by Sara Stone
“Lia, you’re training. You’re supposed to learn, which eventually means I will be a casualty. You are catching on quickly,” he said, smiling. The gentleness of his voice caught me off guard. I sat back on the dirt, letting the adrenaline of hitting him wear off. He hadn’t let go of my hand, and I was trying not to be so aware of it.
“I can help you.”
“You can?”
“It’s nothing really,” he said as he reached over and placed his hand on my arm. “This will help replenish your strength.” His hand grew warm and sent magic into me. The warmth from his hand spread, easing my aching muscles and fog from my tired mind.
He held out a bottle of water he pulled out of his bag. I graciously accepted it and downed it with a few chugs after feeling like he had just pushed a magic energy drink into me. He chugged his own down as well. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one affected by using my magic.
“Thank you,” I said, feeling the fatigue from using my magic, and my heavy soul tiredness, ebb away.
“How are you feeling today?” he asked, cocking his head to the side to inspect his handiwork. Whatever he had done, fixed me up. His healing magic really did the trick, not that I wanted to make a habit of needing it in the first place.
“I am okay. Hattie and I stayed up late, so nothing some extra coffee won’t fix.”
“You won’t need it. I put a little extra push into my magic just now.”
“Thanks.” I was fighting with myself about bringing up what I saw yesterday. Would he think I was nuts, or have an explanation for the glowing? I couldn’t bring myself to ask. Whatever I had seen was most likely caused by the damage my body had taken.
My phone chimed with an incoming text, and I was relieved for the distraction.
It’s Brad; want to meet up for dinner tonight?
Brad? Dang, he had been serious. I smiled. I hadn’t had a date in way too long. It was exactly what I needed. I stood up, dusting myself off. I pulled Ulric up and grabbed up his bag.
“What’s the rush?” Ulric asked as we started walking towards the car.
“I need to get home and shower. I have a date.” I was blushing slightly. I couldn’t figure out why telling him that had been so hard. I was excited to be out with someone who didn’t want me training, and who had nothing to do with magic. It would be a welcome reprieve.
I got home in time to shower and get ready. I even put on more makeup than I usually would, highlighting my eyes and then curling the ends of my hair. I felt like a schoolgirl getting ready for a dance. It had been so long since I went on a date, I was afraid I was getting too crazy with dressing up.
We agreed to meet at the Bamboo Sun, my favorite Chinese restaurant. There were only a handful of places to eat, and I was craving some barbeque pork. We grabbed a booth, laughing over the Chinese Zodiac signs. Turns out he was a pig to my high and mighty dragon. I boasted a few times that dragons were way better.
We ordered our drinks and made light conversation. His dark hair falling into his face. The buzzed sides called to be touched. I bet it would feel like velvet. I clasped my hands together under the table.
“So chem class?” I asked, wondering how I missed him.
“Yeah, I sat behind you in Mr. Whitter’s class, but you’re asking because you don’t remember me,” he said, seeing right through my facade.
“I have to admit I don’t. Don’t be insulted. It’s not just you that I don’t remember.” I tried to play it cool, hoping I didn’t just stick my foot in my mouth.
He laughed, sending the butterflies in my stomach dancing around. It was a deep throaty laugh that got us a few sideways glances.
“I’m not insulted. I’m happy you agreed to dinner,” he said with a cocky grin, “Luck was on my side having you walk into me.” He reached over and brushed a curl out of my face. I looked away a trying to hide the blush creeping up my neck.
Our drinks arrived in time for me not to have to respond. What do you say to something like that? Thank you? Yes, I can make any situation awkward with my overthinking and lack of general people skills. We placed our order for dinner, talking about high school, him moving to town his senior year, his real estate job, and why I came back to town. It led to the usual condolences, which I awkwardly waved away.
Overall, I was enjoying the date. He was nice to look at and could hold a decent conversation, which sometimes was not the case with a drool worthy man. Trying not to talk about all the magic and mumbo jumbo going on in my life seemed a bit harder than I thought it was going to be. I struggled not to let anything slip. We talked about eating all my favorite dishes. It was sort of cute that when I listed off what was good, he decided to order it—all of it—I was really impressed.
“Are you going back to work soon?” he asked between bites of pork dipped in hot mustard.
“I haven’t decided yet. I have a week left on my time before I need to make up my mind. I can work remotely, which would mean keeping Gram’s house,” I said sighing. I hadn’t thought about it as much as I should have. Leaving the house to be sold broke my heart just thinking about it. On the other hand, if I didn’t keep up my work, my job would easily be handed off. The thought of all my hard work going down the drain to stay in Gram’s house was just as bad.
“What happens if you met someone interesting enough to keep you around?” he winked. I would have thought he’d play it off, but he was just that confident. His presumption was loud and clear. He leaned into the booth draping his arm across the top, utterly relaxed and confident that I wouldn’t say no.
“I guess that could make me stick around a while longer.” Flirting was not a forte of mine. I tried for his nonchalant attitude about it. At least I didn’t try to wink back. We still had a lot of food to eat, and I didn’t need to be stuck here after my mortifying awkwardness had a chance to peek through.
After finishing dinner and a slightly out of place good night kiss, I drove home. When he leaned into me, I suddenly turned my head at the last second, taking his kiss on the side of my cheek. I hadn’t intended that at all. The date had gone better than expected, and I just pulled the friend card. I laughed it off and stood up on my toes to kiss his cheek, so he didn’t feel like I wasn’t into him. I wanted him to ask me out again. When he said he would call me, my insides flipped as it sank in that my fumble didn’t mess anything up. I hadn’t scared him off. I completely sidestepped all the craziness going on in my life—I pulled off being normal. It felt good.
For the first time in a few days, I walked into the house and felt completely alone. It was overwhelming as I took in the dark house. Judson wasn’t here telling me what to do. Ulric wasn’t here to train me, and as much as I’d love to stay up, Hattie wasn’t here for a girl’s night. The darkness of the house had me instantly flipping on a bunch of lights to fight the eerie feeling of being alone. I was completely used to living alone, but now something just felt off, like my internal alarm bells were ringing. I was rushing myself up the stairs to get to my room when a searing pain hit me in the chest, knocking me to the stairs.
I sprawled out awkwardly as I gasped for air. My head broke out in a sweat as I pulled myself up enough to crawl up to the landing. I couldn’t catch my breath. I laid there, with the cool floor pressing into my cheek, as my body felt like it was being torn apart. A feeling of dread, as I realized I would die on my floor alone, pressed in on me as I wrapped my arms around myself, trying to stop the pain. The dread weighed me down, making me shake with fear. Tears blurred my eyes as I struggled with my phone to call for help.
Once I got it out of my pocket, I couldn’t see enough to call, let alone speak, as I gasped to catch my breath. It was like trying to breathe while throwing up; I knew I couldn’t take a breath but tried to anyway. I finally opened a text and sent off one word. I had no idea if it was sent or who I sent it to but prayed someone got it. I couldn’t die here on my floor and had no idea what the pain was even from, let alone how to help myself. With all the training I had been
doing, I was still clueless.
I leaned into the wood, hoping the cool would fight off the burning. I couldn’t even tell how long I was laying there before strong arms picked me up off the floor. I was sobbing at this point. I turned into his chest, trying to escape into him as he laid me on my bed gently, taking the spot next to me while whispering that it would be okay. I tried to hold onto him as the wracking sobs rocked through me, as the pain fell away, and an empty hollowness was left in its wake. The darkness of this void swallowed me, making me feel like I would drown in it with no idea of how to battle my way through.
I awoke with a start realizing I had only dozed off for a short while. My eyes were so puffy they felt too grainy to blink from all the crying. An aching pain was still in my chest like it had been bruised. I found myself still wrapped in his arms and tried to bask in the safeness he tried to blanket me with through the night. The hiccups following the sobs alerted him to me finally calming down, at least compared to the state he had found me in.
“Rose called me right before you texted me. She told me to find you.” Judson said, the harsh lines on his face told me I wasn’t the only one having a bad night.
“A witch from your coven was taken.” He searched my face for understanding, his own getting tight with the realization I didn’t understand what was going on.
“Is that what I felt?” I already instinctively knew the answer. I had felt the presence of everyone when she handed over the coven.
“Yes, you are magically bound to all the members.” His forehead creased as he spoke, his ordinarily impassive mask slipping away.
I didn’t want him to finish what he was saying, not ready to hear that something had happened because I hadn’t figured this all out yet. I couldn’t do anything with my unchecked power, and I couldn’t fight the bad guy when I didn’t know who it was. I wasn’t a detective. I had no idea how this would even get figured out.
“They found her in the woods where Ulric takes you to train.”
Numbness took over. I had cried until I had nothing left. The guilt fell like a heavy stone settling into my belly, making me cross my arms over my middle, trying to keep it from getting any heavier.
“W-what...when did it...did she...” I trailed off, lacking the ability to physically ask the questions. If I looked inside myself, my intuition already told me all the answers, but I didn’t want to believe it.
“It all just happened. Her sister called Rose, letting her know she was missing. When they found her body, she had been drained of her magic.”
“We have to go see Rose.” I stood up and smoothed out my day-old clothes, which still reeked of Chinese food.
He followed me silently down the stairs into the front yard. The usual cheery floral smell that came with all the flowers seemed sickly sweet. It wasn’t the time to remember planting all my favorites with Gram. It was out of place with the way we were feeling. I couldn’t think of anything besides getting to Rose and getting some answers.
We got into his truck, and he sped away from my house. I couldn’t focus on anything, even on such a silent drive. My thoughts seemed to be screaming inside my head, making me wince, and still, nothing was making sense.
“There’s one more thing I need to tell you.” His hesitation was not like him at all. He was straight forward and to the point. He kept opening and closing his mouth like he couldn’t find the right words. He didn’t want to say whatever it was he needed to tell me.
“She looks...looked a lot like you.” The bottom of my stomach dropped out. What does that mean? So many questions with answers I didn’t particularly want. I teetered on the brink of hysterics with the lack of sleep and knowing I had felt everything she felt. It made me sick to think that as I was feeling better, she was already gone.
“Pull over! Pull over now!” I yelled, grasping for the door handle. I hopped out of the truck before he fully put it in park, scrambling for the nearest bushes. I heaved until there was nothing left but the sour taste of stomach acid in my throat. I stood, hunched over for a minute before wiping my face with the shoulder of my shirt.
I turned around to find Judson standing at the bed of his truck with his hands in his pockets, looking entirely at a loss. His no-nonsense attitude was missing and in its place was helplessness. He didn’t need to say he didn’t know what to do to help me or the coven. It was written in his body language. Neither of us liked feeling so lost.
We continued our way to Rose’s. I couldn’t figure out why I needed to be there so bad, but it just felt like the place I should be. Before I could even knock, she opened the door and smothered me in a hug. She stood there, slightly rocking me as we both cried. I knew I looked silly as I hadn’t even known the girl, but Rose had to know what I had felt. The only moment of peace out of all the darkness was when it hit me that Rose would have felt it all, her friend and sister witch dying, had she not passed the coven over to me.
Once we stopped the tears and straightened ourselves, Rose went into business mode, recounting what she knew and had seen. The girl, Mandy, hadn’t even made it to her car. She was locking up for the night at the Italian restaurant kiddy corner to the Chinese one I had been at when she must have been grabbed. Her sister went looking for her only to find her things scattered all over the sidewalk. Mandy was always prompt and on schedule, which told her sister something had happened after she was late getting home.
Her sister scribed for her location and found she was in the woods when she called Rose and others to go with her. They found her lying in the dirt in a sloppily painted pentagram, lifeless. Her chest had been cut open; her heart removed. The heart was used to take her magic; a burnt husk of the organ was all that was left. I had to swallow my stomach back down, hearing all of it. I could not imagine seeing brutality of that proportion on a loved one, finding them discarded in the forest like trash.
Rose asked me what I had felt. I was reluctant to tell her, as morbid as it all was, but she was insistent that she needed to know. She sat stoically as I told her, only giving away how she felt when a few stray tears ran down her face. It took her a minute to compose herself when I was done, then she only asked if I was okay. I was not even sure how to answer that. Since becoming the leader of the coven, I had a hard time. Being around others made me feel like their feelings were my own. Having lived through Mandy’s pain, and now feeling the intensity of everyone around me, I couldn’t tell how I was actually feeling.
This was a shocking act of brutality. For a witch to be taken right off the street. Whoever was cursing witches was becoming increasingly bold. We had to find a way to figure it out. We had no leads and I was clueless as to where we could even begin.
Chapter Six
Mandy’s poor body was still lying in the forest when Rose took us to her. She believed that we, as a coven, could spell the area surrounding her into giving us some answers. I had no idea how that would work, but we proceeded silently, setting up the spell. I continued to receive an onslaught of everyone’s emotions, which varied between sadness for a life lost and fear of who could be next. I worked hard to find my own in the sea of them to keep from drowning in tears. I only glanced at her briefly lying there before my world started to spin. The sight of the blood and her lifeless eyes had my stomach flipping with an impending faint following. I leaned against a tree until it passed, wiping the cold sweat off my forehead. She was so much more like me than Judson had explained, with the same long dark hair, and her clothes, although dirty and covered in blood, matched what I had in my closet. It scared me to think that maybe this had more to do with me than we would have thought, but who would be targeting me? I was only just learning about this life.
Ulric went about placing a salt circle around the deceased witch, an older woman placed candles at the four points to invoke the elements. Each witch of the coven was trying to contact their spark, some sitting down and meditating and others chanting in place. Rose flitted around, trying to make sure everything was in the correct position befor
e mixing a concoction of herbs and then pulling one long hair from the victim and placing it into the bowl. Once everything was in place, we all joined hands as Rose started to chant. She then lit a match and dropped it into the bowl.
“Goddess above hear our call, show us who made our sister fall, they follow the darkness, they need to be caught, we ask for your guidance as our hearts are distraught, one to three so mote it be.”
She chanted these three times, with us joining on the last one. Our voices raised into the night. The wind picked up around us, bringing with it a cold fog that hung heavy with darkness. I could feel the magic tingle between our joined hands, itching at my palms and spreading up through my arms as my spark flared in my chest to help as the spell continued to grow around us. Static clung to the air as the fog closed in, blinding us from each other and the circle. It was so disorienting I wanted to let go and run back to the car.
I struggled not to panic, squinting my eyes to try to see what was happening around me.
As quickly as it rolled in, it dissipated. I briefly caught a flash of a figure pointing to the ground a few feet behind the circle. The shape had a fuzzy outline that couldn’t be seen clearly with the fog, but I knew it wasn’t alive in a sense as I could see the faint silhouette of the brush through it. I looked around to see if anyone else saw it, but no one seemed to be reacting to it. Hekate had already appeared to me, and here she was sending the dead to show me the way. I wanted to be thankful for her help, but seeing the figure gave me chills clear to my bones.
Rose closed the circle, shaking her head at the fact that nothing had come of the spell. I was the only one to see what had happened. I couldn’t be sure that I saw Mandy’s ghost. I knew it wasn’t Hekate, as she would make sure I knew she was there. Everyone’s spirits seemed to drop with the lack of answers received from the casting. Judson stood off to the side with a grim look on his face as he watched. Only I knew that it had been successful, bringing her back long enough to give us a clue and show us a sign that could help bring her justice.
