by Laura Emmons
Huh? I assumed I was the new girl. No one could claim me as a prize or possession…even Evan.
He must have seen the look on my face, because he shook his head back and forth.
“No,” he said, “I just like being with you guys a lot more than my own family.” The excuse sounded lame to me. I’d met his family. They were all really nice people. I adored his mom, Jenny.
For a moment, it looked like Pat intended to say something else. Sharp looks from Rose and Duncan made him hold his tongue. After that, everyone relaxed and the conversation flowed. It pleased and gratified me that Duncan’s sons had taken Corey in as one of their own. He eagerly shared with them how he’d been able to hang mistletoe over almost every doorway in the house. There was a lot of laughing and kissing between everyone involved. At least Rose and I were kissed a lot (on the cheeks, mostly). At one point, Corey and Evan met walking between the living room and the kitchen.
Corey looked at him totally deadpan and said, “Dude, if you do, I’ll deck you.”
“I don’t know,” replied Evan, “Kyle Dawkins seemed quite taken with you.” He grabbed Corey’s hand and kissed the back of it. Then he nimbly sidestepped Corey’s punch and walked into the living room, still laughing.
“When did you run into Kyle?” I asked as an upset Corey stomped into the kitchen.
“He came by the store yesterday. He kept talking about your friend from California. I knew you’d had no friends visit so I let him talk. When he mentioned how beautiful her freckles were, I put it together.”
“Oh, poor kid,” I mused smiling, “I hope Corey can live this down.”
“You’d better not show him that photo!” A shout came from the kitchen.
“Oh yeah, I have a picture.”
***
The guys stayed for about an hour and explained how they had a couple more stops to make as first footers. Fiona’s cabin came next and Duncan was eager to see her. After, they were headed to the Macgregor farm to see their grandparents. Pat and Evan wanted to stay with us. Duncan asked if he could take Corey out with them. Corey was thrilled with the idea and Rose had no objection, so soon we all sang ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and said goodbye. After they’d left, Rose and Pat went upstairs to celebrate the New Year alone, so Evan and I retired to the den. We put an old black and white movie about a Christmas miracle in the DVD player and settled down on the couch with mugs of hot cider. It tasted different.
“Why does this taste weird?”
“Mike spiked it with the scotch when no one was looking.”
“Oh,” I said, surprised, “it’s not bad.”
“It was a really good bottle of single highland malt scotch,” he replied.
I settled back into the couch and let the spiked cider spread warmth inside me. After a while I stopped paying attention to the movie and realized Evan had casually draped his arm around my shoulders. For an unknown reason, my inner practical Maggie was taking a nap, so I didn’t feel self-conscious at all asking him the question that had been burning inside me all night.
“Evan, why did you want to Hogmanay with us instead of your own family?”
He didn’t seem surprised. If anything, his arm tightened slightly around me.
I wondered if the alcohol had affected him, as well.
He took a deep breath before answering. “I like you. I like being with you. You make me happy. Everyone else makes me feel weird, like there’s something wrong with me.”
“How could that be? Your family is nice.”
“They are,” he agreed, “but sometimes the pressure gets to me. Two and a half years ago, I was like any other kid in the clan. I kept developing these new gifts, you know, so I received a lot of attention from adults, but was still just one of the gang.”
“You mean you developed rare abilities like astral projection and dreams of other people’s memories,” I prompted.
“Yeah, but the kids at school, my parents and my extended family said, ‘He’s really talented’. I didn’t feel weird.”
“What happened?”
“When Logan learned he had cancer, about seven years ago, he started training two people, me and your Uncle Larry. Then Logan died. The High Council met, evaluated Larry and me, and picked me.”
“I didn’t know I had an uncle.”
“Yeah, your mom had a sister and your dad had a brother. Anyway, Logan left instructions with Paul Sinclair to follow after his death. The instructions recommended me over Larry as the next Great Seer. Logan thought I had more talent than Larry and he made no secret about how he felt, so the council chose me. Afterward, everyone treated me differently. At school, the other kids stopped talking to me. I felt like an alien from another planet. They were intimidated by me. Your uncle, Larry Stewart, was really upset, so he moved to Maryland and doesn’t talk to anyone in the clan anymore. Even my own relatives treated me different. It’s been really uncomfortable these last two and a half years.”
“I’m sorry that happened to you.”
“See, you don’t treat me weird. From the very beginning, you’ve treated me like a regular person. You’re not afraid to joke with me, or yell at me if I deserve it. I’m happier with you than with anyone else. That’s why I came here tonight.”
“Why do you think people are intimidated by you?”
“I guess it’s a combination of the authority I have as a member of the High Council and the extent of my gifts. It’s all bull, by the way. My vote is only one of seven. The other council members treat me as if I’m too young to know what I’m talking about half the time. It’s true. I don’t have their experience. Then there’s the fear of my powers. People are always afraid if I spend time with them, I’ll have a vision about their early demise, or something else bad.”
“Hmmm, I wonder if that’s part of the reason the High Council chose you,” I noted.
“What do you mean?”
“Most of the council members inherit their positions, right? Maybe the council gets to select a member once in a lifetime. Am I right?”
“Yeah, probably,” he agreed.
“Well, I wouldn’t put it past Connor McCoy or Paul Sinclair or most of the other members to take the opportunity they had and use it to pick someone who wouldn’t challenge them on any issues. It would give them more influence in the Council. To them, your age makes you a pushover.” Connor McCoy was the Great Warrior of the clan and known for being overly aggressive.
“Wow, that’s a really astute observation. I’ll have to remember to pay attention the next time we have a meeting. See, you’re smart, too. Why wouldn’t I rather be with you?”
His words made me smile and roll my eyes. As I did so I noticed something totally unexpected. “Honestly, Corey, what were you thinking?” I groaned.
“What?” Evan asked.
I pointed overhead. Nailed in the ceiling over the couch was another sprig of mistletoe.
“Hmmm,” Evan mused, “there’s no one watching us now.” He closed the distance in a heartbeat. It always felt so right when he held me tightly.
I sighed. As I did, he captured it with his mouth. His lips pressed insistently onto mine. It wasn’t an urgent kiss. He didn’t crush my mouth. His lips just wouldn’t take no for an answer. He took his time, exploring my mouth with his own. When he let me breathe again, I felt dizzy.
The first time he’d kissed me it had been an act. We were trying to avoid being shot for trespassing on a bad man’s property so we pretended to make out. Those kisses had left my lips swollen, this kiss left them tingling. I wanted more.
Unfortunately he started talking.
“You know, the kid’s powers of premonition are so good, it’s spooky.” He chuckled with admiration, but the words were like a splash of cold water on my face. I didn’t want Corey to have powerful magic. I would’ve preferred it if he really had no magic. I wouldn’t have to worry about him destroying the world.
The warmth of Evan’s arms outside of me, and the single-malt scotch inside of
me, were suddenly less appealing. It didn’t matter how good this felt. In the eyes of the clan, we could only be friends. I needed to keep it that way. When had the movie finished?
I put space between us on the couch. “I think we’d better go to our own beds.”
“This is my bed,” he stated. “Rose left blankets earlier.”
I looked in the corner of the room, so she had.
“Okay, I’ll see you in the morning.” I got up, pleased to realize I could walk. I made a beeline for the door as he whispered, “Good Night, Maggie.”
***
I doubted I’d slept two hours before an extremely wrinkled, white-haired, stooped woman beat me with pine branches.
“What the hefalump?” I mumbled. I briefly acknowledged privately that I’d been kissing Evan in my dreams and the realization woke me up faster than the old woman.
“Rise and greet the New Year!” she cried.
I smelled pine scented smoke drifting up the stairs. The redding had begun. The woman, whom I assumed was Evelyn Macgregor, waved a sage smudge stick all around my room making it rather smoky and hazy. I followed her out noting I’d fallen asleep in my party clothes. I vowed silently to never drink scotch again.
When I reached the hallway, she was beating Corey out of his room. I wondered what time he’d gotten to bed since the hair on the left side of his head stuck straight up and he could only open his right eye.
As we trudged behind the highly energized woman down the stairs, I became aware that the house was full of people. Rose had not had the pleasure of being beaten out of bed with branches, because she worked in the kitchen with Ginger. Fiona stood in the living room with Duncan and his four sons. As I had assumed, the evergreen branches from the hearth burned in the fireplace. The whole house was smoky and my eyes started to water. I reached the living room in time to see Evelyn beating Evan good-naturedly out of the den. Satisfied that she’d sufficiently stunk up the house, she approached Fiona, who gave her a cruet of water and a handle-less cup.
She started walking through every room in the house. As she did so, she sprinkled water from the cruet around and intoned, “Mother Earth and Father Sky, we ask your blessing for protection from evil; grant prosperity and happiness for all the residents of this home. May the hearth keep away cold and danger, may the beds be soft and warm, and may the pantry be full so they never hunger. We ask you to banish all sorrow and evil from this place and bless it with love and good will. Your servants: Rose, Maggie and Corey will live here in peace. They pledge themselves to follow the rules of the land and the clan. They will always strive to keep the balance of nature intact. Blessed Be.”
When she’d finished with the water, she approached each of us in turn, saying, “Drink from the Usque-Cashrichd, the dead and living ford, and be blessed.” She poured water from the cruet into the cup and made Rose, Corey, and I drink it.
I mumbled, “What’s a dead and living ford?”
Corey answered me. “I know, ‘cause I’m the one who gathered the water!” He seemed really proud of this and I became instantly suspicious.
“What did you do?” I whispered.
He grinned. “Ken hung me by this harness over the place where the Cacapon and Potomac rivers meet, over near where they buried Mom, and I scooped up the water into a jug. Then they hoisted me up.”
“Was it dangerous?” I asked tentatively.
“Oh yeah,” he grinned hugely.
“How much cider did Mike give you?”
“They didn’t give me cider. We drank straight from the bottle.”
“Oh my heavens…does Rose know they let you go drinking?”
“Yup. She said ‘never again’.”
“Thank goodness for that. Hey is this water safe to drink?”
“Duncan boiled it, so probably.”
We returned our attention to the Crone.
She shouted, even louder, “Now open all the windows and greet the fresh air of the New Year with confidence!”
We did as we were told and ran around the house opening all the windows. The smoke dissipated and the freezing 6 AM air replaced it. Then the Crone called us all into the kitchen. She’d poured a shot glass of scotch for each of us.
I made a face.
Evan warned me, “You have to drink it or you’ll have bad luck.”
Evelyn toasted us all by saying, “Slainte mhath!” She downed the shot in one.
“Huh?” I said to Evan. He repeated, “SLAN-jay vah, it means good health.”
“If you say so,” I grumbled.
Chapter Twelve
New Kids in School
I sat outside the guidance counselor’s office, alone and stressed. Rose had taken Corey to settle into his new school. For me, things weren’t going well. None of my classes from Samohi lined up with the offerings here. At the first bell, I’d walked into what should have been AP Physics but turned out to be Biology 1. Clearly lost, I’d headed to the guidance office. Nothing on the little printout the school secretary gave me made sense. There was no mention of a choir or music period and no Latin class on my schedule.
I decided to go to medical school when I was Corey’s age and had thought about being a doctor even before that, so my academic path through high school had been mapped out in the ninth grade so I would easily get accepted into a UC pre-med program, preferably at UCLA. Now the plan had shattered.
The door opened and a decidedly terrified kid in glasses and a huge parka stumbled out, carrying his backpack and a slew of loose papers in his arms. A nice, if slightly frazzled, lady, wearing her hair in a bun and a slim skirt with a cardigan sweater, called my name. I grabbed my class schedule printout and my backpack, and entered her office.
“It’s Maggie, isn’t it?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Call me Mrs. Donnelly. I had the pleasure of speaking to your mother over the phone about a month ago. I am so sorry to hear about her passing. How are you doing, dear?”
“As well as I can, I suppose. It’s been hectic moving to a new home, and the funeral, and now this…” my words trailed off as I held out my printout in a gesture of despair.
She smiled sympathetically and looked down at a file folder on her desk containing my transcripts from Samohi.
“I’m afraid the first thing you’ll have to accept is we’re a small county in a rural community. We don’t have the same programs you had at Santa Monica High School. You are going to have to make a few decisions regarding your class options. Since we’re in the middle of a school year, it’s going to be difficult, but I want you to know, we will do everything we can to keep you on the path toward medical school. I must say, your academic record is very impressive.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Donnelly.”
***
By the time I’d finished straightening things out with the guidance counselor, it was lunch period. I only had two classes left in my day afterward. I asked a random jock in the hall to direct me to the cafeteria.
After checking me out, he obliged.
Luckily, a familiar voice called out from behind me.
I stopped and waited for him.
When he caught up with me, he put a hand on the small of my back to guide me away from the jock-guy lounging against his locker still looking at my butt. Evan speared him with a vicious dirty look and I felt like the prize in a mud wrestling competition.
Wriggling my back, I dislodged his hand, still upset at what had happened on New Year’s. I’d had a couple days to think about it and had decided it was unfair of him to kiss me, liquor or no liquor. We had agreed to be friends. There had to be boundaries.
He looked curiously at the way I’d walked away from his touch, but since we’d reached the cafeteria, he needed the hand to open the door, anyway.
I brushed past him into the requisite standard high school cafeteria.
Evan led me over to a table away from the food line. He said without preamble, “Okay, what’s going on with you.”
�
�We shouldn’t talk about it here.” I looked down at my boots.
“No one’s listening. Tell me what’s on your mind?” Then after a few beats he said, “You didn’t like the kiss, right?”
“Of course I liked it,” I said a little too quickly. “But I’m confused. Are we friends? Or are we trying to start a war with the whole clan and a goddess? I don’t want to be the girl who followed in her parents’ footsteps and couldn’t control herself.”
He ran a hand through his gorgeous thick, black hair and huffed out an exasperated breath.
“You’re right. Of course, you’re right. We’re friends. I promise I’ll never do it again.”
“So what happened?” I looked up into his face to see his eyes when he answered me.
“Hogmanay happened. Expensive, single-malt whisky matured in sherry wood casks in the Scottish Highlands for twenty-one years happened. Sappy old movies happened. Let’s just chalk it up to one of those things. Okay?”
“Okay.”
He took a relieved deep breath. “So, tell me how your day is going. Let me see your schedule.”
I sat down and pulled out my lunch bag. He pulled out his, and then went to the soda machine and bought us both a couple of soda cans. I showed him what the counselor and I had worked out.
“Here’s what I was taking in Santa Monica.” I pulled out the old piece of paper.
“Valkyries Choir in Period A, followed by Latin 3, U.S. History, break, AP Pre-Calculus, AP Physics, lunch, AP English and Psychology.”
“Holy Macha!” he said. “You must be really smart. I didn’t realize…”
“Well, I want to prepare for med school. When I got into the Valkyries Choir instead of the Viking Ensemble, it freed up another period, since they meet at 7 AM before school starts.”
“And you sing, too…” he seemed in awe.
“Yes, I sing too. What about you? What are you taking?”
“That’s not important. Show me what your schedule looks like now.”
I showed him.
“I had to drop choir altogether and I’m really bummed. They have Homeroom here, we didn’t at Samohi. I kept AP Physics, but instead of AP Pre-Calc, I’m in Trig/Pre-Calc. I still have AP English, Psychology and U.S. History, but this school doesn’t offer Latin, so Mrs. Donnelly signed me up for a distance-learning class on-line. None of these classes line up exactly with what I’d been doing before winter break at Samohi, but once I get all my textbooks, I can work it out and keep up with the class.”
