Rule watches me for several seconds until it becomes awkward. That’s when I notice the bag on the ground next to his feet, one he evidently dropped when I attacked him. Slowly he reaches down and picks it up. He pulls out two books and extends them to me.
“I saw you almost freak at my grandmother wanting us to wait until in the morning to start looking through the material, so I brought you some,” he says.
I stare at the books then back at Rule’s face as I take them. “Why would you do that, go against your grandmother for people you just met? Ones who could pose you harm.”
“Grandma’s never wrong about people. If she thinks you’re to be trusted, that’s enough for me. Plus, you know, you passed the test.”
Ah, yes, the test. I’m still not sure I buy that whole nails of the cross deal, but is it any stranger than the powers a bloodstone possesses? Plus, if it gets me information, I’ll go with Fiona’s belief in it.
Still, there’s a first time for everything, even for Fiona to be wrong in her people assessment. But suddenly I don’t want her to be wrong, don’t want to give her any reason to regret her trust.
“Thank you.”
Rule shifts the bag’s strap to his shoulder. “That seems hard for you to say.”
“I’m not in a position to have to say it often.”
“Not a lot of people on your side?”
“No. Just Egan.” And Keller and Toni. That too-familiar pang of loss and guilt punches me in the gut. I miss them both terribly, and at least a dozen times a day I wonder if I made the right decision in leaving them behind without even a goodbye.
And then I remember my mother’s broken and drained body, as lifeless as a dried corn husk, and know in the deepest part of me that I had no choice if I wanted to ensure their safety.
“Well, now you’ve got me,” Rule says.
Having someone else in my corner should feel like a victory, but I don’t want someone else to worry about becoming collateral damage in a witch war. I already don’t like involving Rule and his family long enough to sift through their historical documents, but I have to. They’re the only chance I have of finding out what happened in the past and if a white witch might have the power to stop the covens.
I press the books against my chest. “Thanks for the information, but you need to go home.”
“Why?” Rule plants his feet and looks as if he doesn’t plan on going anywhere anytime soon.
“Because being near us isn’t the safest place to be.”
“Neither is sitting atop centuries worth of information the world’s covens would kill to destroy.”
He has a point. “But the covens don’t know about that bunker of information, or you and your family would already be toast. The covens do, however, know that Egan and I are out here somewhere bucking authority.”
I watch him for a moment and detect something unsaid just beneath the surface.
“Why are you really here?” I ask.
“Because I want to know more, do more. Our family has been on the sidelines for centuries. It’s time we did something instead of letting the covens continue to have their way.”
I walk in a half-circle around Rule. “And just what do you think you can do? You are powerless. What can you do anyway besides tie herbs in bundles?”
I don’t like how ugly and mean I sound, and hate how I can’t tell if it’s the new, more powerful me talking or just my normal self trying to convince Rule to stay out of harm’s way.
“Power comes in different forms,” he says.
I shake my head as I stop pacing. “You barely have the right to call yourself a witch. You could no more defend yourself against a coven witch than an average human.”
“Is that right?”
I lift a finger and let him see the electric power sparking white there like tiny bolts of lightning before I flick the finger, tossing him back against the wall without even touching him.
“Damn, Jax, quit using your power,” Egan hisses from the doorway. “And close this door before you turn the house into a freezer.”
My vision darkens as I look at Egan. His startled expression gives me a moment’s pause.
Egan looks at Rule and points toward the street. “Go.”
This time, Rule doesn’t argue. He does pause when he comes abreast of me. “I’m going to help you, whether you like it or not. And I don’t think you’re going to fry me just to make a point.”
For a moment, I’m not so sure of that. But then the idea of having another friend somehow overrides my will to protect Rule and his family. I can’t find appropriate words to thank him before he retraces his steps down the path.
When I no longer hear his footfalls, I turn back toward the cottage to find Egan staring hard at me.
“What the hell was that?” he asks.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re always the one saying not to use our powers, and trust me, it’s been damned hard the past several days, more so than usual. Then you go all sparky-fingers tossing around some dude who just might lead you to some answers before our families make our heads spin like we’re in The Exorcist.”
I press the heel of my hand against my forehead. “I know. I just feel . . . off. Tired and on edge. Maybe it’s the white witch power. I just don’t know how to harness and control it yet.”
“Well, you better figure it out soon before you get us killed.”
He’s right, but that thought makes me feel like I just slid a little closer to the edge.
I stride into Wiccan Good Herbs the next morning with a renewed determination to end the day with more answers than I begin it. One question has to be answered to my satisfaction before any of the others.
Fiona looks up from where she’s replenishing a shelf of herbs. “Good morning, Jax.”
“Did you send someone to search our place last night while Egan and I were here?”
“No.”
“Are there others like you?”
“Yes, but not in Salem.” Her ease in answering with no hesitation convinces me she’s telling the truth.
“Well, that means the intruder is someone else, someone with an unknown agenda.” I pace across the room. “I’ve felt like someone has been watching me, but I thought it was Rule. Now I don’t think he was the only one.”
“You think the person who broke into your cottage has been watching you?”
“Maybe. I don’t sense a dark witch’s signature, but they might not have used any magic, which would make it more difficult to detect.” But a coven member wouldn’t have stopped at snooping. They would have waited for Egan and me to return to try to finish what my coven started during the battle at Shiprock. “I don’t think it’s a dark witch though. It feels different, sort of like you and your family, but not quite the same. Do you know who it might be?”
Fiona shakes her head, her brows knitting in concern. “I’m afraid not, but we’ll keep our eyes open for anything unusual.”
She finishes her task in silence.
“You’re worried,” I say.
“I would be a fool not to acknowledge that having you and Egan here is dangerous. You’re both powerful, and you evidently have powerful enemies. That puts my family at risk, puts everything our family has gathered over the centuries at risk.”
“You want us to leave.” Not that I’m going to agree to that.
She shakes her head. “No. I think it’s imperative that we help you, and you help us. We each have knowledge the other needs. We’re stronger together than apart.” Fiona looks up and meets my eyes. “But know this. I may not have access to powerful magic like you do, but if I feel like you are a threat to my family, I will do everything in my power to stop you.”
My muscles tighten in response to her threat, but I force myself to relax. Another part of me respects her stance, her courage to stand up to a witch she knows could destroy her with next to no effort.
After holding my gaze for several meaningful seconds, Fiona glances toward
the street. “So, you left Egan behind today?”
“He’s doing his own research.” We decided it’s safer for him to do some online snooping today, maybe see if there’s any buzz in the hunter community about our whereabouts. If the prowler wasn’t a member of Fiona’s family or the covens, a hunter makes the most sense.
“Something is bothering you,” Fiona says.
“Lots of things.”
“No, something specific.”
I stare at her. “Are you sure you don’t have magic?”
She smiles. “Just good old-fashioned intuition.”
I tuck my hair back behind my ear and consider how to answer. I don’t want to get Rule in trouble for bringing me those books. “Rule had the misfortune of showing up at the cottage right after us last night. I might have been a bit aggressive in confronting him.”
“Oh? I saw him this morning. He seems fine to me.”
I tell her about how I’d reacted when I’d heard Rule approach the cottage.
“You were understandably wary after discovering the break-in, but I get the feeling this reaction isn’t normal for you.”
I shake my head. “I don’t feel like myself sometimes. I keep thinking it’s fatigue or just being jumpy all the time because I’m afraid I won’t find a way to protect us before the covens find us. But I don’t know.”
“You think something changed when you fought your coven and won?”
I shrug. “Maybe.”
After Adele comes to mind the shop, Fiona motions for me to follow her into the back room. When she reaches the cupboard, she opens the door and leads the way downstairs.
I halt a couple of steps from the bottom. What had been an orderly room the night before now consists of a bunch of scattered maps and opened books. And in the middle of the research explosion sits Rule.
“Aren’t you supposed to be in school?” I don’t know why I am being so ugly to him, especially since I feel guilty about how I treated him the night before. He’s done nothing but offer me help.
Yes, you do. Despite the fact I still love Keller, something about Rule pulls at me. And that makes me angry.
“Aren’t you?” Rule asks without looking up.
“I’m eighteen, graduated.”
“No, you’re not.”
I don’t bother trying to convince him.
“It’s teacher in-service day,” he says, finally answering my question.
I take a deep breath, determined to be more pleasant. I descend the rest of the stairs and approach the table. I run my hand over a pile of loose papers. “How long have you all been working already?”
“When I came down here an hour ago, this one was already at it,” Fiona says.
Rule looks up then and meets my gaze for a brief moment, long enough for me to realize he’s probably been in this room since he returned from the cottage last night. That knowledge makes me feel like a bitch.
“Found anything yet?” I soften my tone, smoothing away the rough edges.
“We’ve mainly been refreshing our memories about the families that became the dark covens,” Fiona says.
“Yours was the first,” Rule says, a hint of accusation in his voice.
Okay, I deserve a bit of payback.
“I didn’t know that,” I say. But it doesn’t surprise me, not if my ancestors were anything like my father.
Rule pushes a weathered ledger toward me. “Seems Olaf Pherson had advocated fighting back against the witch hunts even before he knew about the wells of dark power that existed in the earth.”
“Wait. Olaf died in the witch hunts,” I say.
“No, he was the leading voice for accepting the dark power so they could fight back.”
“Can you blame him? They were killing us for no reason.” I wince at how I jump to the defense of a man who’d evidently led the witch families to become the vindictive forces they are today. I just can’t seem to keep a lid on my anger lately.
I press my hand against my forehead as I sink into a chair. “I’m sorry. I’ve not been feeling well.”
“I can make you some soothing tea,” Fiona offers.
“No offense, but I don’t think I’m going to be trying any more of your tea.”
To my surprise, Fiona laughs. “I don’t blame you.”
The laughter lightens the mood, and I breathe a bit easier.
“How did they find out about the dark power, how to even draw upon it?” I ask.
“Someone in one of the other families remembered a story told by his grandmother,” Fiona says. “This bit was oral history, so we’ve never been able to identify who it was.”
“But when Olaf heard the story, he became an advocate for tapping into that power,” Rule says. “Members of the various families started searching up and down the East Coast for fissures in the earth where the power seeps out to the surface. Some weren’t careful and got themselves killed.”
“We encountered some of them, in North Carolina,” I say, shivering at the memory of the spirit coven that had almost killed one of my classmates.
Fiona and Rule look at me as if I’m nuts.
“A spirit coven,” I explain. “Somehow when they died, they got trapped in that spot. They’d been killing people ever since, until I destroyed them.”
Neither Rule nor Fiona speaks for several long seconds, and I worry I’ve revealed too much about my power.
“We’ve never heard of such a thing,” Fiona finally says.
“Neither had we.”
“How did you destroy them?” Rule asks.
“Just blasted them with my power.” I make the mistake of looking at Rule. The expression he wears tells me he knows there is more to the story. Maybe I should trust them more. I could be making a huge error by not doing so. “I . . . drew on the power from one of the fissures, too.”
Rule’s eyes widen, and I sense Fiona tensing.
“Drawing from the fissure gave me enough magic to send my coven members fleeing, but it . . . it scared me.”
“And that’s when you started feeling different?” Fiona asks. “That edgy, snappish feeling you mentioned?”
I nod. “Soon afterward.”
Fiona crosses her hands in front of her on the table. “You messed with something you didn’t understand.”
“If I hadn’t, I’d be dead right now,” I say. “So would Egan, as well as some people who weren’t witches. I couldn’t let that happen.”
Fiona and Rule stare at me for a prolonged, uncomfortable moment before Fiona nods. “Somehow you were able to manage it.”
“Have you ever heard of anything like that?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “No. I’ve never heard of anyone drawing on that magic since the days of the Salem trials. Certainly not anyone who was able to control it so that it didn’t twist them into something worse than they were before.”
“Sometimes I wonder,” I say, wondering about how off I’ve felt since that night. Could be anxiety, fatigue, loss. Or is it something else? Did I open a can of very ugly worms?
Rule leans back in his chair and crosses his arms. “How did you find this spirit coven?”
“By accident. Someone we knew had a wreck on the way back from a dance. When we stopped to help her, Egan and I sensed witches. Only we figured out they were dead witches.”
“This girl you helped, she wasn’t a witch?” Fiona asks.
I don’t answer immediately. Something inside me is whispering that these two are asking too many questions, that they pose a threat. But the person I’ve always been doesn’t believe that. I want to believe in the good of people. As I stare at Rule and his grandmother, I realize they are what I might have been had my ancestors not made the wrong decision. Because of that long-ago action, I might never be a simple, harmless witch, but I can certainly try to befriend them. Emulate them.
“No. Egan and I fled our covens and tried to live a normal life. We had non-witch friends.” I lower my gaze to the tabletop and wonder what Keller is doing r
ight now. Is he missing me? Or is he so angry about my abrupt departure that he’s moved on? My heart aches at that thought.
“Tried?” Rule asks.
I raise my gaze to meet his. “Turns out it was harder than we expected.”
“Did you hurt someone?”
I shake my head. “Not like you’re thinking. In fact, we left so that people wouldn’t get hurt.”
I sense that Rule and Fiona have countless more questions. “We came close to getting them killed because they cared about us.” I swallow past a lump in my throat, the same lump that always forms when I think about Keller and Toni being kidnapped by my father. The memory of seeing Toni tossed through the air like she weighed no more than a marble. I blink against tears. The worst is the image seared into my brain of Keller inside the Siphoning Circle, the circle of rocks that allows a witch’s power to inflict unimaginable pain on the person inside. The same type of circle where my mother died.
“We had no choice but to leave to protect them, to find out as much as we can about the covens’ past. I have to know more about that power I drew into myself, if there’s a way we can maybe take all that dark magic away from the covens.”
I shift in my seat and pull a book toward me. I glance at the title, another history of the witch trials but one I didn’t see in the local library. “There’s a part of me that understands why the covens did what they did. It was a natural reaction to the threat against their lives, the anger at having lost family members and friends for no reason. I took in that same power to protect my friends, and I’m afraid it will corrupt me. Maybe it already has.”
Rule reaches across the table and places his hand over mine. “I don’t think you’re like them.” His words and his hand feel warm and reassuring, and I nearly turn my hand over and entwine my fingers with his. Only the thought of Keller holding me close gives me the strength to pull away.
Instead, I focus my attention on the cover of the book in front of me. When I open it, I see that the pages inside are handwritten in flowing script.
“That’s an accounting of what really happened during the time of the trials,” Fiona says. “Our ancestor compiled information from members of all the families that fled rather than become dark covens. Perhaps you should read that before anything else.”
Bane Page 5