I tried to fix this situation for Helaine, but Stan’s comment wasn’t fueled by emotion and therefore wasn’t something I could easily change. At least he didn’t feel bad about it. I couldn’t get a clear read on him.
You just wait until my powers expand, I thought, and then realized it was inner dialogue.
“I count on it,” Stan said directly to me, and I felt the blood rush to my face.
“Looks like we each have one strike now,” Helaine said, nudging me in the arm.
Gregory and Maddi let out laughs, which neither Helaine or I were expecting. They were the oldest and most mature, and just as I had expected them to judge us for our indiscretions, they weren’t taking us too seriously.
“Stanley teaches us a lot about ourselves, often,” Maddi says. “With senses of humor like that you’ll fit in fine. Don’t worry about any more rules tonight. Get to know your new home.”
“Which means picking out rooms. There are two rooms with open doors on the third and fourth floors,” Gregory shared. “They’re the same size, but you can fight over them if you want.” He looked at my bag of weapons. “Or maybe not you two. A game of rock paper scissors would be preferable to you breaking our furniture. This is your home now, and we think that it has its very own personality.”
“I’m dying for Chinese takeaway,” Maddi said. “Is that alright for dinner?”
“Sure,” I said, as everyone else agreed.
“We’ll get to know each other tonight then, and tomorrow, the real fun begins. Don’t think you have to stay in your dresses, either. I love the ceremony of it all, but you should be comfortable since you’re stuck inside of this house for three months.”
“Thank you,” I said for the both of us.
“Take your time. Just meet us in the kitchen in an hour or so?” Maddi asked.
“Sure. And really, thank you so much. We’ll do our best,” I told her.
“You better,” Gregory said seriously.
He and Maddi burst out laughing when Helaine and I looked at each other, horrified, and Stan even gave us a small smile. Or was it a grimace?
Helaine steered me towards the foot of the stairs, and we exchanged mutual glances as we paused at the first step. We looked up towards the five-step stairwell with a landing that twisted up to the right. The first-floor stairwell was full of photographs from the witches who had been in the Coven before us. It had to be the first stop all new initiates made.
We walked up the stairs together to look for our family members.
“There’s Dave!” I yelled, pointing out my grandfather. “He looks so young!”
“Far less grumpy,” Helaine conceded.
“Where is your mom?” I asked.
“Mum is…here!” Helaine pointed out. “And far less tattooed.”
“Still tiny though, not a testament to her personality at all.” I paused and grinned. “I wonder who else on this wall got kicked out or left.”
“Onyx has got to be here somewhere… there!”
“He’s standing two over from your mom!”
Onyx was a friend of the family’s, and also an earth witch who served with Helaine’s mom. He went missing during an undercover operation and fate led him over to The Hallowed Locus, back when it was just beginning. He knew our parents and their friends. It slipped my mind to look for him at auditions today.
“So much has changed in twenty years,” I said.
“Except Onyx always wearing black gloves,” Helaine shot back. He had his trademark black gloves on in the photo, and his full and fuzzy-looking jet black hair was a little longer than the last time I had seen him.
“I wonder what we’ll do here to change it.”
“Well, it’s just the beginning. Let’s go.”
I followed Helaine up the next flight of stairs to the right after the landing. We passed the second floor, as there were no vacancies, and the stairwell twisted upwards again.
We took our suitcases up to the third-floor landing and looked around. It contained three doors and a small window, before continuing to the next floor. A beige tweed carpet covered most of the landing, with hardwood floors beneath. Creamy, latte-colored walls surrounded us.
“There are two rooms on the third,” I told Helaine, “too bad one’s taken. We could have been roommates.”
“It’s not like we won’t see each other, stuck inside this house for three months.”
“Point.”
We turned on the light to the open room, and it was stark white, but not unbearably uncomfortable. It had a full-size bed and a white comforter, and gorgeous built-ins and crown molding on the walls. After today I just wanted to sleep and wasn’t so concerned about decorating.
Unable to claim a room until we saw both of them, we wandered up to the fourth floor to check that room out too. Peeking my head into it, I saw that the layout was different, but it was the same bank slate as the room on the third-floor. I had a fleeting thought about the witches who lived here a month ago. Was everything moved out magically? Did they have time to pack? Were their rooms splashed with white paint the moment their feet hit the doorstep?
While I was thinking, so was Helaine, and her thoughts were directed at the closed door at the end of the hall.
“That’s the door to the attic,” she said. “That’s where my mum lived while she wasn’t allowed to leave for four years. I want that room.”
“You’ll have to settle for the one down the hall,” I reminded her. “Though it would be sentimental and awfully sweet if someone switched with you.”
Her fingers itched idly at her neck.
“They’ve been here so long that I can’t expect that of anyone. I just want to see it.”
“In five to seven years it’s yours,” I reminded her. “I’ll take the third-floor room.”
“Thank you.” Helaine grew silent a minute, setting her things in the empty fourth-floor room.
“Look, Helaine,” I instructed in awe, walking over to the window of her room that looked out into the courtyard. She joined me in front of the chilly glass window.
“The garden is brilliant. These floors wrap around it.”
Each floor had tall ceilings and encased the courtyard on a different side. A compass rose was inlaid into the garden’s concrete, and I could still make it out being this high up. I would bet anything that’s where we’d do most of our rituals at.
“I can’t believe that we’re here,” I said.
“Me either.” Helaine cocked her head to the side and I felt judgment off of her, but it was soon replaced by curiosity. “You slag,” She said jokingly.
“What?” I asked, hardly offended.
“The off the shoulder design and the huge slit in your dress. You channeled emotions to make fire.”
“That was the plan, and I’m not sorry.”
“Brilliant,” she hissed, as if she wished she would have thought of it.
The plan was to summon confidence so that I didn’t psych myself out. My clothes had more to do with channeling the sultry side of myself than impressing any boys my age. I hadn’t met that side before today, and she was already up to some shenanigans I didn’t approve of.
“There is something else I should have told you…”
“What is it?”
“I should tell you why I picked fire. I think now is the time.”
“Why does it sound like you’re about to confess something…” My unblinking best friend raised a dark red eyebrow.
“It’s something no one knows. Before I was born, there was a prophecy told about me.”
“Okay…”
“Grandpa Dave told me, and… the Seer from the Isle of Shrouded Souls said I would be a powerful force for good. The strongest amalgam our world has ever seen. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, but I thought if you knew, that you wouldn’t try as hard to get into the Coven.”
I felt relief emanate from Helaine.
“Brittany had a dream that I would get in as Water, and I didn’t
tell you,” Helaine confessed.
We both burst out in contagious giggles, our similarly nuanced laughter echoing through the hall. When we kept something from each other it wasn’t for very long.
“Does the Coven know?”
“I don’t think so, and I’m not ready to tell them.”
I knew that we should probably tell the Coven about the prophecy, but I didn’t want to be the one to cause trouble within the first hour I was at the mews house. It seemed like something I should burden my mentor with before anyone else, and I would soon meet the most influential witch of my life. Tomorrow, I’d meet the mentor that the Coven and Mages picked for me, the one I’d learn under for two long years.
Tomorrow, training began.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
One of the Gang
Helaine
After spending eighteen years in my apartment building, the paradoxically long and short span that made up my entire life, I had a new home. This mew’s house in central London was everything, and it was the same one that my mother had called her home for four years. She didn’t end up serving her whole time, being too busy with reforming the Coven’s entire foundation, but even though I was away from her, I felt even closer to her now.
As I pulled my asymmetrical tunic down over my thighs, I realized the girl in my stand up mirror looked a lot like my mother. Though I had my dad’s brown eyes, my mom and I were still petite redheads, and I knew I looked a lot like she did when she was initiated at eighteen.
I put black leggings on under my red tunic and shut the lid on my suitcase. I’d unpack straight away, or at least sometime in the next two weeks. Maybe. As I climbed back down the winding staircase to meet the others for dinner, Rose heard me coming and walked down with me, still annoyingly giddy about our new living arrangements and destinies. After auditions today, I was starving for Maddi’s Chinese take away, and my nerves didn’t help.
I wasn’t completely anxious, but I felt pressure for the Coven to like me and felt a need to impress upon them the best Helaine I could design. I knew they had reasons for picking me, and that I should be myself and to hell with everything else, but our first dinner together was going to be as intimidating as could be.
The kitchen was bone white and so shiny that your eyes slipped effortlessly over every glossy corner. An opening in the wall led to a gorgeous leafy green conservatory with a glass roof and skylights. I loved how the green plants spilled into the kitchen, though I knew that studying herbs and elixirs was my weakest point. They never interested me much.
“Did you find everything okay?” Gregory asked me and Rose.
“Yes, thank you,” Rose said, as polite as ever.
“It’s your home now too, so I hope everything is to your liking, and in time you can decorate your rooms. Focus on making it to official initiation right now. I’m sure you will. Honestly, everyone usually does.” Gregory’s grin enforced all of the points he made.
I echoed with a smile.
The three of them had changed out of their ceremonial cloaks along with me and Rose, who predictably changed into denim jeans. Maddi had on a low cut purple top that left an exposed glimpse of skin between its bottom hem and her leggings. Gregory wore sweatpants and a t-shirt that matched as if by accident, and Stan had on dark wash jeans and a black sweatshirt.
We made our plates from the spread of food on the massive kitchen island that housed a deep farm sink, and then sat around the dining table that separated the kitchen from the living area. Maddi had ordered way too much.
“I know there is a lot of food to choose from,” Maddi told us. “You’ll realize that free things are thrown in all the time. It’s kind, but can be exhausting.”
As Coven members, we were given a monthly stipend averaged with the other careers in the underground, and it was paid from the witches’ long-standing treasury. There were other perks, like mass amounts of Chinese food, and endorsements for clothes and items sold in the underground.
I almost missed my mouth with a forkful of white rice, because my eyes were fixated on a large alabaster china cabinet on the wall behind the wooden plank table. It was a spell cabinet, and in it was everything we needed to make spells, elixirs, and magic. I knew that along with being guarded by the eye, that it was probably also secured by a magical and unbreakable lock.
“Cheers to you,” Gregory said, pouring us all a glass of beer as soon as we settled around the table, breaking my gaze from the spell cabinet’s drawers and doors. “I brew my own.”
“If you don’t like it, please say something,” Maddi said. “Stan doesn’t drink much and I didn’t like beer when I was eighteen.”
I took a long sip and thanked Gregory. It had a hint of honey and was smooth as could be. This was the second adult beverage I had ever consumed because I knew that my dad would find out instantaneously when I did anything dodgy. Having a father who could read minds and even control people left no room for unscripted adventure in my life. But here I was as Helaine Laurence, Water witch, living at the Mew’s House, and equal to my father at only eighteen years of age, on my first day as a legal adult.
“We want to introduce our elements and explain ourselves better,” Maddi said, setting down her fork. “Informally and without all of the ceremony. You know I’m Air, but what you might not know is that my symbol is Gemini, my zodiac sign.” Her symbol sat on a short wire, nestled into the dark skin of her throat. It was a proud and powerful place to wear one’s symbol. “Gemini happens to be an Air sign, and I chose it because I like to see all sides of people and situations. I think it brings wisdom. I come from a matriarchy of witches and a lineage of Spriggans. I’ve always wanted to be here.”
“I always loved the first day of class,” Gregory said, pouring himself another foaming glass of beer. “I’m Gregory, my element is Earth. I’m the oldest so sometimes I’m bossy, but I’m really just here to help you. I joined the Coven to help investigate and solve supernatural crimes—”
“And sometimes he takes them all on by himself,” Maddi interjected. “I’m not one for death scenes or funerals, however, I did warn Gregory that the two of you might be interested and he will have to share. I’m afraid we’ll become too marginalized and the Mages won’t approve. We’re not supposed to have departments, so please interject if you want in on the murders. I mean, solving the murders.”
“I want in,” I said with a huge grin. I had joined for the same reason as Gregory.
“As I was saying, I joined to investigate and keep the streets safe. My symbol is Earth.” He pulled his hemp necklace out from behind his t-shirt, flexing his arm, as Maddi poured me another glass of beer. The last time a homely looking witch ended up in the Coven was never. All I needed was to see one of my coworkers through beer goggles on the first night, but wasting the aesthetic of it all—meaning Gregory himself—would have been far worse. I had a thing for older guys too. I didn’t mean that I liked him, but if it happened someday, I wasn’t talking myself out of it. It was too early to know, and I didn’t have strict rules like some of my friends. Sitting next to me. On my right.
I needed to take this glass slower and suppressed a burp as I tried to even out my booze to Kung Pow ratio.
“It’s a cross with a circle around it,” Gregory explained. “I’m also a Lusion, so therefore, my body heals and I’m confined to the earth, so it’s as generic as it is a good fit. It’s also why I investigate the violent crimes. No one can kill me. Stan?”
“You may think I look familiar,” Stan said. “I don’t.”
“You will now with us living in the same house,” I retorted.
Stan gave me a disapproving look to tell me he received my smartass message, but he still wasn’t the least bit enthused to talk about himself. The way he narrowed his eyes—you could tell he had that steely look down, the one that either said, “I’m judging you,” or “I’m effortlessly being sexy but I’m not exactly aware of it.” Both had confidence, but at the same time, it still felt like there w
as a deep river of misunderstanding between us. He had to be closer to me and Rose in age, but since we got to the house he’d been acting more like a Mage. Perhaps he was just feeling us out, but Rose and I didn’t have much to hide… except that she didn’t tell me about the prophecy. The beer did make it sting less.
“I’m Spirit. It’s my third year here,” Stan stated idly.
“What’s your symbol?” Rose pressed from the right of me.
He pulled a string from underneath his hoodie. It was a symmetrical u-shape.
“Pluto,” Rose said. “The planet of mysteries and hidden information.”
“Always wears a hoodie,” I added.
Rose sniggered and gave us a light-hearted smile before she spoke. “I always thought Pluto should be a planet like it was a long time ago. I think it’s a great symbol.”
Stan looked at her blankly, enforcing the fact that the planet of mysteries and hidden information was a sure fit.
“And I see dead people,” Stan finished with a shrug. “Either of you want to have a go?” He asked me and Rose.
“Well I’m Rose,” she said. “But you do call me Avereis now. I placed second last spring in the black belt division at the Taekwondo championship of greater London, and up until yesterday, I was going to be an undeclared major at King’s College. Now I’m here and I’m the first to initiate under an element that wasn’t part of my witch heritage. Cheers.”
“Laurence,” I said. “My talents include summoning and heating water.”
“And dumping boys the night before the spring dance,” Rose shot at me.
“That too. If this beer wasn’t putting me in such a great mood, I’d fight you.”
“Let’s not fight in the house,” Gregory said. “You should see the courtyard though. Plenty of room to get out excess energy there. I do yoga in the courtyard for anxiety, and you can join me in the afternoons if you’d like. I’m even out there in winter.”
Death's Primordial Kiss (The Silvered Moon Diaries Book 1) Page 10