by Sandra Kaye
Origins
A Ravenwood Novel
Copyright © 2018 Sandra Kaye
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in reviews and other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
This is a work of fiction. All events, names, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to events, locals, places or people, living or dead, is coincidental. All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, including electronic without the permission of the author.
Cat O' Nine Unravels
Acient Furies Lie
Call of Witches
Heaven's Sinners Fly
White Familiars Blackened
Spells Incant Unleashed
She Enclosed in Cackles
Flirts Now with the Beast.
~Steven Paul Reents~
Chapter One
I’d been tossing potions and spells for so long, I wasn’t sure how much more I had in me. Still, I continued. Freeze spell, knockback spell, anti-shifting potion, then slice, stab, repeat. This was the pattern I was following. For each spell and potion bomb I landed, Gabe and Tony trailed behind me and secured each prisoner. But I was running low. Low on magic, low on potions, and low on energy. Once those were exhausted, I’d be left with just my blades. I was no slacker when it came to blades, but blades equaled injuries and possible deaths. I preferred not to resort to that. I knew we needed to take care of the werehyenas that had been causing chaos throughout our area for the last month. Each act they committed increased the risk that the humans would discover our world. The supernatural world was ours to protect, and the biggest part of that was making sure the humans never found out about us. Our discovery would mean cages, slavery, experimentation, and, once they had everything we had to offer, death. Humans had little tolerance for what they didn’t understand, and the human government would not allow any species they found threatening to exist. If we weren’t within their control, we were the enemy, plain and simple.
As witches, my sister and I were raised to never allow any nonmagical being to know about us or our powers. Not all supernaturals, or “Nats” for short, wanted to live in the shadows, though. Many, like the group we were dealing with, thought that being stronger meant they were superior. To them, there was no reason to hide, when in fact, humans outnumbered the supernatural community one hundred to one. While witches, shifters, and all the other miscellaneous supernatural beings may indeed be stronger, humans had the numbers, making it an unwinnable fight. That was why my sister and I were trying our best to keep our community safe from the humans, even when it put us in situations like our current one, fighting a faction that wanted to stop hiding. The werehyenas had been killing in our small Illinois town for a while now. At first, the deaths were isolated to the woods and were believed to be wild animal attacks, but they had recently escalated to shifting in plain sight making it necessary to wipe the humans’ memories and risk exposing our secret. There were only so many things we could cover up before what was happening would become known. That was something we could not allow to happen. Which brought us to our current predicament. As much as we didn’t want to kill the werehyenas, they weren’t giving us much of a choice. There were six of us and more than twenty of them. Seslie and I had used freeze spells on as many as we could, which allowed us to take them into custody. They would be turned over to the Illinois branch of the Paranormal Intelligence Agency or PIA for short. Nobody called the Paranormal Intelligence Agency by its full name. It was just pronounced as one word: PIA. Too much trouble otherwise. We were the policing branch of the Paranormal Council.
Our team consisted of me and my sister Seslie, both witches; Tony, a tiger shifter; Gabe, a were-vampire; Adrena, a fae-human hybrid; and Blue, a wolf-witch hybrid. We had been working together for years, with the exception of Gabe, and for the most part, we were friends. Gabe and Seslie were currently a couple, which we all hoped wouldn’t blow up in our faces. We were a solid team with a good record, considering we were one of the youngest teams out there.
By the end of our battle, twenty werehyenas were in custody. Six were dead. It could have been worse. We headed out after handing them over, because the questioning wasn’t ours to do. Not this time anyway. PIA is not known to the real world, and we all had jobs in the human world. Not that our team wasn’t paid well; we were, but we were all expected to also be human. The paranormal council not only expected it but demanded it. So, we did. It was already six a.m., which meant I had an hour to get home and get ready for my human job as a nurse. Luckily, Seslie was still in school for computer technology. Gabe was also a student for something or other. Tony would be off to bed; he worked nights as a bouncer. Blue did something that put him in a suit, and he spent a lot of time at the courthouse. I thought it must be law-related but had known him too long to ask now. I didn’t want to be rude after so long.
Chapter Two
Monday morning at work was just a normal day. I arrived my traditional five minutes late and happily noted that Dr. Jensen had not yet arrived. Dr. Jensen and Dr. Jameson were my bosses at the oncology and hematology clinic where cancer and blood disorders are treated. They were both semi-retired, so each one worked three weeks then took three weeks off. This was Dr. Jensen’s week, which meant things would be very tense and hurried. Dr. Jensen and Dr. Jameson were complete opposites. Dr. Jensen wore a wool three-piece suit year-round. He still carried a pocket watch and was very, very uptight. He liked things to run just so. On the other hand, Dr. Jameson wore khakis and polos and just took things as they came. One of my best friends and fellow nurses once compared Dr. Jensen to a “bully in the sandbox” due to the immature and toddler-like behaviors displayed during his rotations when things went wrong. Needless to say, it stuck.
This day was the same as all the others, checking in patients, drawing blood, taking vital signs and weights, then placing patients in the exam room to see the doctor, who arrived as we placed the second patient into a room. Wow, and only thirty minutes early. He must have decided to give us a break. Lucky us! I was working in the chemo room with Celia. Celia is a mare, better known as a horse shifter. She and her mate had chosen a human ceremony, swearing themselves to only each other, mating with only one another. That is unheard of for their type of shifter. They tended to have many women to each male. Got to give a woman credit where credit is due. If one woman could meet all the needs of a randy stallion, she must be one hell of a woman or shifter in this case.
Our day was progressing the way most days in the chemo room do: place IVs, or access ports, which are very common in our office due to the long-term treatments that require intravenous access, then run labs and wait for the doctor to see each patient and set the doses of chemotherapy. When I was starting Mrs. Artsons’ first treatment, it was well into the afternoon. I was running on autopilot after just a few hours of sleep when Celia appeared beside me. Celia gave me a look that said something wasn’t right. For someone as cool and collected as Celia, that wasn’t a good sign. I finished with Mrs. Artsons and quickly returned to the mixing room, assuming that was where something had gone wrong. The mixing room was where we mixed each patient’s chemotherapy based on triple-checked calculations. As I stepped into the room, I felt it. Magic. The feeling one gets when there is another powerful nonhuman near. Its source wasn’t immediately clear, which was scary, consider the room was only eight-foot by eight-foot and the mixing hood took up a third of that.
As I ventured farther into the room, I bec
ame aware of the pixy hovering above the counter to my right. Unfortunately, pixies were nothing like they appear in cartoons and books. This particular pixy went by the name of Jin. He was about six inches tall with wings that reminded me of a fly, except his were blue and green, kind of like a horse fly. He had an oversized head and big, round, wide-set, green eyes, with a flat pug-like nose and sharp, pointy teeth. His body was similar to a human’s and he was wearing what looked like leather pants, no shirt, and a two-inch sword, which looked more like a toothpick, in a sheath strapped across his back.
After fully entering the room, I slid the pocket door closed, mainly for my peace of mind; humans refused to see magical creatures and most magic. For the most part, the human mind was so logical, it tricked itself into believing what they were seeing wasn’t real. Therefore, a six-inch man floating over a counter may look to them like a bottle we were picking up or setting down. In some cases, they wouldn’t even acknowledge seeing anything. It just didn’t exist, because six-inch flying men with tiny swords just did not appear at your doctor's office. Yet, there he was.
So, the thousand-dollar question became, “Why?” But, just as I was about to ask that very thing, Celia snapped, “What the hell? Why are you here? This is not the time or place for a drop in, BUG!”
Celia knew Jin was not a bug and that he would only be visiting us to deliver a message or try to barter a bit of important knowledge for a potion or two. She had seen him before, and the two really did not care for each other. However, Jin could be very resourceful and he owed both my sister and me for rescuing him from the web of a black witch a few years ago while trying to track missing children from the human world. It turned out the web Jin had been caught in was meant to capture small children for the black witch to sacrifice as she tried to raise a demon under lord. Seslie and I helped him escape after using him as bait to draw the old witch out. Jin wasn’t very happy about the whole ‘using him as bait’ thing, but in the end, his life was spared, thanks to us. In the world of the fae, that meant he owes us fealty, also known as a life debt. He kept us informed from that day on. If he brought us something useful, we gave him a harmless potion or two for his trouble.
Jin hissed back, “None of your business, cow. You are not why I’m here. Analese is.”
Celia started to reply, but I stopped her by asking the obvious question. “So, just why are you here, Jin, and why couldn’t it wait ‘til after I was done working?”
Jin’s irritation was apparent by the blur of blue his wings were creating. When pixies were upset or scared, they had a tendency to move their wings so fast that they appeared to be nothing more than a blur of color. From experience, I knew blue showed when he was nervous or anxious, and green usually meant he was happy or excited. After his reply, I wasn’t sure it wasn’t a little of both fear and anger.
“The vampire king has requested an audience with you and your sister this eve at sunset,” Jin blurted.
Someone could have knocked me over with a feather. That was not even in the same realm as what I would imagine Jin coming here to tell me. A “request” from the vampire king was not truly a request; it was a demand. If not followed, bad things would happen. While I had no wish to visit said king, I truly had no choice, because while my sister and I were strong witches, we could not deal with a whole nest of vampires. That was a meeting we would definitely not skip.
“So, Jin, did he happen to mention why he wishes to see us, or why he needed both of us?” He could have asked for either of us if he just wished to talk. Wanting both of us there was a bit unnerving, but that’s what he would get if for nothing more than to keep from having to battle him. This vampire wasn’t one I cared to cross. I’d seen his power firsthand when I was younger. That was before he had a nest of vamps adding to his it.
“Oh, yes. Yes, he did,” Jin stated sarcastically. “We did each other’s hair and talked all about it. NOT! Like he tells me anything. I mean really, witch! I thought you were smarter than that.” He continued to rant, but I had already tuned him out and started thinking of the many possible reasons for a meeting with the vampire king, none of them good.
After sending Jin away with the message that Seslie and I would be at the meeting, I could not put my mind fully back into work mode. So finally, I took Celia’s advice and texted Seslie a simple message: “Call me ASAP”.
After several hours and way too many texts, I couldn’t handle it any longer, which led to the event that would leave Seslie so pissed, I wasn’t sure when she would talk to me again. In my defense, everyone knew I was a worry wart. It wasn’t my finest quality.
I may only be two years older, but since neither of us could remember a time before we lost our parents, we were closer than close. Sometimes, that caused me to be a mother hen where she's concerned. I stepped into the chemo room quickly to let Celia know what I was planning, so she could cover for me. It was our slow part of the day, so things would be fine. Being my closest friend and knowing me as well as she
did, she gave me a tight smile and nod. She knew there was no stopping me at that point; I was beyond reason. When it came to my sister and my friends’ safety, I could be unreasonable. Plus, Seslie not answering my calls after the vampire king asked for us made me very nervous.
I ducked into the ladies’ room and locked the door. The last thing I needed was someone finding me unaware when freeing my astral self from my physical body. It was the only way I could travel the planes to find Seslie. Once I found her, I could freeze the room and make myself visible, so no one would see what was going on. Piece of cake, right?
When I’d done this before, all I needed to do was think of Seslie and I’d be by her side, but to interact with her on our plane, I would need to rematerialize and stop time. Otherwise, I’d risk giving the whole non-human thing away, which was quite a no-no.
Seslie didn’t care for my astral-projecting, which may have been one of the reasons she hadn’t honed her own ability. She claimed traveling as an energy being brought one too close to becoming a lost one in the grey fields, the area between heaven and hell where trapped souls resided. While the grey fields could be a dangerous place for a being with a soul to travel unprotected, she knew this was never the case with me. The goddess Hecate protected us in spirit. I also wore her in tattoo form across my upper back for added protection, and I always carried pink quartz for purity and white ash for strength. Seslie was right in thinking we should fear the lost ones, though. They would try to hitch a ride on any unprotected soul passing through, but if one was smart, the grey fields were a useful tool.
As I stepped through the grey fields to stand next to my sister, I found myself agitated to find her in class and unharmed. Not that I wished her harm. But she should have just called or replied to my messages. That would have saved us both time and energy. From the look on her face when she noticed me and her frozen classmates, she was as upset as I was.
After we both simmered down and I was back to feeling relieved to find her unharmed, she explained her phone was at home. She had forgotten it. With that revelation, I felt rather stupid for overreacting.
I decided to make my exit before the others in the room lost too much time. When I was stepping back into the grey fields, however, I remembered the whole purpose of my impromptu visit. I turned as I left the room to holler back, “We have an appointment with the vampire king at sunset!” Then, I unfroze the room as the void shut behind me and my astral-self snapped back to my body.
I dropped to my knees as I came back to my body. It took a few minutes to get my bearings after astral-traveling. With the sharp pounding in my head and the churning of my stomach, I quickly remembered why I seldom made jaunts like that. The after-effects were a bitch. Slowly, I rose to the basin, splashed cool water on my face and neck, and stared at my pale, ashen face. I needed chocolate and caffeine, the perfect recipe to make things better.
Leaving the ladies room rather shakily, I headed straight to the coffee maker. Our coffee was nowher
e near the quality of my favorite Step N Brew. In fact, most days it was more like burnt sludge. Still, it was hot and had that much-needed caffeine, so I threw in a bunch of creamers and some Sweetener to make it almost tolerable. As an added bonus, someone had been kind enough to bring in donuts, so I snagged a glazed one and called it good. It wasn’t chocolate, but sweet would have to do.
Back in the chemo room on a stool with my coffee and donut, I tried my best to avoid Celia’s “I told you so” look. It, of course, did not work at all. That woman could bore holes in you with her stare. Heaven help any children she ever had. I didn’t have to endure the stare for long, though. Just as I took the first bite of my donut, it seemed she could no longer hold her tongue.
“Well, what happened?” Celia demanded, hands on her hips and that knowing look in her eyes. Some child was in trouble when she turned that look on him or her later in life. Even I didn’t really care for it, and we were the same age.
“Nothing happened,” I stated rather childlike, not meeting her eyes and continuing to sip my awful coffee while shuffling papers.
“Don’t give me that ‘nothing’ business, girl. You better spill or I’ll be sitting at Seslie’s tonight, and I’m sure she would love to tell me,” Celia threatened with a smart-ass smile.
“Fine! She was fine. Just like you said. She forgot her cell phone at home. That’s why she wasn’t answering. Now, are you happy?” I mumbled, hating that I had to eat crow in front of my friend. Admitting I overreacted left a fouler taste in my mouth than the awful coffee I was trying to choke down.
“How pissed is she? On a scale from one to ten? One being she doesn’t speak to you for a couple days like she did when you popped into her high school cafeteria then out and all her friends thought she was crazy for talking to herself. Or ten, like she punches you in the face and nearly breaks your jaw, like she did at basic training when you got her and her whole platoon smoked for popping in at three in the morning?”