Furbidden Mate

by Jessica Snow

  Since then, however, McKenzie struggled constantly with even the most basic use of her magic. It wasn’t like her mother could be much help either. Trapped in the feline form as she was, the biggest extent of Reba/Rosie’s power was her telepathic link with her daughter, and her seeming ability to make herself almost appear and disappear at will.

  Shaking her head, McKenzie focused harder on the water. She tried to use the imagery techniques that her mother insisted that she try, and she tried to will herself into feeling like a giant bag of water. It helped a little, she could feel her body tremble and cool almost like she was quickly dropping to the room temperature of water. If anything, it made for one hell of yoga meditation because her muscles and joints felt like they didn’t exist at all. McKenzie let her mind wander knowing that the words that she had to use were not as important as the power of her mind and the strength of will. Instead, she muttered, knowing that somewhere inside of her brain was the key she was looking for. On the table, the bowl itself started to vibrate slightly as if the water inside was moving side to side shaking its plastic container, trying to get free. Ripples began to form on the surface of the water, a half dome starting to form, creating a clear roof-like shape. “I’m doing... I’m doing it... I.... shit!”

  The water sloshed back into the bowl, a little escaping over the side to splatter on the cheap tablecloth they had. At least she was getting a little bit of control, a month ago, Reba would not have let McKenzie even try this outside of the bathroom.

  You almost had it. You were getting everything done until you lost your focus there at the end by getting excited.

  “Yeah well, I feel like all of this is like one giant Zen fucking riddle,” McKenzie complained. “When I want it, I can’t have it. When I don’t need it, I have it in spades. Or I just get gigantically pissed off and I lose control, going all wrath of God on things. How the hell am I supposed to make big damn magic to defend our family if I can’t even make a ball of water?”

  Patience my little one. For someone who has had so many challenges just getting started, you’re doing fine.

  “Mom, can you tell me something?” McKenzie asked, looking down at the furry feline form of her mother. “Just how in the hell did you end up as a cat anyway?”

  If it was possible for a cat to look pensive and chagrined, then Reba looked that way now as she paced around the table. Finally, she looked at her daughter and came over sitting directly in front of her looking at her with her feline eyes but still, somehow it was the same loving gaze that McKenzie remembered from years ago.

  It’s going to sound ridiculous, but I got trapped in this body because of another woman. You see there aren’t too many of us witches left, and those that do exist either must be very, very careful with how they display their magic and hide most of the time, or they find a protector. I got lucky, not only was Mike my protector, but I fell deeply in love with him as well. Unfortunately, not every witch cares about the feelings of their protectors. Madeline was one of those types of witches.

  “Madeline?” McKenzie asked, confused. “I’ve never heard of anybody named Madeline before.”

  She came to town when you were about eight years old. Of course, she and I knew what the other one was very quickly. You haven’t had a chance yet but when your skills get strong enough you will be able to tell supernatural beings simply by the aura that they put off. By the way, it was the main reason I knew that your sister would become a bear, while you would become a witch, even at birth you had very faint auras that told me what you’d become. But anyway, getting back to Madeline. She didn’t come to the house very often which was a good thing, she was at least smart enough not to piss me off on my home turf. Someday, if I ever get back into human form, I will show you some of the enchantments and spells that I put around the old house. They focused and enhanced my abilities, and within those walls, I was more powerful than anything could take on.

  What the enhancements did not do, however, was stop Madeline from seeing your father and wanting his abilities for her own. She knew that one of the main reasons I was able to use magic more than most other witches was because I knew that between Mike’s physical abilities and my magical abilities, we could hold off an entire pack of werewolves, or even a small coven of vampires without too many problems. She wanted that ability for herself. So, she got herself a job at your father’s company as a secretary.

  “She worked with Daddy? Why?”

  She was trying to use her subtle magic to take him away from me and from you two. It’s an old magic and one that has been mostly outlawed by any witch that has even a shred of common decency, but the idea is basically to make the victim fall in love with you. You may have noticed about the time you were nine years old that your father and I had a rough couple of months.

  McKenzie remembered. While her mother and father tried to hide it from their daughters, both she and Kat could sense that something was not always right between their parents at the time. Back then, Kat thought that it was just about money. Big Mike had recently taken a cut in his weekly mileage, and for any trucker who was being paid by the mile, that hurt. Apparently, there was something else involved. “She was trying to take Daddy from us.”

  She was. Thankfully, during one of the arguments that Mike and I had, her name came up for some reason. It tweaked my suspicions, and that night while your father was asleep, I magically scanned him. The spell is old, slow working, and powerful, but it also leaves traces that even a novice witch can pick up. Those traces combined with her name led us to a duel. It was there that I made my mistake.

  “What did you do? Did you lose the duel?”

  Hardly. Magic is a lot like any other muscle, you must exercise it to be able to keep it strong. While Madeline’s spell was powerful, her magic was in general very, very weak. Meanwhile, I had over a decade of having your father protect me and the ability to use my magic more often. I was in, for witch’s terms, tip-top fighting shape. By magical law, we had to meet in a neutral location, and since I was the one claiming that I had been wronged, I had the choice of location. I ended up picking the old abandoned zoo that was shut down about twenty years ago. We met at night, near midnight, and the only regret I had was that because of the influence of Madeline’s magic, your father and I never said goodbye to each other. Instead, we got into an argument, and I swore to myself as I headed out the door that it was going to be our last one. I guess, in that regard at least, I was right.

  When the duel started, I was handing Madeline her ass pretty quickly. In fact, I thought that this would be a quick dust off and that maybe she would get the message and get the hell out of town. Unfortunately for me, I underestimated her nearly insane obsession with getting your father as her protector. I was just about to cast the final spell which would paralyze her mind and make her never able to set foot in Bone City again when she countered with a suicidal spell of her own. I guess she figured that if she could not have Big Mike then nobody could.

  “What was the spell Mom?”

  There are a couple of different ways to do it, but basically what she did was, she trapped me in the body that you see before you. Normally to do so, you either must have the permission of the person that is doing it, or you have to be willing to sacrifice some of your own life force. Because of the advantage that I had in magical strength, Madeline had to use all her life force to put me in this body. I could feel myself shift, maybe for the first time understanding on a personal level what your father and your sister feel like when they change their own shape, and the pain made me black out. When I came to, Madeline was dead, lying on the ground in the middle of the zoo, and I looked like nothing more than your average stray cat. It took me two days to get back, and I had a few fights along the way, since I was a new cat in established territories, and I didn’t know how to act like a cat very well.

  “Is there a way to counteract the spell?” McKenzie asked, her heart breaking knowing that her mother truly loved her and had returned home soon a
fter they thought she had left. “Is there any way to change you back to the woman that you were?”

  The spell exists, but it is just as dangerous as the spell that Madeline used to trap me in this body. It requires the use of life force to power the magic, and quite frankly McKenzie, while you have the talent, you do not have the control or the strength yet to make it happen without killing either yourself or me. I’m not willing to take that risk until you have more control of your abilities.

  McKenzie took the opportunity to press what was burning on her mind. “Mom, this is why I want to find and talk to Kat. She deserves to know that you are still here with us. For God’s sake, she has spent years thinking that you ran out on us, and regardless of the bullshit that they tell you in school when one parent leaves, you were around to see her blame herself for the whole situation. She deserves to have this relief.”

  Perhaps. And I pray that there can come a day when I will be able to look my daughters in the eye and give both of you the big hugs that I have been unable to give you. Why do you think I spent so much time rubbing against your legs when you two were getting ready to go to school? Or when you two were feeling bad? It was the best I could do. For now, though we need to focus on getting your abilities stronger.

  They continued to work until McKenzie was at least able to bring the water out of the bowl a little bit, then set it back down without creating a gigantic mess. At that point, though, she was exhausted and had to take a break. “That’s enough for now Mom, I can barely see straight and my head is killing me.”

  Reba meowed in reply and rubbed herself against McKenzie’s cheek. It felt strange to the girl knowing that her mom was a cat, so part of her wanted to still rub her back and pet her the way she used to when she thought her mother was Rosie. Still, it felt nice knowing that when she kissed her mother on her furry head, it was her mom there and not just a cat. Reba left, probably heading out to see what she could scrounge up for the two of them. Being a cat, her ability to carry things was limited, but on the other hand, her ability to disguise herself and to make it look like there was nothing wrong, meant that she could come back with packages of food very easily. It was better somehow to McKenzie when she did that instead of the times she would come back with a fifty or one-hundred-dollar bill clutched between her teeth, lifted from a local restaurant or gas station. McKenzie knew there was no choice, she was still a high school student and she had little ability to use her magic either for attack or even for her own protection, and she still did not know how to read the aura of those around her to be able to see if somebody was a shapeshifter or not. Still, it didn’t feel right knowing that her mother was stealing for her. She couldn’t even go to school, there were too many students she knew that were wolves, and who knew what else.

  McKenzie looked around the small apartment that they were sharing, a flophouse on edge of the city. She had learned quickly from her mother that there were certain areas of town that she could not go yet. Downtown and the urban sprawl there, was the home of the vampires, who took advantage of the old tunnels and sewer systems beneath the city to dig their catacombs. Bone City was one of the older cities on this coast, and as such some of the old tunnels were easily one hundred to two hundred years old, and the city had been rebuilt on top of itself so many times that the vampires’ web was wide as well as deep.

  Many of the suburbs and the wealthier industrial areas belonged to the werewolves, and the forest was a total no-go for obvious reason. So, that left McKenzie a narrow band in between the two warring groups. In the poorer working-class neighborhoods, she could find at least what she thought she could call relative safety. Still, she did not go out at night; that kept the vampires away from her. It was the only thing, because according to her mother, garlic, crosses, and holy water did jack shit to vampires. Their two weaknesses were sunlight and wood, although silver also left a hell of a sting and fire could be effective if it was intense enough to emulate sunlight. That and blunt force trauma on the scale a werewolf or werebear could deliver.

  Sighing, McKenzie went over to her bed and laid down, figuring she could close her eyes and try and meditate a little bit. It was a trick that her mother had showed her that was supposed to give her the ability to learn to use her magic without having to be in full-on rage mode. McKenzie didn’t quite understand how it worked, but then again, she didn’t understand how most of it worked. Instead of debating the finer points of meditation, she closed her eyes and tried to clear her mind, just like she had been taught. At first there was nothing, just the normal swirling emotions that she felt all the time. But she looked forward to what came every once in a while, the ability to psychically see her family. It was from that skill that she knew about Kat, even if she didn’t know exactly where she was, she knew about the three babies, and more importantly she knew about her father, kind of. But she felt totally powerless and unable to do a damn thing about it. Probably that was one of the things stopping her from really using her abilities. She wasn’t able to achieve the level of inner assuredness that her mother kept saying she needed to really harness her abilities.

  It didn’t come easily, letting go of the questions that swirled around her head. But suddenly, with a flash in her mind like a camera going off in her face, McKenzie was assaulted with a vision. Her father. Big Mike was in a cage, sitting on a metal frame bed. Suppressing her excitement, McKenzie struggled to focus, to not let her emotions cloud the image she was seeing.

  “Of course, we still have the bear, my Lord,” a voice said, and McKenzie could see her father turn his head, her own vision expanding as he did to allow her to see who the voice was attached to. The man was in his forties, maybe about six feet tall, and had the relaxed, countrified air of the trained outdoorsman. Except for the cell phone at his ear, he looked like he was about to go out hunting deer or something. “Yes, he’s right here. Oh, he’s decided to stay in his human form, probably because he’s hungry most of the time. Yes, my Lord, and when he’s in his other form his needs are even greater.”

  “You know asshole, I can still hear and talk back,” her father said, but his voice did sound weaker than normal. In looking at him, he also looked smaller than before, easily under the three-hundred-pound mark that Big Mike had always joked was his ‘bottom floor.’ “And I know who you’re talking to. You sold out.”

  The man, obviously one of the Wardens that her mother had filled her in on, ignored Big Mike and kept talking on the phone. “Yes, my Lord, he still has a mouth on him. When? I’m not sure, but after the other’s Guardian approached me, I don’t think it’ll be that much longer. Of... of course, my Lord. Yes, I can do that. I’ll be ready. My reward? I look forward to it, my Lord.”

  The vision quavered, the image of her father melting away like ripples on a pond, to be replaced with an image that was truly horrifying. It was a valley in the hills above Bone City, which by itself shouldn’t have been scary at all. She’d had flashes of this valley before in her meditative visions, and figured that it was the valley where Kat was staying safe with her babies, even if she hadn’t seen the exact location of their camp yet.

  But what scared her was the gaunt, almost coat rack thin figure that had her back turned to McKenzie’s vision, her scarred, pink scalp still showing the horrible effects of the magical fire that had burned her nine months earlier. The figure was standing at a curve in the road that overlooked the valley, sniffing the air before laughing, a laugh that had no sanity in it at all. “Soon, oh so soon now... I’ll have what I deserve.”

  The figure turned, and before she screamed, McKenzie saw the horribly twisted and utterly insane face of Crystal Lilly as she squatted down, not even worrying about taking off her clothes before transforming, whatever cheap clothes she was wearing ripping at the seams as she body shifted. She leaped out of sight, but by then McKenzie was screaming, sitting up in her bed in the now totally darkened room in a panic.

  What’s wrong? Reba asked, coming in the door. I just got in, and you were sc
reaming.

  “I... Mom, I saw Crystal Lilly. She’s still alive, and she’s... we must find Kat and the others. I don’t care if there’s danger. Mom, she’s back, the Wardens have Daddy, and... I can’t wait any longer.”

  Visions of the future can be tricky. Are you sure of what you saw?

  McKenzie got out of bed, throwing back the sheet to get to her feet and looked for her shoes. “Damn sure. Mom, even if it’s a risk, we have to make the attempt.”

  You know you don’t have full control of your powers.

  McKenzie found a tattered, battered Adidas and pulled it on, tying it by muscle memory. “And if we don’t go, there won’t be a need for my powers, because our family will be dead.”

  Chapter 40

  The fire wasn’t very big, but then again for the past couple of months, things hadn’t been going very well. Ever since Jerle had hooked up with her ex-friend, the crazy bitch Crystal Lilly, things hadn’t been going well. While she hadn’t been on the planet long, to Sherry, her opinion was well informed in terms of things not going well.