“You know what it is, don’t you? You know who he is.”
“If I tell you before I speak to Onyx today, then I lose my boost. That’s all I’m saying.”
“Is he a sociopath? Tell me,” I commanded, even though I knew I had little sway without using my powers.
Helaine was about to brush me off again when suddenly her eyes narrowed as if she heard something I didn’t. “What’s that sound?”
“It’s the piano?”
“Who’s playing?”
We walked through the conservatory and kitchen to see that it was Stan in the living room, a melody pouring from his fingertips. I had forgotten that there was an upright piano just to the right of the dining table and spell cabinet. There weren’t artists in my family. We were scholars and martial artists—and then there was Grayson—but no one was a musician. Helaine had taken a year of violin until a sparring accident broke one of her fingers.
Maddi flew down the steps in a hurry. Only the right side of her burgundy hair was curled. An asymmetrical pattern of five braids twisted off just behind her ear into loose waves. The left side of her hair fell straight.
“Just let him play,” she warned, “sometimes this happens for hours.”
“Is he okay?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Maddi said, but a sadness came from her. She nodded for us to follow her around the corner into the kitchen, and the classical melody continued without interruption.
“He’s been alright during your lessons, yeah?”
“He’s been Stan,” I said honestly.
“Sometimes this happens. He can’t even hear us at the moment. Usually, something triggers it, but I’m not always sure if it has to. I just know he’ll be fine. Tea?”
I could tell that Maddi cared about him a lot, the way in which she cared for all of us. She understood that the world was against us, so we had to be a team, a family of friends. Helaine and I couldn’t have been more right for this job.
We set our practice knives down on the kitchen table to have tea with Maddi and noticed the high stacks of sorted letters.
Stan had no letters, Gregory had a few, and Maddi had the most, though our piles were almost as big as Maddi’s, which worried me.
“These are them? Aren’t they?” I asked.
Maddi smiled cheekily, twisting one of the straight strands of her hair around her finger, realizing she had been interrupted mid-styling. I still wasn’t sure if her aim was to save us from Stan or Stan from us.
“Some people leave their initiate hate mail for later or burn it. Stan opened the first half of his and then saved the rest to burn a few months ago. Some of them might be good letters too.”
I doubted any of them were fan mail. By popular opinion I was supposed to be Water—well me or Moon—and Teddy was supposed to be Fire. Neither of those things happened, and The Thirteenth reminded us nearly every edition.
Sitting next to the letters was the newspaper article that painted Helaine in a less than favorable light. She glared daggers at it.
“I haven’t read the whole thing yet. Is it that bad?” Helaine asked me and Maddi.
“You know the worst parts already,” I said. “Therese writing you off as the underdog… and also a quote that seventy-five percent of people polled hope you get kicked off of the Coven. No big deal.”
“My idol has turned me into an effigy better than my peers could ever hope to. She’s sneering at me from the byline, just waiting to chat more shit about me to the entire underground.”
“I can save this paper for you if you want,” I told Helaine.
“Put it in a time capsule or something,” Maddi suggested.
“The President’s PR rep is already all over the statement that suspects bribery led me to the Coven. I opened their letter, but the rest… I guess I’ll save those for later. Hey Maddi, did the Mages protest me joining?”
“Do you want the truth?”
“Yes.”
“They weren’t happy, and it was Stan who stood up for you the most. Maybe because you’re from a spirit line, or maybe because he was taking down data the whole time and it computed properly. Either way, I wouldn’t worry about the Mages.”
Helaine didn’t worry about the Mages. More than anything she was proud that they hated her. She did still worry about Moon, however, and though I thought her fixation had ebbed, it crept up once more. I shifted it to the side for her.
“I want to open one,” I said.
I reached down and tore a letter open.
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you Avereis,” Maddi said with a smile.
“Oh, that’s cute,” I said. “Ring-a-ring o' roses. A pocket full of posies. Ashes! Ashes! We all fall down.”
“No A-tishoo?” Helaine asked.
“What’s that?”
“That’s the sound for a sneeze. All this time in England and you still don’t know we used that instead?”
“We always said ‘ashes’.” I explained. “That’s a weird letter, and maybe your right. Save them for later?”
“It’s for the best,” Maddi reminded us.
“What should I do?” I asked again, nodding over at the piano where my mentor seemed to be in his own world.
“Independent study. I don’t know how long this will last.”
My last chance to try and figure Stan out was lost in a trailing classical melody. I didn’t know how I could begin training without the boost. It would be grueling and dangerous enough, even if I was able to control the fire better. At least Helaine got it, I thought, though on the inside I was obstinately jealous. I wouldn’t show it and pushed it out of my mind for tea.
I needed to know more about Stan, but I also wanted to, and for some reason, it was more important than any attainment I had read about. As I stirred honey into my tea, I realized that figuring Stan out was more important to me than anything else at the moment.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Earth
Helaine
When Onyx showed up in the afternoon, I aced my quiz on the water witches that came before me. My favorite was Rose’s grandfather. He created the first scandal in decades by falling in love with a younger woman, who would go missing after she gave birth to their child and put her up for adoption. That child was my Aunt Row, and because she never met her mother, it was a story of tragic loss for everyone, and I found the whole story of love lost incredibly romantic.
Relationships in and outside of the Coven were forbidden then. You used to take a vow of celibacy when upon induction, and either suffered for a decade or never got caught. I thought a year would be easy enough, as long as you had entered the Coven single, delighting in dumping your boyfriend as I had. Besides, you always found someone when you weren’t looking. After five years though, there would be secrets (more accurately, people) and I was sure the witches before us found some way to hide things so even the Mages didn’t know. Those fucking kill joys hated me right now, and I loved to think that there was some magical way I could lie to them.
“The power of water comes from balance,” Onyx said, interrupting my thoughts as I closed the midnight blue leather-bound book, shutting the lid on my daydreams. “Water redirects energy from other sources to create its own harmony. You must learn to be gentle like rain and harsh like waves. Since your mum never practiced water, you’re going to have a tough time.”
“I’m determined to make it,” I told him. “I would have chosen water over spirit if I had the choice. It’s my favorite.”
“Do you want to hear about my element?”
“Yes, of course!” I said back. I didn’t like herbs and plants that much (all of those boring things that went with earth) but learning about Onyx’s past was exhilarating. I was surprised that he felt he had to ask. I had heard rumors about his power, and hearing his story for himself was brilliant.
“I can transform into any living thing, as long as I eat it.”
“I heard that the black rooster was your main choice.”
“I had gotten stuck
that way for years,” Onyx said. “And because of it, I’m, largely a vegetarian now.”
“How do you turn back?”
“I have to eat the same thing as I did to transform. It can be tricky,” he explained.
“Is that why no one can kill black animals?”
“Yes. We said it was superstition in the community, however, that was the real reason.”
“That’s a massive price to power ratio,” I said analytically.
“It is because there is power in shape-changing, and the only other person we knew who had it… could turn into humans.”
“Princehorn?” I asked. “Thom Princehorn? The Clerisy?”
Witches were never afraid to say a name out loud, but sometimes the rest of the underground was.
“Yes. Before his exile, his power, like mine, is what we call a left-hand power.”
“Left hand?”
“The price is greater to return the energy.” He explained. “The right hand usually emits the power in spells, the energy emitting hand, and the left hand receives it. When the price to use a power is bigger, it’s a left-hand power. Reversing the effect is risky, and me turning into a rooster for three years demonstrates it.”
“And it was incredibly painful for Princehorn to change bodies,” I said.
“They say that once, he was forced to change back from a form without being able to control the pain, and he was never the same again.”
Now was the time for rapid-firing of questions to find out what I really wanted to know.
“Can you turn into other people?”
“No, this is me as a human,” Onyx said. “My power comes works across species.”
“Does anyone else in your family have that power?”
“A great twice removed uncle or something did, but that was so long ago that no one knows for sure.”
“What do you think mine will be?” I asked.
“You probably get to choose it, Laurence. In that case, it could be whatever mental power you’d like.”
“Oi, why are there some books with blank pages in the bookshelf?”
“You noticed already?”
“Yes,” I said curiously. “I can’t leave the house or I’ll be struck down by lightning, so I’m well acquainted with my surroundings.”
“You won’t be struck down,” he chuckled. “No one would even know if you left. The point of it is for you to study history and honor tradition.”
“So what are they?”
“They are texts not suitable for initiates,” Onyx said back to me, as if he were mentally crossing his arms in his mind. “They are not suitable until a mentor or a fully inducted witch touches the book.”
“So all you have to do is make contact?”
“But if you touch the book after me without me having cleared it, then the words will disappear.”
“What the hell kind of magic is in them then?”
“Relax Laurence, it’s just advanced. It’s a way for us to design coursework. Some books are ancient and contain subject matter concerning ritual sacrifices.”
“What happened to do no harm?”
“The Lightless Years changed everything, and witches had to improvise. After being treated so horribly, they became a projection of the fear forced upon them. It’s against the rules, but we keep the spells in case we need to recognize them. There are others out there, renegades, witches with no Coven who like the shortcuts.”
“Short cuts?”
“In the Coven you pull from the collective, and we take things step by step to help you build your powers safely. Dark magic takes less time to perfect. Look at vampirism for a moment. In exchange for one’s soul, a vampire usually gets a perfect power connected to the senses. It works the same with witches.”
Well before the changes, practicing dark magic was out of the question, but it will still in this house, built on top of a foundation of good earth magic. The renegades and texts were a foreboding reminder of the amount of power we held. In the event that desperation took us over, any one of us could leave the Coven and turn away from the light.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Spirit
Rose
That evening following the piano incident, Stan seemed perfectly fine, or well enough to show up for our second lesson of the day. Days were noticeably shorter now, and when I met with him in the conservatory, easily my favorite room inside of the house, the slanted glass ceiling overhead was deep cobalt. I was also supposed to learn about his powers today, and I hadn’t cracked the code on his identity and gift power. It meant no attainment was earned, and I’d have to wave goodbye to the magic boost I had been hoping for.
Helaine had figured it out, and once again, I knew I was falling behind.
“Are you okay?” I asked Stan, as he walked into the kitchen to refill his thermos with water.
“Yeah,” he said. That was the end of our conversation about that.
Stan sat in the wicker chair to the left of me, a dark blur in the corner of my vision, and said, “The tub is blue.”
“The—oh the third-floor bathroom, yeah, I washed my hair.” By the look on his face, I guessed that he meant it shouldn’t be blue. “Oh, I’m sorry. I’ll clean it out until I have a magical spell to fix things instantaneously.”
“Now that that’s settled, we can talk about the root of your powers as well as mine.”
“Really? We can finally talk about fire?”
“Yes. It’s all about your element and the source of my power today, but I don’t like to talk about myself,” Stan said.
Obviously, I thought rolling my eyes.
“Obviously,” he echoed. “I didn’t take you for a slow learner, but you still don’t understand that I can hear your clear thoughts.”
I changed my face to stone and turned my thoughts into empty craters.
“I don’t like to talk about me,” he began again, “but learning about the root of my power and where it draws from was helpful when I was inducted as Spirit. Just like you, I’m not just a witch. For lack of a better definition, I’m a Bathory, someone who descended from Countess Bathory. As you know, I can pull memories and personalities from people by drinking their blood, and I need it to live. Countess Bathory, the one who started it all, acclimated, evolved, even, to live off of blood, because she had such a lust for it.”
We knew of only five people who possessed the powers and weren’t just carriers, as I presumed I was. My mother was a Bathory, Talia, the former Queen of England was one when she was alive, and then two other people no one had heard from in twenty years—Corinne and Thom Princehorn. I knew the story, but I would listen to it again and again. Sure, everyone could agree that Bathory was a little insane—a lot insane to torture hundreds of girls—but the part that I thought was cool was that Countess Bathory was more powerful than her husband and even kept her family’s name when she was married.
“Bathory was aggressive and sadistic, and the root of my powers, on the Bathory side, are activated through aggression and sex—it’s very Freudian, says my psychologist—and both are part of human nature. When it comes down to it, we’re all motivated by similar forces. What does fire mean to you?”
“A four-hundred-year feud in which my ancestor’s blood was poisoned by the Spriggans so the Changeling and human races could not intermingle until the curse was broken,” I said plain as day. “My saliva is poison and my blood is flammable, so you can say that fire runs throughout my entire body.” That was true, and another reason I had never recreationally dated.
“So you see fire as your birth-right then.”
“Yes, I do.”
“That’s very analytical for an empath. I expected you to understand the more straightforward roots of fire.”
“Would you like if I were as blunt with you as you are with me?” I asked Stan, a sneer on my lips.
“If that’s how to tap into your sense of justice, yes,” Stan said. “You don’t seem to grasp the motivating sources of witch fire. But
even though you don’t understand, you still possess those qualities, and that’s why we think you’re a great candidate. Fire isn’t fueled by anger, as some people might think, or from impulsiveness or destruction. It’s overcoming the challenges we face when we’re passionate about something. That’s why we chose you. All three of us. It was unanimous.”
“I had your approval, Stan?” I didn’t think he’d ever admit it.
“Fire is activated by passion and justice,” he said, ignoring me. “The willingness to do the right thing, and the ability to follow the heart’s desire give fire strength. If you have those two things, you’ll be unstoppable. Your power is activated by realizing and embracing the primal things you desire. I know how you conjured fire at auditions. Likely, it wasn’t your sense of justice. I’m willing to bet you channeled sexual desire, which I’d imagine is a huge risk to take in front of such a large group of people, but you did it anyway, didn’t you?”
“Excuse me? A little less friend and a little more mentor, please. I don’t appreciate you talking to me that way. I value my privacy.”
“So mature for an eighteen-year-old,” Stan said dryly. “I don’t see what the problem is with talking about simple facts of life. Without sex, there would be no birth, death, or rebirth.”
Who was this guy really? I couldn’t change or even slightly influence his emotion, and he relied on body language as if he had been trained to. I thought that something was blocking me from sensing him, but it then occurred to me that Stan still felt some emotion, but he didn’t always understand it.
I used everything I had not to think, oh shit, but I’m pretty sure I did anyway. I was angry at myself for speaking and thinking so cruelly to him, hearing my mom’s voice in my head, telling me people take in information differently, and his studying of my body language combined with my words was how he processed people. I had severely misunderstood that Stan had a form of autism that interfered with his ability to understand emotions. I felt tiny, like a speck of a human, and an even smaller Changeling.
“I am so sorry,” I said. My shame formed tears behind my eyes, but I quickly shifted the humiliation out of my mind. “I hope you can forgive me.”
Death's Primordial Kiss (The Silvered Moon Diaries Book 1) Page 13