It was silent, and she sighed. In relief or sadness, she wasn't even sure anymore.
Sophie quickly threw on some jeans and a t-shirt, pulled her hair into a low ponytail and headed out to do the milking, which she was late for. She saw that the chickens had already been let out, the goats watered, but clearly not milked, since she hadn't seen any fresh milk in the refrigerator when she'd grabbed a hard-boiled egg on her way out.
Damn him for continuing to be considerate and sweet even when she acted like a jerk, she thought to herself. And why that bothered her, she couldn't even say, because it shouldn't have bothered her at all. He loved her. He was taking care of her in a way that mattered to her more than she could ever say.
She took the bucket to the first female goat, May. May watched her warily, as she always did, but just went on standing there, chewing some of the hay she'd pulled from the feeder. Sophie set the galvanized pail under May, cleaned her, then started squeezing.
Nothing.
Sophie furrowed her brow, gave another squeeze, felt May's underside. There was none of the usual heavy, full feeling that indicated she needed to be milked.
She sat back on her heels and looked up at the goat. “What the heck, goat?” she asked. May just continued chewing. Sophie went to the next goat, Clarice. Same thing. And when the third of her females had nothing as well, all Sophie could do was stare at her in disbelief.
She rested her forehead against the goat's side, took deep breaths, dread settling into her gut. These same goats had given gallons of milk the day before. She'd been in a hurry to turn it into soaps as well as a few wheels of cheese to store for the coming winter.
Well. The garden, then. She'd harvest some of the greens and carrots.
The garden, when she got there, was a withered, pathetic mess. Plants that had been standing tall, if a little less than perfectly healthy looking the day before, were slumped over, withered, yellowed.
Sophie dropped the harvest basket, ran to the chicken coop. A search of their nesting boxes showed nothing. Nothing, when she could always count on a few eggs every day.
“No,” she whispered.
She closed her eyes and opened her senses, hoping to be comforted by the spirits of her ancestors. And when she did it, she felt nothing.
“No, no, no, no,” she whimpered, slumping to her knees. “Please, no. Not now.”
Migisi's words from the journal came back to her: “Nothing is right. I am wrong in my own body, unable to do even the most basic spells. My healing elixirs fail. My garden withers.”
“Why?” she screamed into the silence, and a group of sparrows flew from their perch atop the chicken coop.
It wasn't even her overwhelming need to protect herself anymore. Calder. If she didn't have her magic, she didn't stand a chance in hell of saving him.
“No,” she said, standing up and wiping her eyes. “No, I'm just tired. I just need to do a few things, get back into the groove of things, and I'm fine.”
Even she didn't believe the words she was mumbling.
She marched into the house, gathered her soap-making supplies together, and got to work. She went to work on a new batch of soap, combining the lye and beeswax, jojoba oil, goat's milk and essential oils. She whispered spells, though it felt like a child pretending, because when she reached for it, though she could easily see how her spells were supposed to work, there was no magic there.
She took several deep breaths, determined to keep herself together.
She watched the soap, continued stirring. And just at the point where it looked as if this batch would reach the soponification stage, when everything came together into a perfect, creamy, fragrant liquid, it separated, falling into what looked like globs of rice in the pot. A failure.
“Damn it,” she shouted, grabbing the pot off of the woodstove and hurling it into the field beside her house. It hissed in the damp grasses when it fell, and she turned and stormed into the house.
She tried a simple calming spell. Failure.
She tried her spell to translate Migisi's journal. Failure.
She was about to start crying when she looked at her door. Her heart stilled. She walked slowly up to it, reached out tentatively, and ran her hand along the woodwork.
Her wards had failed. There wasn't even a single wisp of her own Light magic left. Nothing.
Her heart sped up, beating wildly as if it was about to beat out of her chest, as the realization hit her. She was sitting here, unprotected and powerless, and Marshall was somewhere out there, and Calder's beast was somewhere out there and all it took was one wrong stupid move, one wrong step, and she was completely doomed.
Calder's beast. How in the hell was she going to save him now?
“Aw. Poor little Lightwitch,” a voice she knew all too well said, way too close to her. Sophie scrambled up, and Marshall laughed from the place he'd suddenly inhabited on her sofa. She grabbed the fireplace poker, and he laughed again. “Do you really think that's going to do anything against me? Powerless whelp.”
“What did you do to me?” she asked him, hating how her voice was shaking.
All it earned her was a derisive laugh. “You give me too much credit. No, you did all this yourself.”
“I didn't do anything. What did you do, Marshall?” she asked, close to shouting in her fear and panic.
“Hm. Maybe you should have been focusing more on do-gooding, and less on screwing. Are Lightwitches supposed to be such lustful, filthy creatures?” he asked with another slimy grin as he stood up. “I could hear the two of you last night. Such impurity, for a creature of the Light.”
The thought of him standing out there, listening in as Calder had loved her. The thought of him invading a moment that was possibly one of the most beautiful, pure moments of her life, enraged her. Before she even realized what she was doing, she'd dropped the poker and raised her hands. With a snarl, she shot a concussive blast of energy at him, much like the one she'd used to knock Calder on his butt the previous week, but so much stronger. He went flying through the room, out the large window behind the sofa, landing over a dozen feet away outside, in her gravel driveway.
He picked himself up, laughing, and it took every ounce of willpower she had not to kill him.
Because she wanted to. She wanted to see, right then, exactly what it was she could do to him.
He tipped his hat at her. “You'll come to me. You have the beginnings of power, raw and unfocused. You come to me, you'll have power. Unlimited power.” He stopped, crossed his arms, watching her through the broken pane of glass. He looked completely unruffled, as if he hadn't just been hurled twenty feet through a pane of glass. “What do you suppose you'd do with unlimited power, little girl? Anything your heart desires, you can have. All you have to do is come to me.” And with that, he was gone, as if he'd never been there at all.
She stared out the window, at nothing.
Unlimited power. The words echoed in her conscience.
She shook her head. She stood there for several long minutes, just breathing, just trying to get herself back together again.
“Holy shit! What happened here?”
Sophie jumped, spun to see Layla standing just inside her front door.
“Soph?” she asked.
Sophie shook her head, and she felt her face crumple. Within an instant, Layla was there, arms around Sophie, holding her and murmuring comforting, useless words as she fell apart in huge, wracking sobs.
“What's wrong, Soph? Come on, girl, I can't kick anyone's ass until you tell me what happened. Did Calder do something to you?”
At Calder's name, Sophie backed away. “Don't you tell him you saw any of this,” she said.
“Sophie. I come over here and you're goddamn pale as a sheet and your window's all busted out. What the hell happened, because if you don't convince me in about two seconds that he didn't do something to you, I'm gonna hunt Calder's ass down and make him hurt.”
“Calder would never hurt me,” she s
aid, and Layla gave her a disbelieving look. “He wouldn't. I love him, and he loves me, and this wasn't him.”
“The warlock?” Layla asked, and Sophie nodded. “What about your wards?”
“They failed,” Sophie said quietly, hating the words.
Layla stared at her. “What?”
“They failed. I can't even do the simplest spell. Wards down, even my soap failed. My garden is dead, my animals are dried up…”
“Girl, you need to run, then. Run far, and run fast, and don't goddamn come back.”
Sophie stared at her in shock. “What?”
“You have a warlock stalker who's been on your ass for years, just waiting for the first sign of weakness. You have Calder, who I totally believe loves you more than anything in the entire world, but who has less and less control over a beast that will do god-knows-what to you if it gets a chance. You need to go,” she said, each of those last words delivered deliberately, slowly.
“No.”
Layla gave her an incredulous look. “Have you lost your mind along with your powers?”
“Maybe,” Sophie said, raising her voice. “Maybe I have. I'm not leaving. Not when he's still cursed. Not when I still need this house. Not—“
“You are completely fucked here, Soph,” Layla said, shouting over Sophie. “You can't stay. You can't solve his curse. This place is a loss. You either come home with me, or you run. But you can't stay here.”
“I'm not running anymore. And I'm not just bailing on Calder. I have another couple weeks until the equinox.”
“And no power to help him with, sweetie,” Layla said gently. “Soph, you know I love you. You know that. I know it's going to hurt you. I know you love him. I know that the second you two saw each other in fifth grade, something happened. Okay? I know, girl. But you can't save him.”
I have to try, she thought, and her mind went to Marshall. Just as soon, she forced it away. “Maybe there's still something I can do.”
Layla sighed, shook her head. “Didn't you just get done telling me the other day that Migisi's powers got messed up over time, too?”
Sophie nodded.
“And how'd that end for her? Because I'm pretty sure Calder could remind you how it ended.”
“I'm not Migisi,” she said, something, again, irritating her as if there was something she'd forgotten.
“No. You're not. But her blood runs through your veins, her magic lives in you, and if you're losing your magic, where do you think that's going to lead? She lost her mind, Soph.”
“I'm not her,” Sophie repeated. “And Calder is not Luc. I'm going to fix this, and I'm not running.”
Layla growled in irritation. “Have you ever considered that no matter how much you love him, the boy's bad for you? Have you thought of that?”
Sophie stared at her, refusing to dignify it with a response.
“Think about it. He's all 'I love you baby' and I can smell him all over this place, so I'm guessing he's gotten lucky a few times.”
Sophie glared at her.
“Okay. He definitely has. So all that's going on, and the bastard's still holding this house over your head? If he loved you, he'd fucking give it back, Soph. And even if that wasn't all, there's the fact that your magic was getting better. It was growing. You were gaining even more control over it since you moved back here. And then he comes into your life, and boom! You're powerless.”
Sophie didn't answer. She didn't feel like correcting Layla. She wasn't powerless. She just didn't have the right kind of power anymore.
As Layla stood there staring at her, the gears started turning in Sophie's brain.
“I was fine until Calder,” she said softly.
“Yeah. You were,” Layla said, crossing her arms.
“Migisi was fine until Luc,” Sophie said, thinking. She looked up at Layla. “Doesn't that seem like an awfully impossible coincidence to you?”
Layla didn't answer, and Sophie started pacing, thinking. “Migisi was a hero. Healer, everyone loved her. She was the most powerful Lightwitch of her time, right?” She kept pacing, not waiting for Layla's response. “She meets Luc, they fall in love, start spending time together, and she starts having problems with her magic.” She looked at Layla, who was giving her a sad look. “I meet Calder again, after years of healing myself, of getting my magic to a point where it was useful. We start spending time together. And my magic gets messed up.” She thought back. “When I'm with him, it happens. I can feel it. I'm fine, and then all of a sudden, I feel this… irritation creeping in. It's not me. It's him.”
“Okay,” Layla said, holding her hands out as if pleading with Sophie. “Okay. So that's one more reason to stay away from him then, right? One more, of about a million.”
Sophie shook her head, still pacing. “But why? Why does his line do this to mine? I mean, Migisi and Luc meeting was a fluke. In her journal, she's just talking about how she didn't like him trapping in her woods, so she was following him, messing up his traps, and he caught up with her. Probably sniffed her out, right?”
Layla nodded slowly, still not looking all that pleased with Sophie.
“Okay. So why? Something in him messed up Migisi…” She stopped talking, stared at Layla.
“What?” Layla asked, looking alarmed.
“It was us. It was always us.”
“What?” Layla repeated, looking helpless now, on top of looking alarmed.
“Someone knew. Someone saw. Someone noticed her paying attention to him.” Her mind went back to Marshall, how he'd disappeared earlier that day, how he'd always seemed to appear, just out of nowhere. “They were a tool to get to us.”
“That's kind of a leap…” Layla began.
“It makes sense, though. I mean, Migisi was dedicated. She was good, and she was powerful, and she was the best at what she did. The best. Unmoved by the Shadow. That amount of power would have been attractive.” That, she knew. Even her meager amount of power had been attractive to Marshall.
“Attractive how?” Layla asked.
“I don't know,” Sophie said, slumping a little. “To use? To try to take?”
“But she went dark and screwed your line, right? So the magic was gone.”
“Or it's not. Not really.” Not with the way she'd tossed Marshall across the room earlier. She'd never felt a burst of power like that in her life. Not even on her best days.
“Okay. Even so. Even if you're right: someone cursed Luc so he'd somehow make Migisi's powers go away, and that curse carried on down his line, and it just so happens that his descendant ends up with a descendant of Migisi's. Even if all that is true, what difference does it make?”
“I don't know. Maybe none. But it's something. Magic is always in a state of balance, right?”
“If you say so. We don't do much with magic,” Layla said, plopping down on one of the chairs.
“Maybe Migisi figured it out. Maybe she tried to fix it later. Maybe she came to her senses somewhere along the line.”
“Sweetie, have you found any evidence of that, anywhere?” Layla asked.
Sophie didn't answer.
“You're hoping for impossible things. You need to smarten up before you get hurt. Now come on, let's at least board up that window before it gets absolutely freezing in here.”
Sophie didn't answer, walking out the back door toward the small barn, still thinking. She and Layla grabbed a sheet of plywood, a hammer, and a box of nails. They carried it back out and went to work, one of them holding the plywood while the other nailed, then switching roles until it was up.
“Glad it wasn't a huge window,” Layla said.
Sophie nodded.
“What went through it, Soph?” she asked gently.
“A warlock,” Sophie said.
Layla stared at her. “He crashed through the window to get to you?”
Sophie gave a humorless smile. “No. He crashed through the window when I showed him the way out.”
Layla was studying her. “P
lease come stay with us,” she finally said.
Sophie shook her head. “I love you. Thanks for worrying about me. But I'm not going anywhere. Not now. Not when he still needs me and I need to figure this mess out.”
Layla looked at her helplessly, then sighed and pulled her into a hug. “Call if you need me.”
“I will,” Sophie said, hugging her back. She watched as Layla shifted, picked up her clothing in her mouth, and ran through the woods, heading in the direction of town.
Chapter Twenty-One
She went back inside and settled on the sofa with Migisi's journals. She was just grateful that she'd read her way through the ones with writing in them before losing her magic. While they hadn't revealed a whole lot, at least it was something. She opened the third journal, the one with the sketches and paintings in it. She flipped the pages, studying each one. The first few were drawings and small paintings of flowers and trees, birds that she'd often seen around. It was the painting of a bear that she kept going back to, knowing though there was no proof, that it was Luc. Its massive size, its shaggy fur. The almost knowing look it wore. But it was more than that. The way she'd rendered it in such exacting, careful detail, as if determined to capture all of it, spoke to a certain adoration. She'd loved whatever was in that painting. Whomever. And Sophie knew it had to be Luc, because she'd seen that form so often now in Calder. She still intended to show the painting to him, to show him that, no matter what else Migisi was, she'd been someone who had been deeply in love at one point in time. She didn't want him to forget that.
When she was being realistic, she knew she needed him to know that so he'd remember it when she acted like a jerk, as she had that morning.
She glanced toward the door. He hadn't been home all day. She wondered what he was feeling. Was he angry at her? Did he think they were over? Did he want them to be over, tired of dealing with her crap?
She shook her head, tearing her thoughts away. She flipped to the page with the painting of the falls, this one, once again, in lush, perfect detail. Sophie knew the scene well. There was the huge rock on which she and Calder had been sitting when they'd kissed so long ago; there was the deep pool right to the left of the falls where they'd enjoyed swimming on hot summer days. Whatever else this place had been, it seemed to have been a place that brought Migisi joy.
Shadow Witch Rising (Copper Falls Book 1) Page 21
