Finally, I turned and wrenched it open, thrusting my hand inside and grabbing the first piece of cloth it brushed. I tossed it over my shoulder. “There you go.”
“Thanks,” he mumbled.
Wiping my hands on my cloak, I stared into the blackness of Braden’s closet until I heard the soft sound of cotton being pulled over bare skin. Glancing over my shoulder, I found him wearing a T-shirt sporting the faces of several surprised cats floating in outer space. He looked down at his chest and shrugged.
“It was a gag gift.” His voice thickened. “From Lucas.”
I squeezed my eyes shut. “I’m sorry. I just grabbed—”
“Hey,” he grunted. “It’s cool. Listen, Meena, I get it if you think I’m an idiot.” He suppressed a belch by thumping his chest. “I am. But this idea. It’s bad.”
“Did you not hear me in there?” I pointed toward the living room. “I saw how my mother died.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I heard. And I’m sorry. Really sorry. But that’s even more reason—”
“And it wasn’t how he always told me.” The words fell out of my mouth. “He lied. He’s been lying my whole life. About so much. And I just need him to know… that I know. That he couldn’t keep it from me forever, so he never should have tried. I deserved the truth.”
Braden hung his head. “I get it, wanting the truth. Believe me, I do. But it won’t change anything. Won’t help anything. You need your wand back.”
I shook my head, turning back to the closet and groping for the coil of magical string. “It’ll come back when it’s ready. I don’t need the stress of hiding it all year anyway.”
In spite of all my wiping, sweat continued to slick my fingers, making it impossible to maneuver the thread around my Academy-issued ring.
Braden heaved a sigh, and a moment later, his warm breath was blowing across on my neck. “Here. Let me—”
I let out a shrill laugh, jerking away from him. “You can barely stand up and you think you can work your fingers better than me?”
“Oh, I know I can,” he murmured, and his confident laugh set my cheeks on fire.
In the moment it took me to recover from my own incredibly poor choice of words, Braden made a swift gesture with his right hand that sent the end of the thread zipping through my pinched fingers. Like a very tiny snake, it coiled around the base of my ring finger and tied itself in a tight knot.
“Oh,” I said, blinking.
The other end of the thread followed suit, this time worming between the ring and my skin. It shot out the other side and looped up and around, tying itself in a tidy knot around the metal band.
“Now you can take it off,” Braden said, stepping out of my personal space.
“Take it off?” I yelped.
Our eyes met. An awkward smile crossed his lips with a dry laugh. “The ring?”
“The ring,” I breathed. “Right. It stays here.”
Braden nodded, smirking. “Should I look away, or—”
“Shut up.” I glared at him as I wiggled the ring off my finger and set it gently on his nightstand.
“Wish you’d reconsider,” he said, ignoring the command I’d just given. He also kind of fluttered his eyelashes, which caused my stomach to kind of flutter back, and for a split second, I also kind of wondered if maybe he was right. Maybe my priorities were out of order. Maybe the wand was the most important thing.
But no. Dasharath was a more advanced student than Braden. If he said my wand was gone, then it was probably the truth. Returning to the clearing would be dangerous and pointless. Getting answers from my father while I had the chance was the right thing to do.
“I have to,” I whispered, lowering my eyes because the intensity of his stare was becoming too much. “I have to know.”
“Okay,” Braden sighed, shaking his head. “Okay. Just… be careful out there, huh?”
“I will,” I said, and somehow my hand wound up touching his arm. “I promise.”
“You better,” he said gruffly. “I’m all out of liquor.”
Chapter 5
Pushing aside the empty plastic hangers dangling from the slightly off-kilter rod in my bedroom closet, I stepped through the breach I’d just opened and over a big plastic tub full of old stuffed animals, nudging the shutter-style folding door open with my toe in the process. The room I’d grown up in was pitch black and deathly silent—my dad had turned my rickety, rattle-y ceiling fan off. Emerging into the stagnant air felt like wading barefoot into an algae-covered pond: not great. Like, really not good.
Since the main light switch was on the opposite side of the room, I reached up and found the beaded string connected to the closet’s dim bulb. A quick tug illuminated the fluffy faces peering out of the plastic bin and threw a rectangular patch of light onto the carpet.
“Cool toys,” Braden chuckled, and I looked up to see he was still standing in the doorway of his own closet, one hand resting casually on the frame.
Glaring, I snatched up a plush hippo and chucked it at his inebriated face. He caught it with cat-like reflexes, flashing a cocky grin. He pressed the purple toy to his heart, and something glimmered behind his unfocused gaze. It sent a tingling sensation radiating out from my core, and I quickly turned away. Pressing a hand over my stomach, I told myself I was just queasy with nerves over what I was doing. Braden Thomas couldn’t possibly be stirring up my butterflies. Not in his current state.
I eased deeper into my bedroom but kept my feet in the patch of light. I couldn’t think of a single good reason why anyone would be lying in wait for me here, of all places, but then I barely knew anything about myself, did I? Someone had wanted my mother dead. Who knew how they felt about me?
My fingers twitched near my hip, aching for the confidence my wand would have brought me had it been sitting there in a holster. Or, rather, the confidence I imagined it would have brought me, since I’d never gotten the chance to use to it. But maybe that was for the best. So far, my hand-cast magic had severed an arm, turned a girl into a wolf, and killed a man. I was honestly a little afraid of what I might be able to accomplish with a wand.
“Stop dilly-dallying,” Braden growled from behind me.
Glancing over my shoulder into the closet, I could see him perched on the edge of his bed, purple plush hippo clasped between his widespread knees.
“I’m going,” I whispered.
Braden glanced at his alarm clock. “Ten minutes. Tops.”
Rolling my eyes, I turned away and stepped out of the patch of light. My room looked sad and sparse given how much of my stuff had been magically transported to the Academy. How had this been explained to my father? I couldn’t have run away on a bus, like he’d apparently been told, with my entire room in tow.
The deep rumble of my dad’s favorite anchorman floated up from the living room below. So that’s what you do when your only child skips town without even saying goodbye. The same thing as usual.
My anger, which had somewhat cooled during the debacles with Leia, Dash, and Braden, suddenly burned hot, like a volcano ready to spill lie-destroying lava from its crumbling peak.
“Dad!” I shouted, bolting from my eerie bedroom. The hallway shook with the force of my footsteps. The aging stairs squealed as I half-ran, half-tumbled down them.
“Meena?” My father was on his feet in front of his still-rocking recliner by the time I reached the bottom.
I skidded to a stop in the TV-lit room. My out-of-shape father clutched a metal baseball bat in front of him. I was no big sports fan, but even I knew his hands were too close together to take a good swing at whoever he believed might be after him. He might as well have just left the bat by the front door to arm his attacker.
“Dad?” I hated the way my voice cracked, but imagining someone trying to hurt him... The flame of rage that had propelled me downstairs was snuffed out. “What are you...?”
“Meena.” He breathed a sigh of relief, but his eyes remained wary. “It’s really you?”<
br />
“Of course it’s me,” I said, circling around the couch slowly, as though approaching a frightened animal. “Who were you expecting?”
Dad lowered the bat with sagging shoulders. “I think you must know now.”
“Yes,” I said, coming to a stop a few feet in front of him. Up close, I could see the dark smudges under his eyes were more than just shadows. He hadn’t been sleeping. “If you mean that I’m a witch.”
The bat slipped from his grasp, clattering loudly against the wooden floor. He sank back into his recliner, hunching over with his face cradled in both hands. The bald spot in the midst of his jet-black hair shimmered blue and white with the flickering of the television.
“I didn’t want this for you,” he moaned. “I’m so sorry.”
“Sorry?” I hissed, stepping over the bat. “For what I am, or how you lied about it?”
He looked miserably up at me through his fingers. “I didn’t want this for you.”
My hands curled into fists. Not that I would ever strike my father, but his pitiful non-answer was making the wall look mighty appealing at the moment.
“Not wanting it was never going to stop it. I had a right to know. To be prepared. Grandma—” My voice choked off and I had to clear my throat. “She could have helped me. But you wouldn’t let her. You—”
“Didn’t want to lose you!” Dad shouted, launching up out of the chair again. “Meena, these… these… people, they’re—”
“My people,” I said firmly, even though only five of them I’d met so far actually made me feel that way. It didn’t matter. I was what I was, and so were they. “They’re my people now, Dad. They always were.”
My father’s face crumpled, his eyes fluttering shut. “Meena, sweetheart, please… let me explain.”
“You had eighteen years to explain!” I exploded.
Of course, that was exactly what I’d come here to get him to do, but in that moment, it felt like the most important thing to do with my limited time on this side of the breach was to make him feel as terrible as I possibly could about what he’d stolen from me.
“But you just pretended like everything was normal!” I screamed, furious tears burning their way out of my eyes. “That I could make plans for a normal life! When you must have known all along that they could come for me. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be sitting here watching the damn news in the middle of the night instead of out there looking for me!” My voice reached a pitch I wasn’t sure I’d ever previously achieved as I flung my hand in the direction of the door.
Dad moved toward me, reaching his hands toward my shoulders, but I jerked away. He winced, as though I’d struck him after all, but respectfully backed out of my personal space. Snatching up the remote, he finally muted the television, and a heavy silence filled the room like an invisible, noxious gas.
“Of course I knew you hadn’t hopped a bus, Meena,” Dad said with a weary sigh. “Your mother and grandmother both prepared me for this possibility.”
“How nice for you,” I muttered. “Advance warning. Imagine that.”
“So, yes, I have been reasonably certain you were somewhere alive, if not entirely safe, or else—”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I cut him off. “If not entirely safe?”
He opened his mouth, then snapped it shut. “I don’t know.”
“Then why did you say it?”
He looked away from me toward the curtained window facing the front lawn. “Your mother did not remember her time in school fondly, but she didn’t like to say why. She survived, though, so I’ve been clinging to the hope that you would do the same. If you have half her power…”
“I have more,” I whispered. “I mean, I think.”
Dad’s head drooped. “She was afraid of that.”
“What?” I asked, but my breathless whisper disappeared under the sudden chiming of the hall clock. My ten minutes was up. Sinking to my knees in front of his chair, I grasped my father’s hands. “Dad, I have to go soon. Please. Why was she afraid? Tell me everything she ever said about me.”
He lifted his head and offered me a heartbroken smile. Brushing a lock of hair behind my ear, he said, “That would take hours, sweetheart. Once you arrived, you were all she talked about.”
My heart seemed to spasm as memories from my awful vision returned full force. My photo clipped to her visor. My cereal getting soggy in the passenger seat. Her confusion and fear. The last thing she saw. The last words she heard.
“I’m sorry, Kim. You knew the rules.”
I pressed my forehead to my father’s knee, tears dribbling down my cheeks and off my chin. “I had a vision.”
He drew in a sharp breath, but then settled his warm hand on the back of my head. “She was afraid of that, too.”
“Did… did she have visions?”
He was silent for a long moment. Too long. I imagined how anxious Braden must be getting back in his room. I worried that he might try to come after me, and in his drunken state, screw the whole thing up.
“Terrible visions,” my father admitted, his voice hoarse. “They kept her up at night.”
I lifted my head, sniffling. “About what?”
“She wouldn’t say. She kept it all inside until…” He pressed his lips together in a look I knew all too well meant he was trying not to cry. “Well, you know.”
“I don’t know,” I whispered. “That’s the problem. Except now I do. But I still don’t, and—”
He smoothed his hand over my head. “I’m afraid I’m not following, honey.”
“My vision.” I squeezed my eyes shut and looked down at the floor. “Dad, I saw how she really died. It… it wasn’t a car accident.”
“Oh no,” he murmured, and I felt his whole body tense. “Oh no. No no no. You were not supposed to see that.”
I straightened up, letting go of his hands. “So you knew that?”
He pushed out of his chair and paced across the room, wringing his hands. “Of course I knew that. How could I not know that? I had to see—” He clenched his jaw and shook his head. “I understand why you’re angry we didn’t tell you, but you were just a little girl. Practically a baby! There was no way to make it make sense to you.”
Standing, I caught his arm and made him hold still. “Dad, I haven’t been a little girl in a long time. You could have told me. You should have told me. If Mom was murdered—”
Dad’s mouth fell open, and the utter shock in his eyes ended my sentence. His hand covered his mouth, and then moved to cup my cheek. “Oh, sweetheart, no… That’s not…”
“Yes, it is,” I said, gripping his wrist. “I saw it. Her car ran off the road, and then she got out, and there was a wolf, and he said—”
“Meena,” my father said sharply. “I know nothing about magic, but I would hope that school is teaching you to distinguish between a bad dream and a psychic vision.”
I blinked, unsure how to proceed if he was going to continue denying things.
“It’s true that your mother ran her car off the road,” he said in a flat, lifeless tone. “But she wasn’t eaten by a wolf, or whatever it is you think you saw happen.”
“No, Dad, I saw—”
“And I saw her body, Meena.” His fingers dug into the side of my face, jostling my head. “That was my job. As her husband. To identify her body. And I can assure you she had not been…” He grimaced. “There were no wolves involved.”
I stared at him. Had Professor’s Castle magical telescope shown me a false vision? Or was I the one who had jumped to a false conclusion? Because suddenly, hearing my father say words so difficult I knew he couldn’t be lying, I realized I had never actually seen the wolf attack.
The silver string tied to my finger pinched roughly into my skin. Braden was beckoning me back. I gave a quick tug to let him know I was coming. Dad eyed the string with an expression of curiosity and bitterness. Whatever was on the other end was going to take me away from him again.
“So…
” My brow furrowed. Maybe the wolf hadn’t killed her, but she had still died that night, and not inside her car. “Then what?”
Dad made a single sound of distress deep in his throat, and then he threw his arms around me, gathering me to his chest. There were still things to be angry about, but I clung to his neck, letting him make me feel truly safe for the first time in days. A sob welled up in my throat. I didn’t want to go back.
“I never wanted you to have to know this,” he said fiercely in my ear. “But I can see that was an impossible dream. You are right about one thing. Your mother did not die in the car accident.”
I pushed away from his embrace, eyes wide and desperate, searching his for the truth. But he immediately clenched them shut. His teeth ground against each other with a painful, rasping noise.
“Meena, I need you to understand that you were the light of your mother’s life, but—”
“But what?” I asked, my voice shrill. A cold pit of dread had opened in my stomach.
“Her visions made life very dark.”
“No,” I whispered, the chasm inside me widening. “No.”
“After your mother wrecked her car that night, she… wandered into the woods. She came to a cliff and… she jumped.” His hands gripped mine. “Your mother ended her own life, Meena.”
I yanked away from him, stumbling backward. “No. No, she must have fallen, she must have—”
“There was a witness, Meena. A man came across her car and saw her going into the woods. He followed and he saw the whole thing. She meant to do it. I’m sorry. I know this is a terrible thing to learn, but—”
“Then he pushed her!” I shouted. The wolf. A man. A shifter. Now it made sense.
Dad shook his head. “His story checked out, and your mom… She hadn’t been well, sweetheart. Not for a long time.”
As I gaped at him, trying to process this disturbing news about her death—and worse, her life—the silver string cut into my finger again. Hard enough to pull my whole arm backward.
Whirling toward the stairs, I shouted, “I am coming! Hold on!”
Broken Wand Academy Page 33
