by Celia Crown
I want to tell Jesse that there is nothing good about the way he looks at me. There were death daggers when he laid eyes on me, and I would have manifested a bolt of lightning and strike him if I hadn’t run away.
Cowardice over confrontation, it works for basically every problem I have.
Every witch has the basic elements ingrained in their DNA, but other forms of magic need teaching and practice to perfect them.
“Come and have dinner. You two can get to know each other since he’s going to be here for a while.”
“A-a while?” I stutter.
Jesse smiles, “Yeah, until he finds a new place.”
He sees me struggling to comprehend my survival as my face is an open book, “Just pretend he’s another me, or think of him as your ‘brother’.”
I frown, “He’s not my anything.”
Jesse continues to smile with patience and understanding, “I know, but it’ll help you be less anxious around him.”
“He’s scary,” I whisper as I fear that Alexander is going to hear me.
Jesse laughs, good-naturedly, “He’s the commander of our team.”
That’s more reason to kick him out of our home, or he’s going to kill me in my sleep. I need to set up protective spells around my room and Jesse’s, just in case this commander decides to do something funny.
I don’t care if he’s the bishop of Rome; Alexander is not on my safe list.
“Dinner?” Jesse suggests.
I hate to do this to him, but I’m not comfortable around that man, and I don’t think I’ll ever be.
“Um, maybe tomorrow,” I itch my cheek.
His smile is radiant, and I’m blinded for a moment.
“Yeah, let’s have dinner tomorrow.”
Chapter Two
Alexander
I don’t see the kid until the next afternoon.
She comes out of her room when Jesse makes loud noises with the pans. He’s spilling hot water everywhere with his uncoordinated movements that make me question whether he is truly a special ops member on my team.
I have seen him in war, and his skills are one of the best I have seen, but he’s entirely useless off-battle.
The kid walks into the kitchen and goes straight to her brother. She doesn’t notice I’m nearby as when she turns to get a kitchen towel, her body froze and her big blue eyes widen like a deer in the headlights; she’s going to pass out if she doesn’t breathe.
“Towel, Charlotte,” Jesse winces as he whips his hand up and down, “Eggs shouldn’t be this hard to make.”
The girl steps back as she keeps her eyes on me when she hands the towel to Jesse. I equate her to a wounded animal, untrusting, hair sticking up in guarded anxiety, and wariness that’s clear on her face.
“How about we go out for lunch?” Jesse tries to resolve this tension between us.
She reluctantly tears her eyes from me and frowns, but Jesse cuts in first.
“You didn’t have breakfast,” he points out, “You can’t skip lunch.”
“I’m fine,” she murmurs in a low voice, and my ears almost miss it.
Then, her eyes snap back to me as she awkwardly pulls the refrigerator open beside her, hands going in the rustle through the contents to find whatever she is looking for. She closes the door with a bottle of water and a wrapped sandwich, and she flees to her room again with a loud bang of the bedroom door.
I listen for any sound coming from her room, but it’s completely silent. Jesse’s sigh gets my attention, and I turn back to him with a stoic expression. His forlorn sigh and the drop of his shoulder tells me that something is weighing on his conscience, but I’m not going to ask just for the sake of knowing.
I don’t like prying in personal information from anyone, especially not from the brothers that I fought in battles with.
“Sorry, she’s not used to strangers,” Jesse flexes his burned hand, “Charlotte is a bit of an oddball.”
“You never talked about her,” I mention as I take a step towards him, sweeping my eyes over to the corner where she disappeared.
Her head pops around the edge of the wall and narrows her eyes at me. It’s as if she’s warning me to not step closer to her brother. Her tiny hand had something balled in it, and she tosses a tube of cream into the air in the direction of her brother.
I, however, catch it.
Her aim sucked so much that it came to me, and her gasp of surprise turns into a distressing noise. I look down at the aloe vera cream in my hand and glance at her. Her blue eyes glare with a ferociousness of a declawed kitten.
She’s not going to scare a seasoned soldier into submission with her tiny head out the corner, but she tries anyway. With my height, I’m able to stare down at her from a distance, and her shoulders hunch back in fright.
She scurries back with the door slamming seconds later. Jesse laughs and shakes his head.
“Don’t be so mean to her. She’s a delicate girl.” Jesse takes the cream out of my hand and puts a decent amount of cream on the back of his hand.
“Give her time. Charlotte will warm up to you.”
I raise an eyebrow. Time is not something I have laying around. I need to find a new home since I’m not that comfortable with living with someone else. I don’t want to bother Jesse and intrude in his home or his time with his sister. I have no plan on staying for more than a week.
“Let’s grab lunch around the corner, and I’ll order take-out for her.”
We leave to the restaurant just a block down the house. There is nothing special about the neighborhood. It’s quiet, and people keep to themselves while cars are running up and down the streets. Children are playing on the sidewalks under the hot sun, but this heat doesn’t bother me.
I have been under intense training and missions with unpredictable weather before. Summer humidity is a warm wash on my skin.
Jesse and I make small talk about current news in the world. He doesn’t talk much about his home life. I don’t think he had much as he and I had been teamed up since we were both eighteen.
In the ten years of combat and confined spaces, he never mentioned anything about that little girl named Charlotte. He didn’t talk about his home life much, just that his parents died in a Wicked protest.
I deduced that someone in his life is a Wicked, a witch with black magic.
His relationship with his sister was estranged, and it took a toll on him when he came back to the military. Jesse didn’t let that deter him or mess with his ability to fight, but he did hesitate on killing witches.
Our missions were to annihilate witches who didn’t obey the laws, and we hunted down those who practice black magic. It’s a type of magic that would bring this world to a shamble if it’s not stopped, and many witches are in over their heads when they try it.
The prices are too high; no one has been able to survive using black magic.
The penalty for black magic users is death, and they always gather in groups to form a greater alliance while we take the title of Special Forces to put them down with any means necessary.
There were elderly, women, and children in the rubbles after battles.
I couldn’t sleep at night for years, and I would hear their cries, and it doesn’t get better the older I get. I can only manage the nightmares and trained instinct to view everyone as a threat to my life.
‘No questions asked’ is the phrase that my former commanding officer had told the team. It’s best if we view them as monsters with ten limbs, six eyes, and rows of sharp teeth, anything to make it easier to kill people who are considered a danger to society, and I am ashamed to say that it works.
It casts a cloak on the heinous things I have done, but it doesn’t make the weight in my heart any lighter.
After lunch, we make it back to Jesse’s house when he gets a call on his phone. He tells me he needs to get it and I should go in first, and I open the door with his key while carrying the bag of food in one hand.
I walk to the
kitchen, and the kid is there again, sitting on the high chair with a pen between her teeth.
She looks over as I set the food on the kitchen counter. Her reaction is instantaneous; her feet kick as she scrambles off the chair but she’s too short to make it to the ground without struggling between the edge of the table and the chair being stuck.
“Stop,” I bark at her, and she stills unnaturally stiff.
I don’t need her to like me, and I don’t need to know what the hell is wrong with her, but she needs to understand that I will be here for a while and she can’t keep avoiding me like the plague. It’s not comfortable for her and for me, and it’s her home, so she shouldn’t have to avoid a stranger being in the same space as her.
I slide the food across the table. It stops in front of her, and she scrutinizes it with her blue eyes. She peers at me, wariness clouding her eyes as everything about her screams that she doesn’t trust me.
I wouldn’t trust me either if I was in her shoes. I’m too big, my height intimidates almost everyone, and the muscles I have built over the years emit a type of unseen power that will do more harm than good.
“Eat,” I order, but I stay at the other side of the table.
I don’t want her running away again. Her behavior reveals a scared, little girl who can’t handle stressful situations. A big part of me wants to take care of her, to destroy whatever is scaring her. It’s in my nature to be a leader and a protector. That’s the reason why I joined the military and let the money I make go to my parents.
To protect and to serve is the oath Jesse and I swore, and I will take that to my grave.
Watching her tentatively open the bag to peek inside should be offensive, but I don’t feel anything other than the need to brush those strays of black hair from her face.
“Is it poisoned?” she asks.
The words come out of my mouth before I know it, “If I wanted to kill you, I would have done so already.”
Fuck, I swear under my breath when her blue eyes widen.
Her guard went up even higher. The shield she forms around her is metaphorically strong as she leaves the food where it is to run back into her room.
Jesse comes into the house and takes one look at the food across the table and laughs. I fail to see the humor in this situation as I made his sister think of me as a crazy man.
“Well, try harder next time, commander,” Jesse said with a chuckle.
I’m not purposely trying to be friends with his sister, but I owe it to him to at least try to be civil. He did just come back from his duties, and he must want to spend time with his sister, but I’m here, and it makes that kid scared.
He’s not going to have any quality time as long as she’s adamant not to be in the same room as me.
“I can leave,” I suggest, and I think that it shouldn’t be hard to find a place to live in the big city.
There are lots of apartment units open, but the pricing can be a bit too much. Commanders get paid much more than the average soldiers; we get paid for our services through the skills and the ranks we climb. Special Forces have more funds since we are the ones who face witches in life or death situations more frequently.
“No, no,” Jesse quickly waves his hand, “You being here is good for her.”
“How so?” I watch him take out the container of food from the bag with the plastic fork.
He smiles, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. “I have been a shit brother. I left her here by herself, and because of that, we stopped being a family for years. Maybe you being here would get her to be herself again.”
“I can’t do anything,” I tell him plainly, “I don’t know her, and frankly, she doesn’t trust me. Is there something I should know?”
Jesse purses his lips as he cracks a grimacing smile, “It’s complicated.”
We leave it at that after I promise that I would try to help his sister however I can. It’s going to take time with multiple trials and errors to get her trust. I blame my bleeding heart for this young girl, and I blame myself for seeing a halo of beauty around her when we first met.
I doubt she saw any of that in me. She did run away like a bat out of hell.
We settled in the home as I try to get my body used to being in an environment that is relatively safe with less openings for enemies to attack.
I couldn’t sleep last night. The bed was too soft, and the room was too quiet. Sleeping on the floor was the only choice I had, but I kept my ears open for any noises. I had faintly picked up the girl’s voice whimpering and crying in the room next to mine; she sounded like she just woke up from a nightmare and was terrified out of her mind.
I had my back to the wall when I listened and guarded her for the entire night. I waited and waited until she stopped gasping for breath. The walls are thin. It hadn’t taken much to find the source of the sounds.
As Jesse and I talked in the kitchen, it was soon dinner time, and he ordered in again. The man didn’t know how to cook and neither did I. There was no hope in trying to make something when we barely knew how to turn what was in the refrigerator into a meal.
We could stomach many things, but I doubt the little girl can eat what Jesse makes.
Jesse’s voice was muffled, but it’s a long conversation, and I somewhat hear a negotiation between the pair of siblings. It’s quite amusing to hear a brother and a sister bargaining about dinner of all things.
Jesse made her sit right in front of me for exposure to my presence, and I think she is about to freak out at any second now. She hasn’t blinked once, just staring at me with this unnerving silence that makes the clock’s ticks obnoxiously loud.
The shade of blue in her eyes is a sapphire; gorgeous in the coloring and mysteriously coated in a shine of brilliance that outwashes the darkness that she can’t hide from my keen observation.
She’s hiding something, and it’s affecting her to the point that her distrust in her brother is borderline hostile.
I might be overanalyzing things.
It’s best if I bring it up to him later when she is off to bed, probably once she finishes eating. The girl has a habit of running away, but I don’t know her mindset to give a judgment.
This behavior could just be from a girl who has social anxiety and is deathly afraid of people.
“Alex isn’t going to disappear even if you bore a hole in his head,” Jesse bites into his food.
The girl copies his action and chews with her puffy cheeks, her blue eyes never straying from mine. It’s adorable seeing her trying to use her will to make me go into a puff of smoke, but that’s not possible unless she has magic.
Magic.
I knew there was something off about her. I just couldn’t put my fingers on it yesterday. It’s not noticeable to normal people, but as I have been in battle up close and personal with witches, I can pick up on their aura.
It’s light and heavy at the same time, hardly noticeable with warning bells ringing off in my head from the innate wiring of human evolution.
This girl is a witch.
Something flickers in her eyes, hardly noticeable to untrained eyes, but it’s a tiny spec of defensive magic in her eyes that makes the sapphire hues glow for a split second. Jesse missed it, but I didn’t, and she made sure I didn’t.
It’s a warning, and it’s quite effective considering the intensity of her magic. Just by the smallest spec of magic, she is able to bring my body into battle mode, which is surprising for a girl half my size.
Almost half my age too.
“Where’s Finny?” Jesse asks. He’s unaware of the tension between our eye contact.
She leans back as she gives me a stink-eye. It’s hard not to find her adorable when she pulls off faces that are considered unappealing.
“Finny wilted,” she says with a pout.
Jesse pauses with a deadpan expression, “It’s a cactus; they can’t wilt because they can survive in the desert.”
“I didn’t know how much to water Finny, so I didn’
t,” she sticks her fork in her mouth and pouts even more.
Jesse squints his eyes, “Then?”
She turns her eyes down to the food, avoiding both of our attention as she squirms in her seat. I notice that her body is much more relaxed than before, it could be from her brother’s presence or she’s getting used to me being here.
I won’t know the answer until I get her alone next time.
“Then…” she starts slowly, “I watered it.”
“And?” Jesse presses as he chews on his food.
I focus on mine as I leave half of my attention on her body’s guilty shifts.
“It died,” she said.
Jesse laughs and rolls his eyes, “You drowned Finny.”
She snaps her head to her brother and whines, “I thought Finny was really thirsty!”
She looks too upset about a dead cactus; her pout turns into a frown as her brother laughs more. I want to kick that fool in the shin, so he can stop laughing at the miserable look on the girl’s face.
“You should water it once a week if your container has drainage holes,” I tell her, and her eyes widen at the information.
It takes her a moment to let my words sink in, and then she gasps, panic washed on her face as she whimpers.
“I didn’t water Finny for two years, and then I gave it a whole bottle of water,” she admits it with a shameful flush on her cheeks.
Fuck, I think, she’s pretty.
Jesse snickers brassier, “It’s okay. We can shop for another plant.”
She murmurs, “I don’t know how to take care of it.”
“I can teach you,” I offer, but I don’t know a thing about taking care of plants other than the basics.
It’s good for now because when her blue eyes brighten so lively, I knew I said the right thing. I don’t want what happened this morning to repeat. That was my mistake as it’s how everyone on the team talks to each other.
Brash and wild, we are a bunch of warriors in appearance and undomesticated animals at heart.
“Really?” a little smile plays on her lips. It’s shy and uncertain.
“Yeah,” I affirm.
Picking up Jesse’s appreciative nod towards me through the corner of my eye, I subtlety nod my head back. I let the girl eat in silence as her moves are more natural and relaxed. Her shoulders aren’t tense anymore as she chews with her rosy cheeks.