Awakening (2 page)

“I’m afraid it can’t,” Hunter said. His voice was quiet, but there was a final tone in it.

Robbie looked like he was about to argue, but then he simply handed Hunter my car keys.

Sky turned to Hunter. “I’ll try to find out where they’ve gone, as we discussed,” she said.

“Right,” Hunter agreed. “I’ll see you at home later.”

“Where who’s gone?” I asked. This was all moving too fast for me.

“Cal and Selene,” Sky told me. She pushed a hand through her short, silver-blond hair. “Their house is sealed with warding spells, and both their cars are gone.”

I swallowed hard. The thought that they were out there, who knew where, was terrifying. I had a sudden, irrational conviction that they were hiding behind a tree or something equally melodramatic, spying on me at this very moment.

“They’re not in Widow’s Vale anymore,” Hunter said, as if he’d read my mind. “I’m sure of it. I’d be able to tell if they were.”

Though the logical part of my brain told me that nothing is ever certain, something in the way Hunter spoke made me believe him. I felt a burst of relief, followed by a wash of intense pain. Cal was gone. I’d never see him again.

Hunter put one hand under my elbow and steered me over to my car. He opened the passenger door, and I slid in. The inside of the car was frigid and that, combined with the adrenaline still pumping through my body, made me shake so hard, my muscles started to ache. Hunter cranked the engine, flipped on the one remaining headlight, then pulled out onto the quiet, tree-lined street.

He didn’t say anything, and I was grateful. Usually Hunter and I were like sparks and gunpowder. He was a Seeker, sent by the International Council of Witches to investigate Cal and Selene for misuse of magick. He’d told me they were evil. Before I’d learned, to my horror and shock, that he was right, Cal and I had almost killed him. That was just one of the things that made me intensely uneasy around him.

In one of those weird connections that seemed common among blood witches, Hunter was Cal’s half brother. But where Cal was dark, Hunter was fair, with sunlight-colored hair, clear green eyes, and sculpted cheekbones. He was beautiful, but in an entirely different way than Cal. Hunter was cool, like air or water. Cal smoldered. He was earth and fire.

Cal. Every thought led back to him. I stared out my window, trying to blink back tears and not succeeding. I wiped them away with the back of my hand.

Gradually it dawned on me that I didn’t recognize the road we were on. “Where are we going?” I asked. “This isn’t the way to my house.”

“It’s the way to
my
house. I thought it would be better if you washed up first, got the smell of smoke out of your hair and so forth, before you faced your parents.”

I nodded, relieved that once again he’d thought it out. My parents—my adoptive parents, really—weren’t comfortable with my powers or with me practicing witchcraft. Besides the fact that they’re Catholic, they were frightened by what had happened to my birth mother, Maeve Riordan. Sixteen years ago Maeve and my biological father, Angus Bramson, had burned to death. No one knew exactly how it had happened, but it seemed pretty clear that the fact that they were witches had had everything to do with it.

I pressed my hand against my mouth, trying desperately to make sense of the last few weeks. Just a month ago I’d discovered that I was adopted and that by birth I was a descendant of one of the Seven Great Clans of Wicca—a blood witch. My birth parents had died when I was only a baby. Tonight I had almost shared their fate.

And it had been at Cal’s hands. At the hands of the guy with whom I’d hoped to share the rest of my life.

Ahead of us, a fat brown rabbit sat frozen in the middle of the icy road, paralyzed by my car’s headlight. Hunter brought the car to a stop, and we waited.

“Can you tell me what happened tonight?” he asked, surprisingly gently.

“No.” My hand was still pressed against my mouth, and I had to take it away to explain. “Not right now.” My voice cracked with a sob. “It hurts too much.”

The rabbit came out of its paralysis and scampered to safety on the other side of the road. Hunter pressed the gas pedal, and Das Boot surged forward again. “Right, then,” he said. “Later.”

 

Hunter and Sky’s house was on a quiet street somewhere near the edge of Widow’s Vale. I didn’t really pay attention to the route. Now that the adrenaline of escaping the fire was leaking away, I felt exhausted, groggy.

The car pulled to a stop. We were in a driveway beneath a canopy of trees. We got out to the night’s chill and walked up a narrow path. I followed Hunter into a living room where a fire burned in a small fireplace. A worn sofa covered in dark blue velvet stood against one wall. One of its legs had broken off, and it listed at a drunken angle. There were two mismatched armchairs across from it, and a wide plank balanced on two wooden crates served as a coffee table.

“You’ll need a shower and clean clothes,” Hunter told me.

I glanced at a small clock on the mantel. It was nearly nine. I was more than late for dinner. “I’ve got to call my folks first,” I said. “They’ve probably called the police by now.”

Hunter handed me a cordless phone. “Should I tell them about the fire?” I asked him, feeling lost.

He hesitated. “The choice is yours, of course,” he said at last. “But if you do, you’ll have a lot of explaining to do.”

I nodded. He was right. One more thing I couldn’t share with my family.

Nervously I dialed my home number.

My dad answered, and I heard the relief in his voice as I greeted him. “Morgan, where on earth are you?” he asked. “We were about to call the state troopers!”

“I’m at a friend’s house,” I said, trying to be as honest as I could.

“Are you all right? You sound hoarse.”

“I’m okay. But Cal and I . . . we had a fight.” I fought to keep my voice steady. “I’m—I’m kind of upset. That’s why I didn’t call earlier. I’m sorry,” I added lamely.

“Well, we were very worried,” my dad said. “But I’m glad you’re all right. Are you coming home now?”

The front door opened, and Sky walked in. She glanced at me, then looked at Hunter and shook her head. “Not a trace,” she said in a low voice.

Ice trickled down my spine. “In a little while, Dad,” I said into the phone. “I’ll be home in a little while.”

Dad sighed. “Don’t forget that tomorrow is a school day.”

I said good-bye and hung up. “You didn’t find them?” I asked Sky anxiously.

“They’re gone. They hid their tracks with so many concealing spells that I can’t even tell which direction they went,” Sky said. “But they’re definitely nowhere nearby.”

I stood there, feeling my heart beat, not knowing how to process that information. After a moment, Sky took my arm and gently led me upstairs. I was too out of it to notice much more than that there were two doors up there that were closed. The third, in between them, opened into a narrow bathroom.

Sky disappeared through one of the doorways, then reappeared a moment later holding a bathrobe. “You can wear this when you come out,” she said. “Leave your clothes outside the door, and I’ll throw them in the washer.”

I took the robe and closed the door, feeling suddenly self-conscious. I turned and dared a look in the mirror. My nose was red and swollen, my eyes puffy, and my long dark hair matted and flecked with ash. Soot streaked my face and clothes.

I’m hideous, I thought, as Cal’s face rose in my mind again. He’d been so incredibly beautiful. How could I ever have believed he could really love someone like me? How could I have been so blind? I was such an idiot.

Clenching my jaw, I stripped down. I opened the door a crack and dropped my clothes in a heap on the hall floor. Then I got into the shower and scrubbed my body and my hair hard, as if the water could wash away more than dirt and smoke, as if it could take my sorrow and terror and rage and sluice them down the drain.

Afterward I dried off and put on the robe. Sky was taller than I was, and the robe bunched at my feet, looking shapeless and drab. I pulled a comb through my wet hair and went back downstairs.

Sky was sitting in one of the armchairs, but as I came down, she rose gracefully to her feet and went up to her room. As she passed me, she let her hand rest briefly on my shoulder.

Hunter stood at the fireplace, feeding a log to the fire. A small ceramic teapot and two mugs sat on the coffee table. He turned to face me, and I was keenly aware of how good-looking he was.

I settled myself on the sofa, and Hunter sat in a worn armchair. “Better?” he asked.

“A little.” My chest and throat weren’t quite as sore, and my eyes had stopped stinging.

Hunter’s green eyes were locked on me. “I need you to tell me what happened.”

I took a deep breath; then I told him how Sky and I had scryed together. How she’d helped me to spy on Cal and his mother in their spell-guarded house as they talked to their coconspirators about killing me if I refused to join them. How I saw that Cal had been assigned to seduce me, to get me onto their side so that my power could be joined with theirs. How I’d learned that they were also after my birth mother’s coven tools, objects of enormous power that they wanted to add to their arsenal of magickal weapons. How I’d gone to talk to Cal, how he’d overpowered me with magick and taken me back to his house.

“He put me in a
seòmar
in the back of the pool house,” I said, a vivid picture of the horrible little secret room rising in my mind. “The walls were covered with dark runes. He must have knocked me unconscious. When I came to, I heard Selene arguing with him outside. She was telling him not to do it, not to set it on fire. But Cal said”—my voice broke again—“he said he was solving the problem. He meant me. I was the p-p-problem.”

“Shhh,” Hunter said softly. Reaching out, he laid his palm flat against my forehead. I felt a tingling warmth spread outward from the spot, like a thousand little bubbles. His eyes held mine as the sensation washed over me, dulling the edge of my pain to the point where I could just bear it.

“Thanks,” I said, awed.

He smiled briefly, his face transforming for a moment. Then he said, “Morgan, I’m sorry to press you, but this is important. Did they get your birth mother’s tools?”

Maeve had fled her native Ireland after her coven, Belwicket, had been decimated. I had recently found her tools, the ancient tools of her coven. Selene had wanted them badly. “No,” I told Hunter. “They’re safe. I’d know if they weren’t—they’re bound to me. Anyway, I hid them.”

Hunter poured us each a cup of tea. “Where?”

“Um—under Bree’s house. I put them there right before I went to see Cal,” I said. It sounded so lame as I said it that I cringed, waiting for Hunter to yell at me.

But he just nodded. “All right. I suppose they’ll be safe enough for now, since Cal and Selene have fled. But get them back as soon as you can.”

“What can they do with them?” I asked. “Why are they so dangerous?”

“I’m not sure exactly what they could do,” Hunter said. “But Selene is very powerful and very skilled in magick, as you know. And some of the tools, the athame and the wand in particular, were made long ago, back before Belwicket renounced the blackness. They’ve since been purified, of course, but they were made to channel and focus dark energies. I’m sure Selene could find a way to return them to their original state. I imagine, for example, that Maeve’s wand in Selene’s hands could be used to magnify the power of the dark wave.”

The dark wave. I felt a coldness in the pit of my stomach. The dark wave was the thing that had wiped out Maeve’s coven. It had also destroyed Hunter’s parents’ coven and had forced his mother and father into hiding ten years ago. They were still missing.

No one seemed to know exactly what the dark wave was—whether it was an entity with a will of its own or a force of mindless destruction, like a tornado. All we did know was that where it passed, it left death and horror behind it, entire towns turned to ash. Hunter believed that Selene was somehow connected to the dark wave. But he didn’t know how.

I put my head in my hands. “Is all of this happening because Cal and Selene are Woodbane?” I asked in a small voice. Woodbane was the family name of one of the Seven Great Clans of Wicca. To be Woodbane meant, traditionally, to be without a moral compass. Woodbanes throughout history had used any means at their disposal, including calling on dark spirits or dark energy, to become more powerful. Supposedly this had all changed when the International Council of Witches had come into being and made laws to govern the use of magick. But as I was learning, the world of Wicca was as fractured and divided as the everyday world I’d known for the first sixteen years of my life. And there were many Woodbanes who didn’t live by the council’s laws.

I happened to be Woodbane, too. I hadn’t wanted to believe it when I first found out, but the small, red, dagger-shaped birthmark on the inside of my arm was proof of it. Many, if not most, Woodbanes had one somewhere. It was known as the Woodbane athame, because it looked like the ceremonial dagger that was part of any witch’s set of tools.

Hunter sighed, and I was reminded that he was half Woodbane himself. “That’s the question, isn’t it? I don’t honestly know what it means to be Woodbane. I don’t know what’s nature and what’s nurture.”

He set down his mug and rose. “I’ll see if your clothes are dry. Then I’ll run you home.”

 

Sky followed us to my house in her car so that she could drive Hunter home. He and I didn’t talk on the way. Whatever calming effect his touch had had on me was entirely gone now, and my mind kept replaying Cal lying to me, shouting at me, using his magick to nearly kill me. How could something that had been so sweet, that felt so good, have turned into this? How could I have been so blind? And why, even now, was some shameful part of me wanting to call to him? Cal, don’t leave me. Cal, come back. Oh, God. I swallowed as bile rushed up into my throat.