Hush (Witches & Warlocks Book 2) (2 page)

Except for that pesky ‘intoxicated by my dark magic’ stuff. But I’m not really content with that and he doesn’t even know it exists, so I think I’m gonna choose not to count that. We’ve kissed a few times. Ok, more than a few times. Honestly, we’ve done a lot of kissing since moving into Windsor Manor. Sometimes, I can’t help but feel a twinge of guilt, like I’m cheating on Luke, but that’s just plain old dumb.

Sure,
maybe
Luke ended up feeling a tad bit of something for me by the time I was killing people on accident and whole summits of all the paranormal beings in the area were called to place judgment on me, but in the beginning, our relationship was nothing more than a job to him. Everything he said and did was designed to make me fall in love with him. And it almost worked.

Almost.

Well, those thoughts about Noah and Luke are doing their job because I’m definitely feeling agitated. Add that agitation into the mix with all the sound and energy and nauseating coffee I’m dealing with and my magic is starting to flare into existence. The tiger, you know, the thing I used to think was some kind of metaphor for inner strength and is
actually a tiger
- my magical familiar? Ya, she’s pacing around, flicking her tail, roaring like crazy, begging to get out.

I’m almost sweating and I’m definitely shaking, gritting my teeth together and balling my hands into fists. Light magic feels warm and easy, dark magic feels powerful and destructive. When it wants out, it wants out.

I take a deep breath and focus on the calming mantra Noah taught me, letting my gaze scan the room. Over there, at a table tucked into the corner, are four people - two guys clearly from the local college and their dates. There’s something about the one guy … something that is, I don’t know … familiar. Something that’s somehow making me even more upset than I was just a moment ago.

I can’t help but study him and wonder who he is and why he’s so upsetting. And then it hits me. The day I saw my first remnant, the day that I was lost and confused and scared out of my mind, this is the guy that knocked me straight on my ass and walked away without offering a hand, laughing with his friends about it as he passed me.

Anger flares and it’s like warm caramel and oozing fudge, so bad but so good. I smile a little, the corners of my lips pulling up in a wicked little grin, all pointy and filled with satisfaction.

I don’t like this guy.

Not one bit.

And sitting here, my magic all worked up and the tiger pacing inside me, I could kill him with a thought.

Chapter Two

The guy’s busy laughing and it’s ugly. I don’t know, like it comes from a place that isn’t really happy. One of the girls, the one who’s sitting beside him and leaning her shoulder against his, looks uncomfortable. She fakes a laugh and scoots her chair back, excusing herself to the bathroom. The other girl, a bleached blonde showing way more of a spray tan than she needs to, joins her as she heads to the back of the coffee shop.

I can’t help it but I hate this guy, the guy who knocked me down on the sidewalk on the scariest day of my life. Maybe it’s a little unfair, maybe my fear of the remnant - she was hollow, a demon, and utterly terrifying - got attached to him a little and I should cut him some slack. Except, umm, no. Even if the whole thing with the remnant hadn’t happened at all, this guy still knocked me over and laughed about it, didn’t even have the decency to ask if I was ok.

I think I’m justified in not liking him.

My magic is pulsing. Pushing against me. It needs an outlet or I’m gonna end up exploding and having absolutely no control over what happens or why. I could just cast a little spell, you know, like opening a pressure valve. The guy’s leaning in towards his friend, this nasty look smeared across his face. I could just use my magic to listen to what he’s saying. That might help me get control of things again.

I purposefully focus on the way my light magic feels, warm and golden and
right
, and close my eyes, blocking out all the sounds of the coffee house and focusing on the table tucked into the corner. I catch a few words, and then I hear the entire conversation.

“...bitch is dumb. Just waits around for me while I have my way with every girl on campus.” He laughs and his friend does, too, and I’m angry on behalf of the girl in the bathroom. “Like tonight, I’m hooking up with this girl, Ashley…”

“The one with the huge tits?”

“Yup. Gonna make those things
bounce
!”

As much as I’m trying to follow Noah’s directions and focus on my light magic - focus on how good and right it feels - I’m not gonna lie, my dark magic feels pretty damn good, too. I can deny it all I want, but I am a light witch
and
a dark witch. For me, both forms of magic are right. Both forms of magic are part of me, the deepest most darkest and truest form of myself. Denying my dark magic is like denying an entire aspect of who I am.

And haven’t I already done that enough?

Haven’t I suffered enough, being something I’m not?

Sure, before this, it was Becca’s spells that forced me to deny my magic, and this time I’m supposed to be choosing to do it myself, but does that really matter? Wouldn’t it be better just to be me … good and bad … right and wrong?

Noah squeezes my hand and his magic kind of zings up my arm. He’s trying to help me calm down. I guess he can see me struggling. I open my eyes and his face swims into focus, all worried and puckered. He runs a hand through his dark hair, his lips moving, but I don’t care enough to hear what he’s saying.

I focus on the jackass across the room and make my thoughts kind of pointed, just push my mind towards his until I feel his subconscious give way. I’m in his head, rifling around, throwing nasty thoughts aside like the trash they are until I get to the memory of the day he ran into me. I pull that one out, make it big. Make it important. I watch it through his eyes and guess what. He totally saw me. In his memory, he hates me a little because I might be taller than him, and I look afraid. He ran into me to feel powerful. He ran into me to look big in front of his friends.

When I fell to the pavement, tears spilling from my eyes, he didn’t feel remorse, he felt vindicated.

I add my own personal memory of the day to his. My fear. My shame. The scrapes on my hands and the ache in my tailbone. I make sure he gets to experience that day from my point of view; I kind of juxtapose my memory on top of his memory.

When I open my eyes, I see he’s paused in his conversation with his friend. His face is pinched, kind of like he’s in pain and kind of like he smells something bad. He presses a hand to his forehead and clears his throat.

I make my thoughts hard. Angry. I let them expand and fill his mind and when he flinches I smile. My magic rolls into his brain, sick, purple fog and swirling with green venom and burning with fire, and it feels good. Sure, light magic feels good, too, but vengeance is sweet and his pain will make restitution for my pain, for the pain the girl in the bathroom is sure to feel every day.

I rifle through his head until I find thoughts of the girl he’s with. Funny thing is, he actually does love her. I take that love and I make it big so he can see it and feel it and know it. I fill him up with his love for her. Then I pull up all the betrayals, all the times he’s cheated on her, all the hints he’s dropped about all his conquests to make her feel uncomfortable, to keep her questioning how he really feels about her, and I make those even bigger than his love for her. Force him to feel the guilt he’s been ignoring.

And then I make my thoughts really tight, like a fist, and I slam them around inside his head.

The guy - Todd, I found his name in his mind - grimaces and drops his forehead into his hands, groaning a little. His friend looks worried and reaches across the table, only to pull back when blood starts dripping out of Todd’s nose. Like dripping a lot.

“Shit, dude!” Todd’s friend leaps to his feet and the coffee shop goes quiet for an instant before erupting into a different kind of sound. People are gasping and someone screams. There’s scrambling for cell phones and napkins, and the truly selfish rush for the door.

There’s the little pop inside my head that I’ve come to recognize as my magic and it’s like I can see through my own eyes again. Noah’s standing over me, leaning down so his eyes are level with mine. His hands are on my shoulder and he’s shaking me.

I really want him to stop shaking me.

Todd’s bleeding all over the place and right now, that feels just about fine. He’s also crying. Keeps repeating “I’m sorry” over and over, rocking in his chair like a child. Maybe that doesn’t feel quite as fine. Maybe now it’s starting to feel like I’ve become more of a jackass than Todd ever was.

Ok, maybe not more.

But definitely just as bad.

Shit.

I don’t want to be the kind of person that hurts people. The whole point of coming out here and stressing me out is to help me learn how to control my dark magic so I
don’
t hurt people. I meet Noah’s eyes and become aware of the nasty little smile I’ve been wearing. My face goes slack and my eyes go wide. “I’m sorry,” I whisper in conjunction with Todd, my words overlapping his.

I can at least fix the bleeding. Make up for the pain I caused. With a discrete wave of my fingers under the table, I call upon the tiger - the tiger with the thumping tail, just as disappointed in me as I am in myself - and I ask for her strength.

“Sanibit percuro.” I keep my voice as quiet as a sigh, which is a little silly because there’s so much commotion around me, no one would be able to hear the incantation.

Todd stops bleeding, and his tears dissolve into sniffles, but he doesn’t stop rocking, and he doesn’t stop apologizing. At some point his girl came back to the table and he’s fallen to his knees in front of her, holding her legs, apologizing over and over and telling her he loves her. She looks equal parts uncomfortable, vindicated, and grossed out. His blood is smeared on her clothes and hands and I don’t think she knows what to do about that.

Noah tugs on my arm and I follow him. There’s a moment - just as he touches me - that my magic, my
dark
magic, reaches out to him. I feel it creeping from my hand into his, and worse, for just the tiniest fraction of a second, I feel the answering nudge of his own magic. His own
dark
magic. The stuff he’s worked so hard to keep locked up.

That’s not ok.

Noah’s good. Even if, like me, he came with access to too much power, his heart and soul are pure. When he agreed to be my mentor, I knew he was taking on a lot of responsibility. I knew he was putting himself in danger. Dark magic is like whiskey to an alcoholic. As long as you keep denying yourself, you’ll probably be ok, but the effort to deny yourself is a constant thing. Being around someone who drinks, or in this case, being around someone who can’t help flinging dark magic around, that makes it all the more likely the alcoholic will fall off the wagon.

When Noah took the job of helping assimilate me into this magical world, he put himself at risk. Sure, I have to tolerate minor injustices like the tracking spell he has on me that makes him aware of every place I go, but he has to fight hard to keep the integrity of who he is and how he wants to live whole.

And I just totally messed all that up.

“You think we’ll need a cleaner?” I ask as he leads me away from the coffee shop.

“No.” He’s not looking at me and there’s a whole hell of a lot of concentration straining across his face. “It’s just a bloody nose and a troubled conscious.”

Noah closes his eyes and swallows hard and there’s a flare of magic that pours from his hand, up my arm, and into my entire body. Maybe even my soul. It feels good. Like praying. Like singing. Like dancing.

I totally understand why Noah continues to choose light magic. It’s pure. It’s wonderful. It’s light streaming through cathedral windows and birds singing on a sunny day. It’s new fallen snow, crisp and white and bright in the sun, tiny glittering flakes drifting through the air. It’s a soft touch and a warm hug.

It’s the way the world should be.

Judging by the path Noah’s taking, we’re heading back to the car, and probably back to Windsor Manor. I stop walking and pull on his arm. He takes one extra step, exhales, and then just stands there. Great. I’ve upset him. Noah, the guy who doesn’t get upset, is upset. He sighs, more of a forced exhalation really, and faces me.

“I’m sorry.” I say it and I mean it. My stomach is doing that icky sickly nervous dance it used to do when I thought there might be a chance Becca was upset with me. Except this time, I’m nervous about what Noah’s feeling because I genuinely care about what Noah’s feeling. Because I genuinely care about him.

“I know.” He gives me a weak smile and drops my hand. I don’t like either of those things. I want his sexy smile, and I want him touching me. “But we’re gonna have to make sure that doesn’t happen again.”

I don’t have anything to say, so I stay quiet. I’d love to find a quiet place in his arms right now, lay my head against his chest and let his warmth make me feel better, his arms wrapped around me keeping me safe. As if he could read my thoughts, he opens his arms to me and I step right in, pressing my body to his. He rubs his hand over my back and up into my hair.

“You’re lucky you’re alive. You realize that, right?” There’s something heavy in Noah’s voice. I nod against his chest. “By all rights, Daya, Lucy, and Albert should have ordered your execution at the summit.” He’s told me this before. After I killed all those people, there was this trial, a summit, to discover what exactly happened. For whatever reason, they decided to train me, not kill me. “You’re going to have to do a better job at hiding that you have access to dark magic.” I pull out of his arms and nod my understanding. There’s a light breeze at my back, chilly with the first touch of autumn, and goosebumps break out over my skin.