Speak (Witches & Warlocks Book 1) (17 page)

The tiger is pacing, but it feels so different than it used to. She’s not frustrated, she’s not urging me to push past my comfort zone, she’s excited, eager, ready to see what’s about to happen. Ready to take part in what’s about to happen. And she’s not in my head, she’s actually beside me, her head nuzzling my hip, the contact giving me strength.

I stare at the wailing remnant, her dark eyes no longer sending goosebumps shivering out across my flesh. “Tenebris ad lux.” The words come unbidden but full of truth and I hurl the swirling ball of magic in my hand at the remnant.

Oh, I feel so good! To have spent my whole life as a mouse and to experience what it must be to live as a tiger is more wonderful than I can ever describe. My magic strikes the remnant in the chest and shimmers and pulses out around her body. She lifts off the ground, this indescribable combination of light and dark surging around her. I whisper the words again: “Tenebris ad lux.” I repeat them and send wave after wave after wave of magic at the remnant.

“Zoe! Stop!” Noah’s eyes are wide and the wind is standing his hair on end. “You don’t know what you’re doing!”

He’s right. I don’t know. But right now, I don’t care. I couldn’t care if I wanted to. I am lost in my magic, totally at the mercy of its every whim, stuck on the train until it comes to a stop. It fills me and it defines me and I love the way it feels to just let go and enjoy the ride.

There’s this pulse. Like the way they show an atom bomb on TV. It goes off, and there’s this wave of destruction that knocks people to the ground. The poor souls who stuck around to watch the crazy lady screaming on the street collapse and little balls of light and dark and strange combinations of the two kind of suck out of the people and stream towards the remnant, leaving sparkling trails of energy in their wake.

The remnant takes a deep breath, as if she’s breathing in life itself, and closes her eyes. The magic fades and the wind dies down and the remnant falls to her feet. She turns to me, the movement made all the more eerie by the fact that her eyes are closed, and she smiles. This is a smile that speaks of peace and gratitude. Not the awful, stretched smile of before. She opens her eyes and the darkness is gone. In its place is the most beautiful light, light like autumn sunshine. It’s tranquil and filled with the kind of truth that makes me want to fall to my knees. Which I do. I feel the concrete tear my bare skin, but I don’t care.

“Thank you.”

If before, the remnant’s voice was darkness and distortion, the stuff of horror movies made real, then now it is a sigh on the wind, cherry blossoms swaying in a spring breeze. I can’t help but smile. The girl looks at Noah. “Don’t fret,” she says, “nothing is worth that kind of distress.” She blesses him with a touch and I wonder at the complex battle of emotions straining across his handsome face.

The remnant grows dim, kind of I don’t know, thin … see through. She looks up and smiles, this look of utter transcendence streaming across her face and this is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever experienced. Whatever I did, I don’t think I just made her change from hollow to light, I think I helped her to, I don’t know, pass on? Is that the right word? It’s just a sense, just a feeling that I don’t know how I know, but I’ve been doing a lot of things based off nothing but some strange sense lately.

As she fades, I’m feeling pretty damn proud of myself. I just helped the ghost of some tortured magical creature overcome whatever darkness had haunted her in life. Not only that, but I helped her to leave this plane and head to the next. I know that sounds dumb, and I really don’t have the words to explain it all that well. But that’s what’s happening. Whatever I did, I healed her enough to let go of this world.

What an amazing feeling. I’m smiling and kind of bouncing off my heels. For all the confusion, for all the unanswered questions and uncomfortable truths I’m going to have to face here in a minute, in this moment, this tiny little blip of my day, I feel good. I’ve done something commendable, even though I have not one single iota of one single ounce of a clue as to how I managed to pull it off.

The remnant fades away completely, but not without sparing me one last look filled with love and gratitude. If this is what being a witch is, if this is what I can do to all the scary remnants I come across, well, I think I can manage it. I turn to Noah, all filled with pride and ready to see it mirrored on his face. Only, it’s not pride on his face. It’s horror.

His eyes are wide and his face is pale and his mouth is kind of hanging open. “What have you done?” His voice is low, a breathy whisper and all the serenity I felt watching the remnant fade is obliterated.

I guess that’s a very good question. What
have
I done? All that’s left of the bliss I felt just moments ago fades away as I survey the scene. There are two people still standing, and my gaze goes to them first. They’re standing apart from each other, each wearing a look of shock and blame and horror. One, a female standing off to my left, shakes her head at me before turning to arch an eyebrow at Noah. Her skin glows and she moves with a grace that I don’t think even a dancer could hope to achieve. When she turns her focus to the other person still standing, my gaze follows hers.

This one’s a man, older, hair thinning and sprinkled with gray. He’s got that look that says he used to work out and was probably something impressive back in his day, but age has started to make its mark on him. He levels me with a look that suggests judgement has been cast before he turns and lopes off towards the parking lot behind the movie theater. I can’t help but look back towards the woman, but she’s gone. No trace of her passing.

That leaves Noah and me as the last people standing. Some of the lights on the signs are still sputtering, little strobes and flashes of light casting flickering shadows across the ground. The trash that had been spun up by the wind now covers the sidewalk, bits of discarded paper and debris strewn across the bodies surrounding me.

Bodies.

The people who’d come out of the movie and didn’t run away, the people who’d screamed and covered their heads and eyes, ducking out of the way of something awful they couldn’t really see or explain, they’re all lying haphazardly along the sidewalk. “Oh my God, are they dead?”

Noah doesn’t answer, but the look in his eyes is all the answer I need. Except I won’t believe it, I can’t believe it. I scurry from person to person, looking for anyone still breathing, anyone whose eyes aren’t bulging and whose lips aren’t blue, whose veins aren’t standing out, discolored and streaking across their skin.

Not one.

Not one person survived.

Whatever I did, I killed them all.

Noah’s muttering into his cell phone, saying things like ‘accident,’ and ‘clean up.’ He apologizes and asks for damage control. And then he turns to me, his face sad and resigned. “I understand,” he says into the phone. “I’ll bring her in.”

When he takes me by the arm, I don’t fight. When he whispers things that sound like reassurances, I don’t listen. When he walks me up to the door of a mansion, and big men with huge muscles are waiting for us at the door, I’m not surprised.

Chapter 20

It’s funny how quickly your life can change. It’s also funny how sometimes getting everything you’ve ever wanted can sometimes completely ruin it all. How long ago was it that I was just a shy girl making her way through life, wishing she could be seen? How long ago was it that the most amazing thing about me was the fact that I blushed a lot when people spoke to me?

It might as well have been a lifetime ago.

I’ve moved into Windsor Manor — the mansion Noah brought me to after the … um … incident at the movie theater. I think of it as a halfway house for the magically confused. There are others here like me, but not really like me at all. There’s a handful of children who are transitioning early and need help understanding their powers. I guess a kid without a fully developed moral compass wielding magic is more than just a little dangerous. There are some teenagers who took the transition badly and are struggling to come to terms with what they really are. There’s all the people who are here as mentors, guides, and teachers.

And then there’s me.

Remember how I said I’d gotten everything I’ve ever wanted? Ya. I guess you could say that’s what happened. I’m seen. There’s no way I could complain about being invisible now. People hover around me, pretending to care, asking me questions, listening to my answers. They write stuff about me in little charts, I mean, all the details of my day. What time I wake, what I eat, even my mood. All my answers to all their questions end up getting something checked off on the charts that all the people in charge carry around.

Despite being swarmed by people all day long, I’m still kind of an outcast. No one knows what to make of me. Whatever it is I did seems to be some kind of really big deal. No one wants to be on my bad side, but no one wants to get really close enough to find out about my good side either. So, I guess you could say that as much as my life has changed, it really hasn’t changed at all. The scenery is different, but the theme is the same.

Noah’s moved into Windsor Manor, too. He has the room next to mine. All of us who are here for ‘help’ have a mentor, someone who’s taken responsibility for their ward and helps them deal with all the crap we’re having to deal with and who helps us go through the exercises we’ve been assigned. For me, that’s Noah. He’s been great, but I’m not sure I care. I still haven’t worked out how I feel about him. He’s been filling me in a little bit about the people I thought were my friends.

I guess Becca’s from a long line of witches and her family has a reputation for being … I don’t know … mercenaries? From what Noah’s been telling me, it sounds like they don’t care so much about right and wrong, as long as there’s payment involved. Noah doesn’t have a clue as to why she was guarding me, or who my parents were, or if the people who raised me knew what was going on. I struggle when I think of my mom — bearer of hugs and cookies, the woman who got up early each morning to make sure her family had a full breakfast before we left for our days, and my dad — a strong man in a suit who came home from work with stress lines puckering his forehead that disappeared the moment he wrapped his arms around his wife.

I have so much love for these people, so much respect for them, and it turns out they were lying to me my whole life, too. Everything I thought was true is an illusion. Everything I thought I am is a lie.

When I ask Noah about Luke, he clams up. “That’s not my story to tell,” is the only thing he’ll say on the matter.

Great.

More secrets.

Apparently, there’s a big … I don’t know … summit? People say all these words around me, words that make sense to them, but not at all to me. I’m trying to catch up, but mostly I spend my days confused. Anyway, this summit sounds kind of like a trial. And I’m the one being prosecuted.

Not Becca — the one who hid me from myself for so long. The one who kept me from being trained and from understanding my magic and the power I have at my control.

Not Noah — the one who started kind of waking me up the day he met me, with his little touches, the little pings of golden contact effectively setting my magic on fire.

Not Luke — the one who aided Becca in her deceit, with his clouds of confusion making me forget all the stuff I’d started to learn.

Me. The one they turned into a time bomb and set out onto the street. The one who ended up killing eight people. The one who put her magic on public display because she had absolutely no skill in controlling it, and managed to do so in front of both a vampire and a shape shifter.

We’re headed to the trial now. Noah’s been coaching me on what to say and how to say it and I’ve been trying to listen but mostly I’ve just gone numb. This is supposed to be my world. I should have grown up in it, had the chance to learn all the rules, the chance to gain control of my magic and understand what it can do. But I didn’t have that chance and so this doesn’t really feel like my world. Of course, the world I knew, the one I lived in until all this happened doesn’t really feel like my world either. I’m caught between the two, still not really belonging anywhere.

Windsor Manor focuses on witches who wield light magic, people who have feline familiars, people who are hardwired to help and protect. Maybe that’s what I
was
, maybe that’s the path I’m
supposed
to be walking, but I don’t really fit that description. Not perfectly.

‘Cause whatever I did to that remnant? I used both light and dark magic. And ever since then, as I’ve been working with Noah on learning how to wield my magic, I’ve been really having to fight my darker emotions. I get mad easily and apparently, that’s not supposed to happen. According to my teachers, my magic should stem from a place of positivity, a desire to help and spread joy.

“Zoe?” Noah leans over and touches my arm. I guess I zoned out again. Some things never change.

“Hmmm?” I look in his general direction, but don’t actually make eye contact.

“Have you heard a single thing I’ve said?” Old Zoe would have started to blush. She’d have gotten a little nervous and her senses would have gone all crazy trying to give her more information than she ever needed about her surroundings. New Zoe couldn’t care less.

“No.”

Noah sighs. “Your future — hell, your
life —
is in jeopardy, here. What you say tonight is going to matter.”

“No, it won’t.”

I turn away and study the steady stream of people on the sidewalks as we drive past them. Noah takes the hint and we stay silent the rest of the trip. This is the kind of life I live now, the kind of life where I live in a mansion and am escorted to important meetings by a personal driver. Just another way to prove that getting everything you ever wanted isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.