Destiny

by Amanda Lynn Petrin

  “I would love some, thank you,” he said before going up the stairs, presumably to shower.

  I used the French press and ground some beans to be fancy, while making myself an Earl Grey tea. I made a lot of it, and I made it strong, in the hopes of adding ice to it later. The sweet tea here was amazing, but I was craving something with less sugar.

  “Are you ready?” Gabriel asked, coming over and taking a sip of the coffee I made. He ran his hand through his hair, shaking it to remove the excess water.

  “Coming.” I took my tea and followed him to the blanket we always practice on.

  “What am I learning today?” I asked. I was able to track people on a map, make small objects float, and make things temporarily catch fire, even without a candle. Luckily, it was a safe fire that didn’t burn you when you touched it, because my instinct the first few times was to send it away from myself, which usually meant throwing it straight at Gabriel.

  “I thought we would try a few of these.” He opened the Book of Shadows to pages with dark borders. I had ignored them ever since I saw the picture of an invisible hand choking a woman on the first one.

  “Or we could see if I can levitate.”

  “You can,” he motioned to the rock I overturned.

  “Myself,” I argued.

  “That would definitely be very cool, but I don’t think it would be useful,” he pointed out.

  “Probably not against the Big Bad, but for day-to-day chores, grabbing things off high shelves...very useful.”

  “Cute,” he assured me. “But I thought you wanted us to train you, so the next time they find us, you won’t be defenseless.”

  “That’s true,” I agreed. “But if I never use them, what’s the point in learning them?”

  “Why wouldn’t you use them?”

  “Because I don’t really trust the magic yet, and those spells look like something I don’t want to accidentally use on the wrong person or go too far.”

  “We can start small then, see if you get comfortable, and stop whenever you want,” he offered.

  “Okay.”

  He went through the book and found a page he thought fit the criteria. It had ropes drawn around the text, but closer inspection revealed that it would immobilize someone, as if they were held in place by ropes.

  “Useful but doesn’t harm,” he waited for my reaction.

  “What should I practice on?” I looked around for a bag of potatoes or something. “The scarecrow?” I asked of the tiny, doll-like figure out in the distance of Charlie’s yard.

  “You won’t know if it works unless you try it on something that moves.”

  “We can go to the swamps Eric takes me to. They’re full of mosquitoes,” I suggested.

  “You can practice on me,” he turned my idea down.

  “What if I do it wrong and hurt you?”

  “I trust you,” he assured me, but I was still nervous. “I’ll just come back,” he teased, trying to make me smile, but I wasn’t there yet. “You’ve got this, Lucy. I promise.” He took my hands in his to support his claim, but I could feel my heart beating faster and my cheeks going red from his touch.

  I reread the page in question, which didn’t have an incantation, just advice on things I could to say to focus, and the intention I needed to have. It was great that Annabelle and Beth had so much faith in their powers and intentions, but what if I was distracted or my mind wandered, and I did something terrible? What if I ended up doing one of the other things from those pages, with much scarier images of missing limbs and storm clouds.

  “Are you okay to try it once?” he asked after a couple of minutes.

  “Sure,” I said, feeling anything but.

  Gabriel walked towards me, slowly, so I concentrated on stopping him. I imagined invisible ropes around his arms and legs, keeping him in place.

  “I’m sorry,” I said when he reached me without anything happening.

  “You don’t have to apologize.”

  “I tried,” I told him.

  “But…” he said like he already knew the answer.

  “I don’t want to hurt you. I don’t want to concentrate too hard and stop more than your limbs, or think of something or someone else and…”

  “I get it.”

  “You’re upset.”

  “I’m not,” he assured me.

  “You wanted me to learn all their magic and I’m not making it easy.”

  “The magic isn’t for me,” he said, taken aback.

  “Embry?” Now I was confused.

  “You say you want to fight Donovan and the Big Bad next time they come…”

  “We can’t keep running and letting them surprise us and take Sam,” I agreed.

  “How did you expect to do that? Martial arts and weapons?”

  “It can’t hurt, compared to not knowing anything to defend myself.”

  “I have seen Caleb go against them. I’ve had help from someone with blades at the end of their arms...Cassie was strong and fierce, and she had knowledge and weapons…”

  “She gave up,” I pointed out, which was clearly the wrong thing to say, because he glared at me like I was the one who murdered her.

  “She gave her life to protect her daughter,” he argued. “And it was after a long time spent running away from them, and a terrible defeat.”

  “You let her fight them?”

  “We didn’t have a choice. He surprised us and we were never very good at getting Cassie to do anything she didn’t want to,” he got a sad smile as he remembered her. “The point is, I could train you in every weapon and every martial art I know, but I don’t think any of that will make a difference. Because the real Big Bad, he doesn’t need to touch you to kill you. He might not even need to be in the same room...I’m not saying this to scare you…”

  “But I’m dead no matter what?” I let him know I understood.

  “No,” he was upset. “Weapons and combat won’t defeat them, but you have something Cassie didn’t. You have Annabelle’s magic. The only reason I am pushing you to learn how to use it is that if I have to let you defend yourself against them, I need to give you a fighting chance.”

  “And you think these spells are my best chance to stay alive?”

  “I do.”

  “I can’t let them win,” I sighed, resigning myself to being uncomfortable.

  “I can’t lose you.” He looked right at me as he said it, with an intensity that made me feel like he could hear how fast my heart was beating. “None of us are willing to accept that outcome.” He turned away from me, but it took a while for my heart to go back to normal.

  “Let’s try again,” I relented.

  “I don’t want to push you if it makes you uncomfortable. It’s no use to us if you can do stuff to them but you’re never actually going to use it.”

  “I’m nervous about my powers but you’re right. I would rather learn how to use them, so I can focus and immobilize the next person who comes at me, instead of blowing them up,” I took a deep breath, trying not to see that woman, or the pile she became when I was done with her.

  “If it’s Donovan, or the Big Bad, or anyone who is trying to hurt you, you do what you need to stay alive,” he waited until I met his eyes, adding weight to each word.

  “But hopefully it won’t come to that?”

  “If I had my way, you would never know about any of this. You would live your life and be happy and none of it would touch you,” he got a dark, haunted look.

  “Bad things happen even if there isn’t a Big Bad hunting you down,” I said simply.

  “I would protect you from that stuff as well, if I could,” his eyes locked with mine in a promise.

  “I know. But it’s not something anyone can protect me from.” I shook my head to snap out of it. “Do I try it on you again?”

  “Do your worst. I can handle it,” he assured me with an uncharacteristic wink.

  He started walking towards me, so I imagined the ropes binding aroun
d him and he stopped. It wasn’t really like invisible ropes, because other than his eyes, he couldn’t move anything. Not even to try and break free.

  “It worked!” I said excitedly, but he was still frozen in place, so I imagined him walking to me again, which he did.

  “That was perfect,” he beamed.

  We worked on that a bit longer, then I tried to build an invisible barrier between us, so whatever he threw at me would bounce off.

  “There has to be a way to combine both,” I said after we were at it for hours. I could either make one that blocked his high-speed body from colliding with mine, or one that stopped objects he threw at me from getting through. The same barrier couldn’t withstand weapons and magic. I had to let one fade away and conjure a new one, which was not an easy feat.

  This was the first spell to take a lot out of me. I had to rest a bit between each attempt, or the barrier disappeared as soon as the first assault bounced off.

  “What does the book say to do?”

  “Imagine a shield for weapons, and a wall of energy for things with magic.” I reread it every couple of tries to see if I was doing something wrong.

  “Can you picture something in your mind that withstands both?”

  “I could try,” I shrugged.

  “Go for it.”

  I imagined a wall of blue energy, like water, with a hard shell around it. Once I nodded to say I was ready, Gabriel threw a rock so it would hit above my head, but still within the force shield, and ran at me with his super speed. The rock hit and bounced back, so I closed my eyes to brace against the inevitable collision. I felt it happen, but it was a few feet ahead of me, where I had the shield.

  I opened my eyes, ready to celebrate with Gabriel, but he was at least twenty feet away, on the ground and not moving. “Gabriel!” I screamed, my heart in my throat, cursing away tears as I ran over. I shook him when I got there, praying I hadn’t killed him.

  What felt like an eternity later, but was probably only seconds, he woke up and coughed. The air was knocked out of him when he collided with my wall and bounced back into a willow tree.

  “I thought I lost you. That I killed you.” I tried to steady my breathing, holding on to his hand like an anchor.

  “I’m fine,” he assured me, struggling to get up.

  “This is why I don’t like the magic,” I told him.

  “Accidents happen, Lucy, it really wasn’t that bad. With a bit of practice you’ll be able to--”

  “No. You say that I need to practice so I can control it, but I’ve been practicing and I’m still hurting people.”

  “You need to give it time.”

  “No. I’m never doing that again.” I crossed my arms, cold now that the fear adrenaline was wearing off.

  “Lucy…”

  “You said we could stop, and this makes me uncomfortable.”

  “Okay.” He wasn’t happy, but he didn’t follow me as I went back to the villa, still shaking.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I woke up early the next morning and went for a jog. Staying on the property made it quite the workout, since I had to run through the wooded trails instead of flat roads. By the time I got back to the villa, I was exhausted and covered in sweat.

  “What’s with the new look?” Embry asked me, sitting at the kitchen table with his espresso.

  I filled a large glass of water and drank it before answering him, “Working on my cardio.” My breathing was still labored, but my heartbeat was slowly getting back to normal.

  “Because you plan on listening next time we tell you to run?” he asked with the hint of a smile.

  “Gabriel didn’t tell you?” My legs were killing me, so I wanted nothing more than to take the seat next to him. I knew from experience that I should keep moving, so I walked around the room instead.

  “He hasn’t,” he raised an eyebrow at me.

  “I’ve decided that I don’t want to work on the magic anymore. I want you guys to train me like what we did at Caleb’s. Kickboxing, weapon-wielding, throwing things… anything I can use against Donovan’s army,” I looked him square in the eyes.

  “What about Donovan?” he asked after a moment, when his judgmental look didn’t make me falter.

  “You would never actually let me fight him. I’m not a match for him either way.”

  “Gabriel agreed to this?” he asked.

  “He said I could stop with the magic.”

  “What happened? You were doing so good,” he looked defeated.

  “I was hurting people,” I reminded him. “I practically set Gabriel on fire, nearly crushed the mole with that rock and almost killed Gabriel when I threw him into a tree.”

  “None of those actually hurt anybody,” Embry argued.

  “I killed that woman in the diner. I’m sure she had done terrible things, but there’s a reason why we put people in jail and have trials before giving them the death penalty. I didn’t even know what I was doing. I raised my arms and she died. I don’t ever want that to happen again.”

  He opened his mouth to say something, then looked at my face and reconsidered, “I won’t force you to do something you don’t want to do.”

  “Thank you.” I took a seat beside him. “Will you train me?”

  “I’ll do everything in my power to make sure you get through this,” he assured me, putting his hand on mine.

  I spent my mornings training with Embry, alternating between kickboxing and fencing, then Gabriel would come in the afternoons and do some capoeira or aikido with me. We had just started hand-to-hand combat and it was by far my favorite. I would say I was getting good at it, but learning the equivalent of a choreography with Gabriel was not the same thing as fighting an assailant who took me by surprise.

  Last night, Embry had asked me what I would feel most comfortable using if Donovan’s people found us again, so I wasn’t surprised when he showed up during my training session with Gabriel.

  “Why are you hoping I’ll be terrible at this?” I asked, knowing how upset he was that hand-to-hand was my favorite.

  “Because if you’re more confident in hand-to-hand combat, you’re going to let them get close enough to use it, which isn’t something we ever want to happen.” Their faces showed nothing but concern.

  “Or I won’t panic when someone happens to get close,” I argued.

  “In a crisis, we don’t rise to the occasion, we fall back on our training,” Gabriel said like a mantra, upping the speed of the training because I refused to stop and let them talk me down.

  “We can keep working on the sticks and swords too,” I assured them.

  “Fencing doesn’t count,” Embry argued.

  “Then why did you bother teaching it to me?” I called him on it. True, the swords in fencing wouldn’t be my first choice if I was attacked, but the skills had to be transferable to real swords.

  “In an ideal world, they would never get close enough for you to use any of it.”

  “You’re still planning on hiding me any time someone comes close to us? Spend the rest of my life running?”

  “If you’re using sticks and stones to fight them, then yes,” Embry at least sounded apologetic.

  “They won’t be unarmed when they come for you, Lucy,” Gabriel pointed out. We were in a groove, going faster and faster so I felt completely connected to him. Then he went faster than humanly possible and got my wrists in one hand behind my back, the other arm resting against my neck before I even knew what was going on. “They will either have weapons you can see, Gifts that you can’t, or both.”

  “But you can use this in the future, if there’s a weird guy on campus or something,” Embry tried to make me feel better as Gabriel released me, his point made.

  “Do I even have a future? I either spend the rest of my life outrunning him, or he finds me and I’m dead.”

  “No,” they said in unison, but neither had a plan nor reasoning as to why I would be different from all the Owens women before me.

/>   “I know you think this is useless unless I’m going against a drunk college kid who isn’t much taller or stronger than me,” I summed up their concerns, “but I would like to have options if ever I am cornered with one of them again.”

  “You run,” Gabriel said with an intensity that left no room for arguments.

  “How about we call it a night?” Embry suggested.

  “I’ll go do some laps,” I said, leaving them there and going to change into a bathing suit.

  I was trying to make up for a lifetime of prioritizing book smarts in as little time as possible. My legs protested even light jogging this morning, but the water felt wonderful. I started out with the breaststroke, but mostly swam from one end to the other underwater. Adrenaline would help me go faster and harder, but learning to hold my breath and to control it would help keep me focused. Right now, I needed all the help I could get.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “It’s a shame you can’t see NOLA. You’ve been here for weeks and you still haven’t seen more than this place and one store in the Quarter,” Eric said, leaning against the edge of the pool. When he found out about my new goal of ‘becoming a fighting machine’ as he called it, he offered to teach me a few things from his time on the wrestling team in high school. It gave me a new appreciation of why the guys were so worried about me getting close to someone in a fight. Not that I would ever tell them that, but I had no interest in ever getting close enough to use wrestling. Unless it was a throw, after I got a lot better at them.

  Once he ran through what he said were the absolute basics, we decided to go for a swim to rinse off the sweat, escape the heat, and enjoy his last day before going back to school.

  “It’s not really a sightseeing vacation,” I defended.

  “There’s not sightseeing and then there’s not leaving your hotel room,” Eric argued.

  “I’m sure you’ve noticed Embry and Gabriel are very overprotective.”