Unus (Stone Mage Saga Book 1)

by Raven Whitney

  There, atop a red satin pillow, sat a silver bracelet. It had six links joined by silver rings which held different colored stones: a bright red ruby, a deep blue sapphire, a clear stone that at that size was probably a white sapphire, a golden topaz, a pale pink sapphire, and a rich purple amethyst. Their facets caught and reflected even the mild, incandescent lighting in my bedroom giving each stone a brilliant glitter.

  Unable to resist the temptation, I fastened the bracelet's tiny screw-on latch around my wrist and admired its artistry. And here I'd just been thinking that I would probably never be able to purchase anything nice for myself! Even if each of the stones was just a colored quartz— which was likely, considering that I bought it at a garage sale— it was beautiful nonetheless and I couldn't wait to show Lexie later.

  Knowing my luck, if I wore it to the party tonight, it would undoubtedly get lost. I tried to unscrew my new bracelet's unusual latch. Apparently whoever made it had never heard of the sacred rule of rightie-tightie, leftie-loosie. After five minutes of trying to get it undone, my frustration persuaded me to concede defeat. For now.

  A chime sounded from my purse. It was Lexie telling me that she was almost ready with her costume and would be leaving in ten minutes, meaning I had fifteen minutes at most to get dressed.

  Digging through the darkest depths of my closet, I found the box with my costume in it. It was simple, so it wouldn't take me long to change. I thumbed the gauzy material of the fluffy tan skirt and matching woolly sweater that I had glued candy wrappers and bottle caps to several years ago. I hurriedly pulled them on until I came across the leash and tiny brown halter with the Hershey bar wrapper bow tie at the bottom of the box and my heart almost stopped.

  It was Thumper's Halloween halter. For as long as I'd worn this costume, I'd always taken my cantankerous, old, black-and-white Lop with me. He was the giveaway. The little kids who came trick-or-treating always got it when they saw his fluffy face. Seeing and petting on his soft fur was more of a treat than the candy for most of them. Of course, they never saw his razor sharp little teeth like I did, but he was my fluffy best buddy who had always been there for me and who had only ever judged me when I tried to pet his tail.

  I treasured every one of the tiny white bite scars that freckled my forearms. I ran my fingers over the last one he ever gave me, still scabbed over.

  The loud sound of my phone trumpeting Lexie's ringtone snapped me out of my reverie. I dove for my bed and pawed through the rumpled sheets, praying the noise didn't wake my parents.

  “Hey,” I said, my voice hoarse.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I'm fine.” I cleared my throat. “I just realized I don't have Thumper to be my co-dust bunny this year, that's all.”

  “Do you want to borrow one of my costumes? I think I still have last year's faerie queen.” Her offer was sweet, but I would never wear one of her skimpy costumes in public. While I'd never been particularly bashful, I could never be as brazen and bold as Lexie. Not to mention that over the four years of college, then these last three stressful years with Mom's cancer coming back and my coffee shop barely making ends meet, I'd put on a few pounds.

  “No, thanks. We knew that his time was coming for months. He was thirteen years old. I just got caught off-guard, but I'm okay.”

  “You don't need to have your guard up. It's okay to mourn for him.” She sighed and made a disapproving sound through the phone. “But you'll talk when you're ready to. Do you still want to go to the party? If you're not up to it, we can just stay at home and have a monster movie marathon.”

  The out she'd given me was tempting and I greatly appreciated it, since I knew how much it cost her. She'd been looking forward to this party for weeks. Luke had been overseas visiting family in the French Riviera for the last two months and Lexie had been missing him like crazy. He flew back home today and she was so excited that he was all she could talk about all day. There was no way I could spoil this for her.

  “No, I'll go. Where are you?”

  “I'm outside.”

  I walked over to my bedroom window overlooking the street. Parked on the side of the street, beneath the massive tree, was Lexie's cherry red BMW. Any other time of the year and I wouldn't have been able to see her waving at me through the tree's dense canopy, but Jack Frost had stripped the Revolution-era white oak naked.

  “Give me just a minute.”

  “I'll be waiting right here,” she said just before the line went dead.

  As fast as I could without falling down, I pulled on a pair of tall boots that would cover the exposed part of my lower legs against the cold, donned the bunny-ear headband, and looped my purse around my shoulder before sneaking back outside.

  It wasn't until I got to the front door that I realized Thumper's costume halter was wrapped around my forearm. My feet froze in place.

  I didn't want to just leave it by the door and didn't want to risk creeping back upstairs to put it in my room. It should be on his grave, at least for tonight. This would be my first Halloween without him in so long, it felt right to include him somehow.

  I went out the back door into the yard and knelt by his little grave. It was no bigger than the surface of a textbook of freshly turned soil underneath my mother's rose bushes. Yet it held one of the best friends I'd ever had.

  Setting the halter on the damp earth, I placed my hand atop his grave. A painful lump formed in my throat and I couldn't stop myself from crying. I missed him like a lost limb, but if there truly was a heaven, he would be blissfully rolling around in a mountain of the juiciest strawberries right now.

  Clearing my throat, I wiped my eyes off and stood to go back inside. I paused in the kitchen to rinse the dirt from my hand and noticed my finger was still bleeding. I wrapped it in a bandage and hurried from the house.

  2

  I slid into the buttery leather seats of Lexie's car and sighed as the warmth slid up my spine. She'd turned the heated seat on for me.

  I moaned, “You're a goddess.”

  “Damn right.” She grinned, her lead foot taking over.

  “You don't need to speed. We have plenty of time to get there,” I grumbled, knowing that it was pointless to give her the lecture on speeding again. If she hadn't heard it in the eight years we'd been driving and hadn't learned her lesson from totaling her old Audi, she wasn't going to.

  She gave me the same bland line of reassurance.

  Thankful for BMW's high crash rating, I rolled my eyes and changed the topic. “So I got that box from the garage sale open.”

  “Huh. What was in it?”

  “A bracelet.”

  “Cool. Did you bring it? Let me see,” she said, turning to look at me.

  My heart leaped into my throat. “Eyes on the road! I'll show you when the car is safely in park.”

  She harrumphed under her breath. “Spoilsport.”

  “Yes, but I'm a spoilsport who likes being in one piece.”

  A moment later, we turned off on a different street than I was expecting and parked on the street next to a too-familiar building.

  “Why are we parking next to the police station?” I asked.

  Lexie had already turned off the engine and was halfway out of her seat when she responded with a beaming grin, “Because I'll probably need a ride home in the morning.”

  I chuckled. “Of course you will.”

  “Plus it'll make tomorrow morning so much easier if I don't have to listen to Rosemarie lecture me about having to pick me up when I'm hungover.”

  “She only does it because she loves you like her own daughter.”

  “I know, but she could at least mix it up a bit. Throw in words and phrases other than 'irresponsible' and 'reckless' and 'don't you know how much it worries me when you–' insert-fun-activity here.” She shrugged. “It's only a five minute walk to the cemetery from here, anyway.”

  “The cemetery?” I asked as we started off on the sidewalk. “I thought we were going to his house
.”

  “Nah, one of his friends has a grandpa who was buried there, so she has a key. Luke thought it would be so cool and spooky to move the party to a graveyard.”

  While I could appreciate the creep factor to having a Halloween party in a cemetery, it still felt wrong to me. It felt crass— like he was being disrespectful to the dead. If it were me who was six feet under, I would be a little bit upset that my peace and quiet was being disturbed by an obnoxious frat boy doing keg stands above my head. But there wasn't anything I could do about it now, so I kept my mouth shut.

  “So what do you think of this year's costume?” She twirled like a model under a street light, showing off a charcoal gray, knee-length trench coat. Her face was caked in pale makeup, giving her a deathly pallor with trickles of fake blood coming from the sides of her lips. Her hair was in a state of intentional disarray and she wore jagged fake nails that were painted with flecks of red.

  “Please don't tell me you're a dead flasher.”

  “No, silly, I'm a zombie!” she corrected, like my answer was ridiculous. Untying the sash holding the coat closed, she revealed what she was wearing underneath. A torn and bloodied denim miniskirt and halter top that displayed a silver-screen-grade fake wound on her belly, complete with exposed intestines.

  “Zombie hooker?”

  She nodded her head back and forth like she was literally rolling the idea around in her brain. “That works, too.”

  A sharp breeze gusted into us from out of nowhere, the frigid air piercing through the thick layers of the skirt I was wearing. Just for a second, I involuntarily squeezed my eyes shut against the wind and turned my face from it, though I was still walking.

  In that brief second, a shriek sounded from inches in front of my face.

  Startling, I stumbled backwards, which caused Lexie to go crashing onto her backside. She yelped in pain as I regained my footing. Still shaky on my feet, I looked for the source of the shrill noise and saw a large black shape with bright red glowing eyes dancing in front of me. Before I could think, I had shifted to stand in front of Lexie, who was defenseless on the ground.

  Lexie shrieked when she saw the shape, a sound which rapidly changed into howling laughter. It took me a moment to realize that the screaming shape bouncing in front of us was a witch. Her warty green face was frozen in a permanent maniacal grin as she flitted in place.

  Lexie cackled loudly. “Wow, Mrs. Abbot really went all out this year. That scared the daylights out of me.”

  Mrs. Abbot was an empty-nester who in the last few years had gone positively nuts with her decorations for every single holiday as her new hobby. She was very dedicated, putting up the best and most elaborate displays. This year was no disappointment. The life-sized plastic witch was dangling from a tree limb hanging over the sidewalk. It must have been set on a motion sensor to terrify any unfortunate passerby. Last year, she had set up a vampire horde in her front yard, even going so far as to hire some neighborhood kids to stalk around covered in ketchup with little plastic fangs. If she kept this up, it was only a matter of time before she gave somebody a heart attack.

  My racing heart was beginning to slow and I caught my breath. Panting a little, I grabbed Lexie's arm and helped her to her feet. The witch's cycle ended and she went limp, the light in her eyes extinguishing as she was reeled back into the tree by a winch.

  “Man,” Lexie giggled, snorting just a little as she got to her feet. “I can't believe you fell for that. Witches aren't real.”

  “Yeah, they are. Don't you remember that Wiccan girl from college, the one with the dreadlocks and the ear gauges?”

  Lexie scoffed. “Unless you can turn someone into a frog, you aren't a witch in my book.”

  I rolled my eyes at her logic, but let it drop.

  “So let me see this new bracelet of yours.” She turned to stand in front of me, walking in reverse, and snagged my hands to look at my wrists. Finding it on the left, she grinned. “I bet that kid will be so pissed if he finds out you got that box open on the first night. Was there anything else in it?”

  “No, just this sitting on top of a red satiny cushion. Someone obviously loved it.”

  She stopped, bringing me to a halt as well, to examine the stones directly under a street light. “Can't blame them. I'm pretty sure these stones are real,” she said nonchalantly, though whether her tone was because she was used to seeing rocks that big or that she was trying not to shock me, I couldn't tell.

  “You're joking,” I half shouted.

  “Nope. I can tell. We can take it to a jeweler to confirm it, but he'll probably just tell you the same thing. It must be pretty old; you don't find many genuine, natural stones this big in modern pieces.” She turned my wrist with an assessing eye and tried to remove the clasp.

  “It's stuck. I can't get the little screw clasp to come undone,” I explained after she tried and failed to get it undone with her fingers.

  Lexie never did take failure well. Scowling, she gave it another go, her face turning pink with effort. With a huff, she dramatically threw her hands up. “Man, that thing is really stubborn. But on the bright side, at least you don't have to worry about fifteen grand falling off your wrist.”

  “How much?” I squeaked, having a minor panic attack.

  “I'd say that's worth around fourteen or fifteen thousand dollars. It's got around three carats each of diamond, topaz, ruby, sapphire, pink sapphire, and dark tanzanite. It's an odd mix of stones, but the diamond says that the setting is probably platinum,” she elaborated as she shrugged, her voice so strangely casual.

  It felt like I'd been hanging upside down for too long and all of the blood was rushing into my brain. How could I possibly own anything worth that much? That tiny, selfish part of me wanted to keep it because it was just so pretty and feminine and I'd never had anything like that before. But my more rational side persisted. If I could get it off and sell it, I could pay for a chunk of Mom's piling medical bills or keep it for emergency mortgage payments to stave off the bank's threats of foreclosure.

  “Would you help me sell it?”

  Lexie froze in a brief moment of confusion, cocking her blond head to the side in a childlike gesture. “Why would you want to do that?”

  “To pay some of Mom's medical bills. But I can't just sell it on my own because people won't believe it's mine. I need somebody to sell it for me so I won't get in any trouble.”

  “But it's such a nice bracelet. You ought to keep it. I see the way you look at it,” she insisted, looking almost wistful.

  I paused, trying to put my thoughts into words that Lexie would listen to. “Just because I like it doesn't mean that owning it is what's best. My family could use the money more than me.”

  “But you know I'd help you guys if you needed it. You and your parents have been more of a family to me than my own blood.” Her voice cracked on the last word and she dabbed at her eyes with her sleeve. It was true that my family and I had been there for her and probably loved her more than her own biological family. Out of the fifty two weeks in a year, her parents were only home for maybe two or three. They rarely called, messaged, or emailed her. Hell, they've never even sent a postcard from any of their exotic locales with a “Wish you were here!”

  I didn't know what to say to an offer so pure-hearted and generous. It would be so easy for her to do, too. But my father once told me when I was eight years old and got caught cheating on a math test, “God does not judge you for the challenges you've overcome. He judges you on how you overcame them.” There was no way that he would accept anyone's charity. “You know they'd never let you do that for them.”

  Sniffling, she mumbled, “I wish they'd let me.”

  There was nothing that I could say, so I just held her hand as we walked.

  Around the next bend, the ornate metal gates to the cemetery loomed like cold sentries over the sidewalk. Bare-branched trees danced above gracefully, like skeletal ballerinas. From deep within, the faint drumming of bass
pulsed through the air, hinting at distant life.

  “Oh yeah,” Lexie said, reaching into the pockets of her coat for her clutch and passing me a wad of cash. “Here's some cab fare. I know you've got church and work tomorrow, so you're going to want to go home earlier than me.”

  I pushed her hand back. “I don't need it. We aren't all that far from my house. I can just go a few blocks over from here and get to the bus stop.”

  She shoved the money back at me. “You can pay me back later if you want, but you're taking a taxi home tonight because I'm going home either in the back of a cab or squad car way after you go to bed. I plan on ending tonight naked, sweaty, and with twice the legal blood alcohol limit. Minimum.”

  “Fine, fine.” I griped about accepting the money— for now—, but I really didn't want to be a third wheel while Lexie was welcoming her boyfriend home.

  Next to me, Lexie started to sing, “Do you know the Muffin Man, the Muffin Man, the Muffin Man?”

  For a moment, I was confused, thinking she had either had some sort of mental breakdown or I was missing out on an inside joke she was having with a tree. A scuffling noise from the other side of the brick wall preceded a kid who couldn't be more than fifteen popping up from behind a hedge and passing a key through the bars of the gate.

  Lexie used it to open the padlock chaining it shut and passed it back to him.

  “And what do you get for being the gatekeeper?” I had to ask. It seemed like a pretty crappy job, sitting alone in the cold while people were partying nearby.

  “A fattie and a bottle of vodka.” He grinned as he sat back down in his spot. Pointing to the middle of the graveyard, he said, “The party is in a mausoleum over there.”

  Lexie nodded as she pushed the creaking gates open. “Fair compensation for a job well done, kiddo.”

  She was nearly skipping with anticipation along the gravel path through the darkened forest of headstones and statues. She pulled farther ahead of me until I could only make out the faintest hint of her corn-silk blond hair against the murkiness of the night.