Magic in my Bones (Lesser Magicks Book 1)

by Kellie Sheridan

  “I can explain,” I said, before exhaling a long, slow breath, trying to buy myself more time. Because what explanation could I really offer her. In the long run, it was possible I'd be better off if I just let her shoot me. There were people out there who'd been willing to rip me apart when I was only a newborn. Who could say what they'd be willing to do to me now?

  But if I was going to be dead soon anyway, what did it matter who I told? Taya and I had lived together for two years already. I liked her. She’d turned my flat into a nerdy paradise, had introduced me to Doctor Who, and had always been a fantastic wing woman. If someone was going to hear my story before my time ran out, I wanted it to be her.

  “I’m not sure where to start ...”

  Chapter 5

  "Could you just put the gun down for a second?" I asked. "It’s not like I can do anything." I pushed my shoulders upward to drive my point home, but the action only looked to make Taya more uncomfortable.

  "The problem right now Melanie is that I don't know what the hell you're capable of. Or what I just saw. It shouldn't be possible. Add in whatever magick I felt a few minutes ago ..." Taya took a step backward, looking around the room. "There's someone else with you."

  Damn it. For the entirety of my time living with Taya, I'd managed to avoid using my abilities when she was home. And in one moment of desperation, I'd given all my secrets away, even if my roommate hadn't quite figured them all our yet.

  I could have sworn I saw Taya's trigger finger twitch. I started shaking my head as emphatically as I possibly could. "No! That was me."

  "Not possible. God, Mel, you've been playing me this whole time."

  "No. Well, yes. But not like you think." If I'd had any real witchcraft abilities in that moment, I would have loved the ability to just make Taya stop talking for a second so I could get a word in edgewise. I'd steeled myself to finally come clean after all these years. After a lifetime. "When I started looking for a roommate, it was just a way to help pay the rent. But I knew you were a witch. I could tell. It's why I picked you, you know other than you being totally amazing."

  "Don't fuck with me. Not now." Okay, too tense for jokes. Noted. But as much as Taya tended to talk when the situation got to be too much, I always leaned toward trying to ease tension by cracking a joke. More often than not, I was completely unsuccessful.

  "Okay, okay. I've been hiding from the greater magicks for my entire life. I moved to Galway because it was supposed to be quiet here. Normal. But when I met you, I figured maybe living with a witch who wasn't in a coven could be a solid compromise. A way to keep my ear to the ground in case ... I don't know. I just wanted to keep myself safe.”

  “I think you might be overestimating how much I care about you looking out for your own well-being in this particular moment.”

  Damn it. I was screwing up my big moment left right and center, alienating my closest friend in the progress. But I'd never told this story before, not even to my adopted parents.

  "This is hard," I said, trying to explain. "I'm not even sure it makes any sense. You know I was adopted, right?" I didn't bother waiting for an answer. Taya and I had had our share of drunken heart-to-hearts by then. "It's no secret that I was abandoned at a hospital and that my parents took me in a few weeks after that. I grew up as normally as anyone, I guess. Except for the fact that for as long as I can remember, I've had a separate set of memories, embedded in my own." That was the closest explanation I could find to the phenomenon I'd been living with my whole life.

  "I don't understand."

  "Yeah, me either. Not really. But I'll do my best to explain. I've never said any of this out loud before, so ... I'm trying." I took a long breath and started the story I'd been holding in forever. I knew it would sound insane, but Taya would have grown up around magick. Hopefully she'd understand.

  "Starting from when I was a baby, for each day of my life, I could also remember that same day, lived by someone else. My fifth birthday, losing my last baby tooth, all of it. And as I got older and my own memories faded, so did the second set. I was living my life, and remembering someone else's life. At first my parents thought I had some sort of imaginary friend, especially when I started talking about how this other girl, Lynn, could see magick. But my parents had always been solidly catholic, and I could tell all the magick talk was making them uncomfortable. Eventually, I stopped bringing it up."

  I took a breath, trying not to make any sudden movements as I attempted to work through where to take this story next. "I tried to explain away what I was seeing in every way imaginable. But on the same day that I finally convinced my parents we needed a computer, I was probably about twelve or so, I learned enough that I couldn't ignore my gut anymore. There was no record of Lynn anywhere, but it was easy to find the people she knew online. Not her family, but people she went to school with. Her doctor, her neighbor. They had all lived in some small town in the United States more than a decade earlier. The memories I was seeing were from the past, seventeen years before, specifically. But if the memories I was seeing of this girl's normal life were real, it meant that the other part of her life was too."

  "She could see magick. I've never heard of a witch who can do that." Taya lowered the gun, but only slightly, still keeping her eyes focused on me.

  "She wasn't a witch. She came from a family of lesser magicks. Her father could see magick as well, her mother was fae, but several generations removed. They mostly kept away from the magickal community, raising their kids as human as they could. But once Lynn got a little older, around when she started high school, she started running into people with significant power—witches and fae, mostly. She learned about the world her parents had been keeping from her, the world that wouldn't want her because of how little she could do. It became an obsession. But her seeking out as much information as she could was the only reason I ever learned about the any of this."

  "None of this explains why you were seeing this girl's life."

  "I'm getting there, I promise. There's just no simple way to explain any of this." My muscles were starting to cramp, so I risked a quick rotation of each of my ankles, silently enjoying just how much better I was feeling.

  "Lynn started sneaking to the city, to Boston, to meet with people who could teach her, but there was only so much she could learn, limited by her own birth. But she wanted more. Around the same time, a prophecy had started to surface, whispered about in clubs and shops. Some of the factions were convinced that a child would be born before the end of the decade who could control all magick. Most didn't believe it, but some would have given anything to control this child even though they hadn't been born yet."

  "I heard about this," Taya said, finally putting down her gun, though I still didn't let myself entirely relax. It would only take a moment for her to change her mind and end my life. Not that I really thought she would do it. But after the night I'd had, I wasn't exactly in the mood to take chances. "There was a civil war between the factions in the states. Children were killed, all in the name of making sure this kid didn't end up in the wrong faction.

  "One. Who decides which faction is the right one? The wolves thought the child would be born to one of them. The fae were certain the child would be theirs, even though there had only been a few dozen full-blooded fae children born that century. The witches were sure their odds were the best. And the vampires were determined to seize control of this child through any means necessary. But no one knew who this kid was. Two. It wasn't children that were dying in the crossfire, it was babies."

  "And this Lynn girl was involved somehow?"

  "When I was around seventeen, the memories stopped. I thought she'd died, but no matter how deep online I went trying to find out what happened to her, there was nothing. Seven months later, she was back. My first new memory was her staring down at a positive pregnancy test. Lynn was my mother. My birth mother. The math was undeniable. It was my mother who had existed my head for as long as I could remember. And a countdown had
started toward learning why she'd given me up."

  Taya had all but dropped the gun on the table, but by then I couldn't stop. "When her parents learned their teenage daughter was pregnant, they went through the usual rollercoaster of emotions. Ultimately, they were supportive, until Lynn started insisting that the child she was carrying was the one everyone had been waiting for. Her parents, my grandparents, had no idea what she was talking about."

  My throat was starting to feel rough. I'd been talking almost nonstop ever since Taya found me, and unluckily for me, the healing benefits of my ability didn't stretch out over time after initial consumption. "Can I sit?" I ask. I didn't bother stretching my luck to see if maybe I could step into the kitchen for something to drink. Taya didn't move. "Look, you're either going to believe me or you're not. But we've lived together for years now, and I hope ..." I don't really know what I was hoping for at that point.

  Taya nodded, and I almost passed out from relief.

  It took nearly five minutes for Taya to free my hands and put on the kettle before the two of us were settled on the couch, face-to-face as some chamomile brewed in the kitchen. Taya snuggled deeper into the blanket she had wrapped around her shoulders before finally asking her next question. It was more self-restraint than I could have showed if I was in her situation. "What happened next?"

  "Honestly, this is the hard part. It was only a matter of weeks between when Lynn learned she was pregnant and when the civil war broke out, the greater magicks all fighting one another whether or not they believed in the child their peers were looking for. It was only once the first reports of infants and their mothers dying came in that my mother started to realize she was in way over her head. She'd been so loud at first, telling anyone who would listen that she would be the one to have the most powerful child our community had ever seen. But she'd been ignored because no one had really considered the possibility that the child they were looking for would come from the lesser magicks. She was terrified."

  Of all my mother's memories, it was always her fear for me that I could connect with most easily. She'd known it would only be a matter of time before someone made the connection between her and what was going on all across the country. She fell asleep every night to the thought that she'd probably doomed us both, so I did too. But that was more than anyone other than me ever needed to know.

  "The night she died is the only piece of the puzzle I'm really missing, maybe because that was when her consciousness and mine started to exist separately. This is all guessing really, it's not like anyone has ever taken the time to explain."

  "She died giving birth to you?"

  I shook my head. "We had a few hours together in the hospital, there with my grandparents and my uncle, like a normal family. Safe. I don't remember that day myself, obviously. But I can remember her looking down at me, happy but afraid. They came for her after the sun set."

  "Who?"

  "Vampires. They ripped my grandfather apart while his children watched. Drained my grandmother. I remember Lynn's brother hitting the wall and the sound of bones breaking."

  "What happened to Lynn?"

  "I don't know." That wasn't true. I felt the moment her neck broke, had been startled awake by the complete absence of her memories, the feeling nothing like my missing few months before she'd been pregnant with me. There had been no question she had died. "I don't know any of what happened next either. How I got out alive, or how her memories ended up inside of me."

  "Damn, Mel. I'm so sorry! I can't imagine ..."

  Seeing your mother die? Losing everyone? I could imagine it all. But I soldiered on with my story, mostly so I didn't have to answer whatever question was stirring in the back of Taya's mind. "After that, I had to know. Had she been right all along? So many children had died that year ..."

  "Forty-six."

  "Shit." I'd never been close enough to the supernatural community to learn more about what had happened beyond my mother's memories. "But I started to experiment, to try and learn what I could do. I had no idea where to start, beyond the magick I could see. What you sensed earlier was me using my powers to get into the building after I'd lost my key. But it's all kind of complicated. It was a rough few years from there, and I'll save you the details, but hey, what do you know—"

  "It's you then?" Taya asked, eyes wide. "When years passed and there was no sign of anyone who could do what had been prophesied, everyone had assumed they'd all made a massive mistake. That they'd killed one another's children for no reason at all. That war is probably the only reason there's any peace between the factions now."

  "Which is exactly why I need you to promise me that you won't tell anyone." Okay, that and my own sense of self-preservation. But both reasons were good.

  "Can I trust you?" Taya asked, locking her eyes on mine.

  "I swear, you can. There's nothing I can do that would ever hurt you, not that I'd even want to. I'm just going to get out of town for a while. Maybe I'll go visit my parents or something. I can cover my rent through the end of next month. If you don't hear from me by then, it'll probably be easier just to assume I'm not coming back."

  "Why, Melanie? You still haven't told me what happened tonight."

  Right. At least this latest not so super fun memory was my own instead of borrowed, but that didn't make it any easier to relive as I gave Taya a play-by-play of my night from being called to fix the wolves' Wi-Fi to crashing the van."

  "You're lucky you made it back in one piece."

  "No kidding. I only wish I knew why there were werewolves here in the first place. I'm hoping once they go home, all my problems go with them."

  "The summit," Taya said like that much at least should have been obvious.

  I shrugged, giving her a blank look.

  "Galway has been named as the home of the European summit."

  "Yeah, I still have no idea what you're talking about."

  "How is that possible? You can’t expect me to believe that you haven't been using me as a way to keep your ear to the pulse of the supernatural community. How do you not know about this?"

  Taya wasn't wrong. I'd been skimming her emails for years, trying to avoid anything overly personal while always on the lookout for any communication between her and other witches. Despite technically belonging to the witches’ faction, Taya barely had enough power to qualify as one of the greater magicks. She wasn't well connected by any stretch, but not entirely unlike my mother, she was trying to be.

  "I really don't know what you're talking about."

  Taya shook her head, not quite believing me. "All the European factions have decided to meet to hopefully get a handle on how to deal with the potential of exposure to those outside of the magickal community. With modern technology, it's only a matter of time before we're discovered. And because Galway is technically neutral territory, this is where it's happening."

  "When?"

  "It's still a few weeks out. Each of the factions has only just started sending emissaries to lay the groundwork to ensure the safety of their people."

  "So that's why the wolves are here?"

  "It would make sense. Ireland only has the one pack, why not use them?"

  "But why the kidnapping attempt? What would anyone have to gain by hurting some wolf’s human kid?" I asked, hoping this would all be behind me by morning. I could head back home to the middle of nowhere, and everyone else could sort this out without me.

  "He's not just any wolf. He's the Alpha of the Dublin pack. But beyond that, your guess is as good as mine. Not everyone is happy with how things have been moving forward, so maybe—"

  "Katie!" I said, cutting Taya off. "When they grabbed me, they were looking for Katie. I don't know what they planned to do to her, but they hadn’t managed their goal tonight. I got away. So if these people are looking to disrupt the summit by getting to the wolves, there's no guarantee they won't make another attempt."

  "Assuming you didn't kill them all."

  Well there was a thought t
hat made me more than a little nauseous. I knew at least one person survived long enough to try to grab me, but that was it.

  But I couldn't think about that now. I couldn't even think about running, Katie had been in danger tonight, and her father hadn't even known about it. If I hadn't stumbled into the wrong situation at the wrong time, she could have been killed already.

  Those people could have already made their second attempt while I was at home having a chat with my roommate.

  God, she was just a kid.

  "I'm sorry for everything tonight, Taya. Really. And if you want to know anything else, I'll tell you as soon as I can. But for right now, there's somewhere I really have to be."

  Chapter 6

  Taya offered to drive me back out to the edge of town where the wolves were staying, swearing she was stone cold sober after the night she’d had. But with the news I was about to deliver, we were both fairly certain that showing up unannounced with a witch when the sun had only just begun to rise, would probably only make things more difficult.

  Sitting in the back of the cab, my head leaning against the window, I could make out far more of the scenery than when we’d first made the trip. There were even a few people already up and about to work their land, none looking up for more than a moment as the taxi I was in passed. Much like back home, people out here at least liked to pretend to mind their own business.

  Really, the only one to give the cab a second glance was a beautiful sable mare, grazing in an overgrown field by a ramshackle barn only a few properties over from the house the wolves had taken over.

  I paid my fare and waved the cab off, hoping its human driver would have a chance to make his getaway before my inevitable welcoming committee arrived.

  The snarls started, low and menacing, the moment I took my first step toward the front door. This time, I wouldn’t get a chance to knock.