Playing With Fire

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Playing With Fire Page 74

by Adrienne Woods et al.


  “Go away,” Camille snapped, turning around so she wouldn’t have to face me.

  I understood Camille wasn’t too happy that I’d left her and Dean at the party on Saturday, but since I’d inadvertently cursed my own sister, which would lead to her untimely death unless I could do something about it, being upset over me leaving early seemed utterly silly.

  Camille strode through the hallway, purposely ignoring me. She paused only in front of her locker, and pulled it open so fast it nearly collided with my face.

  “Don’t ignore me.” I peeked from behind the locker, trying to force her to look at me. “I know you’re mad, but I need your help.”

  Camille snorted. She looked like an angry elf—even when she was this upset, there was a certain cuteness to her. If I told her that, she would probably kill me though, so I wisely remained quiet about it.

  “It’s not the first time you’ve ditched me,” she said while she slammed her locker shut. And she was on the move again. For someone this tiny, she could cross large distances in a surprisingly short amount of time. I struggled to keep up with her.

  “I know, but…”

  “And you always come up with excuses,” she interrupted me before I could finish my sentence. “All of them lame. I know you don’t like parties, but we’re not forty, Kieran. We shouldn’t hang out at home every Saturday night growing old and wrinkled.”

  I held up my hands in defeat. “I know, I know.”

  “And what is even worse than you ditching me every chance you got, is that you’re lying about it.” She faced me now, her eyes burning with anger. “Nathalie told me.”

  Her words didn’t sink in at first, and I frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “She means,” a voice interrupted our conversation, “that Nathalie told us you were with a guy.”

  I turned toward the speaker, my other friend Dean, who was standing right behind me. He had his arms crossed in front of his chest, and he looked anything but pleased.

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “You’re seeing someone and you couldn’t tell us?” Camille shook her head. “That hurts even more than that you’re always running away from us.”

  “It’s not like that,” I tried to reason with her. “I… Please, let me explain.”

  “Can’t,” Dean said while he moved past me to stand next to Camille. “Class is about to start, and we don’t want to be late.”

  They were furious at me, both of them. I couldn’t blame them, though. Ever since what happened with Samantha, I hadn’t been the kind of friend they deserved. I had used them, pretended I wanted to spend time with them, while in reality I was doing the unthinkable and exchanging my own blood with a vampire’s blood, since it was the only substance on earth that gave my sister the strength she so desperately needed to survive.

  Now I came here begging for their help, ready to tell them secrets about my life that they could barely imagine. Would they ever forgive me for not confiding in them sooner?

  “Please,” I begged them. “I… I’ve done something terrible.”

  Camille paused in her tracks. She looked up at Dean, who shrugged. Then, my best friend turned toward me, wary. “What did you do?”

  “I can’t explain it here.” I shook my head, hoping against all odds that both of them would understand. “Can you please come outside with me?”

  They exchanged another look.

  “Skip class?” Dean asked eventually.

  “Yes.” I scratched my neck. “Look, I know I’ve been keeping things from you. For a very long time.” I licked my lips, nervous butterflies swimming in my stomach. “Things about my family. About how I really am. About my sister. But I’m ready to come clean now, and tell you everything. But it’s not the kind of story I can tell in five minutes.”

  Dean sighed. “And say we bite. What then?”

  “Then, I’m hoping you’ll understand why I couldn’t tell you.” I tried to look as apologetic as I felt, because I really did feel sorry for not being able to tell them the truth sooner. Heck, I wasn’t even supposed to tell them now. Confiding in humans broke just about every rule of the Witch’s Grimoire my family and I were supposed to adhere to.

  But if Baba Yaga’s didn’t adhere to the rules, then neither should blood witches.

  Besides, if I needed one of them to act like bait for the Baba Yaga, then I owed it to them to tell them the whole truth, from start to end, including my own sins, and leave nothing out. I rather they detest me for signing my own sister’s death warrant than my parents finding out about it.

  “And that you’ll agree to help me, even if it’s dangerous, and even if it could harm you.” I really didn’t deserve them, I realized as the hallway was slowly emptying around us, all the other students hurrying to class. They were the two best friends a girl could possibly want, and I had pushed them away, time and time again.

  Camille grabbed my hand. Tears glistened in her eyes. “Listen, Kieran. I have no idea what mess you got yourself into, or why you thought you couldn’t share with us… No more secrets between us from now on, all right?”

  Dean put a hand on my shoulder. “We’ll help you, of course. No matter what it is.”

  I didn’t say anything, but I figured that as soon as he knew what helping me entailed, he would regret he ever said that.

  Chapter 14

  “So, you’re a witch. Wow.” Dean whistled, looking a strange mix between terrified and awed. “I have to let that one sink in.”

  We were sitting outside the school building, on a bench near the parking lot. The lot was deserted. All the other students had either decided to play hookey further away from the building, or had, like good students, gone inside the school for first period.

  It was quite warm today, but I still felt chilled. Lack of sleep, and maybe still a bit exhausted over what had transpired last night. I’d never made anyone’s blood boil before. My skills were usually more limited: I could do the basic spells, like most witches, the potions from witchcraft books, the hex bags, I could sense other’s blood and heartbeats, but that’s where it ended. Boiling someone’s blood didn’t exactly fit in that equation.

  “Can you prove it?” Camille, always the most down-to-earth one from all of us, asked. “I mean, prove you’re a witch and not just going crazy?”

  “How do you want me to prove this to you? It isn’t like I can just lift up objects in the air and make chairs fly, if you think that,” I said. “I’m a blood witch, so our powers are related to blood. We can use our own blood to enhance spells, we can recognize people by their blood—say, if you lost some blood, I would be able to recognize right away it was yours.”

  “Hmm.” Camille scratched her chin. “Yeah, you can’t exactly prove that, I guess.”

  “I can also make your blood boil in your veins, but that’s extremely deadly for most people, so I refrain from using it.” Except on Baba Yaga’s, which I didn’t add.

  “I rather you didn’t do that,” Dean said.

  “Blood witches are prone to destruction rather than healing or protection,” I admitted. “There’s not much spells I can show you. We could probably stop an animal’s heart right away—I mean, my grandmother could, but I’ve never tried it.”

  “Thank God you didn’t.” Camille flinched. “Why would anyone ever do that?”

  “My grandmother was terrified of mice, so whenever one came in our house, she’d do it. It was mostly by accident, I think…” I shrugged.

  “Sorry, but I just… I believe you, I do, but it’s a lot to take in.”

  “It gets a lot worse than that.” I licked my lips. “As I said, my whole family are witches, including my sister. You know she’s in a coma, but I always told you it was because of a car accident…” I looked down, avoiding their gazes. “It wasn’t.”

  “Was it a spell that backfired?” Camille asked.

  “No. She was… She went out to hunt a wendigo, and—”

  “Sorry to interrupt.” Dean raised
his hand. “What in God’s name is a wendigo?”

  I blushed. “Oh, sorry. A wendigo likes to eat people. It’s a supernatural creature that looks stick-thin, nothing more than a bag of bones, like someone nearly starved to dead.”

  “Basically a gaunt skeleton?” Camille flinched. “That sounds nasty.”

  “Wendigos are quite strong, but… My sister, my grandmother and my sister’s best friend, Katie, went out to fight the Wendigo that night. Grandmother died. My sister fell into a coma, and Katie lost her mind. She’s in a psychiatric facility now.” I shook my head, reminiscing about the night Katie showed up on our doorstep, my sister’s limb body draped over her shoulders.

  Mother had opened the door, and had let out a loud, startling scream when she saw my sister’s comatose form.

  Katie had collapsed, and with her, Samantha had fallen to the ground as well. I saw all that from my spot, on top of the staircase. I’d always had trouble sleeping, especially when Samantha was out at night, and that night in particular, I’d had a bad feeling from the start.

  As I looked down at Katie from atop the stairs, and she met my gaze, her eyes turned wide, terrified. She seemed to be reliving the exact moments up to whatever happened during the wendigo attack. I thought she was going to die from fear right then and there.

  The next moment, she wailed like a banshee, a sound so loud and shrill it nearly ruptured my eardrums.

  Mother, who had fallen to the ground to inspect Samantha’s limp form, startled when Katie let out that guttural, unnatural sound.

  Then, Katie had slumped to the floor too, as if all the strength that had held her up and had helped her to make it back home, had vanished from her body all in one moment.

  “Kieran?” Camille waved her hand in front of me. “Are you still there?”

  I blinked, struggling to get back to the present. “I’m sorry, I was thinking about that night with my sister.” I bit my lip. “Anyway, what did you say?”

  “You still didn’t get around to the part where you need our help,” Camille said. “What is it?”

  “Well… Remember that guy Nathalie told you about? The guy I was meeting last night?”

  Camille’s expression turned from interested to angry in a second. She had the unique ability to switch moods faster than a hue light switched colors, so I was used to her ever-changing moods, but it still took me aback a bit. She had been really angry about me ditching her again, I realized. When all this was over, I would have to find a way to make it up to her.

  “Yes,” she said. “What about it?”

  “When my sister fell into a coma, everyone thought she was going to die. We brought in the best healer witches we knew, and they all thought the same thing. There was no way she could pull through.” I shook my head, remembering those terrible days when Mother walked around like a ghost—even worse than she was now—and Father snapped at anyone who dared to utter a single word.

  “Every day, she grew weaker and weaker… And then, well, it was stupid, but my friend Jadis said—”

  “Who is Jadis?” Dean interrupted.

  “Someone else you never told us about?” Camille crossed her arms in front of her chest. She seemed okay dealing with that I was a witch rather than a human, and that most of my powers involved blood or destruction, but she seemed to draw the line at me not telling her about people who firmly belonged to the world of the supernatural and whom, up till now, I had liked to keep her as far away from as possible.

  “Jadis is a witch too. Not a blood witch, though. She’s specialized in things like dream catchers, and reading Tarot cards, predicting the future and what not.”

  “She sounds like a fortune teller at a carnival,” Camille remarked dryly. She seemed to resist rolling her eyes.

  “Anyway, Jadis told me something about being able to reach out to the deceased through dreams. I hadn’t really gone to her for help with Samantha’s case, but she told me it could be a way to get in touch with my grandmother, say goodbye, and that sounded like it could help give me some peace of mind, at least. I hadn’t been able to say goodbye to grandma either.” I sighed, still feeling the pain of my grandmother’s passing. Even though it had bene years, sometimes it felt as if it was only yesterday, or as if my grandmother could just come on waltzing in into any room of our house, grab a chair and fall down, complaining about yight and joint aches and all the other maladies that came with growing old.

  “Anyway, I did what she told me to. Used a dream catcher, but not to catch dreams but to guide me in the right direction. I dreamed of my grandmother, and I got to say goodbye to her, but even more than that, she gave me a way to… A way to help my sister.”

  “How?” My monologue about trying to contact my deceased grandmother had put me on Camille’s good side again, because she seemed all compassion now, her eyes even glistening with tears.

  “Our sworn enemies are vampires and—”

  “You’re kidding me. Vampires are real too?” Dean steepled his fingers. “Wow.”

  “Basically everything you ever heard or read about, is real,” I explained to him. “So yes, vampires too.”

  “And why are you sworn enemies?” Camille furrowed her brow. “I mean, you’ve both got a thing for blood, right?”

  “Exactly. Spot on. That’s why we’re different. Vampires have to drink blood to survive, the blood of others. We drive our power from our own blood. To vampires, the blood of a blood witch is like the sweetest nectar in the world.”

  Camille rested her chin on her hands. “So…. I take it they started killing blood witches as soon as they found out?”

  “Exactly.” I pointed a finger at her. “Correct. Which is why we became enemies. They take what is most sacred to us, they destroyed most of our coven. There are only a handful of blood witches left nowadays, due to this. It’s not like we can’t fight vampires, we can. We’re actually quite adapt at it, there’s no better vampire hunter in the world than a blood witch. Young vampires, say about a century old, stand no chance. But the older a vampire is, the more powerful. Nowadays, we mostly try to avoid each other because for every dead blood witch you end up with a dead vampire, and visa versa.”

  “Yikes.” Dean shivered. “Okay, go on.”

  “Well, grandmother told me to get the blood of a vampire. Their blood is unique, it keeps them alive even though they should be dead. The very power that keeps them alive, and that grants them their supernatural abilities, is the power running through their blood. I didn’t want to believe grandma at first, but when I woke up and started thinking about it, it made sense. So, I went looking for a vampire.”

  “That guy…” Camille raised an eyebrow at me. “He’s a vampire?”

  “Yes. Four-hundred-something years old. I’ve made a deal with him. I give him my blood in exchange for his.” I felt bad even saying it out loud, but at the same time, I also felt an overwhelming relief. Finally, after all these months of sneaking behind my parents’ back, of keeping this bad part of myself from my family, I had finally been able to tell someone the truth about what I was really doing.

  “And he drinks your blood?” Camille stared at me with wide eyes. “That sounds nasty.”

  “Yes.” I reached for the choker around my neck, opening the mechanism at the back so that I could take it off, and show them the bitemarks.

  Camille gasped as she saw the two small dots on my neck.

  “It’s not as bad as it sounds,” I said while I put the choker back on. The comment instantly made my cheeks turn hot. Not as bad… How could I tell her that in fact, there was no better feeling in the world? That everytime he sank his fangs into the skin of my neck, I felt all my worries disappear, as if I finally felt whole again, as if I’d finally come home…

  “Anyway,” I continued, trying to move on. “It worked. The vampire’s blood is what keeps Samantha alive. Without it, she’d be long dead. But it’s also extremely forbidden. Forbidden in the sense that, if my family found out, they’d disown me and kick
me out of the coven in less time than it takes to say ‘vampire’.”

  “And you need our help with what now?” Dean asked. “Did this vampire threaten you? Do we have to… Kill him? Like Buffy, the Vampire Slayer?”

  I held up my hands, trying to calm him down. “No, no. He’s actually offered to help me with my problem too. See, yesterday, I met a Baba Yaga and—”

  “What’s a…” Dean interrupted me, and before he finished his sentence, I explained to him what a Baba Yaga was, how this one had tricked me, and how I had now cursed my own sister to death. I told them everything, about barely escaping the hut of the evil witch, about the girl who said she could help me, about Arthan enlisting the help of a bone witch.

  It felt good to be able to tell someone. And even more, from the way they looked at me, expressions somewhere between awe and shock, I knew they believed me. I should’ve never kept my secret from them for as long as I had.

  All this time, I’d tried to carry my burdens on my own. If I’d just told them, they would’ve understood why I had to sneak out of parties early to get the blood my sister desperately needed; they were far better friends than I ever gave them credit for, and in all honesty, I probably didn’t deserve friends like them.

  Once I’d reached the end of my story, I took a deep breath and asked: “So, the bone witch asked to bring a human—strictly for purposes of tricking the Baba Yaga, I assure you, not because she has any plans with your bones or anything—and the bones of a freshly dug up corpse.”

  Dean looked like all the color had been drained from his skin. He swallowed hard. “You mean we have to go dig up a corpse?”

  “Come on.” Camille patted him on the back. “It’s not that bad. It’s a bit gruesome, sure, but if we pick one of the really old ones, there probably won’t be any flesh on them anymore.”

  This comment made Dean promptly turn green, ready to throw up. “Stop it.”

  “I can do the part that involves opening up the coffin and getting out the bones,” I told him. “Besides, Arthan will help too, and I doubt a vampire is scared of a bone or two.”

 

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