Destruction: The December People, Book One

by Sharon Bayliss

  “I understand there is a lot to be upset about right now,” Mom said. Her attempt at “calm” came out as strained and stilted. “But there is only one thing that can currently be changed. Three of you have been practicing magic for your entire lives. There has to be something helpful you can come up with.”

  “Why don’t you just use the spell you used to find Dad,” Evangeline said to Xavier. Everyone’s head whipped over to him, Mom’s the fastest. Xavier gave his sister a look.

  “What?” Mom asked. “I thought he just got a phone call. Or was he lying about that too?”

  “No,” Evangeline said. “But how do you think spells like that work? They work through people and events and things. They change what happens.”

  “Okay. Perfect,” Mom said. “Xavier?”

  “It’s not a good idea,” he said.

  “I try to be patient with you, Xavier, but sometimes you make me want to pull my hair out,” Mom said. “I can’t even begin to fathom why you don’t want to help. Tell me, in plain English… in full sentences… why you can’t or won’t perform this spell.”

  “I won’t do it,” Xavier said. A streak of rather Vandergraff-ish stubbornness broke through his barely-there demeanor.

  “It was a complete sentence spoken in English,” Patrick said.

  Mom turned her sights on Patrick, but Samantha intervened.

  “I think I know the spell. I’ll do it,” Samantha said. Even now, she wanted to neutralize the situation.

  “It’s simple, really,” she continued. “At least… I think it is. I don’t know if it’s different for winter wizards, but it’s so simple, I don’t see how different it could be. My parents never taught it to me. They didn’t allow me to do serious magic. They said you shouldn’t alter the world to get things you want because people are too stupid to know what they want. And they don’t believe in doing magic to earn things you don’t deserve, like to get money or promotions and stuff. If you did, it would be jinxed anyway. But… I think the same concepts would apply here, and it’s not about getting something you shouldn’t have. It’s for a good purpose. So, I don’t think it would be jinxed.”

  “Tell us,” Mom prompted. She tapped her foot against the table.

  “Like I said, it’s really simple. All you have to do is think about what you want to happen and it will.” Samantha glanced over at Xavier as if she wanted his confirmation, but his non-expression provided so little information, he might as well have been invisible.

  “That’s it? That can’t be right,” Mom said.

  “It’s not as easy as it sounds. I mean, it’s really like all other spells. You do them with your mind. You visualize what you want and find the correct current of energy to make it happen.”

  Mom nodded now, drinking in her every word.

  “But it’s easier when you want something simple to happen, like fire to appear in your hand. It’s easy to picture in your head. If you’re trying to manipulate complicated things, it’s hard to find the right thing to focus on. You can’t be too specific. There are a limited number of possible things that can happen. And if you don’t pick something that’s in the range of possibility, it won’t work. You have to let the magic figure out the details. But if you’re too vague, you might not get what you want, at least not in the way you expect.”

  “That’s the thing,” Patrick said. “We can’t picture what’s going to happen. We don’t even know what state she’s in. Like when she jumped off the roof, we knew exactly how it would look for her to slow down before hitting the ground, so we could picture it.”

  “That’s why this spell is more dangerous than jumping off the roof,” Xavier said unexpectedly.

  Mom cocked her head to the side to consider what he had said. She stopped tapping her foot.

  “It really is simple,” Mom said. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of it that way. And if all seven of us… or six… five… all focus on the same outcome while in a circle, it would be extremely powerful.”

  Samantha nodded.

  “What if we simply focus on protecting Emmy? Is that too vague?” Mom asked. “I know it is vague. But perhaps we could make it into a visual. Imagine a bubble of protection around her, or something like that. What do you think?”

  “It seems okay to me,” Samantha said. “I’ve never done this before.” She looked at Xavier again.

  Xavier got up from the table and left the room.

  “Xavier,” Evangeline called as he walked away. He didn’t turn around. Patrick expected Evangeline to follow him, but she didn’t.

  “He’s not going to come back,” Evangeline said. “We should do it with four.”

  “Why won’t he do it?” Mom asked.

  “I think he’s worried about Dad,” Evangeline said.

  Mom furrowed her eyebrows. “I don’t understand. I mean, I’m worried, too, but I don’t even think he’ll even get within fifty miles of that man. He has absolutely no idea where to go and he’s driving around Texas randomly. If he’s in any danger, it would be a car accident, but that’s just as much a danger when he commutes to work, probably more since he’s driving in Houston.”

  Evangeline shrugged one shoulder. “Well, Xavier won’t do the spell. I can tell.”

  “Four is the most powerful wizard circle anyway. Am I right?” Mom asked.

  “Yeah, but it’s supposed to be one from each season,” Evangeline said.

  Mom swatted the thought away. “This is as close as it gets. We have three out of four. A summer wizard would never sit at a table with a winter wizard.” She looked at Patrick. “Are you in?”

  “Yeah, okay,” he said. “It seems simple enough. Just like prayer.”

  ight had fallen. And, in between towns in West Texas, night fell hard. If David cared to look at the sky, he knew he would see all the stars he missed in Houston. No streetlights lit his path. Nothing but his headlights illuminated the patch of black road ahead of them.

  In Ozona, Jude had said they shouldn’t take the exit toward Odessa. He wanted them to keep driving West on I-10 at ninety-five miles per hour. David didn’t think it would make sense for Colter to stay in Odessa. He had successfully faked his own death there, and going to the local grocery store would risk exposure. A logical man would flee to Mexico, but David didn’t think Colter did that. Frankly, he had no idea what Colter would have done. He assumed logic played no factor in his decision. He could be anywhere.

  However, David couldn’t fairly criticize anyone’s logic now. They currently searched for a person in the place where, statistically speaking, a person was the least likely to be. The country areas they drove through had an average of one person per square mile. They were not far from Loving County, the least populous county in the United States, with eighty-two official residents. But David thought Colter would like that. The man had gone well out of his way to avoid people and society. He would want to be that one person per square mile.

  The total darkness made it easier not to talk to Jude. Without seeing him clearly, David could almost believe his son didn’t sit there next to him.

  At least, until he talked.

  “Dad?”

  “What?”

  “I didn’t hurt her or anything. It wasn’t like that.”

  David made a disgusted sound.

  “I mean, I didn’t hit her.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “You’re really mad at me, aren’t you?”

  “No, Jude, I’m mad at you when you break curfew.”

  “So, what are you then?”

  “What was going through your head? What makes a person think that’s an okay thing to do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But you know it was wrong, right? You must know. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have left. You wouldn’t have said you were sorry.”

  “Yes.”

  The blue light from the digital display illuminated Jude’s face, but David couldn’t read his emotions. In the darkness, he coul
dn’t tell his eyes were blue, let alone see any hints as to the emotion behind them.

  “Then why did you do it?” David asked.

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “I really don’t know.”

  “I don’t remember most of it. I was wasted. I don’t remember starting; I only remember stopping.”

  “What made you stop?”

  David hung on to the silence, waiting. In the end, it made no difference. It didn’t matter to Samantha anyway. Or Emmy. But maybe it meant something good had remained. Jude still had a conscience somewhere in his drunken, magic-ravaged brain.

  “Emmy said my name.” Jude turned to the window and covered his face with his hand, as if only that part of the story shamed him. “And I saw her there, watching me.” He paused. “Do you think she’s going to be okay?”

  “And, of course, you mean Emmy, not the girl you raped,” David said.

  “I…”

  “Obviously, Emmy is not fine. But you know what, if she doesn’t end up getting herself killed tonight because of you, she will be fine. Eventually. So will Samantha. They can heal. You can’t.”

  He heard a pitter-patter on the windshield, and David thought they’d hit a large swarm of bugs but saw the rain streaking up the glass. The drops increased in size quickly, and the tiny spot of road he could see in the headlights became distorted from the sheet of water moving across the windowpane.

  “When does it rain in the fucking desert?” David asked.

  He had meant it rhetorically, but Jude answered.

  “Occasionally,” he said casually.

  ightning illuminated the land around the road and startled Emmy so much that the Expedition swerved dangerously. The light had come from nowhere. She hadn’t even noticed the mountains until they turned into massive blue ghosts in the brief flash.

  “Since when does it rain in the fucking desert?” she asked the empty car.

  She felt dead tired, but at the same time she felt like she could stay up for the rest of her life. The adrenaline worked better than caffeine, but she’d had plenty of that too. Although, she didn’t know if the fiery feeling she had came from adrenaline or caffeine. Maybe magic. She didn’t really know where reality ended and magic began. Did everyone feel this way all the time? Like, if they didn’t stop moving they would explode? The nice thing about being a witch was now she knew it could be magic. She didn’t have to be weird or crazy. Anything that went bump in her head she could call magic.

  Maybe because she had gotten closer now, or because lighting had broken the sky into pieces, the fiery feeling had increased. It didn’t just come from inside her anymore. The magic swirled around her like a smell in the air. Wet dust from the storm, electricity, and magic.

  She worried the address on Dad’s desk had been a fake. Some kind of stupid joke. This asshole didn’t live in a city, or a town, or village, or places where people can buy food and gasoline. He lived south of Marfa on Route 67, which, according to the conspiracy nut bumper stickers and T-shirts at the last gas station, was the area famous for the “Marfa Lights,” these unexplained light balls that shot around the sky. She saw no lights anywhere on the horizon, unexplained or not. She didn’t see anything out here. That woman had probably just played a mean joke on Dad.

  The rain started and didn’t kid around. Someone could have poured a waterfall on the car. She had to slow down to a crawl. But at least no one would hit her from behind like they would on I-10. She hadn’t seen any headlights or brake lights for half an hour or more. At least maybe she’d get to skip driving lessons after this. Well… she’d probably still be grounded when she turned sixteen. Driving came naturally when she did it Jude’s way. She had her eyes open, but she kept her other senses open, too.

  She found the road from the address. It hardly looked like a road, but she turned down it anyway. Things got really wet really fast. In her headlights, she could see water running down the dirt road so heavily, she seemed to drive through a stream. But it couldn’t be more than a few inches of water. That’s why she took the Expedition. Then something weird happened. The wheels stopped scraping the road. The car seemed to float. The steering wheel locked, and the lights on the console went out. The car moved on its own. Backward. With a crunch, the back bumper hit a boulder, and then the water spun the car around so the driver’s side of the car smashed into the same boulder.

  David parked on the shoulder of Route 67. The rain had become too thick to drive through. To avoid risking gas and battery power, he had taken the keys out of the ignition. He had thought it was dark before. This was dark. He couldn’t see a damn thing out his window. Not even the road, which he could only assume still lay along the earth, directly to his left. Now that clouds had covered the stars, they could be floating in deep space.

  The cold, white glow of David’s phone flooded the car.

  “I don’t have service anymore,” David said.

  “I know. It’s like we’re nowhere,” Jude said. He spoke the word ‘nowhere’ like it named the Promised Land he searched for. David had considered the possibility that Jude didn’t plan to take him to Emmy at all, but simply followed a mad impulse to drive away from lights.

  “Emmy could be calling me right now. Or your mother. She’s probably freaking out because I’m not answering. When the rain lets up, we’re going home.”

  “You’re giving up?”

  “I would never give up on finding Emmy, but I don’t think that’s what I’m doing anymore. You can’t find a person by randomly driving, making gut decisions about where to turn.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it makes no sense.”

  “But that’s because it’s magic. Right?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know when something is magic and when it’s not.”

  “I do.”

  “You really think you can find her?”

  “Do you really want to give up and go home?”

  “No.” David hadn’t meant what he had said about going back. He would never have done it. He would have kept driving circles around the globe until he found her.

  “You said I was her talisman,” Jude said. “If being around me keeps her safe, why does she keep getting hurt?”

  “Probably because you’re a terrible talisman.”

  Jude nodded. “Maybe I should let her go, then. Can I decide not to be her talisman?”

  “No… that’s not a good idea. You can’t be around her anymore, but you can’t cut her out emotionally. It’s dangerous to renounce your talisman. The truth is, I don’t know if you can be a bad or good talisman. I think you just are one. She still gets hurt because talismans protect the soul, not the body.”

  “What good does that do? That sucks.”

  “It does plenty good. But I’m not surprised you think that. You clearly don’t care about your own soul; why should you care about anyone else’s?”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t know what it’s like.”

  “I don’t know what what is like?”

  Jude ignored the question. “The whole time we’ve been driving, I’ve been casting a protection spell for her. If it’s working… have I been protecting her body or her soul? And if I am just protecting her soul… then what does that mean? That doesn’t do anything. She could still be hurt. She could still be killed. And what? The upside is, her soul floats up to heaven, safe and sound?”

  “That’s the thing. You have no idea how a spell is going to work. Even if they seem harmless. Stop casting spells and focus on finding her. If we do that, we can protect her soul and her body the old-fashioned way.”

  David glanced at his phone, now nothing more than a light and a clock. 12:00 a.m.

  “Merry Christmas,” David said.

  The door wouldn’t open, so Emmy crawled out the window. The water reached past her knees. Her muscles tensed painfully in the cold. It seemed to get colder with each passing minute. The slopes of Winter Park, Colorado must hav
e been more frigid, but she hadn’t been soaked to the waist. And since she’d had the heater on in the car, she had left her jacket on the floor of the passenger seat, now underwater.

  She waded out of the road onto higher land. At least the rain started to pass. She didn’t bring much with her when she scrambled out of the car, but she did bring the gun. In the dark, she couldn’t even tell which way to head back to the road, and her cell phone was both out of area and underwater. The night would get only colder. She didn’t know how long it took to get hypothermia… but she already couldn’t feel her toes. She furiously rubbed her bare arms and then remembered she could do better. She tried to call up the flame as she had on the Solstice, but it wouldn’t come. Maybe her hands shook too much.

  A glow of light appeared several hundred feet away, as if the fire she had meant to create had gotten lost. It bounced up and down, illuminating short, black trees that looked like charred skeleton hands. She thought about the Marfa lights. Then she heard a light cough. Emmy clutched her gun tightly. It had to be him. She should have realized that in the pitch dark, he would have seen her headlights coming from several miles away. The flood stopping her may have worked out for the best.

  The fiery feeling under her skin increased and made her feel warmer. She felt as if she glowed. She looked at her hands to make sure she didn’t actually glow. That wouldn’t be helpful right now. As long as he had the light, she had the upper hand. The darkness worked as well as an invisibility cloak. She should be scared, but she almost never felt scared. Or not exactly. The things that scared other people, such as horror movies and monsters in her closet, didn’t scare her. Some things scared her. But, right now, she felt better than she had in a while. A pleasant heat bubbled under her skin, the same heat she felt when talking to a cute boy or when on stage for debate or theater.

  The light got closer. Now she could hear the crunch of his footsteps on the gravel. She crawled behind a rock to shield herself from a flashlight sweep and tried to breathe as little as possible, a hard task in the situation. He would find the car, and that would distract him. Then she could make her move. If only she could snipe him from behind the rock. But she didn’t have a sight and couldn’t find a good target in the darkness anyway. She hated waiting. She wanted it done now. It would fix everything and bring the world back into balance. Evil would be punished and good would prevail and it would all make sense. Justice. She had to stop herself from saying the word aloud.