Witch Eyes

by Scott Tracey

  I struggled to my feet, trying to keep focus.

  The hound snarled again, its muzzle finally breaking through the circle around me. The power was starting to falter, growing unstable at the intrusion at its side. “C’mon, just another minute,” I pleaded to the torrent, as though it could hear me. I just needed to buy myself a little more time.

  I widened my eyes, seeing the fractures and ripples created by the hound as it tried to force its way inside the circle. The energy was growing more unstable, like a spinning top that was about to fall over. I tried to strengthen it, force the magic to spin faster. Ever faster.

  Once the majority of the hound was inside the circle, I focused on the spell that had summoned it. The hound was linked to the spot it had been summoned from. In this case, right here in the cemetery. The summoning spell had infected my magic two nights ago. Now I was going to do the same thing in reverse.

  I felt the strands of magic that had given the hound a home in this world, and I tugged at them. At the same time, I pulled at the hurricane, tying the two together—infusing the power of the magic with the spell that had summoned the hound. It was like plugging a toaster directly into a nuclear power plant.

  The more I pushed and pulled, the slower the hellhound advanced. Uncertain what was happening, the hound began to whine, scratching at the ground with its paws. The magic churned into it, and back out the other side.

  Each time the magic cycled, it tore away a little more at what made the darkness inside the hound real. Finally, like a balloon that had undergone too much strain, the hellhound popped. It exploded into shreds of magical power, quickly sucked up into the hurricane.

  I did it. I’d just made history. No one had ever killed a hellhound before. All that was left was to disperse the flood of magic around me. I was starting to get lightheaded.

  “I release everything,” I shouted, clapping my hands together in one final motion. My dismissal closed the floodgates immediately. The magic circled only a few more times, but with no more magic drawn from the ground, it spiraled out into the atmosphere.

  There was only a moment to see Trey’s eyes widen as what remained of the magic exploded into ozone and concussive sound, no longer constrained to the simple circle. Like a tornado that touched down and then vanished, it evaporated, taking the remains of the hellhound with it. It had worked.

  “That was cool,” I said, a moment before everything went dark.

  Twenty-Three

  There was only a brief sense of something cool and silken, deep amidst the dreams. I walked the streets of Belle Dam, but a city that was poised to be built, not one that had been old and stable for over a century. The air was crisper here, cool and inviting and full of promises and possibilities.

  The energy in the town was electric, as faceless people wandered the streets in a hurry. Huge trees lined the main avenues of packed dirt and cobblestone sidewalks. Where the high school should have been was a grassy field, devoid of flowers or trees of any kind.

  It was a clear morning, and I could see all the way to the coast to the north. The water glinted against my eyes, charmed by the morning sunlight.

  “The door is the key,” someone murmured from behind me. When I turned to find the speaker, there was nothing but empty street. Instantly, Belle Dam gave way to a forest path, wilted and broken as if by some powerful storm. The trees slanted on all sides, branches cracked and shattered by lightning. There was a smell of smoke in the air, the smell of charred and blackened meat.

  “The door is the key,” the voice whispered again. I spun back around, hoping to see the city once more. But there was just another path, this one branching in two directions. At the crossroads, Lucien Fallon stood in an old-fashioned suit and top hat.

  “The door is the key?” I asked, my voice scratchy and rough.

  Lucien tipped his head to the side to consider it. His hand raised, he tilted the top hat forward.

  “Irrelevant.” Lucien shrouded his eyes with the brim of the top hat and lifted a cane I hadn’t noticed before.

  “I don’t understa—” In a moment, the forest in front of me exploded into lights and sounds and memories. Visions that passed by so quickly I couldn’t see them. The wind whooshed past my ears, and as I smacked into the tree trunk nearby, I fell out of the dream.

  ¤ ¤ ¤

  “Mmph.” I stretched in the bed, feeling the strain the previous night had carried out on my body. The room was incredibly bright, even to my closed eyes. I fumbled against the bedside table. My sunglasses were where I always left them, and I slipped them on automatically. The effort took what little energy I’d had, and I fell back. The top of my forehead throbbed, like horns were threatening to burst out of my skin.

  It took some time for the fog in my brain to ease. Somehow, I’d gotten home. Trey must have brought me here. Across the room, someone cleared their throat. At first my heart jumped, thinking Trey must have stayed and waited with me. Then he spoke.

  “You’re pushing yourself too hard.”

  I recognized Jason’s voice immediately.

  “What are you doing here?” I whispered. Déjà vu struck me until I flashed back to the first time I’d seen Jason and asked the same question.

  “I’ll order breakfast,” Jason said. I couldn’t tell if my words had any effect. It was like business as usual.

  “I need to get dressed,” I muttered. I untangled myself from the sheets, which had become wrapped around me like a full-body noose, slick with sweat and cold. It was a wasted effort. I could barely get the sheets off of me, let alone accomplish the monumental task of getting out of bed. Every shift of my body made my brain jiggle free and loose in my skull, flashing lines of fire and barbed wire.

  Jason walked over toward the bed, holding a dark blue coffee cup in his hands. “Drink this, Braden. It’ll ease the pain.” He held the cup out. I wouldn’t have reached for it, but my throat was completely arid. My hand shook so much that Jason knelt upon the bed, pushing it down.

  “Relax. Let me.” He moved the cup closer to my mouth, his free hand smoothing back the locks of hair curling with sweat against my forehead. Jason’s hands were smooth and cold, and I flinched. A mortician’s hands, not some powerful witch mobster. I sniffed hesitantly, the scent of vanilla and lavender wafting from the cup. The cup pressed against my lips and my mouth opened automatically, swallowing down the sweet liquid. He could be drugging me right now, but anything was better than the putrid sleep taste on my tongue.

  He flourished his hand at the wrist, revealing two of my migraine pills like it was some sort of magician’s big reveal. “Swallow these,” he said, lifting the cup again.

  After another few slow sips, Jason pulled the cup away. “Not too fast now,” he cautioned. “You’ll make yourself sick.”

  “Why are you here? What happened to Trey?” I asked.

  “Shh. Go back to sleep,” Jason whispered, his hand still resting on my scalp. “When you wake up, you’ll feel more like yourself.”

  I wanted to argue, to push and struggle until I could focus on what was really going on. But the warmth of Jason’s elixir soaked into me, relaxing everything with a comforting heat, paving the way to real rest.

  The next time I awoke, the sun was much further along in the sky. I stretched automatically, feeling muscles that should have screamed moving languidly. Had I lost another day?

  Jason sat in the same chair as the first time I’d woken up. He had a cup of coffee in front of him and was watching the skyline. Finding something of myself in the man was hard. His hair was black and gray, mine was a flat brown. His was fine, where mine had a tendency to curl.

  Plus, he was a total dick last time he dropped in for a visit.

  “You’ve certainly been making waves since you came here, haven’t you,” Jason mused. He looked up from the view, watching me with
something that looked like concern. There were rumples in his suit, ones I hadn’t noticed earlier.

  I still wasn’t sure what to think. “So this is a father/son pep talk? Eat all your vegetables and join my arcane mafia and you get ice cream?”

  “Don’t be snide,” he said quietly. He gestured for me to take a seat at the table across from him. “Braden … ” He looked away. “You can hate me for a great many things, but sending you away isn’t one of them. You had to be protected. Catherine wouldn’t have stopped. She’d have come for you too.”

  “What do you mean, ‘too’?”

  “Catherine’s magic is insidious. Powerful in a much different way than yours or mine. She’s mastered disciplines that our families thought lost generations ago. We knew you were a special child even before you were born. Your mother, the most vivacious person I’d ever met, saw things as you grew inside her. A darkness she thought was killing the town.”

  “What does this have to do with Catherine?”

  “The final weeks of her pregnancy, those visions turned darker, drawing your mother down with them. The doctor thought she was suffering from depression. A few days after you were born, she took her own life.”

  “Then it was suicide.” As much as I was trying to stay stoic, it was hard.

  Jason shook his head. “If I’d had your sight, maybe I would have noticed earlier. But I couldn’t see, and you were still a baby. A newborn baby that cried every time his mother came into the room.” He was quiet for a moment. “Your eyes didn’t hurt you then. Maybe they were weaker. But magic killed my wife. And Catherine was responsible.”

  “But you don’t know that for sure. Like you said, you can’t see the things I can.” It made me wonder how much he really knew about my visions.

  “I know,” his voice was immediate and hard. “Just because I can’t see it doesn’t mean I couldn’t feel it. The air buzzed with it. It couldn’t have been anything but magic. It was her.”

  As hard as I wanted to be, as tough as I wanted to act, as soon as Jason started talking about my mother, everything started crumbling. “Why?” I whispered.

  “The feud? Or your mother?” Jason’s tone was gentle. Who was this man?

  “All of it. Why keep it up?”

  Jason closed his eyes, clasping his hands around the coffee mug. “Because I’m not the one who’s supposed to end it. You are.” His eyes opened and then immediately narrowed. “You’d know all of this already, if Jonathan had done his job right.

  “Jonathan was supposed to tell you everything, Braden. It was never my intention to leave you in the dark. Then, when you were strong enough, you could stand up to Catherine if you needed to.”

  That’s not right. “He told me he couldn’t. That there was some sort of … binding on him. What’s that word? The thing that means a promise you can’t break?”

  “A geas.” Jason looked at me. “If he told you he was under some sort of vow of silence, I can assure you my brother was lying. Avoiding his responsibilities has always been his prime concern in life.”

  That didn’t sound like the Jonathan I knew at all. “He raised me and took care of me all my life. That’s a huge responsibility.” Even if he was lying, he would have slipped up at least once. But Uncle John had never said anything about his past. Or mine. And he struggled with the little he could tell me.

  He dipped his head in acknowledgement. “Fair enough. And for which I’m grateful. But now you’re home.”

  “So what now? You’ve got your secret weapon, and you want me to go blow out her tires or something?”

  “Ending the feud will require a little more effort than that.”

  “I won’t.” I imitated the Lansings’ icy tone as best I could.

  “Braden, she’ll kill you,” Jason snapped. “She won’t hesitate. As soon as she thinks you’re a threat, that’s it.”

  “And I’m sure she’s telling her kids the same thing,” I said. “Both of you, keeping up this stupid feud. People would get hurt. I could get hurt. But you don’t care about any of that. You just want to win.”

  “Son, that’s not what’s happening,” Jason tried to say, but I kept going.

  My vision started skewing toward shades of red. I felt the magic drawing itself from the air around me, responding to the feel of my anger. “Don’t ever call me that,” I said quietly. “I don’t know you. And I’m not sure I want to.”

  “You’re being petulant,” Jason said finally, after several deep breaths. “You think I don’t understand why you’re angry? This was the only way I could protect you.”

  “Bull. If the all-powerful Jason Thorpe couldn’t protect me, then no one could,” I snapped. Pointing to the door, I forced it open with magic. “You know the way out.”

  A thin trace of humor shifted his face, an expression I didn’t think occurred very often. “You have my temper, don’t you?”

  “I think I told you to leave.” The evenness in my voice was scaring me.

  “Lucien didn’t mention you would be quite so difficult.”

  “Yeah well, Lucien forgets to mention a lot of things,” I snapped. I’d dreamt of him last night, the only person in the strange alternate Belle Dam. “How long’s he worked for you?” I hadn’t forgotten the research I’d done on him, and the way his age didn’t seem to match up with his background.

  Jason’s gaze sharpened. “My staff are not your concern,” he said, instantly confirming that I was onto something.

  “Really? Because he’s got to be pushing at least fifty by now, right? I mean, you are, aren’t you?”

  “Why this sudden fascination with him, Braden? I thought there were more pressing concerns. You cannot allow your focus to waver. Catherine is the target, son.”

  “I told you to stop calling me that!”

  His lips thinned. “You’ve had a free hand too long, Braden. I’m still your father, and I’ll do what I think is best.”

  “If you don’t leave now—” If they wanted me to be a weapon, they got one. “—then I’ll make you.”

  But Jason was not to be intimidated. “You are my son,” Jason said quietly. “And some boundaries need to be established.”

  Power slammed into me, and the worst case of vertigo I’d ever had was pulling me in every direction. The floor grew uneven, and I could barely stay standing. Even though I couldn’t see it, I could feel the effects of the magic, a force Jason directed so casually. “What are you doing?” I whispered.

  Jason’s voice sounded deeper than it should have, a horror movie monster with access to a synthesizer. “Making sure you understand me.”

  Twenty-Four

  “Don’t strain yourself, Jason.” I grasped the edge of the bed for stability. The vertigo sensation was only growing worse, hurtling through some imaginary chasm I couldn’t see.

  “I’m your father, Braden.” His voice sounded even darker now, rumbling across the room like some sort of demon.

  With my free hand, I struggled to reach my face. But there was a disconnect between my mind and my body, and I couldn’t quite reach it. The more I moved, the more intense the nausea in my stomach. I started gagging as my stomach threatened revolution, but I kept trying. Finally, my fingers slipped onto the glasses, and I ripped them off. My vision sharpened instantly.

  Silver violet rose pink scarlet amber forever and ever she never meant anything to you can’t trust gray embers burnt out sparks of thank god I needed this forest green relief and rest and burning trails of magic.

  Through the haze of a thousand lives, I saw it. The spell was a sickly green, the color of pine needles suffering before death. They formed chains that stretched across the room. I could just barely see over the top of the bed, where they trailed right toward their source. For once, I tried to focus on the impressions sweeping through me, anything to avo
id the effects of the spell.

  “You’re not stronger than me.” It was hard to even choke out the words. I pushed against the chains, forcing them to unravel in front of me. Power surged inside of me, a strength I’d somehow drawn out of the emotions smothering the room. I took it in, and turned it into magic.

  It was slow at first, one link at a time wavering under my concentration. And then all at once, the spell snapped, the chains ripped apart and hurtled toward Jason. Immediately the nausea faded, like it had never been there. I pulled myself up from the side of the bed.

  “Very good,” Jason said, sipping at the cup of coffee.

  “I don’t want to hurt you.” Part of me didn’t, at least.

  “You won’t.” Jason settled the cup back on the table, and then stood up. “You have an incredible gift, Braden. But you don’t intimidate me.”

  I hesitated. Everything was just getting too confusing. First Jason was a jerk, and now he was some sort of concerned alpha-parent. I’d come to keep Uncle John safe, but once I got here everyone wanted me to actually kill someone. Someone else had once had my powers, but hadn’t left anything to help me learn control.

  Jason’s tone was grave. “You’re already winded. I’ve barely gotten started.” He indicated the distance between us. “Could you stop me, if I continued? Or if I’d bound those glasses to your skin? You don’t know the first thing of what you can do. I can teach you strength. I can give you that control. You have to fight through the pain.

  “I want you to live. To grow strong, and be the son I know you can be. I won’t lose you to her.” Jason’s voice was suddenly savage. “I don’t dare.”

  “Do you hear yourself?” I snapped. “You don’t know a thing about me. What was my first word? What did I ask for at Christmas when I was six? God, what’s my favorite book?” I waved my hand in a circular motion, drawing the magic out through the fingers. “I’m just a project to you. A strategy.”