting.
Because the truth was that if Hunter thought someone might try to hurt Raven, I wasn’t going to be able to let her out of my sight.
Maybe not even my reach.
Whether she liked it or not.
Chapter Seven
Raven
I woke up exhausted.
It didn’t make any sense; I’d slept deeply and for over nine hours. But when my eyes opened and registered my surroundings—the swanky, old-fashioned décor and far-too-delicious scent of the man I both hated and adored—I felt the grit of sandy in the corners of my eyes and my mind full of cobwebs. I wished I could sleep for another nine hours, wrapped up in that smell… But I couldn’t. I had a life to start putting back together, now that I knew I wasn’t a murderer; I had magic to do, apparently, to ensure I didn’t lose whatever was left of my brain after yesterday’s revelations; I had college to attend, because as far as I could tell being some kind of biological witch spawn did not guarantee any actual luck or money. In my case, apparently, it just guaranteed you headaches.
I laid there, the pain in my temples gradually ebbing away, and tried to remember what classes I had that day… Before realizing it was Saturday. Well, that was fine; I certainly had plenty of work to do. Essays to write, books half read, quizzes to prepare for. The only real question was how far I wanted to wander from this room. An image of Hunter rose from the murky recollections I had of the evening previous and I frowned, hoping he wouldn’t be anywhere nearby. Jake was… Jake said he was going to the house. A part of me—deeply buried, but unignorable—shuddered at the thought of relegating him to that place, walking the same halls as Lucas. But Jake was a full-grown man now; it’d taken four people to hold him back the other night in the Vault, and that was before his magic took hold.
Before we… Did what we did.
Remembering that night make me shiver for entirely different reasons, and I rolled onto my back, allowing myself to luxuriate for just a second in the same spot where he’d held me so tightly, made me feel so complete… Something wet squished under my arm, and I gasped and jerked upright. The sheets were white, but not the spot on the bed directly behind me, where Jake had lain that night; now, red dotted the sheets, and a wide splash stood out like vulgar paint.
I peeled it back.
And screamed, and screamed, and screamed.
It wasn’t that it was dead—although it certainly was, the poor little body decapitated. Someone had placed the dead mouse’s corpse right behind my sleeping body, and lain the little head on Jake’s pillow. A morbid joke.
It wasn’t that there was so much blood.
It was that someone had done it to intimidate me—to frighten and terrorize me.
To bully me.
And even Jake would never, ever make a joke like this.
Adrenaline soared through me and when Hunter battered down the door I was standing up on the bed, shrieking like a banshee. He rushed over, silent as ever, and looked where I was pointing. Seeing the dead mouse, he immediately left and went to the bathroom, came back with the small trashcan and a roll of toilet paper, and proceeded to roll the mouse up—head and body—and place them in the bottom of the can. By the time he came back from his room, I’d stopped screaming.
I was staring down at the stain, and several things had occurred to me at once.
Hunter had to break in—the door on his side was locked, and the chair I’d placed there was unmoved.
Nothing else in the room was touched. And whoever had done this was probably pretty damn quiet, because I had a feeling Hunter had been propped right up against that door, aware of every sound made within.
“Raven, are you okay? Did they—” He stopped short, his deep, rasping voice low and serious. Hunter offered me his hand to help me down in a surprisingly gentlemanly gesture, and I took it and stepped around the blood stain, then held fast to his fingers as I slid off of the bed. “Raven,” he said again, as if reminding me of his question.
“I think—I’m fine, thank you,” I said, my mind still going over the questions I had, now that I was awake and the shock was ebbing away. I strode over to the main door and pulled on it; nope. Locked. And my books were still spread out right by it, impossible for anyone to avoid if they’d somehow picked the lock without Hunter hearing. “Did you hear anything last night?”
“No,” he said immediately. “I slept for about six hours; someone might have been able to get by then.” I could tell he was thinking the same things I was.
I went over and started to climb on the bed to check the windows, then froze when I saw the blood. He seemed to understand me, and surprised me again by quickly pulling the sheets off and finding a newspaper to cover the stain on the mattress. I waited while he walked across it, both of us in too much of a hurry to fuss about his boots, and while he inspected the windows I went into the bathroom and looked around there. We were far too high off of the ground for someone to have come in this way, I thought; even if there was someone on campus with the ninja level climbing skills it would take to scale this wall, the windows were old. They would have been a pain in the ass to open from the outside—if not impossible—and made a hell of a lot of noise.
But both doors were locked. Which, I thought, ticking over the possibilities, someone could break through pretty easily, relatively speaking… But how would they have gotten back out and placed all of the objects in their path back where I’d left them from outside the room? Without waking Hunter—and not to mention me? It was impossible.
Unless they used magic.
My blood ran cold. Was this little trick meant for me? I was sleeping in Jake’s dorm. Maybe they meant for him to wake up next to a dead mouse. And if so… Did the mouse represent me?
Did they know?
Or was it just some kind of twisted game, a coincidence that they’d exploited to fuck with one of us, no deeper meaning involved?
“Hunter,” I called, trying to keep the panic out of my voice, “did you find anything?” As I came out of the bathroom he landed lightly on the floor and strode over to me.
“No,” he said, his face impassive as ever. “I think we should go, Raven.”
“Go?”
“I can’t figure out how they got in,” he said, and in spite of what that implied, now that I was freshly acquainted with the world of magic, I appreciated his blunt approach. “You need to leave. I can’t keep you safe here.”
“Okay,” I said, biting my lip. “I’ll get my stuff,” I told him, and a throb of real terror rushed through me when Hunter’s hand suddenly landed on my shoulder. I instantly backed away and he raised his palms to me, as if he understood my reaction immediately.
“Sorry,” he said. “I was just going to warn you, Jake’s not going to want you to go home.”
“Am I supposed to give a shit about what Jake wants?”
Hunter said nothing.
Some people can be silent and you will forget they’re there; it was what I wished for, constantly, in high school. To be quiet and still and forgotten. But other people work around the silence, with it, almost—they use the absence of sound as a way to communicate the way the rest of us use words. Hunter told me, in absolute silence, what he thought of my flippant answer. “I don’t have to be here just because he commanded it, and I sure as hell don’t have to go anywhere else if he deems it necessary.”
