Magick (Book 3 in the Coven Series) (12 page)

Throughout the morning, Sarah puts me through a series of exercises with my power. With each one, I feel like I’m gaining a fraction more control. Not a ton, but a little is better than nothing. Hey, at least I don’t blast a hole in the wall today. We’re about to wrap up the morning session when I get an idea.

“I want to do one more thing,” I say.

“Okay,” Sarah says.

I look at Keller. “I want you to go to the farthest point from this room.”

He stares at me in confusion. “What’s going on?”

“Maybe nothing.” But maybe everything. “Humor me.”

After a moment of hesitation, he nods and heads out the door. Once he’s been gone long enough to reach the end of the underground facility, I tap into my magic. The air stirs around me as if a breeze is blowing, and the darkness coils slowly in my middle. I search for the light, but it’s disappeared again. It takes longer than I like, but I pull the darkness back under control.

“Jax?”

I look up to see Sarah watching me. “Did any of the white witches that you know about try to leave their covens?”

Sarah looks genuinely surprised by my question. “No.”

It seems so simple that part of me doubts its truth. But I think about my mother, the only other potential white witch who tried to leave. She didn’t succeed, but I don’t think that’s why she never tapped into her white magic. “Bring Keller back.”

“Care to fill us in?” Egan says.

“In a minute. I need to check one more thing.”

When Keller returns, I immediately try to access my light power, and it’s there again. “This is going to sound corny, but I know why my white witch powers manifested and no one’s before me has.” I look at Keller. “They’re at least partially fed by love. If all the other potentials were living within the confines of the covens, they didn’t have that to draw on. They didn’t have anyone to love them.”

“But you loved your mother,” Toni says.

“It’s not the same. That was instinctual, a child’s love for her mother.” I smile at Keller. “It wasn’t something I chose.”

Keller looks dumbstruck. “Me?”

I laugh a little. “Yeah. I think you’re the key. This kind of love is different. It’s
 . . .
” I avert my gaze, embarrassed to be admitting my deepest feelings in front of everyone. “It’s all-encompassing.” Romantic love versus familial.

Egan claps him on the shoulder. “Congratulations, dude. You just became a witch battery.”

“See how much of your white magic you can use,” Sarah says.

Reluctantly, I break eye contact with Keller and reach back inside myself. Energy crackles at my fingertips, as easy as taking a breath. I pull more energy up through my body, down my hands and into my fingers. Electric bolts of magic escape my hands and dance around my entire body. Again, the air begins to stir. I let it build slowly until I feel first my hair lift away from my neck then my feet easing off the floor.

Yes, that’s it. Release me.

I gasp and fist my hands, closing off the magic. I drop to the floor, my breath ragged. Keller is instantly beside me, his arm wrapped around my back.

“What’s wrong?” he asks. I take comfort from his strength next to me.

“The darkness.” I press my palm to my forehead. It’s hot to the touch, as if I have a fever. “It’s there, and it wants out.”

I meet Keller’s eyes so close to mine. He kisses my temple, and I glance up to see Egan and Toni in front of me, effectively shielding me from the Bane without looking like it’s deliberate. They all know I don’t mean just my dark power but whatever I pulled out of the earth at Shiprock.

“You have to show it that it can’t win,” Sarah says. She steps up beside Egan and looks down at me. “If you keep backing away because you’re scared, you’ll never defeat it.”

“It’s too dangerous,” I say.

“What’s too dangerous is the covens amassing their forces and us with no way to fight back. You know yours won’t stop until they kill you, and they won’t think twice about killing whomever they have to in order to find you. I won’t stand by and let that happen.”

The darkness snaps inside me, making a mockery of the bracelet on my wrist. It wants to lash out at Sarah, but I yank back on it and focus on the goodness I feel in Keller. Sarah’s right. I have to keep working until I am in complete control.

For the next couple of days,
we spend nearly every waking moment practicing. My progress is achingly slow, but at least it’s progress. The longer I work, however, the more I feel like a caged animal. Trying to ignore the feeling, I push myself too hard and take another sizeable chunk out of the wall.

“I’ve got to get outside, see some daylight,” I tell Keller, Toni and Egan one night after another long day.

“Maybe Sarah will let you out for a day,” Keller says. “And I think it’s time we told her about the Beginning and Ending books, that we have them. Maybe there’s something in there that we’re missing and they’ll see.”

I know that’s highly unlikely, but I don’t say so. But on the off chance that Keller is right, I’m willing to follow that road and see where it leads.

“We don’t have the Ending Book,” Egan says.

“But we can get it.” I stop pacing and place my hands on my hips. “We’ll go tomorrow.”

After the guys head to their room for the night, I close the door and lean back against it.

“What were you hiding from them?” Toni asks me.

“You sure you’re not an observer witch?” I ask.

“Nope. Just your average teenager, if by average you mean runaway, truant and friend of witches.”

I cross to my bed and sit down facing her. “I’m going to ask if Piper will go with us.”

“Why? Don’t you think they’ll want to send one of the adults with us?”

“I’ll make the argument that we’ll just look like a group of friends out spending a Saturday together if it’s Piper.” I tell her about my conversation with Piper that night in the study.

Toni’s eyes widen. “You’re totally going to set her up with Rule.”

“At least let them meet each other, see if there are any sparks. When she was talking about her life, it seemed so lonely. That’s when I remembered Rule saying something similar, that he’d never met anyone he could share his real self with until he met me.”

Toni claps. “It will be so awesome if they get together.”

“They’ve got to like each other first. There are no guarantees.”

“It’ll be a shame if they don’t. I mean, she’s drop-dead gorgeous. And Rule’s not exactly hard to look at either.”

I think about Rule and Piper together, but then my thoughts drift to Keller as they so often do.

“You okay?” Toni asks.

I nod. “But I can’t stop thinking about this connection between Keller and me.”

“Yeah, seems like you’ve got all kinds of connections.” Toni smiles, but it’s a bit shaky.

“You know the only reason I have it with Egan is because we’re both witches. That’s all.”

“I know.” She lies on her side and picks at the edge of her blanket. “I just wish I had something like that.”

“What you have with Egan is special, more so because there’s nothing supernatural at play. He loves you. And even though I don’t need my connection with him to know that, I can feel it, too. He was miserable without you.”

“He said that?”

“He didn’t have to.”

She rolls onto her back and stares at the ceiling. “You ever wonder if we’ll all stay together after this is finished, if we make it through it. I mean, you hear about how life-and-death situations bring people together. But do they stay together after the high-stakes danger is past?”

“Toni, you don’t have anything to worry about. I’ve known Egan a long time, and before he met you I would have bet my life that he could never feel about someone the way he feels about you.”

She rolls back toward me suddenly. “We’ve got to kick these witches’ asses so we can get back to Baker Gap. I cannot wait to stroll into school hand in hand with Egan. We’ll be normal couples going to ball games, studying for tests, going to prom someday.”

“Toting your drums to gigs, hunting evil spirits,” I say.

“Okay, so semi-normal.”

We laugh and talk about normal things like breaking curfew and going to prom. When Toni threatens to get a prom dress that looks like Kaylee’s layer cake dress from
Firefly
, I tease that maybe I’ll dress like the glamorous Inara.

“Good grief, Keller will have to beat all the guys off with a baseball bat.”

Even though I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself, the normal girl inside of me sort of likes the idea of Keller defending my honor. “I really do love him,” I say. “More than I ever thought I could love anyone.”

“I know. I think that’s the thing that’s going to save us all.”

It seems cosmic somehow that love might be the thing that fuels the defeat of the covens, which are made up of anything but love. I imagine that pendulum swinging closer to the middle, bringing things back into balance.

“She’s been studying hard every night. To me, that deserves a day off, too. Especially since part of it was for physics.” I give a dramatic shudder.

Sarah looks at me a bit more closely as if she knows I’m up to something. But she must not sense anything negative because she nods. “You all go have fun, but be very careful and observant.”

We hurry from the room before Sarah changes her mind. After retrieving our coats, we head for the exit.

“I feel like we’re making a jail break,” I say as I hurry down the hallway holding Toni and Piper’s hands. But when we make it up the stairs and through the house above, I feel like our escape has taken us to the North Pole. When I open the front door of the house, I gasp. Snow blankets the landscape in all directions, at least six inches of it. The pine trees in the distance are coated like a scene from a nostalgic Christmas card. Luckily, the driveway is clear enough to navigate.

“Let’s take the Jeep,” Egan says and bounds off the porch.

Though it’s cloudy, it feels incredibly good to be outside. I breathe deeply as I head toward the Jeep.

Keller, Piper and I pile into the back while Toni sits up front with Egan. Once Egan starts the engine, he wastes no time flying down the driveway. Keller wraps my hand in his, and I lean against him.

When we reach Salem, Egan glances over his shoulder. “Where to first?”

“The herb shop,” I say. Toni gives me a knowing smile in the rearview mirror, knowing I have a reason beyond getting the Ending Book.

“What are you two up to?” Keller whispers in my ear.

“Nothing.” But I have to stifle a giggle.

When Egan pulls up in front of Wiccan Good Herbs, it feels like forever since we’ve been there. And suddenly I’m too nervous to move.

“What’s wrong?” Keller asks.

“What if he doesn’t want to see us? Me?” Rule and Adele had said they didn’t blame me for Fiona’s death, but they’ve had more time to think about it. What if they’ve changed their minds? Plus, now they’d seen death dealt by my hands. “I don’t think I can stand it if they hate me.”

Keller grasps my hand and squeezes. “I’m sure nothing’s changed, but there’s only one way to find out.”

I’m not sure I want to find out if I’ve lost Rule, one of the few friends I have, but I manage to force myself from the Jeep. I lead the way inside and am not surprised to see the front empty. I am surprised by how different everything looks, at least at first. Then I realize that the change in the arrangement of the front counter and displays and the completely new flooring make sense. It makes the shop seem like a different place than it was when Fiona was always here. If Adele hadn’t made the changes, I doubt she could have stepped foot back in here each day without falling apart.