Meg shovelled eggs, bacon and sausages onto my plate and I picked up the funny little bread dumpling they called a biscuit from the basket next to the stove. It was still warm. Without hesitating, I leaned over and kissed Meg on the cheek and thanked her for the lovely breakfast. Meg was quite overcome and shooed me away but I saw her wipe her eye and knew that the impromptu affection had touched her, making me feel glad.
I sat next to Étoile and she bumped a knee against mine. “Ready for another day of busy, busy, don’t stop?”
“I guess so.” I forked a big slice of bacon into my mouth and chewed.
“If the big guy picks on you, you tell me and I’ll zap him,” said Seren, a wicked glint in her eye.
I smiled and it occurred to me to wonder just how today’s lessons would go; would Evan still get stroppy with me if I couldn’t move an object or shimmered myself flat on my ass? He knew I could do both now and at will if I put my mind to it. Whether I could keep on doing stuff was a different matter altogether. Fortunately I didn’t have to think about it for too long because Evan turned up and helped himself to a bowl of cereal before pouring a mug of coffee from the pot on the table. At least, he didn’t have to think through the politics of where to sit, the only chair left was opposite me. He surveyed my plate and looked back at his healthy bowl with disappointment, before re-inspecting my laden plate.
“I’m hungry,” I protested.
Evan raised his eyebrows and looked over to Meg. “That looks a helluva lot better than cereal this morning. Can I get some too, Meg?”
“Of course you can, my dear. You just wait right there now and I’ll fix you a plate and bring it over.”
“We’ve got a packed morning ahead,” said Evan, to me. “We’re going to test what you can do.”
“I’m watching you,” hissed Seren, only half joking as she waved her fingers at her eyes, then to his.
Evan looked at her, his eyes darkening a shade and I wondered if he was going to get mad at her but then he broke into a smile and rolled his eyes. Seren raised her eyebrows at me in surprise. I think she wondered where “serious Evan” was and I had no intention of telling her why he was in a cheerful mood, assuming that I was the reason. Meg slid a plate in front of him and he ate with enthusiasm whilst I snuck sly glances at him until Seren caught me. I shrugged my shoulders and pretended to be as curious as she.
Étoile and David busied themselves clearing away the breakfast things and stacking the dishwasher. It never ceased to amuse me that with all the magic present in the house, they still needed a dishwasher. Evan twirled a pencil between his fingers, then stabbed at the notepad he produced from his pocket. “Okay, this morning we’ll pair up to practice. Seren take Kitty, Étoile take Jared, David you take Christy and Clara too. Stella, you’re with me. Warm up and consolidate what you’ve learned. Find somewhere quiet to study and we’ll meet up in the living room later today and do a little show and tell. Now’s the time to really show off your progress.”
“Will you be having lunch together?” Meg inquired.
Evan shook his head. “If you’d be kind enough to leave out a cold lunch, people can come and go as they get hungry. There’s no need for all of us to sit together today.”
Chairs scraped against the floor and the household headed off two-by-two as they filtered through the house and into the garden. Then there were two.
“We’ll go up to the balcony,” said Evan, ticking off his list.
I frowned. I’d never been on the balcony though I caught glimpses of it from outside. It led off one of the upstairs rooms, though I wasn’t sure which one and had never had cause to investigate.
“C’mon,” Evan said as he scraped back his chair and led the way, a flick of his fingers summoning me to follow. I traipsed after him through the hallway and up the stairs. We walked down the hall past my room and to his. He opened the door and ushered me in, and just as I was wondering what was going on, he opened the floor to ceiling windows that had previously been covered by curtains and beckoned me outside. I followed.
The balcony was the same one I’d seen from below. On three sides it was framed by a half-height white trellis, over which trailed climbing flowers, which pretty much concealed it from view, at least, from below. The panoramic vista over the ocean was gorgeous. The balcony was set up like a little bistro with a seating area of two iron chairs along with a wooden bench that overlooked the other side.
“It’s so pretty,” I said, my eyes venturing over the edge. I spotted David and Étoile, with Jared, Christy and Clara sitting cross-legged in front of them, on the lawn below.
“I like it,” said Evan simply as he ducked inside and came back out with a bag of tennis balls.
“No rackets?”
Evan snorted. “Not quite.” He knelt on the tiles and spread the balls out on the floor in a ring before he stooped to go back inside. He returned with a couple of floor pillows and tossed one to me. “Take a seat.”
I arranged myself on the pillow, facing the balls as I assumed I was meant to do. Evan sat opposite me and looked at me expectantly.
“What am I supposed to do?”
“Move them.”
I poked one with a finger and it rolled out of formation.
“With your mind.”
“I suspected as much.” I concentrated but when one ball rolled across the balcony, I wasn’t sure if it was me or a gust of wind.
“Try moving them up.” Evan jabbed a finger towards the sky.
I shuffled on the pillow and refocused, visualising the ball, any ball, moving upwards.
Evan sighed. “Stella, you have to open your eyes.”
I opened my eyes. None of the balls had moved. I groaned in annoyance.
“It may seem easier to move things with your eyes closed so that you can visualise objects, but when you are faced with... situations other than the classroom, you need your eyes open. When you’re fighting, Stella, you need to see where you’re going if you expect to manipulate things around you.” Evan looked at the balls and slowly they began to rise, whipping around each other, then holding still again. Some began to rise while others rotated. It was like a little dance of tennis balls. One danced towards me until it was level with my nose then glided around my head before drifting back to the other balls. They rotated again and I wrenched my eyes from them to Evan. He was looking at me, not the balls, and his face did not seem at all strained in concentration.
The balls dropped to the floor and Evan swept them up into a neat circle, but this time he used his hands in the conventional way. “Your turn.”
I concentrated with my eyes open and felt like I’d been sitting there for hours by the time I shrugged my shoulders. I hugged my knees and rested my chin on them as I stared at the balls some more. None of them moved, no matter how intensely I insisted they should.
“I almost think you’re trying too much,” said Evan, as he got to his feet and tossed his cushion behind me. I was wondering if he was cross when he sat behind me, spread his legs either side of me and pulled me into him. I relaxed against him, glad to feel the tension drain from my muscles and rested my head on his chest. “You are straining and it should be more natural, more of an organic action. The magic is part of you, not something you need to strive for. You just need to find it and channel it.” He tickled me and I squirmed and giggled. “Nah, it isn’t there.” He wrapped his arms around me again and nuzzled at my neck. “Try again. Don’t visualise the balls anymore, just feel what you want them to do.”
I raised my head and studied the balls, thinking how nice it was to be sitting up here in the warm sun, completely alone and relaxed with the heat of Evan’s body warming me. I thought vaguely about the air and the balls and how they were part of the ebb and flow of life. I thought about the climbing foliage, their green leaves and the budding pink flowers. Evan put his hands to my temples and I relaxed. Finally, the balls began to rise.
“Hold them,” murmured Evan, his hands steady.
The balls held still. I thought about the balls moving higher and they did. Lower and they followed. I got cocky and had them move slowly in a circle.
Evan nuzzled at my neck. A ball dropped to the floor but I raised it back to the others and kept them still again mid-air. When Evan slipped his hand inside my top, the balls exploded upwards and shot in different directions. I heard a yelp from below as one of the balls hit someone and I had to stifle a laugh. “What are you doing?” I asked softly so that my voice would not be heard by my unfortunate target on the lawn below.
“You need to be able to continue to focus even when under attack.”
“Will my attackers be nuzzling my neck and slipping their hands inside my top?”
Evan stopped and his hand rested on my stomach. “No,” he sighed, his voice heavy. “When they come, it will be much, much worse.”
“Shame,” I muttered, not even wanting to fix on the certainty in his voice. “I could cope with a nuzzling attack.”
“Apparently not. Try and gather up those balls. You don’t know where they are but you need to retrieve them. I will continue to, um, distract you.”
“Poor you,” I huffed but I was amused more than anything and relaxed into his arms while I sent my mind out to retrieve the balls. When I concentrated, I realised that I could send slivery pulses from my mind to locate things I was looking for. I found and moved all but one ball back to rest at our feet.
“Pretty good,” nodded Evan, whose hands were still inside my top, as the last ball whizzed over our heads to land in the middle of the little pile.
“How did you learn this stuff?” I asked, realising I knew very little about Evan.
“Trial and error mostly. Magic has always been part of me. I grew up with my mom and she had some power of her own. She died when I was a teenager, before I had really gotten to grips with what I could do.”
“How did she die?”
“She was attacked one night. She couldn’t defend herself. I was at school – I was on the track team and putting in some extra time – when I got home she was dead.”
“I’m sorry.” Evan didn’t need to drive home the point about me being able to defend myself. I didn’t want to end up dead too soon either. Nearly falling into the hands of the Brotherhood had given me a healthy respect for my life. I shivered. I did not need to be thinking about them.
Evan changed the subject quickly to bring us back to the lesson. “See if you can move just two balls around. I’m going to give you instructions and I want you to match them.”
“When did you come here?” I asked, ignoring him briefly.
“The first time I was seventeen, after my mom died and I’ve come back a few times over the years. I come and go as I please. Concentrate. Pick up the balls.”
I moved two into the air so they were parallel with my face. Evan kissed my neck and murmured instructions. Whilst he tried to distract me, I moved the balls left, right, up, down, circled them and moved them independently as he instructed. I could barely contain my glee that not only was I moving the balls at will, but I could see what they were doing too. It was far more interesting than shutting my eyes and visualising an object moving then opening my eyes to see that, yes, it had actually moved. This was way cooler even if the concentration was making my head throb a little.
“Okay, drop ‘em.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The balls.” Evan gave a little snort and I blushed. “Forget them for a while now. You did good. How far do you think you moved yourself this morning?”
Assuming he wasn’t talking about our nocturnal acrobatics, I calculated the distance between Evan’s room and mine; it was a big house. “Twenty feet, maybe?”
“I guessed thirty. You said you’ve not shimmered that far before?”
“Ye-es,” I said, struggling to think over my burgeoning headache. “Well, I’ve panicked and moved myself across the street, which was probably the same distance and I can get myself across a room, but through walls, that was a first.” Intentionally anyway, I thought. “I thought I’d get stuck,” I admitted, then added, “I’ve gone a lot further when Étoile held on to me. How far can she go?”
“Both she and Seren can go very far. When they were stronger, they could go even further.”
“They’ve both said that but I don’t know what they mean.”
“They had a sister once. Three is a very potent number in magic and they were stronger,” Evan replied at last.
“What happened to her sister?”
“That’s a story for another time,” said Evan, who seemed about as willing to be drawn as Seren and Étoile were. At least, I had a new little piece to their puzzle, even if I wasn’t sure what it meant yet.
“That’s what everyone else says,” I huffed.
Evan looked at me and seemed to be puzzling something in his mind. “I’ll tell you but only because it explains things about Étoile and Seren and they are your friends. Just the basics though. I don’t know a huge amount and it’s their story, not mine,” he emphasised.
“Okay.”
“Étoile is the oldest, then Seren and finally Astra. They look so alike you would, and people do, mistake them for triplets. They are, indeed, very close in age. All three born in under three years. Their family is pure magic, barely of this world at times. Their mother more so and I think that made them stronger still but the sisters are better at integrating than most of their kind. They’re like a super witch. Rare and powerful. Étoile and Seren have told you already that they can do similar things. That power is magnified when the three are together.”
“Where is Astra?” I asked.
“I’m coming to that. Étoile used to work on Wall Street, did you know that?”
I shook my head. I was surprised but when I thought about it, it made sense that she was a financial whiz. She didn’t seem to work but had a lot of money.
“She packed it in when Astra disappeared. Astra was the more flighty of the three. She was less concerned with the world, less concerned about protecting humans from us and not all that interested in concealing ourselves from them. She was getting reckless. She was starting to use magic openly and her sisters, as well as others, had to cover her mistakes. It got old very fast for them. Then one day, Astra left. Nobody was too bothered at first. She’d had an argument with her sisters and they thought she had just gone away in a huff. But she stayed away and they started getting concerned.”
“How long has she been gone?”
“Two years.”
“Can they find her?”
“They should be able to in theory; their bond is a strong one, but they can’t and because of that, they’re afraid for her. We’ve all put our feelers out but no one has seen or heard from Astra in these two years.”
“What do they think happened?”
“They know she’s alive because they would know if the bond had been severed. They think something has happened to her.” Evan didn’t have to spell out that he thought it was something terrible. “She’s unstable as it is. It isn’t good that no one can sense her anywhere. There’s another theory.”
“What’s that?”
“She’s gone stark raving mad,” he said bluntly.
“I don’t know what to say.”
“Best to say nothing. Étoile and Seren are pretty sensitive about her, worried and also, I think, a little embarrassed. They’ll find her and deal with her eventually.” Evan shrugged his shoulders. “Or, she’ll find them.” Evan didn’t sound too happy at the latter prospect.
“I hope they find her again.” I knew what it was like to lose a family. I didn’t envy them their pain.
Evan changed the topic swiftly, reminding me he was still here to teach. “So you shimmer further when you panic and when you’re...” Evan struggled for the right word before settling on, “relaxed?”
“Or not wanting to get caught barely dressed. Definitely a first.”
“Not wanting to get caught barely dressed?�
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“Next to your room,” I added to clarify, lest he get any funny ideas.
“Okay, so we need to work out a trigger for you. Something that you can control so you can actually move when you want to, not when you panic and need to.” Evan thought for a moment. “What did you do when you wanted to leave this morning?”
It was only a couple of hours ago so it wasn’t hard to remember. I had pictured my room very clearly. I felt the softness of the bed covers and the strong iron bed frame, imagined the light trickling through the curtains, the pink roses on the walls, and everything else as fully as I could until I had recreated the room in my head. I could feel the desire to be there reverberating through my bones.
“I made a picture in my head,” I told him excitedly. I could feel my blood jump as the slightest traces of electricity coursed through me. “I could see exactly where I wanted to be and I moved. It’s not like it was that far.”
“Baby steps, honey.” Evan ran his hands along my forearms and pulled me into the here and now.
“I don’t know if I can do it again.” I might have been saying one thing but my blood was telling me something else as little licks of power hit my pulse points.
“Try. Try now. Visualise my room.” Evan stood up and took a few steps towards the doors before closing them.
I breathed deeply and closed my eyes to concentrate, allowing the little surges to well in my veins now that Evan wasn’t touching me to ground me. I pictured the grey walls of his room and the big bed. I pictured the neat desk and the little stack of books. I breathed, once, twice exhaling and vanished.
The door was shut when I opened my eyes and seconds later, Evan was filling the door frame.
Illicit Magic Page 19