Magical Influence Book One (20 page)

The sense of
it
... was
dark. Darker than anything I had ever experienced. The type of dark
that had never seen light and never would.

I snapped my eyes open.

“I don't think we can make it out the
front door, we are going to have to...”

“Jump out a window?”

Before I could turn around and offer
him a snide reply, I stopped. Because that seemed like our only
opportunity. If we couldn't make it down the stairs, then yes, it
sounded as if we would have to jump out a window.

“Wait, you're serious. We can't jump out
of window, we’re on the fourth floor.”

“Just trust me,” I snapped, and with that
threw myself down the stairs.

Though the fear was still there,
though it was ever present and ever threatening, I pushed through
it. Or against it more like. With every step I took forward, with
every breath I managed, I faced it. The more I faced it, the less
frightening it became.

Was this the power my grandmother was
talking of? Was this why you always wanted to face every situation
with as much force as you could? The less frightened you became of
a situation, the more power you took back from it, the stronger you
could stand, the longer you could last.

We reached the third floor, and
without thinking I turned and headed straight for my
bedroom.

“Where are we going?” Jacob asked from
behind me.

I had no intention of answering. The
man was taking up too much of my time and energy. I was acting less
and less like a witch and more and more like a disgruntled little
girl who kept having her lollipop stolen. Jacob was distracting me
in all the wrong ways.

Not even hesitating, I grabbed open
the door to my bedroom and ran in.

The bad was a mess; I’d had a rough
night, after all. In fact the whole room was not as clean as it
usually was.

I heard him snigger from behind me.
Yes, he sniggered. Ordinarily, real, nice men did not snigger when
they entered a woman's bedroom for the first time.

Jacob was none of those things. He was
also something I was determined to ignore for the time
being.

“Is that a teddy bear on your bed?” He
walked over to it and picked it up.

Though I was hoping to ignore him, I
couldn't ignore that. I whirled on my foot, walked over to him, and
snatched back my teddy.

Because yes, it was a teddy,
my
favorite
teddy. It had been with me since childhood. It had had been given
to me by my great-grandmother, and it was a family
heirloom.

A family
heirloom
...
I suddenly stared down at it.

“You aren’t going to hug it, are you?”
Jacob gave a short laugh as he walked over to the door, closed it,
and muscled my chest of drawers in front of it.

“No, I'm taking it with us,” I suddenly
concluded as I turned it over and over in my hands. If I were going
to head out into the real world beyond my house, then I had to take
things with me that would keep me safe.

As a child I had invested much time
and energy into hugging that bear, into taking it wherever I could,
into confiding my secrets to it, into letting it console me. It had
been such a symbol of safety.

I was a witch, I
practiced influence
magic, and I understood the import of this straightaway.

If there were one thing that
could protect me out there in the real world, it was my teddy. So I
brought it up, patted its head, and tucked it under one arm, much
to the surprise and
humor of Jacob.

“You're serious, you're taking your teddy
bear outside... to protect you from the demons and the
skeletons.”

“Yes,” I answered, and thankfully my tone
was even, my chin was raised, and my stare was unblinking. “It's a
lot less arrogant and talkative than you are.”

I turned around and headed to the
window just above my bed. Leaning towards it, I glanced down into
the yard.

The day outside was still dark,
perilously so. Though a brief glance above revealed a swirling,
tumultuous mass of clouds and lightning, it did not account for the
gloom.

Only magic could.

“How the hell is it so dark out there?”
Jacob walked up and stood beside me. A little too close; his arm
brushed against mine.

“Use your imagination,” I shot
back.

“Do you need to take a blanket out there
with you? So you can hide under it with your teddy when the going
gets rough?” He crossed his arms and sneered down at me.

What kind of a man crossed his arms,
sneered, and insulted a woman when they were just about to climb
out the third-floor window and throw themselves into a yard full of
ghosts and trolls and everything wrong with the world?

I was starting to get the
picture that Jacob Fairweather was disconnected from reality. Maybe
he really was on drugs, or maybe the potion my grandmother had
given him had wiped away his common sense and replaced it with the
kind of dry
humor you always got in rotten comic books and TV
sitcoms.

Ignoring him, I slowly pulled back the
latch on the window and opened it.

A blast of wind slammed into my face
and pushed me back, plastering my hair over my cheeks, and bringing
with it a hail of rain and leaves and twigs.

“How exactly are you going to climb your
way down the side of the house? Or are you just going to jump and
hope for the best?” Jacob nodded at me.

“There's a storm pipe just down the side,”
I leaned into the window, against the brunt of the wind, and
pointed to the left. There was the storm pipe. I would not be
considering clambering down it for one minute if it weren't for the
fact there was an army of dark climbing up the stairs ready to eat
me.

“You'll slip and die,” he
pointed out. He hadn't said
we
would slip and die, just me.

“What do you care?” With that I planted my
hand on the windowsill and got ready to climb out.

I didn't get the opportunity.
He stopped me by grabbing hold of my arm. This time it was a light
move. It didn't feel like he was about to tug me around or push me
over. He was just stopping me in place
. “Think about this. It'll be
slippery, it'll be cold, and the wind is going to...” He nodded at
my dress. “Play havoc with your clothes. If you really have to go
out there, shouldn’t you change into something more
sensible?”

He had
... a point. Because I was still
wearing a summer dress. And it had a terribly flouncy skirt. All it
would take was one gust of magical wind for me to be pulled off the
drainpipe and sucked up into the sky.

Reluctantly I clambered back into the
room and patted down my clothes.

Not answering I walked over to my
chest of drawers and started to fumble around.

“You'll need sturdy pants, something with
long sleeves, and maybe a sweater, considering how cold it is,” he
suggested needlessly. It was needless, because I knew how to dress
for a magical storm. I was the witch.

“Just turn around,” I snapped.

“You think I care?”

“Turn around,” I said with a far more
deadly tone.

I turned to check that he wasn't still
staring my way, and then started to fidget into the clothes that I
had chosen.

Well, wasn't this awkward. Here I was
changing in front of Federal Agent Jacob Fairweather, who had
turned out to be more of a pain in the ass than I could have ever
imagined. The idea that my grandmother had clapped eyes on him and
concluded that he was the man of my dreams was terrifying. Did she
know so little about me? For her to think that a man like this
would be someone I would want to spend the rest of my life with,
was further evidence that she really was going insane. I didn't
want to spend the rest of the day with this man, let alone my whole
existence.

I tugged my jeans on, buttoned them
up, and finally unzipped my dressed, pulling it over my head. But I
didn't get so far as to take it off; at that moment something
slammed against my bedroom door, forcing the chest of drawers
forward.

I screamed, fell back, and landed with
a thump on the ground, my dress still somewhere over my head, my
arms trapped inside.

“Jesus, get up, move,” Jacob pulled me
up.

“I thought I told you to stay turned
around,” I said in a high-pitched voice as he pulled me to my
feet.

“Like I said, I don't care, just put the
top on quick,” he brought his gun up and pointed it at the door. It
was still shaking as if something were wailing on it from the other
side. Probably because something was wailing on it from the other
side, something that sounded like thousands of fists.

I imagined even it if I screamed at
him, Jacob would not turn back to the window. Which left the rather
uncomfortable fact that I now had to change in front of him.
Turning, I tugged off the dress, sidled over to where I’d dropped
my top like a crab, and pulled it on with a muffled, weird sounding
whine.

“Is that a butterfly tattoo on your back?”
Jacob nodded my way after I'd finally finished dressing myself and
had turned back to him.

“Just watch the door,” I snapped at him as
I grabbed my teddy and headed back to the window.

“You don't strike me as the kind of girl
to have a butterfly tattoo,” he grinned.

“And you don't strike me as the kind of
guy who would be interested,” I replied coldly, finally making my
way out the window.

It was nicer now that I wasn't
dressed in the summer dress. I’d chosen a sturdy pair of jeans, a
long-sleeved top, and a thick
woolen jumper. It might not be the most stylish
garb, but at least it was practical.

As I thought that, a little
voice in my head popped up and repeated my grandmother's warning
from that morning. If you wanted to be powerful, you had to appear
powerful, which meant you had to dress powerful. And a
woolen sweater with
a reindeer on the front wasn't usually associated with force. I'd
never seen a commanding general waltz onto the battlefield in his
grandmother's finest knitwear.

....Still, it was too late to change into
anything else. It would have to do.

It appeared I would face the rest of
this adventure with Santa Claus and a reindeer emblazoned on my
chest. So be it.

Chapter 15

Making my way down that drainpipe was
the hardest thing I had ever done. It wasn't just that the wind
tugged and pulled at me, it was that with every single gust I felt
hands move along with it. I swore there was a creature in the
storm, or hundreds upon thousands of them, and as it roared past
me, they all reached up to tug me down, down into the yard
beyond.

I managed to keep my grip on the
windpipe, and just maybe with my teddy tucked under my arm, I had
the reassurance I required to continue. However, more likely, it
was probably the sheer annoyance of Jacob Fairweather climbing down
after me, muttering to himself, continuing to insult me, despite
the fact I could hardly hear him.

What a distraction he was turning out
to be.

Though I was sure that the
overgrown shrubs and trees of my yard prevented my
neighbors from
seeing whatever was done there, I was also certain that if any of
them had looked out of their windows at that point, they would have
seen me climbing down from my bedroom window with a man in a blue
tie. If they could have seen through the storm, that
was.

I doubted the rain and clouds
and lightning and wind were putting on the same show for everybody
else in the
neighborhood. No doubt just beyond my fence everything
would calm down. The wind would turn into nothing more than a
breeze, the clouds would part to show the sun shining through, and
the lightning would dwindle to be nothing but a faraway crackling
in the hills behind the town.

The storm was after me, not the rest
of the town.

As I continued to clamber down, my
hands became frigid with every blast of wind. I could hardly move
my fingers anymore, and yet I managed to keep my grip, but only
just.

As I clambered down, my brain started
to do some much-needed thinking. With the wind drowning out Jacob’s
insults, there was nothing to distract me.

It was time to come up with
more of a solid plan. Once we were out of the yard, if we ever
managed to get out, that was, I would have to
... make my way on my own.
Jacob had already made it clear that he was ready to ditch me. And
good riddance to him, frankly. I didn't need him running around as
a liability, attracting various magical creatures, and tugging me
along like I was some kind of rag doll.

Think, girl
, I commanded
myself.

How was I to get through
this?

As I passed the second floor window, I
caught a glimpse inside, and what I saw made me want to let go and
give up.