Hex, A Witch and Angel Tale

by Ramona Wray

  Me, my eyes wide with shock: I’m sorry, I have no idea what this is!

  Him, sighing: ’Course you don’t. It’s from him. His head discreetly gestured to my new northern “neighbor,” Lucian.

  Me, shaking my head, then shrugging: Don’t know anything about it. Don’t care anyway.

  Got to go. To be continued.

  You bet.

  As you’d expect, the rest of history class went by in a daze. J wanted to know everything about Ryder, I wanted to find out about the rose, Lucian was obviously trying to drill holes in the back of my head where I could feel his eyes locked on me, and Ryder probably wished Mrs. Flint hadn’t allowed us in after all. All in all, not the most relaxed hour I’d spent in my life.

  Since the teacher kept a vigilant eye on the class, communication between me and J was limited to little clandestine notes, hastily scribbled across the knees, in a code of hieroglyphs impossible, for anyone but us, to decipher. To sum up, by the end of first period, J had learned that I could touch Ryder without my head blowing up, that I got to ride on his bike to school and survived it, and that I was basically drunk with the knowledge that sometime soon, hopefully, I’d get my first kiss. Without passing out from it, either, which was a big plus. In short, everything. For my “haul,” I found out that Lucian was indeed the one who had left the rose on my desk, that he and J had chattered like a couple of excited soccer moms at a PTA meeting, and that she apparently was now his number-one fan. That I met with very little appreciation. Why? Because there was something about Lucian Bell, something that didn’t sit well with me. He was bad news. But according to J, no one else at Rosemound High saw it. In fact, Lucian Bell was the new it guy, the new must-know, must-have, must-be in school.

  As soon as the bell rang, I launched myself at Ryder, intent on learning exactly what Lucian’s deal was. And this time, I would make darn sure I didn’t get distracted!

  But the pest in question cut in.

  “Wait,” he said silkily. “We haven’t really met yet. I’m Lucian.”

  He stuck his arm out while I, casting Ryder a desperate glance over his shoulder, was forced to shy away from it. He was dressed in red and black, very preppy, and with his short blond hair and that icy blue stare, he was effortlessly easy on the eyes. But the way he towered … Ryder was tall as well, but in a way that made you want to curl up next to him and let his strength be your strength, too. His size wasn’t intimidating but reassuring. Lucian’s energy was different, darker and controlled in some way, even with the bright smile he’d plastered on his face at the moment. It felt as if he was putting on a show for my benefit, as if he was working hard at concealing his true feelings from me. I was puzzled.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t really shake hands.”

  “Oh!” He let his arm fall, not hiding the disappointment. “Did you like the rose?” he asked, perking up a bit.

  Gulping, I said, “Sure. I don’t think I should accept it, though.”

  His smile wilted a second time. “Why not?”

  “Probably because it’s not from me,” Ryder replied softly.

  He stepped around Lucian and came to stand by my side, winding his arm around my waist, which made me ridiculously happy because he was basically marking his territory. Lucian followed the gesture with eyes that grew emptier the moment Ryder touched me. In the corner of his cupid-bow mouth, a muscle jerked.

  “I thought she wasn’t your girlfriend,” he said, with a softness that echoed the calm before a storm.

  “That was yesterday.”

  “Huh.” He studied me slowly, wonderingly, as if waiting for me to take Ryder’s words back. “What a difference a day makes, right? Imagine what could happen in a week, or a month, or a year.” He refocused on Ryder, smiling. “Or a hundred.”The smile widened. “I mean, some things stay the same, obviously, but others …”

  He went back to eyeing me again, very deliberately, not bothering to disguise his interest. His steady gaze drifted across my body with something akin to care, delicately, as though it wasn’t with his eyes but his fingers that he probed. Despite myself, I shivered.

  “Others do change,” he went on quietly, a look of deep longing in his eyes.

  At my side, Ryder stiffened as they locked stares again, both of them unsmiling. The air smelled of electricity.

  “But some never do!” Lucian added, in such a harsh undertone that I cringed.

  Ryder pulled me closer and I was happy to lean against his body. How incredible, I marveled, to suddenly find myself at the center of a clash between two of the strangest, though also cutest, guys in school. Too bad it was like watching a foreign movie without subtitles. I had no idea what was going on.

  Regrettably, I wasn’t the only one wondering about it. People all over the classroom were keenly watching the bizarre testosterone display.

  “Guys, cut it out,” I snapped, even sharper than intended. But my classmates’ attention was becoming tedious. Rosalie Miller, who was blonde, athletic, and the unofficial president of the Ryder Kingscott Fan Club, together with her friends, Anna Sullivan and Cat Cole, were giving me black looks and whispering to each other, probably plotting my death.

  To my surprise, Lucian actually took notice of me. He recovered himself very quickly, pleasant smile snapping back into place in a flash. “You’re right. We’re drawing attention to ourselves,” he admitted, and when his eyes ran over my face, he looked genuinely sorry. “But listen, Lily, I was wondering if maybe you wanted to go out with me sometime. Perhaps on Friday?”

  My face fell. I couldn’t muster the guts to glance at Ryder. Was this going to turn into a fight? Bludgeons and clubs to be drawn momentarily?

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t think so,” I hurried to say.

  “Don’t answer right away,” he continued, as if he hadn’t heard me. “Think it over.”

  Ryder’s arm jerked once around my waist and my hand moved involuntarily to cover his. Again, Lucian watched me doing it with a keen eye, like he knew exactly just how extraordinary that ordinary gesture was for me.

  I couldn’t put up with that intent scrutiny any longer.

  “Please, excuse us,” I said, polite to the tips of my fingernails. Grandma Charlotte would’ve been so proud.

  Clutching Ryder’s hand and motioning with my head for J to follow, I forced us all to make our exit before any actual blows could start. Yay, me!

  “You forgot your rose,” Lucian called, and then somehow he was standing before us, holding the delicate flower in his outstretched hand.

  “Er, I …” I choked out, holding on to Ryder’s hand as tightly as I could.

  “She said she didn’t want it,” he hissed.

  “Of course she does. This is a rare rose. It’s called Cara Mia, Italian for ‘my darling,’” Lucian explained, eyes locked on mine. “And something tells me that Lily knows her flowers. She can appreciate a gift like this.”

  Now, how the heck did he know that?

  “But she doesn’t, so why don’t you take a hike?” Ryder shot back.

  Suddenly, I was both tired and fed up. “Okay, could you two stop talking about me like I’m not here? Lucian, thank you for the rose. It’s beautiful, but I can’t accept it. Ryder, stop speaking for me, I’ve got a mouth of my own. J, why don’t you take it?”

  That won me frustrated stares from the boys and one elated smile from my best friend. My heart twitched painfully at the thought of having upset Ryder, before remembering what Mom always used to say about how, in a relationship, people don’t bend one another but themselves. I may have been new to the dating world, but I’d been my parents’ daughter for seventeen years and had seen them constantly bending bad luck, circumstances, themselves, for the sake of making each other happy. It was all about love and respect. Hopefully, Ryder wasn’t going to try to prove me wrong.

  At least we had successfully put some well-needed distance between us and the tormenting Mr. Bell. I waited until he was out of earshot before cornering a stil
l-sulking Ryder.

  “I want to know exactly who Lucian is, right now!” I demanded, more or less flattening him against a wall, with J standing guard at his side so that he wouldn’t escape.

  His brow collapsed in a frown, sad eyes sweeping my face intently. The lavender accents coiled and twisted, with lovely gold winks flashing at the center every now and then. It was a sight meant to steal your breath away and I succumbed to it.

  “Has anyone ever told you that you’ve got weird eyes?” I whispered, without wanting to.

  “Did you really like the flower?”

  Wounded boy-pride alert, J’s eyes seemed to shout at me.

  “It’s a rare rose,” I sighed. “I liked it enough to have my best friend enjoy it. But not enough to have you getting upset over it.”

  “Wow, that makes me feel … so not much better!”

  “At least I gave you an answer. Imagine how I feel! Every time I ask about Lucian you change the subject. Who is he, Ryder? What does he want with me?”

  He proceeded to do the avoidance thing again, and the more he pulled away, the harder it got to breathe. I’d done it. I’d asked the first question, first of many, no doubt, so, ready or not, there was no turning back now.

  “There are things I can’t talk to you about, Lily,” he responded quietly.

  “Let me guess. Lucian is one of them.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said softly, averting his eyes. “But you don’t understand. It’s not that I don’t want to tell you, it’s that I physically can’t.”

  “You can’t? What do you mean, you can’t?”

  “Watch.” He took a single deep breath, his skin stretched taut over the high cheekbones, muscles locked in place. Almost as if he were preparing to receive a blow. “Lucian Bell is —”

  He choked. Literally! The golden skin of his face reddened as his hands rose first to his neck, then to batter the air like a hanging man drawing his last breath. Next, the wildest outburst of coughing erupted from his chest, and before I knew it, J and I had to keep him from tumbling to the floor. People gaped. And Ryder was suffocating in front of us all.

  Chapter: Seven

  Personally, I thought it was dumb luck that he eventually recovered, but he argued, mumbling something about always coming back from it. That meant the seizure wasn’t his first, and the idea of sick-Ryder emptied my lungs of air. Until I paused and pondered what I’d seen, and figured out that the episode hadn’t been a seizure at all. Not when it’d all started with my own stupid question, which, even knowing what would happen, he’d chosen to answer. Seizure? Yeah, right! Try mystical mojo, the really bad kind. He had been literally choking on magic, something powerful enough to hurt him physically if he broke whatever rules he wasn’t supposed to mess with. Like answering my questions. About Lucian Bell.

  So that’s where it stopped. Questions? Yeah, I had tons, but no answers were worth hurting Ryder. In the end, I wanted him, not the truth behind why I could have him. By magic or some twist of fate, I did have him, and that was enough for me. Or so I thought …

  At the end of the school day, we got on his bike and rode away. The sky was cloudless and perfectly blue, the sun shone brightly without being too hot, and the highway stretched out in front of us like a giant, drowsy snake begging to be ridden.

  He refused to tell me where we were going, but that was cool with me. My instinct sang, cheering me on, letting me know that I was closing in on something big. I was supposed to be here, with him. Besides, when you can assimilate people’s lives through one simple touch, you can always wake up one day in the middle of a weird wave, like the one I was swimming in now. When all the pretending in the world, all the I’m-just-a-normal-kid-from-Michigan stops working. On some level, I’d expected it. Maybe I didn’t want to believe, but I knew it would come.

  And the bottom line was that I trusted Ryder. Even in the middle of whatever was happening, of the unknown, I trusted him enough not to care where he took me. Timbuktu even, was alright with me, as long as we were together. Call it instinct, call it early onset dementia, but being with him felt a lot like belonging. I’d never experienced anything like it before. Heck, I’d never been able to touch someone else and not have my brains liquefy inside my skull before. How could I not trust him?

  Now, Lucian, on the other hand, was a different story. At first I’d written him off as bad news, but was he really? He didn’t seem so bad when he looked at me. His eyes warmed up whenever they locked on mine. But no, I wasn’t turning into a tramp; my interest in him was strictly practical. Because it was clear that the three of us were linked, though exactly in what way remained to be seen. It had to be something metaphysical. Why else would it revolve around me, Rosemound’s own magical freak resident? It was the reason Ryder had gotten sick when attempting to talk about it. Probably the reason Lucian had come to Rosemound in the first place, and why he had taken such a conspicuous interest in me. The three of us were all part of something. A really bad occult affair.

  That was precisely why I was dead-set on enjoying my date with Ryder. There was no telling when or if there’d be a sequel.

  The ride lasted about forty minutes. We took the 41 and then turned east, eventually swerving onto a narrow road that snaked through tall undergrowth and even taller trees. Once we crossed the village of Gay and then left it behind, the buildings on the side of the road grew fewer and further between, and the foliage changed until the road cut through nothing but dense forest. My wolf-sharp sense of smell alerted me that we were approaching Lake Superior. A beach had to be somewhere nearby.

  The idea of him taking me somewhere special had turned my heart into a giant hammer, which hadn’t stopped pounding against my chest since we’d left school. But when I understood that his idea of a special place involved a beach, I flattened like a stabbed balloon. I hated the beach! When the weather was as beautiful as it had been lately, every sandy beach within a hundred-mile radius crawled with people. That was fine by me, since I usually avoided setting foot anywhere near them from April to November. And today of all days, when what I really wanted was privacy; of all the rotten luck …

  Leaving the narrow road, he slowed down considerably and took us smack through a patch of trees, which, of course, gave me flashes of crashing into them and subsequently needing whole teams of people to scrape the remainders of our brains from the trunks. I almost squealed out my terror when the trail opened onto the most beautiful beach I’d ever seen. What made it special? Simple: it was completely, blissfully deserted. And I mean not a single foot, human or animal, disturbed the white, soft-looking sand. I was in awe.

  In front of us, Lake Superior stretched as far as my eyes could see, blue as the cloudless sky above, with soft waves that only kissed the shore here and there. And once Ryder silenced the engine, nothing disturbed the unexpected peace the place enjoyed. It was quiet and serene. Perfect.

  “Do you like it?” he asked, helping me dismount.

  “Boy, do I!”

  He smiled at that, just a quick flash of teeth, and I had the urge to put my arms around him and squeeze hard because he seemed sad and still tense. The seizure thing had left a mark and I wanted it gone. But could I erase it?

  Meanwhile, I tried distracting him. “How did you know about this beach? And how come there’s no one else here?”

  Back turned to me, he wheeled the bike a few feet off the path, sheltering it from the sun under a thicket of oak and ash trees. He was athletic and lithe; I got an eyeful of muscles rippling under his jeans, bulging and making the leather of his jacket shine in the sunlight. Then, somehow, I was picturing the golden skin underneath, sleek with drops of sweat, glistening in the warm sun.

  His sudden spinning around caught me in the act. My complexion exploded into colors they don’t have names for, something along the lines of “nuclear eruption” or “incendiary blood-red.”

  Aware of my fluster and apparently intrigued by it, he came to me, already more relaxed. So my mortification impr
oved his mood; huh, good to know, I guess.

  “Something I can help you with?” he asked, one eyebrow arching knowingly.

  “Er ... no, I’m good. So, this beach? How do you…?”

  Instead of offering an answer, he pointed to our left where, past the tree line, a cottage lay partially hidden by the abundant greenery. The place was so cleverly situated I would’ve walked right past and never even seen it. The beach was small, maybe half a mile or so, and the cottage stood more or less on the line where the center of it should’ve been. The view from the upper floor’s windows had to be worth millions.

  “That’s mine,” he said simply.

  My eyes widened. “The house?”

  “Yes. Hence, the private little beach.” He held his hand out to me. “Shall we?”

  In a perfect demonstration of the fickle nature of a young mind, I went from contemplating flashes of his bare body to, Oh my gosh, we’re going to be all alone in a house. Together! Rationally, I knew that it was stupid and childish to waste even a second worrying about it; after all, I had yet to persuade him to even kiss me. But still my hands were instantly sweaty and unsteady, which was plain aggravating, as well as bizarre. I’d wanted to be alone with him, hadn’t I?

  “You’ve got to make up your mind, Lily,” he said softly.

  Since I’d delayed accepting his hand, he let it drop, no longer amused, nothing light about his expression anymore.

  “Decide if you’re afraid I won’t kiss you or that I might make a play for your virtue.”

  My throat knotted.

  “I brought you here to be with you, but not the way you’re afraid of. I’d never push for anything you didn’t want.”

  Without waiting for me to produce an apology, he offered me the sight of his back and started toward the house. “Coming?” he asked over his shoulder, without looking back.

  I followed, mentally kicking myself for the flagrant faux pas. What was wrong with me?