by Kristie Cook
“No. It’s really none of your business.” Please don’t push it, Owen. But he did.
“I’m supposed to protect you. If he’s hurting you . . .”
“Geez, Owen, if you really have to know, we were just . . . making up for lost time.”
I gave him a significant look. The bewildered expression on his face told me he still didn’t get it. I groaned with frustration.
“We went balls to the wall fucking the hell out of each other! Got it now?” I clapped my hand over my mouth. Did I really just say that?
“Oh,” Owen said flatly. Then realization finally overcame him. “Oh!”
I heard something about Hurricane Alexis muttered from the balcony. I threw Tristan a look through the glass doors. He shook with laughter. Owen looked at Tristan, then at me, and then at the bedroom door. He shook his head slowly.
“I need to get a motorcycle,” he muttered.
I didn’t know if I’d ever heard Tristan laugh so hard.
Chapter 13
As soon as we all sat out on the balcony, the guys hounded me about what I could do, briefly taking me back to my old school days when kids called me a freak for healing in front of their eyes. But, of course, to Tristan and Owen, what made me freaky was my lack of powers. In addition to what I could always do, I could only think of the heightened senses.
“So can you see that boat way out on the water?” Owen asked.
The only boat in our view appeared to be a small fishing vessel about a half-mile away.
“The one with the white hull and blue stripe?” I asked.
“Nice.” He sounded impressed.
So something had changed over the last few days—not even two nights ago could I see so far.
“Can you read the name or the numbers?” Tristan asked.
“No. I can see that they’re there, but I can’t distinguish them,” I answered. “Can you?”
He nodded. “It’s called the ‘Trojan Horse.’”
“It’s kind of an odd name for a boat,” I said.
“Makes you wonder why they’d name it that.”
“Maybe it’s not really a fishing boat,” Owen mused, and then he quickly grew excited. “They must be hiding something bad. Maybe they’re pirates. Or maybe there’s a bunch of Cubans or Haitians in there, escaping to the States. Or maybe they’re drug traffickers. There you go . . . that’s it. Tristan, you wanna have some fun with a drug bust?”
Owen was obviously joking, but Tristan shook his head and answered anyway. “I just got back from hell. I’m not really in the mood to deal with automatic weapons and lunatic drug dealers.”
“Well, I can hear a guy talking, and his words don’t make any sense, but I’m pretty sure he’s talking about fishing anyway,” I said.
They both stared at me, their eyes wide and their mouths slightly open, apparently forgetting Owen’s theories.
“You can’t hear him?” I asked. Owen shook his head.
“I can hear him moving around,” Tristan said, “but not any words.”
“Huh.” My brows furrowed as I tilted my head. “I don’t know who he’s talking to. I can’t hear anyone else. And he keeps interrupting himself with incoherent and irrelevant words.”
It wasn’t just what he said that seemed strange. The quality of his voice sounded odd. His words kind of echoed or reverberated, as if spoken through a wrapping-paper tube.
Tristan peered out at the boat.
“I only see one guy. I think he’s alone.” He paused, looking at me, then back at the fisherman, and back at me. “I wonder . . . It’s a rare gift, but just maybe . . . ”
“What?” I asked with trepidation, leery of his tone and the look in his eye.
“You might be hearing his thoughts.”
“Nah.” Owen guffawed, leaning back in his chair and lacing his fingers behind his head. “Rina’s the only one who can do that. Besides, how can she hear his and not ours?”
“Maybe she’s not trying and doesn’t have control.”
“There’s no way,” I said, shaking my head.
Tristan continued to peer at me, his eyes full of curiosity. “Try me.”
I raised an eyebrow at him. “This is crazy. I can’t read your thoughts, Tristan.”
“Just try,” he urged. “You are unique.”
“Of course I am,” I muttered.
“Remember that connection you spoke of yesterday?” he asked.
“I didn’t hear your thoughts, though. If I did . . .” Well, life would’ve been quite different while he’d been gone. Our connection, if I was right about it in the first place, didn’t exist through the mind. We were connected through our hearts or our souls . . . or our blood.
“No, it would have been too much of a distance. But it could be some kind of a precursor,” he said.
I glanced at Owen. He apparently dismissed Tristan’s idea. He stared off into the distance, seemingly lost in his own world, not paying attention to us. Good thing—our conversation had become a little too personal for comfort. I looked back at Tristan. Anticipation lit up his face.
“Fine, if it’ll make you happy,” I said with a sigh. “How do I do it?”
“I’m not exactly sure. Telepathy’s an ability they couldn’t give me—never theirs to give. My guess would be to open your mind and just listen.”
I closed my eyes and tried to clear my mind of all my own thoughts. That’s harder than it sounds. As soon as you tell yourself to not think, you’re still thinking. So I gave myself something to think about: a black, empty space, like a big cloud of nothingness. And then I grew that cloud so it seemed to expand beyond the confines of my own head. I pushed it out farther and let it spread out on its own, eventually drifting out to enshroud the guys. Thoughts of it not working started to poke into my cloud, and I almost gave up. But then I heard Tristan’s voice, sounding almost like his real one, singing an old rock song loud and clear in my head, “Rocked you like a hurricane.”
I burst out laughing. I thought I rocked him. Now he laughed. Oh! He heard me! He nodded.
Then a vision appeared as if I imagined it myself—the destroyed Caribbean room wavered into view. And then images of a naked woman and man in the heat of passion, their arms and legs entwined. They weren’t Tristan and me, though. They were Owen and . . .
“Owen!” I gasped. I didn’t even want to know the identity of the woman. It was bad enough to see him in the vision when I thought I’d been seeing Tristan’s memory.
Owen jumped with surprise. He squirmed in his chair with obvious discomfort.
“Sorry. I didn’t really think you could,” he said. “I didn’t even know you were trying.”
“I wasn’t trying. It was just there,” I said, exasperated. “Ugh! This gift sucks. I need to learn control.”
“Yeah, you do,” he muttered.
“Trust me—I don’t like it any more than you do. I don’t want to go through life like this.” I shook my head, trying to erase the image of Owen’s fantasy as if my mind was an Etch A Sketch. “That’s really scary.”
Tristan’s eyes bounced back and forth between us. He lifted his eyebrows. Hurricane Owen wants to visit our Caribbean island, I tried to tell him with my thoughts. He grinned. He apparently “heard” me.
“Rina controls it so she only hears thoughts when she wants to,” Tristan said. “She can teach you how to tune the rest out.”
“I hope so,” I muttered.
“Yeah, me, too,” Tristan thought, and Owen’s mental voice echoed his.
I pressed my forehead against the table and put my arms over my head, trying to make the “voices” go away. I imagined sucking the cloud back in and making it disappear. Either both of their minds went blank, or I was able to close my mind to them. I couldn’t hear the guy out on the boat anymore, either.
“I am never doing that again,” I declared.
“Yeah, let’s try something different,” Owen said, jumping at the chance to forget the whole thing. He looked ar
ound. “We’ll start with the easy stuff. See if you can make the chair move.”
“Uh . . . how?”
He shrugged. “I use magic, so I can’t explain it for you.”
“Magic?”
“Uh, yeah, warlock,” he said, flipping his hands toward himself, as if this title was as obvious as the blond hair on his head and I was blind. “Warlocks use magic.”
My eyes bugged. “You’re a warlock? A real-life warlock?”
He chuckled. “You didn’t know? Thought you would’ve figured that one out.”
I closed my gaping mouth and tried not to stare in disbelief. But holy crap! Owen—my Owen, who I’ve known for years now—is a freakin’ warlock! My mouth opened again, but I was too stunned to speak. I pulled in a deep breath and composed myself. Apparently, these were things I would have to get used to.
“That’s, um . . . unexpected. So, you’re not really Amadis?” He threw me a dirty look. “Sorry I don’t get it yet. I mean, were you converted?”
“Third generation good,” he said, proudly smacking his chest with his fist. “Rina’s mother converted my grandparents. All I’ve known is the Amadis way of life.”
“Wow . . . a warlock.” I shook my head, still amazed. I knew, of course, that Owen wasn’t normal, that he could do things Normans couldn’t, but I’d assumed he was Amadis in the same way Mom, Tristan, and Rina were. I thought shielding was one of his quirks, like my sixth sense or Tristan’s paralyzing power or Rina’s telepathy. Never had I expected actual magic. “That’s really crazy, Owen. So that’s why you didn’t stop aging—you don’t have Amadis blood like Tristan and me?”
“Right. I’m warlock through and through. We get really old, though, so I’ll be around at least as long as you.”
“Is that a threat?” I teased.
He smiled. “Nope. It’s a promise.”
“So, do you have a wand or a staff or anything?” I almost laughed at my own question. It sounded outrageous when I said the words out loud.
“Have you ever seen me with one?” He asked with a snort. “Those are for witches, wizards, and sorcerers. I just use my hands.”
“Witches, wizards, and sorcerers?” I stared at him in disbelief again. These creatures all existed in my books, but in real life? I wondered if a line between fiction and reality even existed. It seemed to all be blurring together now. Apparently, my fiction was reality. “What’s the real difference between you . . . you . . . ?”
“Mages,” he said. “We call all magical people ‘mages’.”
“Right. Mages.”
“You were pretty much right on target in your books,” he said. “Wizards and witches—the same thing but wizards are dudes and witches are chicks—are your everyday magic people. Don’t get me wrong, though. They can be pretty powerful. But sorcerers and sorceresses have the greatest magical power, and they’re able to boost it by pulling more energy from the world and the atmosphere. We don’t have any sorcerers in the Amadis. They’re loners, so no one has been able to get to them, and they’re too power-hungry anyway. And then there are the warlocks. We have more power than witches and wizards but not as much as sorcerers, and we’re physically built to fight—stronger, tougher, faster.”
“Are warlocks just guys then?”
“Nope. They’re both. Some of our best warlocks are chicks. Like my mom.”
“Your mom?” Why had I never thought of Owen as having a mother? I’d known him for nearly nine years and was just now learning all these things about him.
“She’s an awesome fighter. Our most powerful magic comes out when we’re fighting.”
“So that makes warlocks ideal protectors.”
He grinned. “Yep. And you happened to get one of the best.”
“One who caves into a pretty face and a steak dinner,” Tristan muttered.
Owen scowled.
“Please don’t,” I said.
“No, he’s right.” Owen’s voice was heavy, and the trio of lines appeared between his brows. “I should’ve known better. And I do take full responsibility for it.”
“It’s in the past, remember? Can we get back to business?” I suggested. My eyes darted between them until I felt the tension release. “So, what do I use, if not magic?”
“It’s just power,” Tristan answered. He held his hand out and drew a line in the air with his finger. With the scraping sound of metal against concrete, the empty chair slid across the balcony floor. “Concentrate your mind on what you want to do. If you have the power, you can do it.”
I imitated his hand movement and focused all my mental energy on making the chair move. It wobbled, and I did a dance in my own chair, shrieking with excitement. Owen laughed and made the chair do a flip in the air. My enthusiasm deflated.
“Show off,” I muttered.
“Yours will strengthen,” Tristan said.
“So what’s the difference between power and magic?”
I’d accepted that Tristan and I—and Mom and Rina—had powers years ago. What I didn’t realize was the magic behind them.
“They’re similar, but different kinds of energies,” Tristan said. “Our powers are basically based on the will of the mind, and we’re not supposed to be born with them. We come into them when it’s time for us to receive them, like with your Ang’dora. Of course, you and I both had some powers before then, but they were comparatively weak. Owen was born magic, but he had to learn how to use it.”
“You’ve been given enough magical energy to do certain things—special abilities—but the power of your mind is how you use it,” Owen explained further. “I have a different kind of magical energy, and I have to learn how to use spells and reagents to make the power useful.”
“So to be clear,” I said, “for Tristan and me, our magic is limited to the abilities we’re given, and we control them with our mind. But you, Owen, can do all kinds of magic, if you know the spells or have the right tools or materials?”
“Right. You got it.” Owen grinned at me. “And your abilities are more physical—you might have to use the mind, but the energy affects real, physical objects. I can conjure intangibles and even some objects using only my magic, like the protective shield over this place.”
“What about this ability to get into people’s heads?” I asked. “People’s minds and thoughts aren’t physical objects.”
“Which is why it’s such a rare gift,” Tristan said. “Even in the Amadis.”
“Cassandra, the Amadis founder, and Rina are the only ones we know who have ever had it,” Owen said.
“Of course, I’d be one to get it,” I mumbled. Based on my experience so far, it was one gift I really didn’t want.
Tristan tapped my forehead. “It means your mind is strong enough to control such a unique power. It’s a good thing.”
I thought about Owen’s fantasy and grimaced. “I don’t know about that.”
“Let’s see what else you can do,” Owen suggested, changing the subject as if he knew my thoughts. Perhaps he did. I wasn’t positive I controlled my new “gift” very well.
They flashed and I walked to the edge of the property, by the trees and brush. Tristan and Owen took turns showing their strength by pulling out bushes with one hand and knocking over trees. They seemed to be trying to one-up each other. Of course, Tristan won on all accounts.
“All right, you’ve proven your point,” I said. “Any more and you two will ruin our privacy.”
“You try,” Owen said. “Here, start out small.”
He indicated a knee-high palmetto bush. I grabbed it at the base and tried to pull it out with both hands. The plant didn’t budge.
“Guess I still have to be pissed off,” I said. Or getting it on with my sweetie. I didn’t have to hear Tristan’s mind to know he thought the same thing. The small smile on his lips and the twinkle in his eyes told me. It was an inviting look, and I so wanted to take him up on it. But we had things to do and places to go. I distracted myself by looking up at a tal
l coconut tree standing near us. “I won’t even try knocking over a palm tree, so don’t ask.”
“I have an idea, though,” Tristan said, following my gaze. He searched the ground and picked up a handful of small rocks, then looked up at the trees. “Try to hit the coconuts on that one.”
He pointed to another tree thirty yards away, the coconuts twenty feet high. I missed by several yards on the first try. Tristan stepped behind me and showed me how to aim properly. The electric pulse when he touched my hand brought back a memory, when he’d tried to show me how to shoot darts on our first date. Unlike those of the last seven years, this memory came bright and clear. I wondered if he remembered.
“I thought you weren’t going to do that anymore,” he reminded me, his voice in my head.
I looked at him guiltily. Sorry. It’s a nice memory I wanted to share.
“Thank you for it.” He raised his eyebrows. “Now please get out of my head.”
I grinned sheepishly and tried to close my mind by focusing on the tree. But suddenly all I could see was an image of many trees and brush stretching high over my head, as if I lay on the ground in the middle of a forest or overgrown vegetation. The vision disappeared as quickly as it came. I shook it off, dismissing it as nothing but a quick thought. I just didn’t know if it belonged to me, Tristan, or Owen, and that annoyed me.
Owen and Tristan still watched me, both of their brows raised with expectation. I refocused on the tree and imagined a line the rock would follow between my hand and the coconut. I let the rock fly. I hit the seed dead on. And after doing so once, it came easily. I couldn’t miss.
“What else?” I asked excitedly, wanting to move on to the next thing. Now that I found something I could do, the tests were getting fun.
“Do you think she has enough power to project?” Owen asked thoughtfully.
“We’ll only find out if we try,” Tristan answered. He demonstrated by holding his left hand out toward a tree trunk about fifteen feet away, twisting his wrist and spreading his fingers in a flicking motion. A fireball shot out of his palm, singeing a hole in the bark. I jumped in surprise.