A couple hours later, he stood on Esme’s front porch with Sophie. She was training with the witch again, and though Calder hated every second Sophie spent in the nutty witch’s presence, he knew Sophie needed to learn. Something seemed to have happened between the two of them when Esme had come over the day before to train with Sophie. When Sophie spoke of her now, there was a softness and sadness in her tone. When he’d asked her what happened, she’d simply said that Marshall had made Esme suffer horribly.
“One more person he hurt, trying to destroy my family. Sick bastard,” she’d said, and he’d left it at that.
Sophie rang the doorbell and they waited for Esme to answer. She glanced up at him with a smile, and when he smiled back, the prettiest blush stained her cheeks.
“Stop looking at me like that,” she whispered.
“Like what?”
“Like you’re going to throw me over your shoulder, carry me into the woods, and do all kinds of unmentionable things to me.”
He grinned. “Oh, I can mention them if you want.”
Her blush deepened, and her arousal scented the air. “Not now,” she said with another little smile. “You are very bad for my focus.”
He cleared his throat. “Well, we can’t have that. I’ll behave, and you focus, and we’ll be unmentionable together later.”
She smiled, and at that moment, Esme wrenched the door open. The redheaded witch looked between the two of them, then rolled her eyes.
“Well, you’re not totally stupid,” she told Sophie. “Come on. Let’s get this over with.” She led them into the house, toward the kitchen again. “Those witches you have watching me are piss poor at their job.”
“How long have you known they were there?” Sophie asked in shock.
“I’ve known since the second they showed up, the night I tried to pick him up at that bar,” she said. She didn’t seem to have any guilt or embarrassment over the fact that she’d done it. “They think they’re hidden in the woods. The trees here don’t hide a damn thing. Too spindly.”
“Well. Thanks for putting up with them and not killing them,” Sophie said.
Esme shrugged. “They’re no danger to me. And if I wanted to hide what I was doing from them, I could.”
“I know. I’ll reassign them if you want.”
“Don’t bother. They’re both pretty nice looking and I think I’d like to teach them a thing or two,” she said, and Sophie laughed.
“They’ll never want to leave your woods after that particular lesson, I think,” Sophie said, and Esme snorted.
“Convenient,” the witch answered back, and Sophie laughed again. Esme had led them outside and into an open area. It was strange to hear Sophie and Esme joking around. He’d only ever seen them snarl at one another, or trade insults. He wasn’t sure if he trusted it.
No, he knew he didn’t trust it. He’d keep an eye on the witch. Maybe he could rope Jon into doing a little surveillance. His brother was always bitching that Calder never let him help with any of this craziness. Well, now he’d get his chance.
He focused on the two witches again. Esme was explaining something to Sophie. Sophie was holding her hand out in front of her, listening to Esme. He watched as Esme seemed to arrange Sophie’s fingers in some sort of gesture, two fingers and the thumb held out, the pinkie and ring finger kind of curved in.
“This gesture helps focus you. There’s nothing magical in holding your hand up this way, obviously. It’s all a tool for focus. You’ll know that when you make this movement, when you hold your hand up this way, you mean business. And business, for you, at this point in time, means to maim or kill. You need to get that through your head.”
“Not always,” Sophie argued.
“If you come across Marshall. If he manages to round up more minions and send them after you, that is your goal. There is no second option.”
Sophie sighed. “I know. Okay. My goal in that case is to maim or kill.”
“You can’t be soft on this. A moment of indecision, of wondering whether it’s right to kill the sadistic bastard who has hunted your line down like animals for centuries, will result in one more dead witch of Micaela’s line.”
“I don’t get it,” Calder said, and Esme turned to him.
“Get what?”
“His goal was to get the Light out of Micaela’s line, right? He was in love with Micaela, and she was sickened by the fact that her descendants seemed to be turning to the Light. He promised her on her deathbed that he’d purge her line of the Light forever. Right?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“Okay. Sophie’s Shadow. Migisi was Shadow. Why does he keep messing with them once they’ve turned?”
“Ego,” Sophie said quietly.
Esme nodded. “Ego and rage. If they’d fallen into line... If Migisi had done his bidding, if Sophie had bowed to him and vowed to do as he asked instead of stealing his power, he would have left them alone. In both cases, he wanted a servant. And from Sophie, he wanted a hell of a lot more.”
“What do you mean?” Calder asked, furrowing his brow.
“She looks like Micaela, according to what he’s said to Sophie,” Esme said. “I’ve never seen him as obsessed with someone as he is with her. He wanted her, for himself. I don’t think he’s wanted a witch like that since Micaela died.” She turned her gaze on Sophie. “It’s why he’s even more full of rage. Not only did you steal his powers, but he knows there’s not a chance in hell you’ll ever be his. Some assholes just don’t understand the word "No.’”
Calder’s gut twisted. “I could kill him, couldn’t I?”
Esme shrugged. “If you caught him unaware, and if he’s as weak as we think he is, then you probably could.”
“But we don’t know exactly how weak he is, so you’re not going to do that,” Sophie said, meeting his eyes.
He didn’t answer. He was too busy planning a hunting expedition. Jon and Bryce could come along as backup. Between the three of them, there would be nothing left of the bastard.
He watched in silence as Esme continued to train Sophie. She had her practice on some of the dead, twisted trees nearby. Sophie would hold her hand up in that gesture Esme had shown her, and then kind of push forward. The first time, the tree she was focusing on shook a little.
“You're going to have to do better than that,” Esme muttered, pacing behind Sophie. “Again.”
She had Sophie repeat the process again and again, and though she seemed to make the tree shake and flex a bit more, it didn’t seem to be doing much.
“He’s going to destroy you. First, he’s going to kill everyone you love, and then he’s going to destroy you,” Esme said. He was about to say something in Sophie’s defense, when Esme gave him a hard look. He clamped his mouth shut. “You’re still holding back. You’re still afraid to let your rage take control. You like the way it feels to use your powers in anger. You shy away from that, because you were told by every Light witch and by the Light itself that that rage is wrong, that there is no place for it. I told you yesterday that you need to learn to let that shit go. We’re not Light. We don’t work that way, and your rage, your passion, your anger, is all that’s going to save you now. You’re powerful enough. But that power doesn’t mean shit unless you harness it. Own your fucking emotions and make them work for you. Now. Again.”
He saw Sophie glare at Esme, but she held her hand up again without another word. She pushed forward, and this time, the trunk cracked and the tree fell over.
“Better. You should be able to rip the whole thing from the ground though. Again,” Esme said, continuing her pacing. “Remember that this motherfucker killed your parents. He killed your first husband. He killed Migisi’s child. He caused Calder’s curse. He hurt your friends. He tried to get Calder killed by framing him for Jacks’ death. He deserves no fucking mercy from you.”
It was a visible thing, the second Sophie truly embraced her Shadow magic. Her spine straightened. Her gaze sharpened. He
r body stilled, and she seemed to almost glow. The scent she gave off… it was almost intoxicating. The warlock had always smelled sulfurous, and he’d smelled a burning aroma near Sophie a time or two. This, though…. This was pure Sophie. It was the same scent he smelled when he buried his face in her hair, but magnified by about a thousand.
Sophie pushed forward with her hand, and not one, but three trees were plucked from the ground like daisies and sent crashing deep into the woods beyond.
He shifted uncomfortably, resting his hands in his lap.
Okay. Fine. His woman was kind of scary and when she destroyed shit, she smelled like pure sex. All he knew was that he had the world’s most painful hard-on and he needed to get her somewhere private, soon.
Sophie turned to Esme, power still coursing through her body.
“Feels good, doesn’t it?” Esme asked.
“Yeah. Too good,” she murmured, taking a deep breath, trying to calm herself down.
“There is no such thing as too good. You need to get that idea out of your head. Stop fearing who you are. If you fear it, it controls you. Shadow is like that. But if you assert control, if it’s clear that you’re the one who’s in charge, it will fall into line and serve you as it should.” She glanced at Calder.
“Did that feel or look evil to you, teddy bear?” she asked.
Sophie studied Calder. His hands were in his lap, and he swallowed hard. The hungry look in his eyes had her body reacting immediately. Instinct.
“No. Nothing evil about that. Holy shit,” he added.
“I don’t get it,” Sophie said.
“I have the feeling he’ll explain it to you later. Lucky bitch,” Esme muttered.
Sophie shook her head, giving Calder another glance. She’d joked earlier about him carrying her off into the woods, but now he really looked like he might. She blushed and looked away.
“Okay. I did that —”
“And I want to see you do it a few more times, to make sure you got it.”
This statement earned an audible groan from Calder.
“Okay, but what the hell does this accomplish? What? I’m just going to keep throwing Marshall around and hope that eventually, I bash him hard enough against something that he dies?”
Esme shook her head. “I mean, you could do that, but it seems inefficient.”
“Obviously.”
“This is the first thing you need to learn. How to manipulate objects. You felt what that feels like now, to harness your power, to focus it.”
Sophie nodded.
“The next step will be actually fighting with it. You can stop a heart with little more than a gesture. Remove the air from lungs in an instant. Snap a neck with a flick of your wrist.”
“This is terrifying.”
“You are. Shadow is not a game. That is why those of us who harness it need to learn how to do it right. When you make a shield, the way you did at the funeral, you’re just manipulating your power, giving it form. And you’re good at that. It takes a lot of focus.”
“But that’s used to protect people. I didn’t feel… like this, when I did that.”
“If you felt like this when you made a shield, not a single fucking thing could get inside.”
Sophie nodded.
“Okay. This is the other side of that. You can shield. And you can destroy.”
“I don’t want to just destroy.”
Esme rolled her eyes. “So take up gardening.”
“Nothing will grow with Shadow. Look around you.”
“Are you stupid or something?” Esme asked, and Sophie glared at her. “Shadow can be whatever you want it to be.”
“No, it can’t. The plants around me wilt, the second I walk past. They do the same with you. My chickens stopped laying. My goats dried up. I can’t even make goddamn soap anymore—”
“You are such a whiny bitch,” Esme said with a laugh. “All of that happens because you’re letting Shadow just sit there. Learn to focus it. Learn to use it.”
Sophie was about to argue, but Esme went on. “It’s all about controlling it. Left to its own devices, yes, Shadow will eventually kill everything around it.” She looked at Calder. “That didn’t feel like death to you, what she just did, did it?”
He shook his head.
“It requires focus. Confidence. Whatever you want, Shadow will do for you. But you have to be strong enough to make it work. You have to manipulate it into being what you want it to be.”
“Then why are so many Shadow witches evil?”
Esme tilted her head. “I only know of one Shadow person who’s evil.”
Sophie rolled her eyes. “In Migisi’s journals, she says that Shadow called to her to do evil. To destroy. To take. She did bad things. She drove people insane with her power. Actually insane.”
“Migisi spent her whole life living with the belief that Shadow was evil, so that must make her evil as well. She gave into that. I think she knew better at the end,” Esme said quietly. “It’s not the power that makes a person evil. It’s the person who makes the power evil, or not.” She smiled. “I’m not a nice person. I hate your line with a passion. But I’ve never hurt anyone who didn’t have it coming.”
Sophie stood there, and it felt like her whole world had flipped upside down.
“Honestly. There are more Shadow witches than Light. Light is picky as fuck. If we were all evil, hell-bent on death, destruction, and subjugation, don’t you think we would rule the world by now?”
“But it feels dark and kind of twisted and wrong,” Sophie insisted.
“Because it is. It is all of that. It doesn’t mean you have to be. You control it. Or it will control you. Choose.”
Sophie looked around. “If you can control it, why does it look like this around here?”
She watched as Esme scanned the twisted, feeble-looking forest around her house. “What I showed you yesterday?” she began, and Sophie nodded, knowing she meant her true form and the glamour she now wore. “That takes a lot of focus. There’s a limit to how much I can control at a time.”
Sophie looked around again. “Hold on a second,” she said, and then she sat down and closed her eyes.
“What are you doing?” Esme asked. When she didn’t answer, Esme apparently turned on Calder. “What the hell is she doing?”
“That’s how she figures Shadow out,” Calder said. And it was. Sophie focused, sensing for Shadow, little by little, more able to see the magic at work around her. Around Esme, Shadow swirled and ricocheted. It looked like a storm, and she saw now what Esme had meant about how much power it took to maintain her glamour. Other traces of Shadow magic, the ones Esme wasn’t directly controlling, kind of floated over the landscape, clinging to the scrawny trees nearby.
“Why does it attack life when it’s not being controlled?” Sophie asked quietly. “If it’s not evil, why is its default to attacking anything living nearby?”
She could see her own Shadow power, too, clinging to what she thought was a lilac bush nearby. She focused, and the lilac sprung back a little, and her Shadow magic receded, flowing back toward her.
“There’s power in life. Shadow is nothing if not power-hungry,” Esme answered. “And to be honest, while most Shadow witches aren’t evil, necessarily, we also don’t give a shit either way about what the trees and flowers look like around us. So if our overflow magic ends up affecting the landscape, it’s not something we tend to worry about. Unless it makes us more powerful, we don't care.”
Sophie didn’t answer. She focused on directing her Shadow magic to repair a nearby white pine, its Light magic dulling.
“The Light is everywhere,” Sophie said.
Esme didn’t answer for a long time. “It is?”
“It is,” she affirmed.
“You can sense that?”
“I can’t feel it, but I can see it.”
She heard Esme suck in a breath. “Migisi used to say she could see the power, too. Of course, she was batshit insane b
y that point, so I didn’t believe her.”
Sophie nodded. “I keep getting told I can only see it because I’m self-taught, that I learned to use magic in a way that made no sense.”
“Maybe. Migisi was self-taught as well. Her mother was very weak in the Light, from what I remember hearing at the time. Migisi was an anomaly.”
“Well. I was really weak in the Light, too. The only way I could do anything with it was to see it and kind of force it to do what I wanted.”
“That sounds like exactly what a Shadow witch would do. Without actually seeing the power.”
Sophie continued focusing, pushing her power in and up the little pine tree. Its Light ebbed, but then began to grow stronger as Sophie’s magic drew the residual Shadow that had been weakening the tree up its branches, through it. She could see the Shadow that had been clinging to the tree become more. It gained form, substance. Purpose.
Soon, the tree grew stronger in its magic. She couldn’t see the tree itself, of course, not with her eyes closed like this. She could see its life force, its Light, and her Shadow.
“Holy shit,” Calder murmured.
“Stop staring at her like that,” Esme said.
“Not a chance,” Calder said. “But look at the tree.”
They fell into silence again, and, after a moment, Sophie opened her eyes. The little white pine had gone from a deformed, stunted little thing and now stood, straight and tall, its needles a vibrant green, its trunk strong.
“Hm,” Esme said after a while.
“Hm?” Sophie mimicked. Esme didn’t look all that interested. “It looks a lot better, doesn’t it?”
Esme shrugged. “Seems like a waste of energy to me. What’s the point?”
Sophie rolled her eyes. “The point is, it’s the way it’s supposed to be. This matters,” she said, gesturing toward the tree and the forest beyond.
“You can’t use that to fight Marshall, so yes, it’s pointless.”
Sophie stood up. “You said it’s all about manipulating energy. Manipulating objects, forcing them to do your bidding.”
Esme nodded. “Yeah, and?”
“What do you think I just did?”
Light's Shadow (Copper Falls Book 3) Page 14
