by Apryl Baker
“Did she ever like you? Give you any hints you’d end up together?”
He frowned again, thinking. “We’ve always been good friends, spending a lot of time together since we live right next to each other.”
“That’s not what I asked, Jeff,” I reminded him softly. “Did she ever give you any hint that she felt like that before Ethan?”
He shook his head. “No, I guess she didn’t. We didn’t really get close until after he showed up. I was the only person she trusted, and I guess our feelings just kind of grew out of that.”
“She cares a lot for you, even I can see that,” I told him. “I would even go so far as to say she loves you, but what I want you to think about is, is it the ever after kind of love, or is it survivor’s aftermath? Is it stronger than what she shares with Ethan? Strong enough to break that bond with him?”
I didn’t think anyone had ever put it to him like that before. He looked a little thunderstruck. Was he gonna go out and realize he didn’t love her? No, because he did, but maybe, just maybe, he might realize that she wasn’t going to love him the way he deserved to be loved.
“I don’t…” His phone buzzed, cutting him off. He pulled it out and frowned before he answered the phone. “What do you want, Megan?” He listened for a minute and then closed his eyes. “Megan, you can’t just put a dash of this and a pinch of that in a potion. It’s not like cooking. The measurements have to be exact.”
I smiled at the look of extreme aggravation on his face. Megan was his sister, and she’d been having issues with her potion crafting. She couldn’t quite seem to get them to do what they were supposed to, and it was because she was measuring wrong. He’d tried and tried to explain that to her, or so he’d told me.
“No, I’m a little busy right now, Megan.” He listened and winced. “No, I am not mooning over Cassie. I’m not even with her right now, I’m on a date.” He pulled the phone away from his ear, grimacing. I could hear her squealing, which made me smile wider.
“Look, I’ll call you when I get back, okay?” He sighed and shook his head. “No, you can’t do that in just an hour. It takes at least three…what do you mean you have to have it done by tomorrow?”
I laughed out loud at his outraged tone.
“Okay, okay,” he said, giving in. “Give me about twenty minutes to get back, and then we’ll Skype.”
“So I guess our date is over?” I asked once he’d shoved his phone back into his pocket.
“I’m sorry,” he muttered. “She’s having more issues than anyone I know.”
“Potions can be hard for beginners,” I soothed. “She’ll get it eventually.”
“I guess we should go,” he said and stood up.
“Melinda!”
We both turn to see Sebastian making his way toward us. Jeff gave me a questioning stare, and I smiled.
“Hey, guys,” Sebastian greeted us as he came to a skidding halt beside our table.
“We were just leaving,” I said. “Jeff needs to get home to help his sister with some homework. She’s flunking.”
“I can take you home if you want to hang out for a little while,” Sebastian offered.
This would be the perfect opportunity to start sowing my plans, but I’d brought Jeff. He didn’t have a car.
“Jeff doesn’t have a car,” I said. “We came in mine.”
“Well, then, let Jeff take the car to his place, and I’ll swing you by to pick it up.”
“If you don’t mind me driving, that’s cool,” Jeff offered.
Well now, things might be looking up after all. The Cheshire grin on my face made Jeff’s eyes go wide. He’d just figured out that Sebastian was one of the people on my hit list. Before he could back out, I nodded. “That’d be great, Jeff, thanks!”
His eyes narrowed, but I shoved the keys at him, and he was forced to take them. After a minute, he nodded and then headed out the door.
Sebastian gave me that turn your knees to butter smile and slid into the seat Jeff had vacated.
Time to begin.
Chapter Thirteen
~ Date Night 2.0 ~
“Soooo…” Sebastian drew the word out and grinned.
I laughed. I couldn’t help it. Sebastian’s good mood was infectious. He looked so teasing and conspiratorial I had to remind myself he was the enemy.
“I thought you were going to wait until tomorrow to hear all about my hot date?”
“So was it a hot date?” He gave me what I could only assume was the Caine look designed to melt the heart of any girl he bothered to even glance at. It was butterflies in the stomach, knees turning to jelly, and heartbeat thudding in your ears, all while you scarfed your favorite chocolate kind of look.
“Do you do that on purpose?” I asked.
“What?”
“That look designed to make a girl fall down at your feet.”
He laughed out loud. “Do I really do that?”
“Yeah, you do,” I said with a smile.
“Is it working on you?” His grin widened at my blush.
“There isn’t a girl alive it wouldn’t work on,” I told him. “Unfortunately, I have no desire to date you, so I’ll brush it off in a few minutes.”
“And that’s why I like you, James. My good looks don’t work on you.”
I shook my head as he ordered a cheeseburger platter. The boy sitting across from me and the one I’d gotten to know in the latter half of Jenny’s journal were so different. Maybe because he looked at me as an equal and not just a means to an end? I still needed to figure out what kind of spell they’d done that required my sister to kill herself.
“He’s the friend in town?” he asked, distracting me.
“Yeah, he and a couple of his friends are staying with my gran. Problems at their place, and Gran said they could stay with us.”
“How’s that working out?”
I made my disgusted face, and Sebastian laughed at my sour look. “You don’t sound too happy about that.”
“Yeah, well, it’s like I’m living in a soap opera at the moment,” I grouched. “I don’t have time to play Doctor Phil.”
“So your date was a Doctor Phil therapy session?” Sebastian looked at me skeptically.
“Sorta,” I said. “It all starts and ends with a girl. She’s in love with both of them, but she refuses to let one go.”
“That sucks.” Sebastian thanked the waitress as she set his food down in front of him.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Jeff is a really great guy, but he needs to just give it up. I’ve seen the way she looks at the other guy. She’ll never dump him. She loves him too much to do that to him.”
“Yeah, love can be kinda crazy, but if you find it, you should never let it go. It’s special, you know?”
“Don’t tell me The Sebastian Caine is in love?” I laughed.
His eyes became clouded, haunted. “I was.”
“Past tense?” I asked. “What happened?”
“She died,” he said simply. The pain in his voice was undeniable. “Even though she’s gone, I still love her. It’s not something that just goes away because she’s no longer here.”
The air rushed out of my lungs, and for a moment, I couldn’t breathe. His eyes were full of so much pain, it made my own heart break. He couldn’t be referring to Jenny. Could he?
“Tell me about her,” I demanded, using my Voice to make him talk. He blinked once, but nodded.
“She was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen,” he said. “Took me almost two years to work up the nerve just to ask her out. She wasn’t the kind of girl I usually dated either. No one understood what I saw in her, but they didn’t need to. Jenny was the kindest, sweetest girl I’ve ever known. She meant everything to me.”
My breath hitched. He was talking about my sister, and it sounded like he loved her.
“What happened?” I asked softly.
“She killed herself,” he said, his voice a little broken. “I didn’t know she was depre
ssed, and it’s something I think about it every day. I look back and try to figure out where I went wrong, how I couldn’t see what was going on, why I couldn’t help her. If she’d only told me, I would’ve gotten her the help she needed.”
“I’m sorry,” I told him, reeling from the information. Mind. Blown.
“I can’t believe I just told you all that,” he said, his voice bemused. “I haven’t spoken to anyone about Jenny since she died.”
“I’m a good listener.” I smiled.
He laughed, but the sound came out harsh. “I wanted us to go to college together, and then when we graduated I was going to ask her to marry me. I made so many plans. When I told the gang about it, they thought I was insane, but I wasn’t. When you love someone, you just know. I knew the minute I laid eyes on her, but it took me a long time to find the courage to talk to her.”
Wow. Jenny had gone on and on about how she didn’t think he loved her, about how mean he could be sometimes later in her journal, toward the end. This wasn’t the same person.
“Did she know how you felt?” I asked, curious.
Sebastian looked down at his food and sighed. “I want to think she did, I told her enough, but sometimes I can be a dick. I have a temper, and my mouth runs away with me. I hurt her a lot, especially in the beginning. When my friends started in on me, I even dumped her. She wasn’t like us, you know? She wasn’t part of the clique, and they were nasty to her. I didn’t want her to have to deal with that, but in the end I was selfish. I needed her and pulled her back in. I told the guys they just had to accept her, she was part of my life and that’s all there was to it. After that, things got a lot better. I started to be the person I wanted to be, you know? The person who brought her flowers every day to school, who carried her books, who took her home and stayed with her when her dad was gone on business. I was the person she wanted me to be, the person I wanted to be.”
“You really did love her, didn’t you?” I asked, dumbfounded. How did this new little tidbit of information fit into the equation? Maybe Sebastian hadn’t been in on the spell that killed her? I felt so confused. Nothing was shaping up the way I’d thought it would. First Brandon, and now Sebastian. I’d been so certain Sebastian was the bad guy. Maybe whatever spell they were using on Jenny made her see him as the bad guy? It sounded like his little gang of wannabes hadn’t wanted him and Jenny together. Could they have made her think he didn’t love her?
“More than anything else in the world, James.”
“I’m so sorry, Sebastian,” I whispered. “I may have misjudged you.”
He quirked a brow in question.
“I just assumed you were this shallow pretty boy who wasn’t capable of real feelings.”
“You know what they say about the word assume, dontcha, James?”
I grinned. Maybe I was wrong, and Sebastian Caine could be saved. “Yeah, and I guess I’m guilty. It’s just the group you hang out with seem to be that way too. You aren’t like them, though, are you?”
“I’ve known them since before we went to school,” he confessed. “Our parents are friends, so we all grew up together, had play dates and stuff. We’ve just always been friends.”
“We are defined by the company we keep,” I told him. “Your friends are…”
“They take a bit of getting used to,” he agreed. “They’re not so bad once you get to know them, especially now that we can do magic.”
“Are you sure you know what you’re doing, Sebastian?” I asked. “Playing with magic isn’t like playing with a new toy. There are consequences, prices to be paid for using it.”
He sighed. “Sometimes, I think about that, and I wonder if maybe Jenny was my price.”
“What do you mean?”
“When we started doing the magic, I used to get these mood swings, and my temper would explode. Jenny sometimes took the brunt of it. Trust me, I feel bad about it, and I did my best to make it up to her after we got back together, but I wonder, you know? What if because I was so engrossed in all this, that’s why Jenny slipped through my fingers, why I didn’t see how depressed she was. Maybe I could have saved her if I wasn’t playing with magic.”
“Sebastian, anyone can do magic, but that doesn’t mean they should. Witches are born with an innate ability of magic. It’s who they are, and they’re genetically designed to be able to do it, to handle the power that comes with it. Ordinary people can dabble in it, play with it, even grow to be very good at it, but they aren’t supposed to be using it. Humans who do usually end up getting overwhelmed and give in to the darker desires of magic.”
“Let me guess, you’re a natural born witch, James?”
I nodded. “Yeah, born and raised. I understand the power high you get from practicing, but I’m worried about all of you. Do you even know what a dark witch is?”
“No,” he said. “I haven’t heard that term before.”
“A dark witch is one who has given up his or her soul to dark magic. All the good in them dies, and their soul is forever damaged. There’s no coming back from it either. Once you surrender your soul, that’s it, game over.”
“We don’t do dark magic.” He frowned, his face a mix of alarm and curiosity.
“Are you sure about that?” I asked. “When I first met Mandy, her eyes were dark, the black in them almost overpowering everything else. You had some of that in your eyes too, Sebastian.”
He just stared at me.
“Would you even know the difference between good magic and dark magic?” I pressed.
“We don’t do dark magic,” he told me, his voice hard.
I sighed. I didn’t think there was anything I could say at this point to convince him, but maybe if I showed him, he’d understand.
I opened my hand, careful that only he could see. A rose started to grow. It unfurled and sat there, looking fat and healthy. “This is good magic. It creates life, gives stability to things around it.” I then made the rose wither and die. “This is dark magic. It kills, takes the life out of the things around it.”
Sebastian’s eyes grew wide. I didn’t know if it was because of my abilities, or he recognized the difference between good and dark magic. “Think about it,” I told him. “Go home and think about all the magic you’ve done. Why did you do it, what happened after? Did anything bad happen, even something small? Can you do that for me, Sebastian?”
He nodded, his face troubled. He didn’t even finish his food, just paid the bill and took me home. Not that I blamed him, mind you. I’d given him a lot to think about. I hoped I was wrong about him, that he was a good person at heart. He might not even know about the spell cast on Jenny. He could be just as much a victim as she was in all this.
I didn’t go in right away, despite the cold. Instead, I sat down on the porch swing. Sebastian had thrown me, and I needed time to think about it, about what that might mean for my grand plans of revenge. The simple task of killing them all had now grown into saving some of them. How had I managed to get so far off course? I couldn’t kill innocent people, though. Brandon wasn’t even a part of their group when Jenny died, and now I didn’t think Sebastian even knew what they did to her.
“Not so black and white anymore, huh, Rose?”
My head whipped around to see Xavier leaning against the porch railing. How had I not seen him sneak up on me? He had to be freezing in the jeans and gray sweater he wore, but he didn’t look at all cold. He looked perfectly at ease.
Xavier always knew way too much. How did he know what I was thinking? Had he been somewhere in the café and I hadn’t seen him?
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said, playing dumb.
The grin he gave me was wicked and sexy all at once. Things started to clench in places they shouldn’t be. “When are you going to realize you can’t lie to me? I can smell it on you.”
He could smell a lie? That wasn’t possible. “Just what are you?”
“I already told you the price of that information, Melinda,” he s
aid and winked. “All you have to do is say yes.”
Why did I feel like I’d be saying yes to a lot more than just dinner? I shook my head. That was even more ridiculous than his so-called ability to smell a lie.
“Why is so important for me to go out with you? Why not just tell me?”
“Because I need you to trust me, Melinda,” he said, his voice so serious it gave me pause. “You saying yes is a step toward that trust.”
“Why?” I asked, frustrated.
He simply smiled. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
I watched as he simply leapt off the porch and started walking down the drive. I stared until he’d disappeared into the darkness. He confused me almost as much as my new situation. I needed to rethink my plans. Whoever killed my sister would suffer the same fate, but if there truly were innocent people in that group, I had to try and protect them.
This had gotten way too complicated, and I needed help.
My first instinct was to call my dad, but I wasn’t honestly sure what the Council could do. They were humans, not witches. Sure, they were playing with magic, but lots of humans did. Didn’t mean the Council went after all of them. There wasn’t an incident in the last hundred years involving a human coven that I knew of. The Council would be all but useless. It wasn’t designed to deal with humans. The human law wasn’t designed to deal with humans playing with magic either. I’d never be able to prove in a court of law they’d killed Jenny.
I just didn’t know what to do!
My head started to pound. I groaned and stood up. Maybe after a good night’s sleep things would look better in the morning.
Chapter Fourteen
~ The Protector ~
After spending the last few hours researching Protectors, I gave up and called my dad. Gran might know, but there wasn’t a chance in hell I’d ask her. It would earn me a session of The Spanish Inquisition. Gran was very good at nosing out exactly what I was up to, so the best thing to do was not even mention it to her.