Lusions were prone to bouts of ups and downs, but what’s that saying? We’re all mad here? Yes, and everyone had their moments, paranormal or not. Yoga would probably help my water element, and while I didn’t want to impose just yet, I’d take Gregory up on his offer in a week or two.
After oily and sugary-sweet Chinese doughnuts soaked up some more of my alcohol and we were loading our plates into the dishwasher, the doorbell made a pleasant chiming sound of five notes. “Anytime the bell rings, whoever is outside has to be invited in, or they won’t be able to cross the threshold,” Maddi explained. “The safety spell has been placed on all doors and windows. That bell is for me.”
When she walked back into the kitchen with a guy, Gregory and Stan nodded at him and said casual hellos.
“This is Tomas,” Maddi said with a sprawling grin, “my boyfriend.”
“Congratulations,” Tomas said to me and Rose with a silky accent that was as charming as it was distracting. My breath was nearly sucked clean out of my chest. He had full dark curly hair, and I would have sworn he was wearing undetectable eyeliner, smudged to perfection, but I figured it that’s just how his eyelashes were. Maddi could land any guy she wanted in the city, and she happened to be great at picking. “You did a phenomenal job, and I would have picked you both myself.”
“I hope you’re not our only fan,” I told him, knowing that was the nicest thing he could have said to us rosy-nosed initiates. “Hundreds of people aren’t liking me and Rose very well. I’m Helaine—Laurence I should say.”
I stood up to shake his hand and Rose did too.
“Stan’s first years were rough too. We just cleared out all of his hate mail a few weeks ago—made a celebration of it, but it will calm down,” Tomas assured us.
“Beer?” Gregory asked Tomas, tilting his locked head of hair to the large growler on the table.
“No, we’re going to go, but thank you. Next time?”
Gregory nodded.
With curfew approaching, I wasn’t sure exactly where they were off to.
“Enjoy the night, I’ll see you tomorrow,” Maddi said, reaching for Tomas’s hand before they walked out of the room. Their footsteps stayed in the house and carried up to the second floor.
Rose got eerily quiet, and I knew the expression on her face. It showed up every time she caught more than she needed to know, and Maddi and Tomas must have had intense energy. And by intense energy, I meant the sexual kind. What else was there?
“W…” She looked in their direction, and then back at Stan and Gregory.
“You’re allowed to?” I added.
“As long as the Coven members are inside these walls by four a.m., no rules are being broken,” Gregory explained. “Anyone else can stay over, as long as they’re invited in, you just can’t stay over anywhere else, not for ten years.”
“I’m sorry, it just didn’t occur to me,” Rose said, drunk off the surprise. I thought her blue hair would give her the confidence to pretend that she wasn’t as coy as she really was, but I stood corrected. She was independent and never really needed romance, but it didn’t mean that she didn’t want it, especially when she could feel what it meant to others. Rose was far more complicated than the open book I was, more like a painting that switched between the mediums of acrylics and watercolours. What texture is this?
“You have my frame of mind then,” Gregory said. “I’m here for the Coven and have my friends outside of it, but my focus is on protecting the city. After Rudolph and Treya… I’m even more traditional about waiting to look for a marriage partner until my years are up. But you do still have a life inside these walls, you know,” he said to Rose. “You just can’t have relationships with other Coven members until you’re a bonafide member, two years in, and in that case, you just need to disclose it. So as long as you two aren’t secretly in love,” he said to Rose and I, lightheartedly, “you’ll be fine.”
“We were raised as sisters,” I said with a smile. “No worries.”
“I only ask because I’m looking out for you. Tomorrow you’ll meet your mentors, and they’ll explain more. If you have questions though, I’ll always help when I can.”
“Who will our mentors be?” I had to ask.
“You’ll find out tomorrow,” Gregory said with finality. I liked him a lot, and not just because he was cute. He was level-headed, and people liked to be around earth witches because they were generally genuine and helpful. I was after my independence like no other, but it was nice to still have a nurturer around. “Since only one acting Coven member can be a mentor at a time, we will be calling in a retired witch of our choosing.”
“Can witches who were exiled from the Coven come back to mentor?” Rose asked hopefully. She was alluding to Grandpa Dave, and it would be brilliant if they brought him back to mentor Rose. He was a raincloud of an old man, but I loved him to bits.
“You’ll find out tomorrow,” Gregory said with resistance. “I can’t give everything away. Maybe try and get some sleep tonight?”
“That’s our cue,” I said to Rose, “and I for one am exhausted. Thanks for the beer.”
We were all off on a good foot, but I was ready to fly. These weren’t just my new comrades, they were my new friends. We needed to get along if we wanted to protect the city. I couldn’t wait until training started so I could show everyone what I was capable of—especially my mentor.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Mentor
Rose
It felt like my life took off at warp speed without me, leaving me behind in a wake of dark matter, and clouding my vision with fragments of things I didn’t yet understand. I was abandoned with my new powers on the dark side of the moon and found myself utterly drained once my adrenaline was exhausted. I ended going straight to sleep last night in my sterile room. It reminded me of a dorm or a barren white vacation rental, but it was clean and a little chilly, just how I liked it. I knew they’d let me personalize the space but I wasn’t sure when. Regardless, I took my purple crocheted blanket from Aunt Kalista out of my suitcase.
Yesterday was exhausting, but the frustration was worse. The pulsing, passionate energy I had to channel to make fire… I wasn’t used to it.
I recited my new time frame out loud the next morning when I woke before the sun, blue hair splayed across my pillow, working at turning the white cover sky blue.
“Three months until the trial is over and its official initiation. Two years until initiate status changes into bonafide Coven member. Eight years left after that to save the world.”
The sun was just barely up, and the bathroom on the third floor was vacant, so I took a shower and then intended to head out to the courtyard to practice forms, stretch, and get mentally prepared for meeting my mentor. I loved getting up earlier than everyone else. It allowed me to focus, and even though I liked people, knowing the world was mine and only mine for an hour every day gave me serenity.
There was one other room on the third floor. I saw the open door and peeked inside for signs of life. Though it was dark, I could make out an unmade bed with no one in it. The oils being diffused within the room smelled like wooden boards that had been left out in the sun, a faint scent of fresh dew with a note of pine; masculine. The space belonged to Gregory or Stan.
I was sure no one was awake yet as I descended the stairs from the third floor. No lights were on in the living room.
As I walked through the archway into the white kitchen motion-censored lights blinked on. The skylight from the conservatory did well to illuminate the back of the room with the first signs of triumphant morning light.
I noticed that tea was on in the kitchen in a stainless steel pot next to the sink. An empty cream-colored mug sat next to it.
No one was around.
I put on coffee, and while it was brewing, I would practice forms outside in the courtyard. After only a few steps, I was in the conservatory. Glass separated me from the dark blue sky of the morning, and I could feel the energy all aro
und me, amplifying mine.
I spotted herbs, vegetables, and even flowers in the three rows of leafy planters that were as tall as my waist. Vines cascaded from the ceiling and grew into the walkway on either side, and I took care not to step on them. It would have been a shame to trim and tame them. I exited double wooden doors to get into the courtyard, breathing in the cool morning air.
A brown wicker patio set rested on the edge of the inset compass rose. The concrete sundial in the center of the patio looked much smaller than when I had first spied it last night from Helaine’s fourth-floor window.
The grass was still dewy, and my bare feet stung with coldness, a feeling I had almost forgotten. They warmed as I moved. I exhaled from the bottom of my lungs instead of shouting, as to not wake anyone, repeating the movements over and over. I couldn’t drop into a class for three more months and didn’t want to forget anything. Had I ended up at university, martial arts would have been my main focus, but now I was an initiate on the London Coven, showing that I had an interest in learning history and obeying my mentor, whom I would see every day for the next three months.
The jumbled emotions that pulsed through my body yesterday, that excited and thrilled me, stirring the innate primal instincts within the core of my being, had almost been too much to take. As I went through each movement of my form, the frustration ebbed, and I began to feel normal.
I found myself selfishly hoping that my mentor was a woman, someone I could talk about these things about without conversations getting awkward. Last night I hoped Dave would be appointed to me, but there was no way I could talk to him about fire and the mass amounts of aggravation I had brought upon myself for choosing to feed it. What I needed in a mentor was an Aunt Jen who could keep a secret—more or less an Aunt Kalista type.
“What is that called?”
I spun around to see Stan, who hadn’t dare interrupt me until I finished the form for the sixth time. He had a cream-colored teacup in one hand and looked sluggish but awake. His ebony hair still had some style to it, which meant he hadn’t went to sleep yet following the auditions. He was still wearing his same sweatshirt and fitted jeans from last night.
Had he heard what I was thinking? Shit.
“It’s called Pal Gae Chil Jung, from Taekwondo,” I said out loud, hoping he was too tired to have noticed my thoughts about prospective mentors. “It helps clear my mind in the morning.”
“It’s time to seize the day then,” Stan said with a slight grin.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I’m your mentor. I go to sleep in about two hours, so carpe diem, grasshopper.”
With no further formality to his statement, I followed him back inside and agreed to spend two hours listening to Stan, who was to be my mentor for two long years. I grabbed my coffee and we sat in the conservatory, on the white wicker furniture that faced the kitchen island. The greenhouse was to the back of us, and the rooms could have been partitioned by folding doors. I expected the appointment of my mentor to be a huge event, but something told me that Stan wasn’t about the frills.
“Mind if I have some of your coffee?” he asked, gesturing to the pot.
“Not at all,” I told him, and when he received the word he pulled a thermos from the cabinet. It wasn’t my coffee, and I could always make more.
“That’s not decaf.” Never was never will be. “Aren’t you going to sleep soon?” I could drink coffee all day, but I could also slightly rearrange my sleepiness by using my powers.
“I need to understand you,” he said, his lack of eye contact a mystery.
I watched him pour something from the fridge into his coffee; cream I thought. His sweatshirt obscured his form as much as his ceremonial cloak did, making his body type appear average, though in my opinion, I figured there couldn’t be anything average about him. The spirit element attracted outliers and non-conformists. I was one, and perhaps he was even stranger than me. He joined me after grabbing a large book off of the kitchen island that wasn’t there when I passed through earlier, throwing it on the wicker end table, and settling into one of the bone white chairs with his red thermos.
“My name is Stan and I’ll be your mentor.”
“Yeah, I kind of got that,” I replied. He was still difficult to read, and I figured the Mages appointed him to me so I couldn’t manipulate his feelings or attention into letting me out of lessons early.
“Avereis, they make me say that. I have to honor tradition.”
“I understand,” I said, shutting my mouth, tucking a blue strand of hair behind my ear, away from the black coffee I held in my right hand. I tucked my freezing feet underneath me. It was odd to be cold, and I supposed my powers were just a little off from yesterday. “What’s your last name?”
“I don’t have one,” he said.
Lies, I thought.
I went by a nickname during initiate status, Stan’s voice echoed in my head, as I realized he heard my last thought. That was wonderful—especially when it was hard for me to read his emotions. Someone was finally pulling the wool over my empath instincts, and it was itchy.
“What was it?” I asked out loud.
“That’s none of your concern. Stan is fine.”
“Noted.”
“So you’re an amalgam? Witch. Changeling.”
“Yes, my heritage is a combination of more than one subculture. My mother is a Bathory but I didn’t get those powers. My brother didn’t either. He got nothing. Not that that’s a bad thing.”
“Grayson.” He nodded. “They gave me a file on you.”
My expression turned into a grimace, and I settled on taking another long gulp of my bitter black coffee. Just as I didn’t know what his smirk from earlier meant, Stan didn’t seem to grasp my grimace. Not without directed thoughts to go with it. I despised that there was some file on me and that the Mages and Coven thought they knew me. I frowned again at the thought of Paper Rose.
“I have a brother too,” he said, as if offering me a rare glance into his life and then doing the Stan thing and shutting it down. “The main point of the first lesson is me telling you that this won’t be easy. It’s a warning. These next two years are going to be difficult, to say the least. There has never been a Changeling in the Coven, and certainly not one that chose to be Fire. Let’s hope you make it.”
It sounded like a threat to me.
“I’m sure I want to do this,” I reminded him. “I want to train my element, and you’ll help me, yes?”
“I will, after your house arrest is over.”
“What?” I groaned. It was then that I realized he was looking me over, but maybe not as creepily as the boys at the pre-initiation social had. His eyes weren’t always locked on mine, and he read my body, much like how’d I’d read someone’s body language in sparring to see where they would try to strike next. It was almost like he could see through me, and I shuddered in hoping that x-ray vision wasn’t a power he had. Was he looking for my subtle reactions to the information he gave me?
“There is to be no elemental training until the winter solstice. You must first accept how difficult this will be and study the history so that you will not make the same mistakes as others. This book,” he gestured to the one on the wicker coffee table, “contains information on all of the fire witches before you. It tells you what individual attainments they’ve unlocked through their trials and what their gift powers were.”
“What are attainments?”
“It’s rare that anyone outside of the Coven knows about them,” Stan explained. “They are individual challenges having to do with spell-casting, energy, and magic. Some of them have time limits. When you complete twenty trials and win attainments, it shows your proficiency and you are allowed to keep your elemental powers after you leave the Coven. You need to read up on the histories of fire witches, especially the more discrete ones before the reform.”
I was finally able to catch some emotion off of him, a desire, and I knew there was something
important that he wasn’t telling me.
“What are you holding back?”
“If you fail, I do too,” said Stan. “I get a mark on my clean record. I really want to stay here. The Coven is a different world, and where you came from doesn’t matter… once your first two years are up and you are no longer receiving death threats.” Was that a smile? “Here, you’re your own person, and I’m not going to let you ruin things for me.”
“Let me ruin things for you?” I scoffed. “They appointed me the least experienced person in the Coven, no offense, and expect you to teach the most difficult initiate there ever was?”
“Yes. Read up on the previous fire witches, and we will discuss them tomorrow—or I mean tonight when I’m done sleeping. I suggest you adhere to my schedule.”
“I get up early,” I said. “You have to be kidding me. Rearrange my whole system to fit your schedule?” Ah no, his room is next to mine, isn’t it?
It is, Avereis. We’re neighbors.
“I passed initiation with flying colors and got a shiny new power to go with it. If you want your gift power in two years, I’d suggest you do everything you can. Avereis, you had better have those witches memorized by this evening.”
His ability to switch from telepathy to actual speech was confusing, but I didn’t miss a beat. I loved growing up around Yves and Imogen even more now.
“I’m sure your files say that I got into King’s College on a full scholarship,” I told him. “I’ll be as ready as Paper Rose could ever hope to be.”
“Who is Paper Rose?”
But a knock at the front door interrupted us.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “If you’re my mentor, and there can only be one active Coven member mentoring at a time, then who is Helaine’s mentor?”
“That would be me,” said a man walking into the kitchen behind Helaine.
He was five foot nine, with dark hair and a graying goatee. He wore—and by wore I mean always wore—a coal black suit jacket over a chalk white shirt and blue jeans, and thin black gloves stretched across his hands.
Death's Primordial Kiss (The Silvered Moon Diaries Book 1) Page 11