by Sara Stone
I mixed up the potion, which looked like chunky homemade playdough in an awful rotten pumpkin color. I hoped I was reading it right and following the spell correctly, given neither of the men followed me. Once I had it all mixed up with fifteen clockwise folds with a wooden spoon. I invoked the elements with candles in the circle, using my mind to light them, feeling proud of myself to easily do so. I set the bowl in my lap and, centering myself, I felt for my spark. It responded, albeit slowly. I chanted the incantation three times.
“Goddess above hear my request, I search for one who is magically blessed, leave no stone unturned, a time limit stressed, so mote it be I behest,” I chanted, my voice growing in strength I wasn’t sure I possessed.
I lit a match as I did the candles and dropped it onto the mixture, which started to smoke. It smelled like if you put incense in a pile of decomposing herbs. The smoke swirled around the circle; as it passed each of the four candles, the flames shot up and then flickered out. I sat there waiting for the next part of the spell to kick in, and nothing happened. The smoke that had been trapped in the circle was now wafting around the room. The circle had closed itself when the spell didn’t work like it was supposed to.
Shaking my head, I picked up the bowl and walked downstairs. Ulric was in a deep discussion with someone on his phone, speaking in a hushed murmur. He looked up as I walked into view. I walked past him into the kitchen silently, dumping the mixture into the trash before cleaning out the metal bowl. I was washing it with regular dish soap when Ulric came in to let me know I needed to clean it and then cleanse it of the spell before trying to use it again, even if it was the same spell being recast. I didn’t respond, as I was madder than before after getting no results from the spell on top of the conversation where he and Judson wanted to tell me what to do. I was not the type of girl to be told such nonsense.
Ulric also made sure I knew that even with the ability to control my magic and years of practice, spells could go wrong or not work altogether. He was adamant that I needed to practice, and he was going to be the one to teach me.
He followed me back upstairs as I carried the now clean and cleansed bowl. I set it down on the desk and turned to him.
“So, what do I do to practice? Shouldn’t I just have intuition on how to use it?” I rolled my eyes.
“First, you need patience. It’s not all just going to come to you and be easy.”
“Yeah, thank you, Captain Obvious.”
“Who’s Captain Obvious?” he asked seriously.
“What? Never mind. So, tell me what I need to do.”
“We are going to try to have you conjure up a fireball,” he said, sitting down in the chair.
Great now my house was in danger of me blowing it up. I sat on the floor and held my palms up as he instructed. I focused my energy into my hands, willing fire to form a ball of flames in my palms. I sat there awkwardly staring at my hands for so long I had memorized the lines.
Ulric moved from the chair to the floor in front of me to show me what he wanted to happen. His palms up, flames appeared hovering above his hands. The fire wrapped around itself in an orb over each hand, sending out embers, yet without burning him. He made them bigger as he brought them together in between both hands near his middle. Slowly he pushed them together until he extinguished it without so much as singeing a single hair.
I closed my eyes and imagined having the same floating orbs over my palms. The harder I concentrated, the more my hands started to itch. I chanced a brief glance at my hands to see tiny flames trying to ignite. Closing my eyes, I focused more energy and pushed it where it needed to go. I felt the pulse and saw I had done it. He had me do it and then do it some more to the point I was exhausted, my butt ached from sitting on the floor, and my head was pulsing with an impending headache.
By the time we were done, it was well into the night, and I was beyond tired. I pulled my bun out, rubbing the ache out of my scalp before getting into clean jammies and switching on the TV across from my bed to clear my mind. Instead of relaxing me, the news flipped to a story about the inexplicable rise in mysterious deaths of people in the area, including a young woman from a county over. I watched as they flashed her picture before moving on to the other deceased in the surrounding counties. There were so many. I counted twelve before switching off the TV, feeling queasy now that I had seen their faces. The faces of the people it was too late to save. I turned over in my bed, punching my pillows in exhausted frustration.
Chapter Five
Ulric had me up every morning to train. Most days, I would end up bloodied and bruised in some form or another. We practiced fighting stances, attack techniques, sword combat, and he even took me to the middle of the woods to battle with spells and how to deflect them. I usually missed, which ended up with me sprawled on my back gasping for air, putting a fire out on myself or my surroundings, or generally in pain.
I was insistent that I needed to learn how to cast spells, use the book, and stay inside Gram’s witchy room instead of stomping around the forest on the edge of town, but Ulric wouldn’t listen. He told me that we would do it his way. I needed to learn how to protect myself first. It made me feel scared of having to use my magic like that. I’m positive that other witches didn’t learn this way, that these types of lessons had something to do with the building tension around the coven.
“There are two things in life you can’t take back—words and magic. So, make sure you hit what you aim at and make sure you mean what you say.” He had a point there. He went to work at hanging up a target. It was the kind with a robber holding up a gun on it. “Now you are going to throw the spells we covered at this guy.”
“Great, more tests.” That’s all I had seemed to be doing for the last week.
“Well, if you hadn’t been so sheltered, my job wouldn’t be so hard,” he mumbled, taking a step away from me.
“I heard that!” I put on my safety glasses just in case I blew something up, before stepping up to the line he drew in the sand. I was not ready to take a hit to the head or chest or wherever my spell decided to ricochet and hit.
I shook off my nervousness, focusing on the things I wanted to do to the target. I held up my hand and blasted off the first spell. It was to incapacitate, and unfortunately missed the mark by a foot. Okay, so it was like a couple of feet. I followed it quickly with a fire spell that hit the target, but off to the side. It wasn’t strong enough to burn the whole thing. I was starting to sweat with the effort of back-to-back spells. I thought of an ice spell and threw it; it formed into an icicle and stabbed into the outline’s belly. Yes! My momentum was wearing down, but the spells were still potent enough to cause some damage and had yet to backfire on me. I picked it up with another fireball, this time hitting where the icicle hit, melting it effectively while dousing the fire.
“You need 100% accuracy. You need to know that your enemy is going down when you hit him with one strong one or back-to-back small spells. You can’t rely on anything else. Not only for your safety, but for those around you. If you miss the target, you’re likely to hit someone else.”
We started throwing spells back and forth once I got my accuracy up to four good hits out of six. He said the only way to hit a moving target was to practice with one, so he volunteered. Actually, Rose had, deciding that he would be better off training me after witnessing the messes I managed to myself into.
Daylight was gone, and I had been hit on just about every part of my body as my deflecting skills were my weakest ability. I was a dead woman walking, barely making it back to my car. My head started to pound. I grabbed for the door handle but missed, falling into the car, smacking my shoulder before sliding down to my butt.
“Lia?”
“Hmm.”
“Lia, are you alright?” His words weren’t fully registering. It’s like my head was underwater, and I could barely make out that he was talking.
The stress of using my magic and being hit by Ulric’s took too much of a toll on m
y body while my mind turned to mush as I tried to remember everything he had taught me. Passing out was starting to become a strange habit for me. Using magic sucked at your energy like a needy toddler; although I had built up some resistance for small, easy spells, it was short-lived with strong ones. I tried hard not to pass out, but the tunnel vision suddenly went from having a light at the end to being completely pitch black with dancing spots.
I awoke, hearing the guys arguing over something. I was inside somewhere as I could hear the air conditioner working. I started to take in how sore I was all over, feeling overly exhausted. My forehead and eyes were covered in a cool cloth. I felt a blanket’s weight covering the rest of my body.
“And it doesn’t bother you at all that you nearly killed her?” Judson yelled.
“I had no idea she was so injured, or else we would have stopped! She is completely unprepared to help with the witches’ grave affairs, let alone go up against whoever is behind this dark magic,” Ulric whispered harshly.
“You went too far.”
“She needs to learn to protect herself!”
“I’m her protector! That’s my job!”
“Your judgment is clouded, Judson. Now let me heal her.”
I could feel him putting drops of something over my arms and legs, then his hands were touching my chest by my collarbone, as they warmed up, the warmth radiated through me. The dark heaviness I was fighting pushed away from the warmth he was sending into me. My eyelids didn’t feel as heavy anymore, so I blinked them open to find Ulric’s hands were glowing brightly with a green glow. His normal whitish blonde hair looked like an ethereal halo, and his skin was shimmering, looking magnificent instead of the usual pale. This was not the guy I had been around. His face seemed sharp with its angles, no lines or pores inhibiting its scary perfection.
My eyes started to water, and as I moved to wipe them away I witnessed whatever was happening with Ulric to instantly smooth back out into his typical look—causing me to question if I had ever seen it happen. It had to be the massive amounts of magic I got hit with frying my brain. I was not cut out for this. I couldn’t even bring myself to focus on why I was doing it anyway. I didn’t know these witches. Why did it matter to me? I felt a pain of guilt for thinking something so callous. I sat up to see that Hattie, Judson, and Ulric were all in my living room. I couldn’t remember driving home from the forest we had been practicing in.
“Here, you look like you need this,” Hattie said, handing me a drink.
I smelled it, hoping it wasn’t the Christmas junk Ulric had me drink before. I smelled the lime and tequila then sighed in relief.
“It’s a margarita,” she said, laughing at my inspection of it.
“Thank God!” I said, taking a big drink of it and leaning back into the couch, feeling the familiar burn of the tequila. I didn’t make a habit of chugging down margaritas, but with all the craziness, I needed some of that five-o’clock somewhere to pick me up.
Ulric explained what had happened, dotted with multiple apologies, which I waved off. I was hoping it would mean I would get a break, but before he left, he let me know we would be practicing the following morning again, as long as I felt up to it. Judson had left quietly after that, leaving Hattie and me alone.
“Want to watch movies and eat ice cream?” she asked expectantly.
“That sounds amazing!” I said.
We sat there eating ice cream out of the tubs, trading between mocha almond fudge and strawberry cheesecake. We laughed and cried through rom coms like we had been friends our whole lives. It was easy going type of friendship budding between us, and I was all for it. The movie finally came to an end, and we sat there in our ice cream induced comas.
“Did one of the guys call you over?” I asked curiously.
“No, I saw that you got hurt,” she said, fiddling with the hem of her shirt.
“You saw it? How?” I asked, bewildered.
“I’m a seer,” she whispered, her cheeks turning red as she grimaced on the words.
“Like a medium?” I asked in surprise.
“No, like I get flashes of things that have happened, are happening, or will happen.” She made me laugh by saying it in a warning tone while wiggling her fingers like she was talking about some spooky hoodoo.
“So, your comment at the coffee shop? Was that about a vision?” The whole conversation made so much more sense now.
“Oh no, it’s because I saw your picture at Mabel’s house and recognized you.” She laughed, pulling at her long ponytail.
“So, how do your visions work?” I couldn’t help my curiosity.
“Well, most of the time, they just happen. I go into a trance where I am shown something. If I can help, I will make known certain information—but as a seer, I can’t tell it without there being consequences,” she said with a severe tone. I couldn’t judge her. I went from being completely normal to having this power and taking over a coven. In some ways I didn’t feel much different, but I couldn’t help sensing that everything was changing.
Her being different made me feel less weird. She wasn’t ashamed of it, but obviously, someone had made her upset when she told them of her seer abilities, as she was expecting that type of reaction from me. We moved off the topic, as my questions seemed to make her uncomfortable. Her body language alone made it clear when she went from relaxed to slowly hiding behind her crossed arms, and she had pulled her knees to her chin. I didn’t want to pry, so I changed the subject.
I leaned into the headboard, moving empty ice cream tubs out of the way, and sighed. Maybe she too would think me dating a normal is a bad idea.
“So, I ran into a guy from school today,” I said shyly. That perked her right up. A smile lit up her face as I filled her in on what happened, and the guys’ reaction to it.
“I wouldn’t worry about it. I date normals all the time,” she shrugged.
“Really? How do you not freak them out?” I asked.
“With the coven business and seerer trances? I just blame the meetings on the cafe, and if they see me go into a trance, I just say it’s a weird form of sleepwalking.” She looked at me, her face completely serious.
“And that works?” I was amazed and kind of excited. I could pull that off.
“No!” She laughed so hard tears streamed down her face. She got me laughing, and I saw how ridiculous her answers had been.
“I’ve dated normals in the past, but it became too hard as my sight became stronger and more frequent.”
“Oh, well, I will try it. I haven’t had a date in forever.”
She sat there, nodding, which made it less awkward. She wasn’t judging me for having a date in the middle of the mess I had been plunged into. I didn’t fully know her, but the lack of judgment had me hoping we would stay friends. We stayed up so late I had a hard time keeping my eyes open. Eventually, we both just fell asleep, jabbering on about different things until the other stopped responding.
I didn’t get a chance to take a breather with all the practice, even with having passed out at the end the day before. It was back to practice right away. They all thought I needed to know as much as possible.
A girl night with Hattie seemed to have revived me. I hadn’t had a friend like her in a long time, and it had felt good to just relax. I was, however, dragging after staying up late and was bloated to the max after all that ice cream. I had pulled on some yoga pants and a t-shirt I didn’t particularly like, in case it would be ruined by spells, mine or Ulric’s.
The smell of the forest calmed me. The moist dirt crunched under my sneakers as I tried to find cover. Ulric was hiding. I wasn’t going to get caught off guard with one of his spells like yesterday. I hid behind a massive tree, the bark biting into my back as I leaned into it, hoping I was well concealed. I didn’t want to hurt him, but he said it was the only way to practice, or so he said. A stick broke, the sharp sound coming from my right, breaking the silence. I sent a spell off without thinking about what I had just d
one.
“You’ll have to try harder than that, Lia,” he laughed somewhere to the right of where I had just thrown the spell.
I had just given away my location instead of waiting to be sure where he was first. I ran and ducked behind another tree. I had learned the hard way not to peek, to be patient. Let the enemy show themselves. He had drilled that into my head, don’t put myself into harm’s way to try to get a shot. Be sure of where it was going and that it was going to work.
I heard rustling around some bushes and sent another spell off. This time it hit something with a loud thud. I got him! He hit the ground with a moan. Crap, double crap. I ran over, and Ulric was lying on the ground holding his chest. His breathing was ragged as I dropped down beside him, my mind scrambling to figure out what to do.
“Ulric, are you okay?” I was trying not to touch where I hit him, so I gently shook his arms. He moaned, which I took as a good sign because it meant he was alive, at least for now.
I grabbed the backpack he always carried, searching for the tonic he had used on me. I pulled his shirt up to see the damage. His alabaster skin was red and singed enough to start blistering. A layer of sweat beaded on his forehead and made his long hair stick to his face. I bit the top off, sloshing it onto the blisters and rubbing it around on the red skin as he hissed in pain. I would compare the painful sting of the tonic to a high dose of antiseptic spray sprinkled with chili powder, which you can imagine didn’t feel too good.
The blisters were slowly disappearing before my eyes into his chest, as the dark redness turned into a faint pink. I carefully ran my fingertip over where a blister had been, noticing that his chest was more chiseled than I had expected. I knew it was working as he sat up and leaned against a tree.
“That was a good one,” he coughed, moaning a bit at the end.
“I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
He grabbed my hand and ran his thumb over my knuckles.
