I wondered if Donovan knew why Angela wanted revenge on Ronnie Holt. I would have been willing to bet that he did. He seemed to be well aware of his future wife’s flaws.
“She didn’t think you were a witch, but giving you a revenge spell to deliver like that would confirm it,” he said. “Since she didn’t know about the curse, she didn’t have any idea that putting the spell in the form of a singing telegram would have…unexpected consequences. She just thought it would be a cute way of getting back at the guy and checking you out at the same time.”
“I’m getting bored, Donovan,” his mother said.
“Just wait,” he told her. He turned back to me. “When you sang the curse and actually used your powers, it set off alarms all over the place. That’s when I found out Angela had hacked my network.”
That was one way to put it, I thought.
“I went to track you down, but before I found you, you’d used your power again.”
That was when I’d reversed the spell on Ronnie, I knew.
“And by then the council was in an uproar. It was my mother’s responsibility, you see…” He gave her a dirty look. “And she didn’t want the rest of them knowing she’d pawned the job off on me, or that she’d let the spell to discourage your singing weaken to the point that it wasn’t working anymore. So she told me to get close to you, any way I could, and fast, so we could find out what was going on.” He sighed and shook his head. “I caught up to you not long after you’d left your parents’ house.”
It was all clear now, all right. My dad had been right about Gene and Dorothy. They had just been driving along innocently when a spell had transformed them into violent, sleazebag thieves. And by “rescuing” me from them, Donovan knew he could win my confidence immediately.
His spell had almost been a little too effective, though, turning big, cuddly Gene into Gene the Monster and resulting in bruises for both of us.
And after that, the whole dizzying pace of our relationship made sense. He had cast spells to make me fall in love with him so he could stay close to me all the time and find out what was going on. What he hadn’t counted on was Angela’s continued involvement.
Why didn’t you just cast a spell and read my mind? I thought. That would have been quicker and easier…and hurt me a lot less.
“I wish I could have gotten to you first,” he said. “Your father did something to you while you were at your parents’ house. I couldn’t get into your head.”
Was he reading my mind now? I wondered. He seemed to keep answering my questions.
“Edward McAllister is a powerful warlock,” he added. “That’s why you didn’t know what he’d done.”
“Edward is little more than a talented amateur,” his mother snapped.
“You know that’s not true,” Donovan told her. “He’ll have a seat on the council one of these days.”
She just sniffed in disdain.
“Anyway, I needed an excuse to be around you, so…”
So you mystically seduced me, you bastard.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. He looked down at the floor. Either he was almost overcome by emotion, or he was putting on a good act. I didn’t know which to believe anymore.
After a moment, he went on, “You know the whole story now. There’s no reason to keep pretending anymore.”
Pretending to love me, I thought, and it was like a knife stabbing into me.
“I’ll deal with Angela. We were arguing about you when you showed up tonight, but I think I can convince her to be reasonable.”
I wasn’t so sure about that. She probably knew that I’d slept with Donovan. He had been unfaithful to her, just like she’d been unfaithful to him.
Well, not exactly the same, I thought, remembering the pseudo-dungeon in her bedroom, or to the same extent, but the principle was the same.
“As long as you don’t sing, there won’t be any more problems, and the witches’ council can stop worrying – ”
“Donovan, how can any son of mine possibly be that dense?” his mother interrupted. “You know we can’t risk her using her powers. The potential for disaster is just too high! We have to shut this down now!”
He stood up and turned quickly toward her. “You promised – ”
“I swore a vow to do what was best for all witches,” she broke in, “and if that means we get rid of these two – ” She flipped a hand contemptuously at Taylor and me. “Then so be it.”
“I won’t let you,” he said.
She smiled at him. “You can’t stop me, especially once I wake Angela up. I’m sure my future daughter-in-law will help me do what needs to be done.”
He shook his head. “You can’t – ”
“Oh, I can, and I will.” She started toward us. “Now step away from that girl, Donovan.”
That was when the door of the guest house burst open with a clap of thunder and a gust of wind like a hurricane was rolling into Corpus Christi. My father followed the thunder and the gale into the room and said in a loud, clear voice, “No, you step away from her, Sharon!”
Chapter Nineteen
Donovan and his mother both turned toward my father. He looked different than I’d ever seen him before. He was in a towering rage and looked, well, scary.
He didn’t intimidate Sharon Cole, though. She glared at him and said, “Edward, this is none of your business – ”
“Aren is my daughter. It’s completely my business. I have rights – ”
Sharon shook her head. “You know that because of the danger she was made a ward of the witches’ council when we put that spell on her. You have no rights other than the ones we’ve allowed you.”
So my parents weren’t legally my parents, as far as the witches’ council was concerned? That was the first I’d heard of it. And it made me furious that the council would act in such a high-handed manner.
But there was nothing I could do about it, trapped unmoving in this chair as I was.
I wondered for a second how my father had found me, but then I realized he must have shown up at my apartment, and Beth had told him where I’d gone. Exactly how that led him to the guest house where Donovan lived, when Beth didn’t know where it was, I didn’t know, but it didn’t seem to matter at the moment. My life, and Taylor’s life, were hanging in the balance.
“The situation is well in hand, Sharon,” my dad said. “Aren is no danger to anyone.”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell her,” Donovan said.
My father glanced at him. It wasn’t a friendly look. But right now, like it or not, the two of them were allies.
“Release Aren, and I’ll take her with me,” my dad told Sharon. “We’ll work out a better system for dealing with her powers – ”
“The only safe thing to do is to make sure she has no powers,” she interrupted him. “And the only truly effective way to do that is to destroy her.”
Well, that was putting it plainly enough. My father must have decided there was no point in talking anymore.
Because both of his hands shot up and beams of pure blue force shot out of them, slamming into Sharon and throwing her against the wall behind her.
That was a new one, too. I never knew he could do anything like that.
Suddenly I could move again. I realized that even though she had seemed cool and detached, Sharon had been using some of her power to keep me paralyzed. The attack by my father had broken that spell. I leaped up from the chair but almost fell down because my muscles didn’t want to work right at first. I stumbled forward a couple of steps.
“Stop it!” Donovan shouted at my father, who was still pouring beams of crackling blue force from his hands to keep Sharon pinned to the wall. Donovan’s reaction was instinctive – a son protecting his mother – and a purple bolt shot from his outstretched right hand to smash into my dad.
He reeled back and Sharon was free. She lurched away from the wall and gestured toward the sofa where Angela lay.
“Awake!” sh
e cried.
That was all it took. No rhymes, no power sanction, just the command. But it worked, and in the blink of an eye, Angela was up and on her feet, glaring around in some confusion but clearly looking for somebody to hurt.
Her gaze fell on me right away. I was a handy target. She pointed at me and screamed, “Begone, you! Make it – ”
Taylor jumped on her back from behind, knocking her forward. My friend, my valiant human friend, who had to be absolutely stunned by everything she had seen and heard tonight, had conquered the terror she must be feeling and leaped right into the middle of a battle where she could be destroyed with only a second’s thought.
I couldn’t let her make that sacrifice.
“Take everyone mystical away from this place,” I sang, “send witches somewhere new, far from humans we might hurt, and do it now, make it true!”
I rushed through it before any of the others could stop me. A huge roar sprang up, and the wind was back, even worse than before. I saw Angela disappear, so that Taylor, still clinging to her back, didn’t have anything to hold on to and toppled to the floor. She looked up at me in amazement as first Donovan, then my father, then Donovan’s mother seemingly winked out of existence as well.
“Aren…!” Taylor cried.
At that moment, I didn’t know if I would ever see her again. It seemed doubtful. So I smiled and said, “Goodbye, Taylor. I l-love you, and Beth, too.”
I didn’t know if I got all of it out in time. I hoped I did.
Because I was gone, lost in a dizzying whirl of colors that quickly faded to black.
o0o
An unknowable time later, awareness came back to me and I realized I was lying on some sort of cold, gray surface. When I groaned and lifted my head, I saw that nearly everything around me was gray: the hard-packed ground, the mountains that rose in the distance, the sky overhead. The only flashes of color were red lightning bolts that crackled and sparked in the distance, above the mountains.
I didn’t know where I was, but it couldn’t be any place good.
I pushed myself to hands and knees, then staggered to my feet. As I did, I heard someone call my name.
“Aren!”
Fighting the dizziness that gripped me, I wheeled around and saw Donovan stumbling toward me.
I lifted a hand toward him and felt power the likes of which I’d never known course through me. Tiny blue sparks danced around the tips of my fingers.
“Get back,” I told him, and there wasn’t even a hint of a stammer in my voice. “Stay away from me, you liar.”
He stopped, but he didn’t back off. “Think whatever you want to about me,” he snapped, “but you’ve got to put things back like they were. You’re not supposed to be here. We’re not supposed to be here.”
“Where is this place?” I asked him.
He took a deep breath. “I think – I don’t know for sure – but I think this is the realm where the witches’ council meets. Where power works without the constraints of our earthly surroundings.”
That would explain why I wasn’t stuttering anymore and why I felt so much energy inside me. But I was puzzled, too.
“I thought witches had to be able to tap into the power of the earth for their powers to work.”
He smiled, but it wasn’t a happy expression. “There are many earths.”
My parents should have told me about all this, I thought. Even though they believed I would never be able to use my powers, they should have taught me more about the way everything worked, just in case I ever found myself in a situation like this. I was proceeding blindly, with only bare hints as to what I was doing.
But they had hoped that I would never be in a situation like this, I told myself, and I supposed I could understand that.
“Reverse what you did,” Donovan said. “Put us back where we were.”
“Back where your mother was about to kill me and my friend and probably my father, too?” I shook my head. “I don’t think so, Donovan.” I paused. “Anyway, you’re such a powerful warlock. Why don’t you do it?”
He laughed. Again, not really happy. “You think I’m powerful? You don’t know, Aren. You just don’t know.”
Was he saying that he wasn’t strong enough to reverse my spell, even in this world where the power of witchcraft was heightened? I found that hard to believe, but what other explanation was there?
“Aren!”
That was my father’s voice. I swung around sharply, just in time for him to grab me and hug me so tightly I couldn’t get my breath. After a moment he stepped back and rested his hands on my shoulders.
“You’re all right?”
I nodded. “I think so. Donovan says this is probably the realm of the witches’ council. Is that true?”
“It is,” he said grimly. “The temple where they meet is up there in those mountains, where the lightning is. You sent us to a place where we couldn’t hurt any humans. That’s certainly true here. No human has ever set foot here.”
“But you have,” I said.
He nodded. “A few times. And I wish I never had.”
I knew what he meant. This was where he and my mother had been summoned after the Apocalypse Incident so the council could deal with the threat I posed.
The way I felt right now, they hadn’t had a clue just how big a threat that actually was. I was ready to blast the whole place out of existence, and I wasn’t sure but what I could do it. I just might, I thought.
I was tired of being jerked around.
But I controlled that anger and asked, “Where’s Donovan’s mother?”
“I’m sure Sharon is around here somewhere,” my dad said.
“And Angela, too,” Donovan put in. “They’ll be drawn to us. They’re bound to find us soon.”
And that wouldn’t be good, I thought. The fight would probably just start up again. I felt that in this world, I was a match for any one of them, but against both Sharon and Angela – and possibly Donovan, too, since I wasn’t sure where his true loyalties lay – I didn’t know if I could prevail.
As far as I could see, there was only one thing to do, one way to keep the battle from resuming. It would be painful in a way, but not as bad as some of the hurts I had already suffered in the past few days.
I grabbed hold of my dad. He exclaimed, “Aren, what are you –”
I overwhelmed his voice with mine. I wasn’t singing this time.
“Return the pair so strongly linked, and bind the others here alone – ”
In the distance, I saw two figures hurrying toward us. Sharon and Angela, I thought. I had to do this before they could get here and stop me.
“Never to return to the earthly realm with their hearts of stone!”
I intended to maroon Donovan, Angela, and Sharon here together. As far as I was concerned, they deserved each other.
“Aren, you don’t know – ” my dad said.
“Now send home those chosen two,” I rushed ahead, “and right away, make it true!”
My father started to fade away in my grasp. Or was I fading? I didn’t know, but panic shot through me. Was the spell working the way I’d intended? Was it going to return my dad and me to our earth and trap Donovan, Sharon, and Angela here?
My dad smiled. I could see right through him now, literally. The mountains loomed behind him, and the bizarre electrical storm going on above them crackled and boomed with renewed energy.
“Goodbye, Aren,” he said, and his voice seemed to come from a million miles away.
“Noooo!” I wailed. This wasn’t the way things were supposed to be.
“Take care of your mother,” he went on. “You’ll figure things out. You’re a smart girl.”
I might have been a smart girl, once upon a time, but I was a stupid woman. I had messed everything up.
But Sharon and Angela were close enough now for me to see that they were fading away, too, along with the rest of the world around me. Their faces were twisted with rage, but something was p
ulling them away from me, just like my dad was being pulled away.
“I love you, Aren,” he said, and it was the faintest whisper of an echo being snatched away by the wind.
“Daaaaaad!”
With a bone-jarring crash, I landed on the living room floor in Donovan’s guest house. A few feet away on that same floor, Taylor had scooted back against the sofa and was staring at me as if I had just appeared out of nowhere.
Which, from her perspective, of course, I had.
“Aren…?” she said. “Is that really…you?”
“It’s…m-me,” I said, feeling so wiped out I could have curled up right there on the floor, gone to sleep, and not budged for a week.
But the fury that suddenly flowed through me wouldn’t allow that. I pushed myself to hands and knees, stumbled to my feet, and looked around.
On the other side of the room, Donovan groaned and tried to sit up.
“You!” I screamed at him. “The spell didn’t w-work! It sent you back with me!”
He got hold of a chair and pulled himself upright. “Aren, listen to me – ”
I charged at him and started pounding his chest with my fists. “It sent you back and k-kept my dad! My dad’s gone!”
“Aren, I – ”
“You lying son of a bitch! I hate you! I hate you!”
Under that verbal and physical onslaught, he reeled back against the wall behind him. He managed to say, “Aren, you need to calm down,” before I slapped him.
I backed away with a hand held up threateningly. I didn’t know what I could do here in the normal world. My stammer was back. But the memory of the power I’d wielded was still strong in me.
I backed away from him and said, “Taylor, come on, we’re g-getting out of here.”
“Aren, you can’t – ”
“Are you really going to try to st-stop me, Donovan? Really?”
The thing is, he probably could have. I didn’t know how our power levels compared, but he was a lot more experienced than I was.
Misadventures of a Tongue-Tied Witch: Boxed Set Humorous Witch Series Page 13