Flames in the Midst (The Jade Hale Series)

by Reckenwald, Sarah

  She waited for me to say something, but I couldn’t think of anything nice to say about a witch who used his skills to cheat regular people out of their hard-earned money. I forced a smile towards her.

  “Listen to me,” she continued with a laugh. “You’d think I was in my sixties the way I talk! I sure feel like it sometimes, though.”

  My day with Kendra slowly ebbed to an end. I couldn’t wait for the ordeal to be over, and I very much hoped she would not be a part of my intense training schedule once Amy and I set that up. I couldn’t imagine Kendra had anything to offer me. On the other hand, people often say you should keep your friends close and your enemies closer. If my suspicions about Kendra were right, then I should probably be trying to spend more time with her rather than less. I would have to consider that when I had my day with Amy and my chance to put a say into my training.

  I spent my seventh day with Garrett. With his fading yellow aura, Garrett did not seem like an exciting prospect for a shadowing day, but I thought it would be a nice break to spend the day with a witch who had obviously survived so much after spending the day with the murky Kendra. Garrett let me down at first. Over breakfast, his conversation approached the same stimulating level as Mercy’s had.

  After breakfast, we went out to the edge of the property, among the citrus trees. We could make out the house from where we stood, but anyone in the house would have a hard time discerning what we were working on.

  “Now comes the exciting part,” Garrett began. I began to become more hopeful for the prospects of my day.

  “What are we going to work on today?” I asked, trying to hold back my eagerness.

  “Well, I know Amy wants to work with you on time traveling, but she really wants to focus on your ability to create portals in time and move a group with you. She’ll want to figure out how long you can hold a portal open for and how many people you will be able to move through it. There is another aspect to your skill that will not concern her as much, and it will be fairly useful to you, not to mention a whole load of fun.”

  “Okay, you’ve got my attention.”

  “I thought I would,” Garrett smiled. I could tell today would be a fun reprieve from some of my other experiences over the past week.

  “So what are you talking about?” I asked as we sat under the shade of the trees.

  “Well, time travel is not just about time. You are traveling through time and space. Think about it. When you first traveled back to that traumatic moment in your life, you didn’t have to be in that location in order to end up back there. You didn’t just travel back in time, or you would have been at some different party in the 80s in the same apartment Stefanie followed you to.”

  I nodded before he continued.

  “So, it stands to reason you can use your gift to travel through space as well. You can, in essence, teleport yourself from one end of the room to the next or from one tree branch to another.”

  I had never thought about that fully, although it had occurred to me it would be convenient when I was trying to get out of Zach’s burning house.

  “Okay, I’m with you so far, but how do I actually do it?”

  “You have to think of time differently. One way to do it, I would imagine, would be to simply send yourself to a different spot a few seconds away through time. This is something that will take practice. I doubt your time travel is down to the second yet.” Garrett winked at me and chuckled. I realized neither of us had on watches, and I wondered how I could move seconds in time if I didn’t know exactly what time it was.

  “Or,” he continued, “You could think of time as more than just those seconds ticking away. If you think of time and space as threads intertwined on a loom, every time hits every place and vice versa at different points in the same fabric. You are like the shuttle in the loom. You can jump from any connection in the threads to any other connection in the threads, except, unlike the shuttle, you have magic on your side. You are not just limited to the new connections that are being made. You are also the weaver’s hand, able to touch any previous connection. Beyond that, you are the weaver’s mind, able to reach any future connection as well.”

  I closed my eyes as Garrett explained all of this to me. I could see the weaver’s shuttle passing back and forth as the fabric wove together. I could see the individual connections all of those threads made and all of the connections the threads would ever make. Time and space had never been described to me in such a way before, and it seemed so clear I wondered for a moment why time travel was such a rare gift among rare gifts. I wondered why regular people, people who weren’t witches, didn’t just travel through time at will. At the very least, a time machine did not seem very far-fetched.

  “Wow.” I opened my eyes. The shade of the trees was becoming more narrow and leaning away from us.

  “We’ll practice after lunch,” Garrett smiled gently.

  “How long have we been sitting here?” I asked.

  “A few hours. When you really get something, it takes time for you to absorb it all.”

  We ate lunch after everyone else. We ate in silence again. I couldn’t believe half of the day was already over. I felt like a new person. I felt like I could be in control of my time travel to a degree I would not have thought possible the day before. I couldn’t wait to go back to the cover of the citrus trees to practice. I had never been so excited about practicing magic. I practically ran to the back of the property after Garrett finished his sandwich and water.

  When we got out to the trees, Garrett simply sat back down and closed his eyes.

  “What are you doing?” I asked in exasperation. How could he teach me a new understanding of myself, of my gift, and then not teach me how to use it? I didn’t get it.

  “I’m giving you more time to absorb your learning.” He didn’t even open his eyes.

  “What?”

  “Just sit back and think about it for a little while longer.”

  “But I’m ready to use it now,” I insisted.

  “Just a few more minutes. I promise you will get to try it out today.” He sat, leaning against a tree and absorbing the warmth of late August in Florida. Actually, no one absorbs the warmth. You brace yourself against it whenever you open a door. You trudge through the stickiness of it whenever you have to walk somewhere without a breeze or the shade of a tree. If you find shade, like we had here, you cling to it because you can feel the heat pressing in on you from all sides, waiting for you to step out of the small respite the shade provides. By the time September hits, if the summer hasn’t been too bad, you can start enjoying the warmth of the sun again. That continues through October and sometimes into November.

  I decided to stop contemplating the heat and at least try to do what Garrett wanted me to do. I found a shady spot under an orange tree, tucking myself in between two low branches. I closed my eyes and thought again about time and space and the fabric on the loom. After I felt enough time had passed, I decided I would try to put it into practice while Garrett was obviously snoozing under his tree.

  As I embraced the connections made by the loom, I became acutely aware of everything around me and within me. I could hear bees whisking around the remaining late blooms of the orange tree. I could hear the grass and leaves rustle with a very slight breeze. Not only could I hear my own heart beating, but I could hear the blood rushing through my veins. I wasn’t sure, but I thought I could also hear Garrett’s heart beating as he slept under the tree.

  In my mind, I could see the spot where the place I stood connected with my now. I opened my eyes and picked a branch in an oak tree to my left, just beyond the cleared portion of the yard and the citrus trees. I saw where my present connected with that spot on the loom, and in an instant, I was there, sitting in the oak tree, as if I had been there all along. I looked down and to my right. There lay Garrett, still asleep under the orange tree. If I hadn’t made my move in seconds, it was pretty darn close. I thought I could see Garrett peeking out of the corner o
f one eye. I looked at the branches over his head and focused on the image of the loom again. Again, in only an instant, I was there, hanging just above Garrett.

  He wasn’t at all startled to see me. He opened his eyes and clapped his hands.

  “Bravo!” he exclaimed.

  “I don’t know what to say. I never thought I would learn so much in one day. Thank you.”

  “It helps to have things explained in just the right way. This of course will not help with your portals, nor will it help with pinpointing your firestarting gift, but it is fun nevertheless.”

  He slid out from under the tree and began walking back to the house.

  “Where are we going?” I called out as I hurried to catch up with him. It did take a moment of concentration to jump through time or through space like that. I didn’t think I’d be using the skill for the mundane, like walking back to the house or getting a Coke out of the fridge—although it could be entertaining depending on who was there to witness it.

  “We are not going anywhere. I’ve taught you more than you thought you would learn for the day, so I think we are therefore done for the day. You are free until you meet with Amy tomorrow.”

  “But isn’t there more you had planned?”

  “No. That was about it. You picked it up a bit more quickly than I imagined, but that was all I had planned. Besides, if you take in too much at once, you’ll be bound to forget something.” He smiled at me and winked, but I wondered if he didn’t have a point. All of this intense training meant I wouldn’t get all of it quite right. I would be bound to forget parts of the training. I hoped I could remember enough to help me face Evan and Cameron with or without the Guardians who planned to join me. I pushed these grim thoughts to the back of my consciousness, determined not to dwell on what I couldn’t change.

  I enjoyed the end of my seventh day of training with Chase again. We hid out in the citrus trees for the rest of the day and into the night. I showed him my new trick by making him climb the oak tree I had first moved myself into. When he was sitting comfortably, I focused myself and jumped through time so I appeared next to him only moments after he saw me duck under a grapefruit tree. He looked a bit dismayed, but I made him brush it off. Our second kiss felt just as good as the first—like we were in the middle of a star with the world standing still around us. Kissing inside a star on the branch of an oak tree is ten times better than standing on the ground. We spent at least an hour discovering that.

  I spent the eighth day with Amy. It surprised me when she took me off the property. I hadn’t been off the property since I went to campus to withdraw from the fall semester. The general consensus remained that the dangers of leaving outweighed the inconvenience to me of staying. Although, they had kept me busy enough I hardly noticed the growing inkling of cabin fever I had contracted.

  Amy wanted to know my honest opinion of the witches I had followed for the past week, and she felt the best way to ensure my honesty was to get me alone. She took me to the Devil’s Millhopper, a state park where we could walk through the trails in relative solitude in the middle of the week. Besides, we were only working to avoid other witches—the witches from our coven and any Shadow Rulers who might be scouting the area looking for me, and despite the name of the park, it did not tend to attract Shadow Rulers.

  As we walked along the wooden boardwalk and staircase leading down into the natural sinkhole, I let Amy have it. I didn’t care for Mercy, and I didn’t trust Kendra. Alex, Gia, Chase and Caylin were great, and I had quite a bit of respect for Garrett. She already knew how I felt about her, Madilyn and Stefanie, but I reiterated that my feelings had not changed.

  “I understand why you might not get along with Mercy. She does have a way of making things difficult when she wants her way, but why don’t you trust Kendra?” Amy asked.

  “I can’t quite explain it. There’s just something about her that seems…off.” I wanted to tell Amy about my gift for reading auras, but I thought about my aunt’s letter. I knew the advice to keep this to myself was for good reason. No one else should know I had three rare gifts. Of course, this made it nearly impossible to convince Amy or anyone else when all I could say was I had a bad feeling about someone. Time traveling and firestarting were not exactly gifts that gave a witch credit as a reader of someone’s character. Despite my lack of credentials in this area, to Amy’s credit, she did hear me out.

  “I’ll keep an eye on her. I don’t think you are right, but I’ll be cautious with her while you are around. You’ve always had a bit of an uncanny skill for reading a person’s intent.” She smiled at me knowingly, and I almost confessed to my third gift right then and there.

  “Why would you say that?” I asked. We walked casually along the wooden planks, hovering above bunches of wild fern that stretched out towards us, as if nature was offering her hand in greeting.

  “When I first met you, you had always seemed apprehensive of Evan. He fooled every one of us, your mother included, but not you. You would hide whenever we were at the bar. Your mother thought it was a stage you were going through or that you didn’t like the building, that the flying pots and pans when we entered the expanded rooms of the back upset you. In retrospect, I don’t think it was any of that. I think you knew what we didn’t. You knew there was something wrong with Evan. It’s the only thing that explains why you called yourself back to that night.”

  We stopped to lean on the railing of the pathway while Amy talked. The tips of the ferns brushed against my calves and sent shivers through me despite the thick heat.

  “What about Cameron? Did I know about him, too?”

  “That is a question I have thought about, and it is the only reason I don’t think you have a true gift allowing you to read people. You bonded with Cameron from almost the first day you met him. You were always happy to see him, and when you weren’t hiding, or rather when Evan wasn’t around, you spent quite a bit of time with him. I can’t explain it.”

  I shuddered at the thought of my child-self being happy to see the man who played a role in my mother’s death. At least I had never liked Evan.

  “So, I will be a bit more alert to Kendra. I hope you will understand that she has been with us for some time now, and I know her as a loyal friend, so the most I can offer you is my added attention. Now, we have another order of business to attend to before we return.” Amy started our walk again, and we descended further towards the sinkhole that was the main attraction of the park. For a moment, I worried Amy wanted to talk with me about Chase. I had intentionally refrained from mentioning anything specific about Chase in order to avoid drawing attention to our relationship.

  It turned out Amy didn’t want to talk about my relationship with Chase. Her mind stayed focused on just one thing these days—saving the innocent lives that had been lost in Salem. She wanted my input before developing my training schedule.

  “To be honest, I really need to work on pinpointing my firestarting. The fires I start tend to spread to nearby objects, or whole houses,” I conceded.

  “Okay, what else do you feel you need to work on before we make our move?”

  I felt like I was on a job interview, trying to identify my weaknesses while making them sound like strengths.

  “I’m not as familiar as I’d like to be with my family book or our history, and I’ve never written my own spell, but I probably won’t need that stuff in order to make our mission successful, especially if we all end up going. I will need more practice in time travel, though.” I didn’t mention the lesson Garrett had already given me.

  “You’d be surprised what you might need. We’ll build a little of that into your training. I’ll put together a regimen for you, run it through the other Guardians, and then let you know your schedule. We won’t move until you are ready; it wouldn’t be fair to you if we brought you along unprepared. However, I will expect you to dedicate yourself to your training one hundred percent. This is a serious matter, and innocent lives are depending on you, whether
you choose to accept our help or not. You and I may have a history, but for the time being, you are in my coven, and I expect excellence from those I lead.”

  “I won’t let you down.”

  We walked in silence, taking in the way the light filtered through the pines and down into the sinkhole. The shade from the trees and the changes in the elevation within the park gave the appearance of a more northern landscape. It created a feeling of being magically transported out of the boundaries of Florida. Of course, now I could magically transport myself to any state or country I wanted to, but the cost of that had been almost too much to bear.

  When we got back to the house, I looked for Chase. I knew once my training started our time together would be limited at best. I found him in a back room of the house, arguing with Garrett. I didn’t want to interrupt, so I stood just outside the room. I couldn’t help but overhear them.

  “What are you trying to do anyway?” Chase asked, anger dripping from his voice.

  “I don’t know what you are talking about.” Garrett sounded a bit uppity and more amused than annoyed.

  “You know exactly what I’m talking about. She doesn’t need to be learning parlor tricks right now.”

  “They’re hardly parlor tricks, and I think she enjoyed herself.”

  “So you do understand what you did then.” Chase’s voice was escalating.

  “Of course, but I don’t see why you’re so upset.” Garrett remained calm.

  “It’s dangerous, what you’re doing, and you know it. Besides, when Amy gives an order, there is always a reason for it.”

  “I don’t think Jade was in any danger. What do you think Jade? Were you in any danger?” Apparently, Garrett had realized I was there when Chase hadn’t.

  “Hi.” I stepped into the room, unsure of what to think. I was embarrassed to be caught eavesdropping, and I wasn’t sure if I should be upset with Chase. First, he was upset I didn’t want to be a Guardian; then he was upset I was learning something fun with my newly acquired gift. I couldn’t figure him out.