Authors: Trish Milburn
Why?
“You want to spend the night at my house?” Toni asks as she pulls into the school parking lot where my Beetle still sits.
“I think I’ll go home. But thanks for the trip. I do feel better.”
“It really will work out, if I have to beat the idiocy out of Keller.”
I smile. “Thanks for the sentiment, but if Keller and I get together—and I’m not sure that’s even the best thing—I want it to be because it’s his decision, not because he was threatened.”
“Oh, okay, but I would have had fun telling him how dumb he is. And for the record, I think you and Keller look perfect together.”
I wrap Toni in a hug then hurry to my car. The night has never scared me before, but something is making me edgy. And if it’s something dangerous, I want to be as far away from Toni as possible.
When I pull in beside my little RV at the Rocky Creek Campground, I scan the area, still feel none of the familiar magical signatures belonging to my family members. Maybe I’m going nuts. Too much stress or something.
I shake my head. The inside of the RV isn’t anywhere near the size of my posh room in my family’s Miami mansion, but it feels more like home than that monument to wealth and darkness ever did. It feels like a cocoon, a nice, warm, safe cocoon.
With Haagen-Dazs in hand, I curl up in the bean bag chair and flip on the TV.
I snort at an old episode of
Sabrina the Teenage Witch
, roll my eyes at some idiot reality show that I can’t believe ever got green-lighted, and finally settle on a rerun of
Stargate: Atlantis
, a world even more filled with weirdness than my own.
Shepherd is having the life sucked out of him by a Wraith when knocking on the RV’s door startles a yelp out of me. My heart beats so loudly I can barely hear. What will happen if I don’t open the door?
Again, the knocking, more insistent this time. “Jax, I know you’re in there.”
I swallow hard, trying to make out the voice through the metal separating me from it. Despite my dry mouth, racing heartbeat and totally fried nerves, I edge toward the door, place my hand on the lock. I tap into my power in case I need it.
I wrap my hand around the door handle and turn.
No one from my coven stands on my front stoop, but it’s a witch nonetheless.
My power surges throughout my body, sizzles at my fingertips like sparking electricity. “Egan. What are you doing here?”
He holds up his hands. “Not looking to get my ass toasted, that’s for sure.”
If I had thought my mouth was dry before, I was wrong. Now it feels like the middle of the Gobi Desert, totally devoid of moisture. Egan Byrne, favorite son of the Byrne Coven of Dallas, is standing on my doorstep in jeans, a black leather jacket and that air of barely contained naughtiness that makes witch girls swoon. I’ve heard the murmurs that my father and Egan’s have discussed a possible match between us, connecting the two powerful families. But Egan does nothing for me despite his obvious appeal to every other female on the planet, and evidently I do nothing for him.
The air starts to stir inside the RV, waves of my energy wafting off me. “Then you better talk fast.”
“First, if you don’t want to be found, I’d bank that inner fire of yours pretty quick.”
My heart lurches, and raw fear squelches my power down to barely a hum. “Did you lead them here?”
He lifts an eyebrow. “Hello. If I’d done that, why would I have just urged you to calm down?”
I narrow my eyes at him. “So I don’t ‘toast your ass’.”
“Good point. But I’m figuring you went to a lot of effort to escape and hide, so why go all witchy and light up the night with a neon sign that says, “Look, here I am.”
I relax a little but don’t take my eyes off Egan. “How did you find me?”
“I’m smarter than the average bear?”
“That’s debatable.”
He puts a hand to his heart. “Ouch, that hurt.”
I roll my eyes. “Oh, please.”
Egan places one hand against the doorframe and leans on it. “I figured all the clues leading your family to Alaska were bogus. You’re from Miami. You’d freeze your cute little butt off in Alaska.”
I narrow my eyes at him again, let a little sizzling spark jump between two of my fingers.
“Touchy. Okay.” He lifts his hands in a gesture of surrender. “I’m very good at computer hacking and not leaving any trace behind. I read through all the communications regarding your disappearance then started checking out places I thought you might go.”
I looked at him in disbelief. “How in the world did you pull Baker Gap, North Carolina from the endless possibilities?”
“Well, they’re not exactly endless. There are places of energy that call to us. It’s in our DNA.”
“What?”
“The places where the covens harvested the dark energy that made us what we are today. There’s one in these mountains somewhere. That’s why you felt like this was the right place.”
“You’re telling me I followed some call of the darkness, the thing I’m trying to flee?” Panic wells up inside me. Egan must see it because he steps inside, closes and locks the door behind him.
“Calm down. I’m not here to hurt you or tell your family where you are. See, I’m in the same boat.”
“Huh?”
“I flew the coop, too.”
“You
. . .
you left your coven?”
“Yeah. I’ve thought about it for a long time. I don’t like hurting people any more than you do.”
I look up at him, shocked to the soles of my feet. “I had no idea.”
“Yeah, not something I advertise. Didn’t think it was good for my life expectancy.”
“Then why find me? Now we’ll have both of our families looking for us. We’d maybe fare better if we split up.”
“Or we could stand more of a chance of fighting them off together if they do show up.”
I pace, which considering the size of the little RV and the fact that Egan is standing at one end means that I can take two steps one way before having to turn around to take another two in the opposite direction.
“This is crazy.”
“Why are two rogue witches any crazier than one?”
“I don’t know. It just is.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll make myself scarce when your little hunter guy is around.”
I stop pacing and face Egan. “Don’t hurt him.”
Egan’s face changes, like I really have hurt his feelings this time. “I won’t, not unless he threatens you.”
“He won’t.”
“Maybe not physically.”
“Have you been spying on me? Wait, I know the answer to this. You were outside the theater tonight. How many other times have you been watching? And why didn’t I detect you?”
“Enough to know when it was safest to approach you. And I stayed out of range except that one blip outside the theater.”
“Safest for me or safest for you?”
“Both. Listen, Jax. I swear to you, I’m being totally honest. I want a chance to make my own life, too. You know me. How well do you think I like being told what to do every damn minute of every day?”
I sink onto the couch that turns down into my bed. “About as much as me, I’d guess.”
“See there, two peas in a pod.” He points toward the bench seat wrapped around the tiny kitchen table. “Is it safe for me to sit down, or are you going to go all sparky fingers on me again?”
I motion toward the table. “Sit.”
“You’re going to be glad you didn’t burn me to a crisp.”
“And why is that?”
“This.” He pulls a thin, black-bound book from the back waistband of his jeans.
“Which is?”
“The Beginning Book.”
I hear the words, but my brain refuses to believe them. “The
. . .
It can’t be. It was destroyed.”
“So we’ve been told. Turns out it was stolen and lost to the covens.”
“How is that even possible?”
“The details are sketchy. I’ve been trying to piece them together since I found it.”
“You found it? Where?”
“Online. This little bookstore in El Paso was selling off its stock so the owners can retire to Puerto Vallarta. They didn’t even know what to call it. They had it listed as ‘novel about witches, no title or author shown’. It just has a black cover, no markings at all—just a small capital ‘BB’ in the top right corner of the cover.”
I shook my head slowly, feeling like I was moving through a dream. “The Beginning Book. God, Egan, everyone’s going to be looking for this.”
“That’s the beauty of it. They’re not. As far as I can tell, everyone believes the story that it was destroyed. I don’t know who started perpetuating that myth, but I’d love to kiss them about now.”
“Why?”
“Because this is what’s going to keep the two of us alive and living the life we want to live.” He flips to a page located in the middle of the book. “Read this.”
I hesitate a moment, half scared to touch a book supposedly forged from the same dark forces that turned the covens into the powerful witches they currently are.
“Go on, it’s safe.”
I inhale a deep breath and take the book. I place it in my lap and begin to read.
The first of each coven is endowed with the full powers brought forth by the callers. From that moment, all that shall ever exist in his line will be endowed with the same powers.
“I know we all have the same powers. Why am I reading this?”
“Keep going.”
The powers are innate, but full development of such powers depends on the individual witch.
Innate.
I look up at Egan. “Does this mean what I think it does?”
He nods. “We were born with all the powers we’ll ever have. What we’ve all been told, that we don’t come into our full powers until we turn seventeen, is a load of crap.”
“Have you tried anything?”
“A little, not enough to send out too much of a signature. I didn’t want them to figure out how I was suddenly using more power than I’m supposed to have before I could escape.” He took a deep breath. “But it’s true, Jax. I could feel it after I knew it was there.”
“Did you
. . .
did it feel like it was pulling you?”
“To the dark side? No.”
I shake my head slowly. “Why the lies?”
“Why do the leaders of the covens do anything?”
“Retribution.”
“Power, pure and simple. It started out as retribution for the wrongs against our families, but it’s changed over the years.” Hadn’t I told Toni much the same thing? “Now they’re addicted to the power, and they don’t want anyone who isn’t fully indoctrinated getting any ideas about challenging them.”
An unwanted image of my mother screaming as she died made my stomach turn. But she’d been an adult, a powerful woman. What does it say about the covens that they don’t trust their own children?
“They’re afraid of idealistic kids? God, there are so few of us who would go against them. What do they have to worry about?”
“Maybe there are so few of us because nobody thinks there’s any choice. We all know what happens if we break rank.” He looks over at me, and I see the knowledge of what happened to my mother isn’t contained within the Pherson Coven. “I think somebody among the first ones was more power hungry than the others and wanted to destroy the book. Maybe he even tried, but it survived somehow.”
I flip through the pages, reading bits of the old script, pieces of my family history. “This is so much to take in.”
He comes to sit beside me. “There’s more. You’d think with all the power our families possess, they wouldn’t be afraid of much, but there is something, something more powerful than even the darkest Master Witch.”
“What?”
“That’s the problem.” He turns toward the back of the book, to where a page has been ripped out. “I don’t know.”
The jagged edge of paper taunts us. “If someone was going to destroy the book anyway, why bother ripping out a page?”
Egan runs a hand through his mid-neck-length, dark blond hair. “All I can guess is a couple of possibilities. One, the person destroying the book might have wanted to keep this single page for some reason. Or there was a disagreement about the fate of the book between some of the first callers of magic, and one of them ripped out this page to save it should the proponents of destroying the book win.”