Sophie blushed, and Faye patted her hand.
“Speaking of which, we need to get that boy moving. I’m not getting any younger,” Faye added, and the three younger women laughed.
“I remember Bryce trying not to look like he was staring at Lay all the way through school,” Cara said with a smile. “Remember how we used to tease her, Sophie?”
Sophie nodded. “I can only imagine that it got more obvious as you all got older,” she said with a laugh, and Layla hid her face in her hands. Cara nodded.
“As if you can talk,” Faye said. “I clearly remember, that summer before you all moved out of here, looking out that front window, and there’s you and Turcotte. Kissing,” she added for emphasis. “Which I wasn’t happy with because you were both too young to be kissin’ that way. But I’m not your momma.” She paused. “So I’m keeping my eye on you, and I see his hands start moving.” She pantomimed two hands reaching around and cupping a backside, and Sophie laughed.
“God, I’d forgotten that,” she said.
“You remember what happened next, then?” Faye said with a wink.
“I don’t know this one,” Layla said. Cara nodded.
“Oh, I remember,” Sophie said.
“What happened?” Layla asked.
“His hands were making their way to her backside, and I had decided he wasn’t getting frisky on my watch. So I grabbed one of the big wooden dough spoons from the back, and I went out that door, and I gave his knuckles a good smack. Boy jumped about a foot in the air and howled like the devil.”
Everyone at the table burst out in laughter, and Sophie wiped her eyes.
“Oh, that’s perfect,” Layla said, still chuckling. “See? At least you never had to smack Bryce with a spoon, gram,” she added.
“No. But I was about to give him a good thwack if he didn’t come to his senses about how perfect you are,” she said, and Layla took her wrinkled hand. “I’m happy for you, sweetheart.”
“I’m happy, too.” Then Layla looked at Sophie. “She’s right, though. Calder needs to pop the question now.”
Sophie shook her head. “Not right now, maybe,” she said, meeting Layla’s eyes.
“Soon, though. Waiting is stupid,” Layla said. “There’s never going to be a perfect time. The perfect time is now, because it’s all we have. We wait, and it can all be gone, like that,” she said, snapping her fingers. “Which you well know,” she added. She and Layla had talked, endlessly, about the curse and what it meant for her and Calder. Only Layla knew how many times Sophie had considered setting Calder free, just so he could hopefully have a normal life someday. And only Layla knew how even the thought of it tore Sophie apart. She exchanged a long look with her best friend, and Layla gave a small nod.
“He’ll ask in his own sweet time, I guess,” Layla said aloud, and Sophie nodded. An awkward silence rested over them, and Faye shook her head.
“His daddy was a good boy. Quiet,” Faye said, remembering, and also breaking the silence. “He was friends with my boy. They were real close until junior high, and then Turcotte turned hermit. Never did come around much after that.”
Sophie didn’t say anything, and Faye watched her for a few moments, then gave a small nod.
“Well. Every family has their secrets, I guess. And a good woman will protect hers to the end.” She patted Sophie’s hand, then got back up and started taking care of the few customers in the diner.
Layla was still smiling. “Well,” she said, “who’s ready for yoga?”
They walked down the block to Bryce’s studio, and when they entered the narrow brick building, Bryce and a few other women from town were already there. Sophie waved at the others, then she, Layla, and Cara strolled over to Bryce.
“Morning,” she said in greeting. “Congratulations!” Bryce grinned and hugged first Sophie, then Cara.
“How’s Calder this morning?” Bryce asked.
“I can’t believe he got into a fight last night. How could you let him do that?” she asked with a laugh.
Bryce grinned. “Have you ever seen Calder when he gets pissed? It would have taken ten of us to stop him from jumping at Jack, and even that might have failed. That bastard is strong,” he said, shaking his head. “I think Jack was afraid for a minute,” he confided, and Sophie laughed, feeling a strange rush of pride at the strength of the man she loved. “He all right?”
“He has a black eye, but other than that he’s fine,” she said, and Bryce nodded. “Thank you for convincing him to go out. He needed that. He’s been too cooped up with me.”
“Seriously, I don’t hear him complaining. If Calder had his way, he’d find a deep dark cave and keep you there forever and be perfectly happy with it,” Bryce said with a laugh, and Sophie shook her head.
“Let’s get started,” Bryce called, and Sophie, Layla, and Cara unrolled their mats toward the back of the room.
Bryce’s studio was a place of absolute serenity. Soft, ethereal music played over the sound system, and bright autumn morning sunlight cascaded through the front windows, gleaming across the dark wood floors. The scent of lavender incense filled the air, and, through it all, Bryce’s voice was its own melody. Sophie tried to let herself be soothed by it. She pushed thoughts of Light and Shadow, Calder, obsession, curses, and everything else, out of her mind and focused on her breath: slow breath in, slow breath out. When thoughts of all of the crap going on in her life tried to flow in, she pushed them away. She focused on the way her muscles warmed as she used them, as she stretched, as she held each pose. Her body warmed, and she felt herself becoming more fluid, more relaxed, with each asana, and she was grateful for it. But it was a lot of effort to get there.
Everything was going well until she was in a downward dog, and Bryce came up behind her, gently using his hands to pull back on her hips, to deepen her stretch and fix her alignment. It was something he’d done several times before.
Before she’d had Calder’s stupid curse.
A streak of hot need shot through her at the feel of his hands on her, the way he was positioned behind her. Calder had enjoyed the same position more than a few times, and it made her think of him.
She blushed furiously as Bryce quickly removed his hands.
“Hey,” Layla whispered from her left. Sophie looked over at her, and her friend looked absolutely furious. “Don’t fucking do that.”
“What?”
“He can smell you. I can freaking smell you. Calm down.”
“I’m not doing it on purpose,” Sophie whispered, irritated with both Layla and herself. Layla just rolled her eyes and started ignoring her. Sophie shook her head in irritated disbelief. As if Layla didn’t know exactly what Sophie was going through. As if she hadn’t sat and listened to more than a handful of panicked phone calls from Sophie about the way the curse was messing with her.
“Screw this,” Sophie muttered. She stood up and started rolling up her mat.
Bryce came over to her, and leaned toward her. “Hey. It’s okay. Don’t go.”
Sophie shook her head again and stormed out of the studio. She tossed the mat into her car, then got in and roared down the road.
Not toward home. Toward the forest. Away from everyone. She could feel Shadow surging within her again, and Layla’s attitude wasn’t helping.
She drove to the entrance of one of the state parks, pulled into a parking lot, and started walking along one of the many trails through the forest. She had done this often, when she’d first moved back, when she’d felt as if moving was the only thing keeping the terror that Marshall would find her again at bay. The trails had become a second home, a place she out-walked her demons.
Now, she ran. She was glad she’d worn sneakers. She ran, and barely noticed the way the tree trunks alls seemed to blur into one, the way her feet pounded the mulched trail, the way the cool air made her face sting, just a little, as she ran. Hunger, rage, anger… all of it boiled within her, just below the surface, threatening to push her ov
er the edge. She ran.
Starving. Empty. Nothing but a void, and she knew nothing would ever fill it. Not food, not drink, not Calder, not anything anyone could give her.
She ran, and her feet hit the ground harder, faster.
Her teeth clenched, her lips pulled back in a feral grimace.
Her heart was pounding, her stomach twisting with the emptiness that never seemed to leave her. Her flesh crawled with the sensation of Shadow within her, a filth she couldn’t escape.
She stopped and raised her face to the gray sky overhead, and she loosed a shriek that sounded barely human to her ears. Her throat burned with it, her chest ached, and still, she screamed into the emptiness. She knew no one would hear it. Not this far into the forest, not during the off-season when few were around. She let it out: the fear, the anger, the lust, the hunger, the knowledge that she wasn’t what she should be. She screamed it into the frigid air, her fists clenched at her sides.
When she stopped, she fell to the ground, exhausted, emotionally spent, terrified and sick at the way she was behaving. But she knew that, for a moment, at least, she’d felt better. How often in her life had she kept her anger inside, hidden every part of herself she’d thought she should be ashamed of? She’d hidden her magic at first, from her family. And when they’d discovered it, they’d proved her right, by freaking out and moving her away from Copper Falls. She’d spent most of her life hiding in general from Marshall.
She was so sick of hiding. So sick of wishing things were different. So sick of coming up short, over and over and over again.
She glanced around, and her gaze landed on a dead tree nearby, its trunk split, the top half of the tree having fallen and crashed into trees nearby.
She remembered the way she’d thrown Marshall across her living room and through her window. It was the one and only time she’d used her Shadow power, and she’d done it without thinking. She’d feared it, hated it, felt sick and filthy with it.
But it was what she had. And she was beginning to recognize that, for a witch, whether she was Light or Shadow, the fact that she had been trying so hard not to use her magic was having a bad effect on her as well. She’d been through that before, too. It never ended up well.
She focused on the tree, on the way the fallen top of the tree was crushing the smaller trees around it.
She felt Shadow rise within her, its destructive nature at the ready, an almost eager feeling to it.
She raised her hands, and felt Shadow surge within her, fed by her anger and hunger, and the top of the tree exploded, slivers of dead wood flying everywhere around her, bent trees springing straight after being freed from the weight of the dead tree. She looked at her hands numbly.
“Okay,” she murmured, taking a deep breath. “Okay.”
That time, she’d called it, and it had come. It had done what she’d wanted it to. She hadn’t had to build a spell, not the way she did with Light magic. She just had to focus, and push her power forward. Was that all Shadow was?
No. There was more to it than that, she knew. Marshall’s ability to manipulate people, to make them do bad things… that was part of Shadow as well. That was something she didn’t want to mess with. But this part of Shadow… this could protect her from Marshall. Maybe. If she caught him by surprise. And it would likely only work once, if that, because she’d already done it to him once already.
But not quite this. Her mind wandered, briefly to what would happen if she wanted to make Marshall explode the way the tree had. She pushed it away.
Still. It was handy to have some kind of control. Even a little bit. Even if she had no clue what she was doing or what she was actually capable of. Sophie glanced around and spotted another fallen tree trunk, this one leaning heavily on a nearby sugar maple.
She focused on the tree trunk. Something less messy, maybe, she thought to herself. Could she turn it to sawdust instead of making shards of wood fly everywhere?
She stared at the tree. Felt Shadow rise within her again the longer she focused. Instead of envisioning a spell, building it the way she always had, she envisioned what she wanted to happen. Tree to sawdust. She focused, hard, raised her hands, and made that same instinctive pushing motion. A loud “crack” filled the air around her, so loud her eardrums hurt. Instead of falling to sawdust, the trunk of the tree split down the middle, each half falling in a separate direction, then falling loudly to the forest floor.
Once the echoes of the tree’s fall ended, Sophie walked over to one of the halves. It was a clean split, as if a hot knife had sliced through a tree made of butter. Perfectly straight, no tears, no shredded bark. But it wasn’t what she’d wanted.
“How the hell did that happen?” Sophie muttered. She chewed her lower lip as she paced back and forth along the length of the tree trunk half nearest to her. She crouched and ran her hand along the trunk. She felt Shadow rise in her again, and she went with it. A flick of her wrist, and the half of the tree trunk nearest to her fell away to nothing but cinnamon-colored sawdust, the clean, antiseptic smell of pine rising into the air as the tree fell apart.
She glanced at the other half. Okay. So Shadow was really, really good at destruction. Really good. That didn’t help her in getting back to the Light, but it did help if it came down to having to protect herself or Calder. Then she grimaced. Something nagged at her. She looked at a healthy, living tree and tried to do it.
Nothing.
Interesting. She looked back at the two dead trees, and what remained of them, and then at the trees nearby. Those trees were now healthier, not being crushed by the bigger dead trees.
So it hadn’t all been destruction. She’d saved the small trees being crushed by the first tree she’d exploded. Her gaze went to the remains half of the second tree. Destruction…
She smiled to herself. Destruction didn’t have to be an immediate thing. She wondered.
She spied some bright green moss on the bark of the tree half. Slow destruction. Over time, the moss would help the tree decompose, and, soon, the tree would be nothing but rich humus, feeding the rest of the forest.
She pictured one of the Light spells she knew, one that had helped plants grow. Part of being of the Light had been knowing that life around her flourished, just because she was nearby. She’d lost that part of it, for sure. But she wondered if she could force Shadow to her will, considering that the ultimate, eventual goal of the moss was destruction of the tree trunk.
She held the structure of the Light spell in her mind, and focused on it, and the moss on the tree trunk, the tree trunk itself, and she felt Shadow winding its way around, through, between all of it, hesitant, but seeming to understand that destruction would be the outcome.
She held it all, her breathing growing shallow, a sheen of perspiration appearing on her forehead as she held the spell, as she tried to force Shadow into what she wanted it to be.
An eternity later, she began to see soft, velvety emerald moss spreading along the tree trunk, through the rough bark, up the thick branches. She wanted to cry. She wanted to shout in glee. She held it together, and watched the moss spread, until the tree was covered in green there on the forest floor. The moss would die with winter, of course, but come spring, the spores would still be there, and they would grow again, cover the tree, and begin the tree’s long journey into decay.
She pulled her power back, drawing the spell to a close. Shadow seemed subdued within her, and she felt better than she had in a long time. She’d made something grow. She’d done the kind of work a Lightwitch would, even with Shadow flowing strongly within her. She’d hoped for maybe a spark, a whisper of Light magic, the sense that it hadn’t completely abandoned her, but that hadn’t happened. She tried not to focus on her disappointment over it. She’d managed much more than she thought she would.
She gave the moss-covered tree one last glance, then turned and started walking slowly back down the trail. She had no idea how long she’d been gone. The sky was very overcast. It was likely p
ast noon, she guessed. Calder would have expected her back before now.
But he’d understand. He’d be happy to hear about the way she’d made Shadow work with her natural affinity, rather than against it. She knew it wouldn’t mean a damn if she actually had to face off against Marshall, because that would require actually wanting destruction, and her magic just wouldn’t seem to work that way.
She thought of Layla, of Bryce, and her face flushed. She’d have to deal with that eventually. While Sophie was irritated that Layla hadn’t been more understanding, she could see it from her point of view, too. How happy would she be to see someone very clearly turned on by Calder? Wouldn’t she want to scratch the person’s eyes out, no matter who they were or why they felt that way?
I’ll call her later, Sophie told herself. Bryce at least had seemed understanding, but that didn’t surprise her, really. Bryce was one of the most laid-back people she’d ever met. He was good for Calder, she thought to herself, remembering Calder’s black eye, those bruised, scraped knuckles. The two best friends had always been opposites, she thought to herself. Even as kids, Calder was the one always getting into trouble, getting into fights, and Bryce was usually the one pulling him off of whoever he was beating up.
She made her way, finally, back to her car, kind of surprised by how far she’d run. She got in and headed back down the highway toward her house. When she pulled into her driveway, she saw Calder across the road, in his driveway, crouched next to the passenger side door of Bryce’s ugly car. He was rubbing something along the door, maybe sanding the old paint or something, she thought. The way his posture looked, she could tell he was tense, on edge. A glance at her dashboard showed her that it was well past three o'clock; she’d been gone for hours and hadn’t even realized it. He’d probably been worried, she realized guiltily.
She walked across the road, and he didn’t look up as she got closer, even though she knew he knew she was there. He’d told her that he could smell her anytime she was near, that her scent drew him in a way nothing else did.
Shadow Sworn (Copper Falls Book 2) Page 9
