CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
The Shortest Night
Rose
The setting of the sun would harken the shortest night of the year, and that was precisely when the ritual would begin. I wore my coral red dress again instead of a ceremonial robe. I figured I’d wait until official induction to pick out my ceremonial clothing. At this point, I was hoping I’d make it to induction and forced my worry aside for the ritual. I had memorized my parts from the spell book. Summer was my season.
I loved the limitless way the ocean appeared in front of me as darkness crashed down on us. The stars were clearer than I ever remembered them being. As a child, I used to shine a flashlight above my head and watch as the beam got lost within the obsidian realms above. Outside in the dark, it felt as though I could see everything.
The five of us gathered around the fire pit, a circle of stones with dry wood piled in the middle. Following Gregory’s lead with north, we called our elements by their names only. Everyone looked to me, and I replied instinctively with, “It is the season of fire.”
As soon as I said the word, fire ignited the bonfire pit in the middle. Flames sprung up within the circle of stones, and the azure fire bled into a sunset-color. I remembered the beauty of my blue flame, the very first time I conjured it. It may have been a rocky road on which I traveled, but I had come a long way.
We threw ceremonial herbs into the fire pit. Gregory burned patchouli, Maddi burned lavender, I burned yarrow, Helaine burned moss, and Stan burned yarrow as well. I could smell the herbs mixing as the wind picked up.
“As our fire dies, so does summer,” I said, and it made my heart heavy. “Everything living must die, but beginnings are only brought about by the latest end. May our circle close in perfect love and perfect trust, as we celebrate the shortest night and the longest day of the year. Blessed be.”
“Blessed be,” everyone responded, and the scent of lingering herbs drifted away.
When we sat around the bonfire with a bottle of solstice mead, I was the first to ask the big question.
“What is the Isle of Shrouded Souls like?”
“It doesn’t take long for a Coven witch to ask during their first summer solstice,” Gregory said. “The Isle has a strong magnetic force that makes everyone there at peace. That’s why we take troubled people there who are immortal but not inherently evil.”
“How do you decide who gets to go?” Helaine then asked.
“It has to be a decision we make together, but we’re good at spotting who is genuinely troubled, and who is trying to manipulate us.”
“So they all live in peace then after they get there?” I questioned.
“Nearly all of them do,” Gregory responded. “But there is one part that is wicked awesome, something we don’t tell the world outside of here. As witches, we have the power to find souls that have been lost on the physical plane.”
Helaine and I were stunned into silence.
“Finding your first soul is a great honor,” Maddi explained, “and while it’s not possible for every case we come across, it’s a peculiar skill set indeed.”
“How do so many people just lose their souls?” Helaine blurted out.
“Mostly it’s vampires,” Gregory said, “So that’s why not everyone knows about us being able to find souls, and it’s not the concern of anyone who has a soul. Some people sell theirs to… unsavory characters, but most lose them if they’re turned into vampires. You can’t own someone’s soul without their permission, so vampires’ souls just hang on and get stuck in the physical world as energy.”
“Where do they go?” I asked him.
“They attach to another person, place, or thing in the person’s life.”
“Why give souls back to vampires who willingly gave up their souls?” I asked. “In most cases, they didn’t want their souls, and that was the price they paid.”
“Our job is to tip the scales towards good,” Maddi explained, “and if a vampire gets his or her soul back, then their moral compass returns. We spend less time policing them. Not every soul can be returned, as I said.”
“What is a soul anyway?” Helaine asked. “What do you think it really is?”
We listened to the fire crackle a moment as we were lost to her insanely philosophical question.
“It’s the emotions, personality, and positive and negative energy someone creates,” Stan spoke up. He had been silent the whole time. “When humans die, their spirits move onto the spirit plane, and then to higher planes of being that I can’t see, and probably couldn’t comprehend.”
“Thoughts on reincarnation?” I asked Stan.
“I’m not sure. I can only see souls for so long and I don’t know where the energy goes. It’s not our job to know, anyway.”
Gregory and Stan went back inside, and I followed behind them, knowing that Maddi had promised that she would cast the stones for Helaine on the beach. It was a technique that the current island seer used, but not many witches chose the stones.
“Can Avereis stay?” Helaine asked at once.
“If you say so, of course. Just be sure you’re okay with her knowing the answers to the questions you ask.”
“Avereis is my best friend in the entire world, I think I kind of need her moral support. I’d be happy to burden her with too much information anytime.”
I beamed. She just wanted me to be able to see this.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
Casting the Stones
Helaine
Maddi didn’t tell the future in the same way that my sister could. She would use amethyst cut gems with ancient symbols on them to take a sneak peek into my life. Onyx was a great mentor, but I enjoyed spending time with just Maddi and Rose, and I know Rose felt the same. Learning magic away from our mentors was far more exciting.
“I was unpopular too once,” Maddi told us, spreading the handkerchief from the basket out in front of her in the sand. Maddi had also packed another bottle of mead and glasses in the basket. She pushed the glasses into the soft earth. We could still see clearly in the bonfire’s glow.
“Really?”
“For a month or two, until I stood up for myself publicly. I was lucky. It could have made me more hated.”
I couldn’t imagine anyone not liking Maddi. Her flawless charisma reminded me of why she was everyone’s favorite. Her smile rarely faltered, and even sitting still she always looked engaged and even-tempered, as if her mind went a thousand miles a minute so that the good thoughts always had a head start over the negative.
“This is Tomas’s favorite,” Maddi said as she removed the cork from the bottle of oak and rose mead.
“Do you miss him?” I asked her, as she handed me the bottle to pour.
“You can tell, huh?” she asked me. “We’ve been together a year, but in ways, it seems like so much longer. I want to share something like this with him, but obviously I can’t. Coven members only.”
I nodded, watching the ruby mead swish into the first glass.
“You know Maddi, missing someone is incredibly romantic,” I said.
“Everything is for you,” Rose teased me, snagging a glass for herself.
We paused a moment to listen to the soft rush of the waves.
“So, what’s your question?”
“You know my question,” I said, with a hopeless tone in my voice.
She shook the amethyst stones in a ceremonial wooden cup and tossed them violently to the handkerchief. When their chosen gilded symbols came to a stop, I counted seven stones.
“A traveler,” Maddi said, lightly touching the leftmost stone.
“Well, that is always a dangerous thing,” I commented. “Travelers come into your life and leave just as quickly.”
“It’s the real deal though. This traveler could make or break your heart.”
“And this is romantic love?”
“This rune here… it could be either. It could be the family complication of your new beau, or it could relate entir
ely to your family.”
“I also sense the letter ‘J’,” it’s just a feeling, a good one.
“Can we roll them again?”
“No. Sometimes that messes with destiny. You can only roll the stones once. Good news though, the choice is yours.”
“What do you mean?”
“You will make the choice whether your heart gets broken, or whether you break a heart.”
“The pressure’s on,” Rose said with a raised eyebrow.
“This rune here is like a wheel of fortune card in tarot. Not many witches get the reassurance that their destiny is in their control.”
“That leaves my question open-ended and easy to validate,” I said, disappointed.
“It’s a good answer, don’t argue with it,” Rose suggested.
“What about you, Avereis, care for me to read the stones for you?”
“No,” Rose said. “I’m not sure I want to know yet.”
“When my future comes true you’ll wish you had,” I told Rose.
“If you are more curious than you let on, my granny told me of an old Irish tradition. You can leave yarrow under your pillow to dream about your next lover,” Maddi shared.
“I’d take dreaming about my first one,” Rose replied with a giggle. Her glass was empty, but she didn’t pour more.
“I am off to bed,” Maddi said. “We leave tomorrow. I hope you enjoyed it here. We don’t get to go every year, like if we have a big case, but when we do get out, it’s always nice.”
Back inside the room I was sharing with Rose, we crawled under the blankets and snuffed the candle out.
“Sweet dreams,” she told me like she did at every sleepover we had from ages five to fifteen.
“Sweet dreams,” I told her back, shutting off the light.
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
The Best Challenge
Rose
I had made it to martial arts only a handful of times each month this year, but I loved being back. When it wasn’t raining, I could practice staff at the mews house in the courtyard, but sometimes I preferred the tall ceilings at the dojo.
I needed martial arts more than ever now. In the short time that I was in the Coven, I had already gotten into enough shenanigans. I had embarrassingly made out in public with a masked stranger who turned out to be the lead human detective for supernatural crimes, invoked a goddess who would have made me do goddess knows what with a boy I had little interest in (Helaine even coined a weird new French phrase from it all), and now my powers were making me have steamy indulgent dreams that were against my will but so good at the same time. I’d also been hung over twice now, which was two times too many.
I counted four incredibly hot makeout sessions in my dreams that didn’t actually happen. I couldn’t control my subconscious, and I was left with guilty and embarrassed feelings from tapping into the dreams to manage my powers better. I was trying to press the dreams down even farther so that Stan wouldn’t catch a thought, and I wasn’t allowing myself to process them. I was so embarrassed that I couldn’t even tell Helaine, not until I was able to interpret what my subconscious wanted.
My Changeling and witch sides were battling each other and making my actions and desires unpredictable, and my body was the ravaged battlefront. Trying to be an adult with powers that were erratic and adolescent blew. What I needed right now was to be human.
That evening, after classes, I practiced every martial arts form I knew on the mats to clear my mind of all of my thoughts. The Grandmaster had already gone home and I just needed to relock the door when I left.
Just as I was grabbing my bag, I heard the front door come to a soft stop.
I stood still, discerning footsteps outside the locker room in the hall.
I had locked the door. What was going on?
On edge, I walked out of the locker room to see who had gotten in through the locked door.
“Mom!” I yelled, hugging her. What a relief. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m married to the place,” she said. “I was actually looking for you. Want to grab a coffee?”
“It’s eight o’clock at night,” I said. “Sounds perfect.”
We went to a human restaurant, a place that was near the college she taught at. I wondered what things would have been like for me if I hadn’t gotten in the Coven. What would life be like if I was a normal college student with a scholarship and a class schedule? The music playing in the background of the diner was soft, and the ting of silverware being wrapped and unwrapped sounded more soothing than hurried.
“This isn’t an intervention, right?”
“If you think you need one, maybe it could be, but I just want to see how you’re doing. I was never a witch and don’t know what you’re going through now.”
“It’s hard,” I admitted, “but anything worth living for is.”
“That’s what I’d always say when I met tough times. Things must be pretty difficult.”
She caught me.
“I have so much power but if I can’t control it, I’m not sure that it matters. And Stan is my mentor…”
“He’s hard to read, yes, but there’s no reason that he doesn’t want you to succeed. Try being more open and he will be.”
“You’ve met him, mom,” I reminded her.
“I can’t say much more, but the Coven is important to him and gives him his sense of purpose. I don’t believe that he is trying to intentionally let you down.”
“I think that when he reports to the Mages, that they give him the wrong advice. The only one he should be listening to is Onyx. Do you think you could maybe…” I looked around shiftily, “pass that on?”
“I can,” she said back quietly.
“Thank you.”
“As for you, you don’t have to be perfect.”
“What?” I asked.
“You can mess up, sweetheart. You can learn from mistakes. There’s still some of me in you after all.”
I smiled. She had told me that when she was my age, she used to be far more impulsive, and though she didn’t make the best decisions, she made them for the same reasons she would have today.
“I’m not worried about you.”
“You’re not?”
“You’re an adult.”
I took another sip and then gave her a pointed glance.
“Dad said I’m also still a teenager.”
“I disagree.”
“Really?”
“Really. You’re ready to grow up. Sometimes that takes mistakes. I know I’m passionate about everything I do, and your father, he’s passionate about keeping his passions in check, but that’s why I like him. I knew from the moment he chose me, that he thought it through. And a host of other reasons, but I’ll save it.”
“Thanks,” I mumbled, hoping to get out of the shadow of their fairytale.
“I don’t want the Coven to be too restricting to you, or make you feel guilty about the things you’re passionate for. The Coven defines you, but you five have more pull than the Mages. Do what you think is right and the rest will come.”
We said our goodbyes and went to our separate homes. Even though I already missed my mom, I felt much better. Little did I know, Stan had other plans, ones that would ruin my even attitude.
“How was class?” Stan asked me as I came in the door.
“It was great. My mom caught up to me, so that’s why I’m late. I didn’t miss a lesson you had planned, did I?”
“No, but you’re three seasons in,” Stan said. “I should tell you something.”
It sounded like a deadline and I hoped that it wouldn’t be.
“I don’t like when people hold things back from me.”’
“The way you originally sourced your power at auditions…”
“This again?”
We stood facing each other. I wasn’t sure if I should sit down.
“It’s so unpredictable lately because of the different sources you’re pulling from. You’ll be th
e most powerful if you pull fire from the passion within you.”
“I know that already.”
“It may be the only way you advance from here, and I don’t mean to sound pushy, but it looks like the original source has solidified.”
“Meaning…”
“The first time you invoked fire, you made a choice without thinking of the consequence, and if you want to improve you need to use the original source.”
My heart sunk. Either I had to become a determined voyeur or I had to find a boyfriend? Unbelievable.
“I’m not at that point in my life yet.” At least he knew about O’Callaghan so I didn’t have to explain it now. That certainly would have pushed my tears over the edge of the waterfall.
“I’m sorry.”
What?
“I’m sorry because I know how much your independence means to you, and how you go out of your way to prove you have your own mind and way of doing things, but if you want to get to induction, it will be nearly impossible.”
I felt seething anger and I saw red in front of me as if blood had dripped into my eyes.
“Stan, nothing in my prophecy says it has anything to do with another person. Why is my progress as a witch tied up in someone else?”
“That’s what this is about then. You think you’re meant to be alone?”
“No,” I lied. “But there is the whole thing about everyone being privy to my private life because the Mages have to know if I’m dating anyone. There’s the whole thing about my poisonous saliva. There’s the whole thing about me not settling for someone, or not wanting to use someone, and there is this whole other thing about me not wanting to change who I am to make someone else happy! I am nineteen for goodness sake, and that’s too much pressure for me to be putting on someone else! It is out of my control!”
Stan was frozen, hopefully not piano-playing frozen, but I knew I had just done a number on him. I shouldn’t have screamed so loudly.
“Look it’s not your fault,” I said. “Fire might change things about me, but in ways, I’m always going to be the Rose who was set on trying out for water. I’ll be overly sensitive, and I’ll be the girl who refused to change for anyone. I want things in my life to be magical, but I also want them to be real.”
Death's Primordial Kiss (The Silvered Moon Diaries Book 1) Page 34