Witchling Wars

by Shawn Knightley

  Did he have a choice? Probably not. The man had smeared his reputation and put Nathaniel’s loyalty into question. He even told Tobias that I had marked Nathaniel. That we had bonded with the unbreakable attachment that only kruxa could provide. The bond that would slowly turn Nathaniel into a mortal man so we could live out a single human life together.

  Not. Gonna. Happen.

  I wasn’t about to let it. Not only did the thought of spending my life with Nathaniel freak me out, but my magic hadn’t shown any inclination toward forming such a bond with him. Not that I would have any control over it if my witchling blood decided to do so. But that didn’t really matter. I had to prove it to Tobias. Then pray that he will let me live. A kruxa. A low-tier witchling who has been on the most wanted list for vampires since medieval times.

  I was sweating. My pajamas were starting to stick to my skin. I sat up to take a few sips from a hot water bottle that survived the blast in my kitchen only to feel fabric latch onto my back and refuse to let go. An hour earlier I had struggled to get my weakened body to my shower so I could wash away the smell of the swamp, but it refused to work. The pipes just made a sound like they were in pain then sputtered a few droplets before quitting entirely. The sweat ridden smell on my hair was starting to bother me. The Georgia heat was unforgiving when I got caught in it for too long. It was even more unforgiving when humidity became a factor. The fact that there was a downpour of rain outside which would inevitably make the day much more humid didn’t help matters.

  My cell phone buzzed beside me on the nightstand.

  ‘Who on earth would call at this hour?’

  I picked up the phone to see who it was.

  Madison. Of course. But still, it was after two o’clock in the morning. Family only calls at such an hour when something has gone very wrong. Which recently meant that everything was normal.

  “Madison, are you okay?” I asked as soon as I answered the call.

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m fine,” she said with winded breath. “It’s Emily.”

  I sat straight up in my bed.

  Emily. The poor girl had just lost her sister. Even if her sister was a skank who called her awful names, I doubted Emily was in a good place. She still worried about her. She even went out of her way to get a reading from me last week before this chaos really got started to make sure that Samantha was going to be alright. If only I had picked up then what I knew now. Maybe I could have given her some kind of warning to prepare herself.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked urgently, throwing the covers off my sweat soaked body.

  “I just found her sitting on the window sill of the guest bedroom in her underwear. She was rocking back and forth, crying hysterically. Harper, I think she was preparing to throw herself off. She was soaked from the rain.”

  “I’m coming over,” I said.

  “Is Nathaniel still with you?” she asked.

  “No. He left.” And he took Isaac’s body and severed head along with him, thank god.

  “You mean you’re at your house alone?”

  ‘Well, the bed was right there and I was exhausted from using so much magic.’

  “Um, yeah.”

  “Harper!” she scolded me.

  “Listen, I’ll be there soon.”

  “You can’t bike over here,” she argued. “It’s pouring outside.”

  “I’ll drive.”

  There was a brief silence on the other end of the line. I had no doubt that Madison’s jaw was on the floor. “Drive? Are you sure about that?”

  “Yes, I’m sure. Wrap up Emily in some blankets and get her dry. I’ll be there soon.”

  With that, I hung up the phone and went straight to my dresser drawer to find some new clothes. Ones that weren’t soaked with my sweat and might keep me relatively dry. As soon as I was decent, I turned on the flashlight feature of my cell phone and headed toward the massive hole in the middle of my house. Water was filling up the center and flooding everything. The beautiful home that I spent the first years of marriage decorating was destroyed by a psychotic vampire who kidnapped me through a vixra tunnel into 19th century Washington D.C. At least the prick was dead.

  I edged along the side of the hole, doing my best not to get wet. Then I grabbed Caleb’s keys and lifted the hood of my jacket over my head. I ran through the puddles down toward his old pickup truck. It took me three tries to get the keys into the door. The metal kept slipping from the rain. Once I was inside, I shoved the keys into the ignition and started the wipers. It took some effort, but I got it started. It had been several months since someone had driven it. It was Caleb’s pet project. An old car that belonged to his grandfather. He worked on it every weekend no matter how hot it was outside. I would bring him ice cold sparkling water with lime, his favorite, while he worked and I was on a break from reading tarot for clients coming in over the weekend.

  I slowly brought my hands up to the steering wheel. The entire truck smelled like Caleb. Even after months of him being gone. His old sunglasses were hanging from the rear view mirror in the center.

  I shook my head. I couldn’t let thoughts like this invade my mind. Not now. I had to get to Emily. I peered out the back and slowly reversed the car out of the driveway. There was no one awake. No one to see me. And no one to witness my sloppy driving.

  There were few things in this world that could get me in a car. One was Madison. The other was being forced along by Officer Parker as I was only a matter of hours ago. And the last was Emily, who was obviously in distress.

  The window wipers were working hard. Caleb had just replaced them the week before he died. Another thing to be grateful for. Otherwise, I would have had to peer out the window with my head getting drenched just to see where I was going. There would be no riding my bike around the next few days. The roads would be drenched with mud.

  When I finally made it to Madison’s house, the door was unlocked. I tore off my soaked coat and removed my shoes, trying to be as quiet as possible. The house wasn’t stirring, so whatever Emily had done didn’t wake up the girls or Madison’s husband, Ted. I quietly walked up the wooden steps and to the guest bedroom where Madison had blankets covering Emily’s backside. But Madison wasn’t near her. She was standing at the back of the room.

  I looked at Madison and she simply shrugged. “I had to wrestle her away from the window. Now she won’t let me even get close.”

  My shoulders slumped.

  Emily looked like a drowned rat. She was half dressed with a t-shirt on, but still in her soaked underwear. Still rocking back and forth. I couldn’t tell at first if it was her wet hair that was causing the droplets to fall down her face or if it was tears. As I inched closer, I could see that it definitely wasn’t tears. Her eyes were wide open, but not wet. As if she was in a daze. She was confused. Horrified. And shaking. In this crazy Georgia heat and humidity, she was shaking like a leaf.

  “Emily,” I quietly spoke to her. “Emily!” I said with a little more force. It took calling her name two more times before I managed to shake her from whatever state she was in and got her full attention. Her eyes drifted over to me. I slowly got closer and sat next to her on the bed, extending my arm to her shoulder to see if she would recoil. If she wouldn’t let Madison touch her, I wasn’t sure if she would let me.

  “We need to get you in warm clothes, Emily,” I said.

  She stopped shaking. The only thing that moved was her eyes. My hand lightly grazed her shoulder. Once I let it down, she fell toward me, laying her head on my lap. I caressed her wet hair and allowed her to stay there. She wasn’t weeping. She merely wanted to be held.

  I peered over at Madison. She opened the drawer of the dresser where she kept extra bedding and brought over a blanket. She placed it hesitantly over Emily as though she might bite her. But Emily accepted it and took the edges into her hands, bringing it over tight around her body. I used the other side to squeeze some of the water out of her hair. Madison, the control freak who always wanted everything
in its place and for things to look neat, didn’t even put up a fight as I used her bedding to dry some of Emily’s soaking wet hair. Which told me one thing. Madison was shaken. Shaken enough not to care about the state of her bedding. Maybe having kids softened her need for cleanliness more than I thought.

  “We’re gonna find out who did this to Samantha,” I whispered in Emily’s ear once I was done with her hair.

  She didn’t respond. She only continued to shake even harder than before. I reached around her and held her close. It was then that I got a clear sense of what she was feeling.

  She was terrified. But it wasn’t the kind of terror I expected her to feel. She wasn’t frightened by her own grief or her father. Not about the media onslaught that was bound to pry into her private life. There was something else. Something I hadn’t expected to find. Her fear was driven by regret. But regret for what?

  I glanced up at Madison who nodded at me as though she had already sensed what I was just now starting to catch onto.

  I moved to the side and forced Emily to lay down on the bed. Once her head hit the pillow, exhaustion started overwhelming her.

  “Try to rest,” I said. I laid there with my arms enfolding her, doing my best to keep her calm. I didn’t let go until she fell asleep.

  Madison stood in the corner, watching me watching Emily. Once Emily’s breathing had steadied, I reached for her forehead to feel her skin and to get a better sense of what was going on inside of her. She was uneasy, to say the least. And the fear inside her had calmed a bit. But that remorse she felt. It was overpowering. Why was she feeling like that? Did she blame herself for something? Something to do with Samantha? Or was it something to do with Tobias?

  I crawled out of the bed and inched toward Madison. She turned on a small camera. The kind she used for her daughters when they were still babies to monitor them as they slept so she could go downstairs for a break. She wasn’t about to leave Emily in her care again without supervision after what looked like a possible suicide attempt.

  We left the room and Madison closed the door, holding the knob tight in her fist and making the clicking sound as it shut as quiet as possible.

  “Well, the odds of me falling asleep are slim to none after that. Want a cup of coffee?” she asked me.

  “I take it the 2% organic milk has gone bad by now,” I whispered back with a hint of sarcasm.

  “I’ve got some powdered creamer.”

  I made a face like I was grossed out, but it honestly didn’t matter. I wasn’t going to turn her down. My frustration toward her was already subsiding in a way I think only sisters can truly understand. Even though she helped to get me into this mess, she was by my side for most of the day, making sure I was okay and trying to make it right. She even stood up for me in front of Officer Parker when he was prying too hard. I would grant her the mercy of joining her for a cup of coffee.

  We walked down the stairs and toward the kitchen. I hung onto the railing to keep from slipping. Wet shoes and hardwood floors didn’t make for the easiest situations with someone as clumsy as me, but I made it work. A few minutes later she placed a hot cup of coffee in my hands and we were slowly sipping from her mugs.

  “What happened exactly?” I finally asked, relieved that it was her who had explaining to do this time and not me. I got her up to speed on everything that happened with Nathaniel and Officer Parker. Now it was her turn.

  She took a peek at the baby monitor. Emily was sleeping like an infant with her mouth open ever so slightly. Madison gave a sigh and held her forehead in her hand like she couldn’t quite make sense of it.

  “I heard something that woke me up. At first, I thought it was Emily crying. Well, waling is more like it. I went to her room to see if I could help calm her to find her sitting there on the window sill, in her underwear with the wind and rain plummeting inside. I made it over to her and yanked her away. She fought me off and we both fell down to the floor. I finally got her to calm down and made her sit on the bed. I swear, Harper, I haven’t seen this kind of behavior before. It’s almost like something a junkie would do.”

  ‘A junkie? What would Madison know about junkies?’

  “Why do you say that?” I asked. “I’ll admit that it’s a bit intense for grieving, but she did just lose her sister.”

  Madison sighed and removed her hand from her forehead. “What did you think when you touched her?”

  That was basically my sister’s way of asking what my magic picked up on. She had given me that knowing nod when I touched Emily, so something was up.

  “Well, there was a profound sense of regret. Maybe there was bad blood between her and her sister. Maybe they had a huge argument before she died.”

  Madison nodded. But not in a way that said she agreed with me. It was like she was preparing herself to ask me something. Something she knew would get a bad reaction from me.

  “Is there a chance Samantha was on drugs? Or that Emily is on drugs? Or that they were sharing them?”

  “I don’t know what kind of drugs Emily could get here in Dilton. Maybe Samantha brought some home from D.C. I wouldn’t put it past her.”

  “What about vixra blood?”

  ‘Okay. That was really random.’

  “Vixra blood can act like a drug stimuli. Eli said that’s what the Catach-Brayin were distributing. And you said Samantha was involved with them on some level. What if Emily got a hold of the vixra blood?”

  “And what?” I asked, tempted to laugh. “Dosed herself? Humans don’t know about such things. She wouldn’t even know what to do with it.”

  Emily was the introverted teenager. A young woman with the world ahead of her. A shy and quiet little thing that barely reached out to anyone. For whatever reason, after this thought crossed my mind, I didn’t think it was so far-fetched. Teenager. Loner. Nerd. And all the stresses that came with starting to apply to colleges. Not to mention the pressure her father put on her. She had lots of reasons that any teenager would use to rationalize drug use. But Emily? Sweet Emily who used to sit with me on the school bus to avoid bullies?

  “Samantha was running the vixra blood around for the coven master of the Catach-Brayin,” I said. “I saw it in a vision. I guess it’s possible that Emily got a hold of some. And she knew who Tobias was. The coven master. I heard her say his name.”

  “Eli mentioned him,” she said. “He’s Nathaniel’s coven master, right?”

  “Yeah. Is it possible that Tobias is using Emily the same way he was Samantha? Is that why she’s feeling so remorseful? And fearful? She fears she’ll suffer the same fate as Samantha?”

  The thought scared me more than it did Madison. Because if it was true, it meant that Emily was in a serious amount of danger. Danger that Madison couldn’t protect her from.

  “Maddie, I think it might be time to get your girls out of here. Ted’s brother has a lake house further south near the coast, right?

  She took a deep breath as if that was the conclusion she had reached as well.

  It was finally here. The moment I had feared for most of my life. When we would have to make a hard decision on whether to stay in Dilton or run like so many other kruxa throughout the centuries. But if vampires were about to swarm Dilton in the way they had the Congressman’s house, she needed to get her daughters out of there.

  “You might be right,” she said. “But what do we do with Emily? She can’t be alone. Especially if she’s coming off a fix on vixra blood.”

  But where did she get the fix in the first place? That is if Madison’s suspicion was true.

  The pocket watch. Samantha’s pocket watch. Did Emily find it?

  “We’ve got bigger problems on our hands if that’s the case,” I said morosely when the realization hit me. “You know as well as I do that humans don’t have a tolerance for magic. It kills them. Slowly, but surely. She’ll need more than a new fix if she’s hooked on vixra blood. She’ll need a miracle.” I couldn’t believe the words leaving my mouth. I had lost C
aleb. Madison might have to go on the run. And now Emily’s life was in danger. Gran told me that vixra blood was so full of magic that it was toxic to any human, no matter how small the amount they consumed. It gave them a brief euphoric high and superior strength. Then slowly the side effects came into play. Aggression. Hallucinations. Heightened anxiety. Pretty much the worst parts of humanity.

  I glanced over at the small screen revealing Emily still sound asleep. I couldn’t help but wonder what she had gotten into. Did Samantha manipulate her into helping the Catach-Brayin…or…Tobias? When Emily came to my house wanting a reading a week ago, she had been interested in a man. A man who made her feel worthwhile. Then a short time after she said she was wrong about him. She even called Tobias by name and said she tried to warn Samantha about him.

  I set down my coffee and went for the stairs.

  “Where are you going?” Madison quietly called for me.

  “I need to know something.”

  “You’ll wake her up.”

  “So be it.”

  I opened up the door to the guest bedroom as quietly as I could manage and walked over to Emily. She was still sound asleep. Madison crept up behind me as I lifted the blanket off her body and reached for the side of her shirt. There on her side was a brand. The same brand that Nathaniel left on me. The brand of the Catach-Brayin.

  “What?” Madison whispered to me. “It’s just a tattoo. Most kids have them these days. It’s like a right of passage.”

  I gave Madison a look that couldn’t be confused with anything other than surprise. “Really, Maddie? You mean gran never showed you what the brand of the Catach-Brayin looks like?”

  Gran always told me that I was more powerful than Madison. For whatever reason, my magic wasn’t as diluted as hers. It was a sore spot while we were growing up. Maddie hated to be reminded of it. And she was always a touch jealous of how close gran and I were. As we got older I think she was relieved. The more my magic popped up randomly, the more she was grateful hers wasn’t as potent. I was always at greater risk of discovery than she was.