by Myers, AJ
“Why do I feel like there’s more to it than that?” Nathan asked on a sigh.
“Because you’re paranoid?” I suggested, rolling my eyes. “Seriously, that’s it. Cross my heart and hope to…”
“Don’t. Say it,” he said, shuddering and clapping his hand over my mouth in case I decided to be rebellious and do it anyway.
Kissing the palm of his hand, I backed away from him with a grin and went in search of Grams. I finally located her in the kitchen, hidden by a stack of research. She was sitting at the table with one of the boxes on her lap going through a handful of aged, photos. She looked up as I wound my way toward her, and I watched as the smile of welcome on her lips slipped a little more with every step I took.
“Something happened,” she said, sounding worried.
“No, Grams, nothing bad happened.”
“Oh, that’s good,” she said, not looking like she was buying it. “Considering we have so far to go in your training…”
Her voice trailed off and I scowled. Every minute I hadn’t spent in the library I had spent with Grams learning as much as I could about how to be a witch—in fast forward. It was a lot easier than it had been for my first lesson in Witch 101…and a lot harder. Instead of struggling to make even the most rudimentary power manifest, my powers now had a tendency to be extremely easy to access.
That would have been great if they hadn’t also been totally out of control.
The only power I seemed to be able to control effortlessly was my ability to make my element, fire, manifest. I could go from human to torch in seconds and put myself out just as fast. I had been terrified at first, but now I loved the feeling I got every time I did it. I felt free. I became a being of light and warmth, beautiful to look at and dangerous to touch.
Teleportation: I’d say I ranked a D, a C minus if Grams was being generous. It wasn’t my favorite form of travel and never would be. And I definitely didn’t consider it the reliable method of transportation the others believed it to be—an opinion I had formed when I ended up standing in the middle of the food court at the mall instead of the back yard during practice.
Witch Fire: Big. Fat. F. I could summon it—sometimes—but I couldn’t control it. My fear for Nathan’s bank of windows had been realized over and over as I tried to control the volatile electric-like power Kim wielded with such ease and accuracy. Grams’ glass mending abilities had probably saved Nathan a fortune in window replacements alone.
And don’t even get me started on my lessons in healing. My failure in that area was just embarrassing.
So, pretty much all I could do reliably was catch fire. Oh, and let’s not forget the talent to predict my own death. Yeah, my powers were so awesome.
“I don’t know how we’re ever going to go through all of this,” I said, staring at the boxes surrounding us, in an effort to change the subject.
“One box at a time, that’s how,” Grams said, sounding as tired as I suddenly felt. “In the meantime, I would like to try something, if you feel up to it.”
“Sure.”
Reaching into the box next to her, she brought out a small velvet bag with a handwritten label dangling from it. I watched as she got up and walked over to get one of the big white pillar candles she kept to help me focus when I was training. Tucking it under her arm, she walked back to me and held out her hand for mine.
I followed her out the back door and into the cold November evening and let her lead me to the middle of the back yard. I shivered as a gust of wind blew over me, penetrating through my thick fleece pullover as easily as if it had been the thinnest silk. After I sat down on the cold ground and folded my legs comfortably, Grams sat down across from me and placed the candle between us.
“Light it,” she said, softly, gesturing toward the candle.
I did as I was told, barely concentrating on the candle before it sparked to life. The first time we had practiced with those candles, I had been a nervous wreck. Instructing me to sit in the middle of the kitchen floor, Grams had set two large red pillar candles in front of me and instructed me to concentrate on the wicks. When I refused to even try, Grams looked highly irritated.
“You can’t fear fire your entire life, Ember,” she said sharply, when I shook my head at her for the third time. “Fire is warmth and light as well as death and destruction. You must learn to see the good in all things, even those things that frighten you. You have to embrace your element, Ember.”
Embrace a burning candle? Uh-huh, that was going to happen.
“Yeah, I think I’d rather not,” I grumbled, getting up and dusting off the seat of my jeans with sweaty palms. “Let it go, Grams. I’m not playing with fire and that’s that.”
“Then you’re never going to be strong enough to save yourself,” she said sadly, “Or Nathan.”
Two days later, I was lighting candles like a human Bic.
Now, sitting on the ground with that cold November breeze blowing my hair back, I watched the flame dancing in the wind, letting it focus me as she had taught me to do. I let my mind become part of the light, feeding the flame all of my negative emotions until all that was left inside me was a quiet kind of stillness. Only when I had reached that peaceful place in my own mind did Grams place the velvety soft bag she had taken from the box in my hand, closing my fingers around it.
“Many witches who have precognitive abilities have retrocognitive abilities as well, meaning they can see flashes of the past,” she explained. “Most of the boxes I have checked contain personal objects that belonged to either the demon’s host or his victims. I would like to see if you can get anything from them.
“Close your eyes and find your center,” she continued, almost mesmerizing me with her calm, even tone. “Feel the power of the earth beneath you, the water that cleanses you of all negativity, the power of the air that breathes life into you, and the warmth of the element that guides you. Now open your mind as far as it will go.”
For a few minutes, nothing happened at all. Then my whole body jerked, muscles going taut, and I found myself standing next to a man at a small table in the darkest corner of an opulently decorated room. A man holding the very bag I was holding. He was pouring a white, crystal-like powder into the palm of his hand. The smile on his face was sinister, the anticipation in his cold black eyes sickening.
As I watched, he dumped the powder into one of the two crystal goblets before him and filled both goblets with wine just as a tall, plain-looking woman entered the room. He turned and offered the doctored goblet to the woman and I wanted to scream at her not to drink it. But, the stupid twit took it anyway.
I watched as she brought it to her lips and took a drink. And then I watched as she died.
Snapping my eyes open, I dropped the bag and started wiping my hand on my jeans like I could wipe away the memory if I could get every trace of the feel of that bag against my skin off my hand. A cold sweat had beaded on my forehead, and my heart felt like it was trying to jump out of my chest. I felt sick and dirty, violated on an emotional level so deep that I hadn’t even known it existed. Trust me, it wouldn’t go down as one of my more pleasant experiences.
“What did you see?” Grams asked, still speaking in the mesmerizing way she had when she was helping me fall into the trance that had forced me to see that woman die at the hand of her demon lover.
“He poisoned her,” I croaked, realizing my throat was as dry as a bone. “He poured some kind of powder out of that bag into her wine and she drank it without batting an eyelash.”
Picking up the bag I’d dropped, Grams calmly removed the tag I’d noticed before and handed it to me. Reading the words written there by the light of the candle between us, I felt my blood turn to ice.
Taken from the catatonic body of Reynaud Crom
Contents: Unidentifiable powder. Believed to be poisonous.
January 7, 1898
London
“Catatonic,” I whispered aloud. I gulped hard as I thought about the real Jac
k again, wondering if that would be his fate once the demon using him for a vacation home was through playing with him.
“He didn’t remain that way,” Grams said, though the look on her face said he hadn’t really recovered, either. “When he finally snapped out of it and found out he had poisoned his wife, who he was rumored to have actually loved very much, the poor man went mad and had to be committed to an asylum. He killed himself a year later.”
I dropped my eyes back to the candle, blinking back tears. Things were looking worse and worse for Jack by the second. If the demon possessing him didn’t kill him, chances were good he would end up in a psych ward pumped full of antipsychotics and talking to himself. Honestly, I didn’t know which one would be worse.
“Do you feel up to trying again?” Grams asked quietly, after I had sat there without making a sound for several long seconds while visions of Jack’s possible future branded themselves into my brain.
“One more,” I whispered, really wanting to scream and run away as fast as I could. “I’ll do one more, Grams, just to see if it was a fluke, then I’m done.”
Nodding her agreement, she got up and disappeared into the house for another cursed relic for me to play with. I turned to watch her go and found Nathan seated in one of the patio chairs, watching me with his face set in taut lines of tension. Slowly, he stood up and walked toward me, locking my gaze in his.
“Are you all right, baby?” he asked, kneeling next to me. In a sweet gesture of real concern, he brushed my sweat-dampened curls back from my forehead, his eyes roaming over my face in search of signs that I had gotten in over my head.
I started to nod, to tell him I was fine, my habitual reply to that question, but I stopped just as suddenly. I wasn’t fine and I was tired of trying to be. I reached for him on instinct, my buffer against the circus of horrors my life had become. His arms had become my safe haven, his love the healing balm on my soul that made the whole nightmare bearable.
He picked me up, settling me on his lap, and I tucked my head beneath his chin and took a deep breath. The scent of his skin, the scent that was his alone, trickled peace through me, blurring, if not really erasing, the nasty scene of death I had just witnessed.
“You don’t have to do this, Em,” he whispered against my hair.
“It’s just one more,” I mumbled. “Will you stay with me?”
“Always,” he whispered, tilting my face up. There was a soft look in his eyes that was so beautiful I felt tears sting my eyes. “I will always stay with you, Em.”
He brushed his lips across mine, sealing his promise into my skin, into my heart. Before I could take full advantage of the moment, Grams walked out with my next nightmare in the making in her hand. Reluctantly, like he actually had to make himself do it, Nathan pulled away from me and stood up. As Grams took her place across from me again, I felt him move to stand behind me, leaving several feet of space between us. Still, just knowing he was there helped give me that illusion of safety I so desperately needed.
I held out my hand for the demon souvenir in Grams’ hand and she placed a small oval locket in my hand. Before I even closed my fingers around it, I knew something was very wrong. My whole body started to convulse and my eyes rolled back in my head. The smell of smoke and burning skin filled my nostrils, choking me and making me gag.
It wasn’t the same as the vision before. Unlike the previous vision where I had only been a spectator, this time I was getting to be part of the show. I suddenly found myself sharing the body of another girl, a young woman with long blonde hair who was tied to some kind of…tree. A tree that was surrounded by fire.
Her pretty face was waxy with fear, her deep blue eyes darting around wildly as she screamed. I could feel the flames as they licked at her full skirts. I felt her fear like it was my own. And when the fire finally claimed her, I screamed with her, feeling the terrible, inescapable pain of being burnt alive. I heard a roar of agony that drowned out my own screams just before I heard the dark sound of laughter ring in my ears.
Just when I thought I couldn’t take it another second without being shipped off to the psych ward myself, the locket was suddenly ripped from my hand. The awful vision and the terrible pain that had gone along with it disappeared, but part of me was still trapped in it, reliving it over and over with such clarity that I started sobbing in desperation.
I opened my eyes to find that, though the pain was gone, the fire had remained. My survival instincts had kicked in, calling up my element, and the flames it produced were so high that Grams had scooted back a good ten feet. The candle I had been focusing on was a molten pool of glistening wax near my knee and the entire back yard was lit up from the golden, flickering, glow I was putting off.
I immediately tried to put out the flames, but I was so terrified that it took a lot more focus than it usually did. In the end, though, I was finally able to manage it. It was only then, shaking and so scared I felt sick to my stomach, that the mayhem around me started to register.
I heard Kim screaming at someone to let her go and turned to see her fighting to get out of Blake’s arms, her face pale and her eyes wild as she looked at me. Blake looked as sick as I felt as he restrained her, never taking his eyes from my face. Next to them, Tyler was watching me with a heartbroken kind of look.
And standing across from me, the locket clutched in one badly burned hand, was Nathan. His chest was heaving and I had never seen him so furious. I couldn’t look into his eyes for long, couldn’t bear the rage I saw there. Instead, I let my gaze drift back to his burned hand, swallowing back another wave of nausea as I stared at the blackened, blistered appendage, the fingers of which were still wrapped around the chain of the locket he had rescued me from.
“Where did you get this?” he asked frostily, shaking the locket at Grams, his jaw clenched and his eyes glowing brightly.
“It was in one of the boxes,” she whispered, looking horrified by what had happened. “I had no idea that would happen. She didn’t experience anything like that with the first vision.”
With the deadliest look I had ever seen, he opened the locket and flung it at Grams. It fell into her lap and she reached for it with trembling fingers, staring at the miniatures inside. I watched as the blood drained from her face, as her eyes widened and then filled with horror.
“No, I don’t guess she would have had the same experience, would she?” Nathan asked, his tone as icy as the fury still glowing in his eyes.
“Grams?” I whispered as her hand flew up to cover her mouth and tears started falling down her cheeks.
When Grams wouldn’t even look at me, Nathan snatched the locket from her hand and started toward me. Kneeling in front of me, he held the locket out to me again. I threw myself backwards like it he was offering me a venomous snake rather than an innocent piece of jewelry.
There was no way I was ever going to touch that thing again.
“You don’t have to touch it, baby.” His silky voice was rough with emotion. When he saw the terror in my eyes, he flinched. “I’ll hold it, Em. I just need you to look.”
Knowing I was going to regret it—hell, already regretting it—I leaned forward and looked at the miniature portraits the locket had kept safe for God only knows how long. On one side was the girl I had seen in my vision, her white-blonde hair done up in an elaborate twist. I stared at her for a second, trying to replace the terror I had seen on her face in my vision, the terror I had felt right along with her, with the happiness I could see so clearly on her face in her portrait.
When I’d memorized every single line of her smiling face, I turned my eyes to the other side of the locket and felt my heart drop into my stomach. Smiling up at me from beneath the tiny piece of glass was a face I would have known anywhere. It was the face I dreamed of at night and couldn’t wait to open my eyes to see when the dreams came to an end.
“Is that…?” I choked out, hoping Nathan would tell me he had a twin somewhere.
“Yes,” he whispered
, his expression tormented.
“Then who is…?” I started, wondering why I couldn’t seem to get a whole question out. My guess was that it was because I really didn’t want to hear the answer.
“You.”
Chills raced across my skin, causing me to shiver uncontrollably, at that softly spoken confirmation of my worst fear. It had been me burning. I had been consumed by those flames. I had lived that fear of watching death coming for me.
I had just had the dubious pleasure of watching myself die—again.
“I’m sorry, Ember,” Nathan, said, softly. Why would he be apologizing to me? That really didn’t bode well. “I didn’t know who you were when Shea sent me to check on you.”
“I know,” I told him, my voice barely a whisper. “You told me, remember?”
“But I never told you why I asked her to find you. I wanted to know where you were so I could stay away from you.”
He closed his eyes, shaking his head in frustration, and I desperately wanted to comfort him. I wanted to be that person for him that he was for me, the person he reached for when he was scared or when things were just too overwhelming to face alone. I wanted to, but I couldn’t seem to make myself reach for him at that moment.
“Seeing you that first time was like taking a deep breath after being buried alive,” he murmured, staring down at the locket still lying open in his hand. “The moment I saw you, I knew you. The face changes, the hair changes, but the eyes are always the same. But I swear, Ember, I tried to stay away from you this time.”
This time, I repeated to myself, silently.
I suddenly understood a lot more than I wanted to. He had given me the only clue I needed to understand everything perfectly. My eyes were always the same. Not that they had been the same before, when I had been the girl being burnt at the stake, but that they were always the same.
I had a bad feeling I was about to be introduced to the amazing Cat Girl.
“How many times?” I asked, my voice shaking.
“Three,” he whispered. “It always ends the same way.”