Destruction: The December People, Book One

by Sharon Bayliss

  “Friends?” Amanda asked.

  “My mom is in a coven with some other women. I already called all of them. They don’t know where she is. But they are casting incantations to help find her and bring her back. They would be happy to help, I’m sure, but they won’t talk to a human PI.”

  “I suppose we could call them,” David said. “Would they talk to us?”

  “Maybe, but I doubt they would tell you anything they didn’t tell me.”

  “Does her coven know what spell it was… that they couldn’t stop?” Amanda asked.

  “No. But they had a few ideas. They said my Mom had been damaged by dark magic and went to them for help. They said they thought they healed her, but maybe whatever it was came back and she tried to fix it on her own.”

  A prickle ran up David’s neck. Amanda didn’t react. They both knew the dark magic had come from him, when he had accidentally deflected her spell.

  “Samantha, you’re welcome to stay here as long as you need to,” David said. “But hopefully we’ll find them soon. Who knows, maybe even by Christmas.”

  “Or December 21st,” Samantha said.

  “Okay… that seems like as good a day as any,” David said.

  “It’s the Winter Solstice, David,” Amanda said. “It’s an important wizard holiday.”

  “Oh. Sure.”

  After their talk with Samantha, David pulled Amanda into his office.

  “Help me out a little bit here,” he said. “If there are wizard holidays I’m supposed to know about, I’d appreciate it if you let me know. I don’t want to ignore the holidays my kids celebrate. By the way, if we are planning on just ignoring wizard Christmas, I think we should have made that decision together. I thought you didn’t want to be the evil stepmother, and now you’re taking away wizard Christmas?”

  “It’s not wizard Christmas,” she said with a smile. “It’s just a wizard holiday that happens to be in December. It’s the last day of the wizard year. The darkest day. On that day, dark wizards celebrate the darkness itself. Light wizards celebrate the triumph of light over darkness. There are no gifts you have to buy, so don’t freak out about it.”

  “When do you think we should call Child Protective Services?”

  “About what?”

  “Samantha. Her parents have abandoned her. We can’t keep her indefinitely.”

  “I didn’t even think about that. Old habit from my parents, I guess. Wizards don’t usually involve human authority figures in their affairs.”

  “All right then. I guess we’ll have to call Wizard Child Protective Services.”

  “There is no such thing.”

  “Clearly,” he said with emphasis. “You know, wizard society is a train wreck.”

  “Exactly. That’s why we’re a part of regular society.”

  Christmas break provided many opportunities for forbidden magic. Mom had to work and Dad said he wouldn’t work over the holidays, but he did, holed up in his home office all the time or rushing off to work saying, “Please, please, please be good while I’m gone. And don’t tell your mother I left you alone. Please, please, please, behave,” code for “Don’t do magic.” By some mysterious Mom logic, she had taken it for granted that she had closed the case on the whole magic issue. That what had happened to Emmy provided incontrovertible proof of magic’s inherent evil, and no one would ever say differently again. But they didn’t fool Dad. Patrick could tell by the manic way he asked them to be good and how whenever he came home, he rushed around the house checking on everyone.

  Patrick felt bad about doing magic behind his parents’ back and lying about it. Especially Dad, who seemed so freaked out all the time. Patrick didn’t consider himself a goody-goody type or anything, but he had never so willfully and knowingly disobeyed his parents. Although, whether or not Patrick actually did any magic was debatable. He still sucked.

  Patrick suspected every one of his siblings except for him, including the Colters, was crazy. And not fun crazy, real crazy. Insane. He should feel grateful he had dodged the bullet somehow, but he didn’t. For one, keeping them from killing each other on accident seemed like a big job. And, two… he felt embarrassed to say it… but he felt left out. Maybe they acted crazy because they had magic and he didn’t. Could wizard parents have a non-wizard child? No one knew for sure. Perhaps he had no magic and a long life of normal ahead of him. Real dark wizards, like mom and dad, worked hard to fake normal and longed for nothing more than not to be crazy. What was so great about being boring?

  He’d only successfully seen one second into the future. The worst possible superpower he could imagine. And it could have been a fluke. Maybe it had happened a few times before, such as when he pulled Emmy out of the way of the truck, but he couldn’t call on the power at will. Currently, he had no idea what would happen in the next second, which would have come in handy right about now.

  Emmy perched on the edge on the roof.

  “Xavier, if you don’t help, I might die,” she said matter-of-factly. “I know you can; you just don’t want to. And that’s fine, but then you’ll have to be okay with me dying and it being your fault.”

  “That doesn’t bother me,” Xavier said.

  “Yes, it would,” Emmy countered. “Even Patrick is helping.”

  Patrick paced around with his brothers on the driveway. They reminded him of dogs circling a squirrel in a tree. Evangeline also planned on helping, always keen to participate in anything unreasonable. Or perhaps she wanted a front row seat for Emmy’s ultimate demise. Samantha sat on the backyard picnic table. She decided not to help. She didn’t want to mess up the spell with her incompatible magic. But she sat as if prepared to fly into the air and catch Emmy if she had to. She had become quieter and maybe… less shiny. Patrick figured her parents disappearing and abandoning her understandably upset her, but Evangeline had said the dark magic hurt Samantha. Living with seven dark wizards could poison the pure of heart. Samantha glowing less brightly didn’t make Patrick want to stare at her any less. If anything, he wanted to stare at her more. All the time. To make sure she didn’t suddenly blow away.

  “Emmy,” Patrick called. “I assume it wouldn’t help for me to say that this is the worst idea you’ve ever had and that you really, really, shouldn’t do it?”

  “Patrick, I don’t even hear you talk when you say things like that. You’re just moving your lips.”

  “Don’t count on my magic,” he said. “My being here might not make a difference.”

  “I don’t want to hear any ‘I can’ts’,” she said, like a miniature blonde football coach. “Magic is all about ‘I can’. Besides, Patrick, you may be doing more magic than you think. It’s not always obvious.”

  “It will be obvious if you fall to your death,” Patrick said.

  “Come down, Emmy,” Jude said.

  “What? You said we could do it,” Emmy said.

  “No, I didn’t. This one’s all you. I thought we would try it with the neighbor’s dog and be done with it.”

  “It worked with the dog,” she argued.

  “It didn’t work with the angel statue,” Patrick reminded them. He pointed to the pieces of lawn angel scattered across the drive.

  “That’s how I know it will work,” Emmy said. “You don’t care about the statue, but you didn’t want the dog to die. And you care more about me than you did about the dog. I know you can do it. I want you to see what you can do.”

  “So this is for our benefit?” Patrick asked.

  “This is exactly like those trust exercises at leadership camp. I trust you. Even the girl.”

  Evangeline glared up at her, arms crossed.

  “Don’t insult your net before you jump into it, Emmy,” Jude said.

  “Get ready,” Emmy said. “Five seconds.”

  “Wait, what am I supposed to do again?” Patrick asked.

  “Force field,” Evangeline said.

  “That’s not an explanation.”

  “It’s the sa
me thing as with the dog,” Jude said. “Just imagine her slowing down and stopping before she hits the ground. Really want it. You have to want her to be okay.”

  “Xavier, are you going to help?” Emmy asked.

  Xavier silently positioned himself as the fourth corner of a square made by Patrick, Jude, and Evangeline, and glared up at Emmy. Which, hopefully, meant yes.

  “Ready?” she asked, looking blissfully calm about jumping off their second-story roof onto pavement. She didn’t wear shoes. A good sign of crazy in forty-degree weather.

  Patrick, on the other hand, could hear his heart beating in his face. Adrenaline shot from his brain to his toes. No one else seemed this nervous, although Jude at least concentrated hard. He had his eyes on her like a baseball player watches a pitch. Evangeline and Xavier had their eyes on her, too, but with emotionless faces, as if whether Emmy lived or died didn’t interest them much. Although, they pretty much looked that way all the time.

  Emmy took a running start and leaped with abandon, as if jumping into a lake on the first day of summer. It happened so fast. In the seconds they had before she would hit ground, Patrick visualized her slowing down and stopping. He panicked even more when he became distracted by the events of the next several seconds in the future and lost grasp of the present. He heard a crash behind him and turned toward the sound, even though he knew the crash hadn’t happened yet. But, with or without his help, Jude and Xavier reached up to Emmy and she grasped one of each of their hands. She hovered and then they helped her down to the ground as if they helped a princess out of a carriage.

  Samantha clapped, and Evangeline cried, “Awesome!”

  Patrick had to admit he had never seen anything cooler in his life. But he alone knew they would bask in their accomplishment for no more than three seconds.

  Dad crashed his car into the mailbox. He climbed out of the car and over the scattered bricks and ran down the driveway. The look on his face, simply… indescribable. Trees blocked the house fairly well, so Mundanes driving by wouldn’t see Emmy’s trick, but Patrick and the others hadn’t counted on the fact that Dad would arrive at the head of the driveway at just the right time to see his daughter leap from the roof into the arms of her willing brothers.

  Dad’s face had gone pale, and his eyes had increased in size and doubled in crazy. He pointed at them with a trembling hand but appeared completely speechless. He leaned over and put his hands on his knees as if he had finished a sprint and might throw up.

  “Do you think he’s having a heart attack?” Emmy whispered.

  He stood back up and blew past them into the house without a word. He slammed the front door so hard the Christmas lights on the house shook.

  “I suppose adolescence is the worst possible time to find out you’re a wizard,” Amanda said in a tone several measures quieter than the one David used. A tone of defeat. “You’re losing your childhood and you would do anything to hang onto that wonder, that magic. Then all of sudden, you can. You can hang on to that magic forever if you just choose to practice magic. You don’t need faith. The magic of the world is right in front of your face. It’s an intoxicating thing.”

  Her words sounded earnest, wistful, as if part of her still felt that way.

  David paced in their bedroom.

  “When I was young, it was harder,” she continued. “I had to get it out of my system, and I hope that’s all that’s happening with them. When I was their age, I didn’t want to listen to my parents either, but, eventually, what they taught me did stick with me. I knew in my gut they were right. I knew the magic inside me was a bad thing. But if I had never met you, I don’t know what would have happened. When I fell in love with you… it was like the gap inside me wasn’t as big anymore. I could cope. The whole world looked different.”

  She turned away from him and rearranged the books on her nightstand. He didn’t think she had ever said anything so romantic, even on their wedding day.

  “What I’m saying,” she said in a more business-like tone, “is that this could easily be a phase. We just have to keep them alive until they grow up a little.”

  “How do we do that?”

  “Keep them from doing magic.”

  “How? We can’t watch them every second of every day. I feel like I’ve been pretty close to it. It’s like they rush to it every moment I turn my head. Even if I don’t go back to work, I have to sleep, for fuck’s sake.”

  “It’s the best we can do.”

  “I don’t know if I agree with our choice to not practice.” David put air quotes around “our”.

  “To be quite frank, I don’t think you’re in any place to say. You don’t have the information you need to make a decision.”

  “I’m still not happy about you poking holes in my brain. I wouldn’t bring it up as an argument against me if I were you.”

  “Fine, then, tell me. Why in the world do you think we should practice magic?”

  “So we know what we’re doing. Even if magic is like a baby defusing a bomb, wouldn’t it be better if the baby had a little bit of training? If the bomb is going to go off either way. You said yourself, wizards do magic on accident. I’m sorry, but that seems a lot more dangerous than doing magic on purpose.”

  “It’s not just the actual spells that are dangerous. It’s the magical energy that’s created when you practice. I can already feel it in the house. It’s like the air is heavier. Can’t you feel it?”

  Yes, he could.

  “That’s why I forbid it,” she said. “Some accidental magic is better than lots of magic on purpose. The more magic in the house, the more likely it will mess with people’s minds. And we have eight powerful wizards living here. Six of whom are going through hormonal changes that make even normal teens act crazy. That has a lot of potential for disaster. As you may have noticed, it’s not going well so far.”

  “Yeah, it’s not going well so far. Because we’re doing it your way.” He shouted the last two words for emphasis. “Your way—which as far as I can tell, is all just hate and lies. Hating who you really are and trying to hide it. Hating everyone else who is like you. And the lies—forbidding magic left and right but then still doing it yourself whenever you feel like it. That’s what you’ve been doing. And that’s what’s not working.”

  She stared him down with eyes that seemed to spit sparks. David backed up. He had to admit, his wife’s glares looked more threatening now that he knew she was a witch, and a wicked one at that. He hadn’t won many arguments in their marriage and felt he had poor odds on this one, too. He also usually didn’t get the last word… but he did this time. For once, she had no reply, no counter-argument. She turned away from him and left the room.

  David retreated to his office. Being a wizard felt lonely. No parenting books or websites existed about how to guide your magical children effectively through their formative years, and David had no one to ask. Not counting his kids, he knew only one dark practicing wizard who hadn’t died. Perhaps, he had no better option. He opened a blank email and stared at it.

  atrick overheard his mother on the phone cancelling an appointment with a locksmith. From what he caught from her side of the call, she wanted him to put locks on the outside of all the bedroom doors, but she changed her mind. Perhaps she wanted Patrick to overhear it as a warning. One more magical infraction and she would lock them in their rooms until they were old enough to vote. She might do it too. His mom loved control, and she would get it one way or another.

  For now, all the kids were grounded, but Mom and Dad allowed them to move around the inside of the house at their own free will. Patrick enjoyed this freedom by pacing around the upstairs family room, practicing for imprisonment.

  Samantha appeared in his path as suddenly as if she had materialized by magic. From his limited understanding of magic, he doubted anything that dramatic could happen. But she could enter a room like an Olympic diver entered a pool. No splash.

  Samantha moved close to him. His heart began i
ts predictable hammering.

  “May I check something?” she asked. “I’m curious.”

  “Okay.”

  She placed her hands on his chest, as Emmy had done to Jude before she went crazy. Patrick pushed her away.

  “I know what I’m doing,” she said.

  “Emmy always knows what she’s doing too.”

  “It’s not like that. I know how to be careful. And it’s not a spell. I just want to taste your magic.” She licked her lips.

  “What does that mean?” he asked, although he barely cared. He wanted her to do it.

  “There are flavors of magic for every second, of every hour, of every day of the year. Every wizard has their moment. The moments closest to the winter solstice are the darkest, and the moments closest to the summer solstice are the lightest.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m a spring witch. We’re about fertility and youth and change.”

  “We’re winter?” he asked. He knew it instinctively.

  She nodded.

  “The opposite of spring,” Patrick said.

  “No, summer is the opposite of winter. Spring and winter lie next to each other.” She lined up her hands, thumb to thumb, to illustrate her point further, as if she needed to. “And I am a March. Right where winter and spring touch. The gateway.”

  That almost sounded like a come-on… maybe. He had enough trouble understanding girls without the magical riddles.

  She replaced her hands on his chest and then leaned the side of her face between her hands, right over his heart. He knew she could hear it beating out of control. He could live with that as long as she didn’t press herself close enough to feel what went on below his belt. Well… he did want her to do that. He wanted her to do lots of things.

  She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply. “Hmm…”

  Patrick breathed deeply, too, but his breath sounded jerky. He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her closer.

  She looked up at him and licked her lips again.

  “Autumn, I think,” she said. “Perhaps even, September.” She said the word September like she might say the word chocolate. “You’ve been misplaced somehow. You don’t belong with them.”