Bruja (2 page)

“Probably?” I didn’t really matter which part I was right about. Just that I was right.

“We’ll go see Tia Rosa tomorrow, but if she says you should go far away, then I think you should reconsider Muraco’s offer on Peru.”

No way, big brother
. “That wolf is old and insane. You heard him. He wants me to go to Peru alone and find some sort of mages that haven’t been heard from in a century. Me? Hiking through the woods? Alone.
In Peru.
Is it just me or does that sound like a disaster waiting to happen?”

Raphael snorted. “When you put it like that…” He paused. “But how can we defeat Luciana if she starts summoning demons again? Especially if she’s using your abilities to boost her spells? We don’t have the knowledge or power to kill that kind of evil and neither do the wolves. She’ll slaughter us all.”

I suppressed the shudder that wanted to roll down my spine. “We’ll find a way. We don’t have any other options.” To be honest, I wasn’t sure what we were going to do, but I’d gone my whole life following other people. Doing what they wanted. Trying to save everyone and only hurting people in the process.

I was done with that.

Yes, we needed to stop Luciana, but I wasn’t convinced that rushing off to Peru because Muraco said so would solve our problems. I couldn’t take his offer seriously unless he had a more concrete goal, like a weapon he knew where to find or a source of white battle magic that was free for the taking. But wandering through the mountains to find mages who may or may not exist and may or may not deign to help? I just didn’t have time to fool around like that. None of us did.

Raphael stood up. “Fine. I’m going back to bed.” He started for the door but paused. “Are you going to be able to sleep?”

Not a chance
. “Sure.”

“Liar.”

I threw my pillow at him. “Go already.” I paused. “But actually give that back first. That’s my only pillow.”

Raphael shook his head and tossed it gently back to me. “Night, Cloud.”

“Night, Turtle.”

He shook his head again as he closed the door. He didn’t like being reminded about his former obsession with a certain quad of human-like turtles.

Once he was gone, it was quiet again, and I wished he hadn’t left. I knew Raphael was just in the room next door, but the walls were so thick that being here was like being in a tomb.

I guess that makes having horrible, screaming bloody-terror nightmares not so embarrassing.

I huffed and the sound echoed against the walls. I wanted to sleep. Exhaustion pulled at my body like a ten-ton weight, but I was afraid of what Luciana would do with my powers when I slept. I didn’t dare let myself close my eyes, but no matter how hard I tried to keep them open, they grew heavy. Sleep tugged and I barely managed to shake free from the next nightmare before it swallowed me whole.

I threw the covers off, walked to the tiny window, and slid it open. Sticking my head out, I breathed in the familiar scent of the forest. We might be miles away from the compound, but it was the same forest. It had the same cedar trees. The same sounds of night.

Two floors below me, wolves prowled through the St. Ailbe’s campus. I’d never been here until a few days ago. The campus was bigger than I’d expected, but completely hidden from the road. It had to be. The werewolves liked their privacy.
That’s one thing we have in common
.

One of the wolves circling the quad below noticed me leaning out the window and headed my way. I was breaking the rules. The campus was on total lockdown, with patrols going night and day as the wolves waited for the next attack from Luciana, but I couldn’t help myself. I would’ve liked to go out and sit in the quad in the moonlight—maybe even do a cleansing ritual—but the wolves wouldn’t let me outside. Not at night. I’d found out the hard way that leaning out an open window was enough to upset them, but I’d suffocate if I didn’t get one clear breath.

The wolf stopped at the bottom of my window and looked up at me, tongue lolling out the side of his mouth. A bright yellow aura of power surrounded him, marking him as a werewolf. All wolves glowed yellow to me. Some so pale the color was almost white. Others so deep and dark it was nearly brown. If I was right, this was one of Teresa’s friends. Christopher? I couldn’t tell one wolf from another, but his aura… the coloring seemed right. He howled up at me, and I waved.

As if on cue, Christopher yipped at me. I started drawing a protection knot in the air in front of the window. I moved my finger through the air, drawing a complicated pattern as I willed the magic to work.

Thick as glass and strong as steel. Nothing shall pass through this seal.

The words didn’t really matter, but I needed them to focus my will. I wasn’t sure why I liked to rhyme with my incantations—I wasn’t a fantastic rhymer—but it made the words feel important, which made them stronger.

I stopped the knot in the same place I’d started it. That was the one thing that I couldn’t mess up. The ends had to align or it wouldn’t work. The knot glowed brightly in the air for a second before dimming.

There. It was done. “All safe now. No need to worry about me,” I said.

Christopher tilted his wolf-y head to the side and yipped again before starting away.

At least he trusted me enough to let me use my magic. I rested my arms on the windowsill. I had a lot to accomplish in the coming weeks—at least I hoped I had weeks… I couldn’t predict how fast Luciana would work against us.

The pressure would get to me if I let it. Instead, I tried to breathe through the stress. Being away from Luciana was a good thing. The first step to getting everything put right.

Thank God Teresa had shown up when she did. She’d been a little later than I would’ve liked, but that was better than not coming at all—which had been a real possibility after she got bitten and turned from our future coven leader to a full-time werewolf.

To be honest, I was a little jealous. She’d gotten to live a normal life until a few months ago, while I’d been struggling with the Wicked Witch. I didn’t begrudge her that…much. I wanted what she had. A life. Real friends—not coven members who were trying to suck me dry. A boyfriend who would do anything for me instead of Mathieu le Douche.

My shoulders were so tense that I could barely roll them back.
So much for breathing through the stress.

The one thing I couldn’t forget—that I couldn’t
let
myself forget—was what I’d done to get here. Taking that stupid oath in the first place so that Mom could leave the coven. Doing Luciana’s bidding until my soul was blackened. Then, manipulating my cousin so that she’d be forced to stay at the compound. She’d been stripped of her powers—tortured—because of me. And getting David killed…

I owed both of them. And no matter what—by the time this all ended—I would repay the debt. So help me God, I would settle it or die trying.

Chapter Two

As much as I’d hated being confined to the coven compound, I’d always felt at home there. It
was
my home. Everything I knew was there. Every
one
I knew. And they all knew me. I’d never been an outsider before. I was from one of the oldest coven families and I had a secure place there.

At St. Ailbe’s, I definitely felt like an outsider.

No one would talk to any of us
brujos
except Teresa’s friends. The rest of them gave us a wide berth. We were unknowns. I understood that. But still, there were eight of us and loads of them. Which meant that we ended up going everywhere in a group. Raphael was half-convinced that if we separated, the wolves would attack. I didn’t think that was likely, but if I were being honest, we’d betrayed our own coven. The wolves knew that, and if it came down to a fight… They might not make the distinction between good witches and bad witches.

I’ve already lost one friend. I can’t lose anyone else.

I swallowed down my grief. I’d cried all day after Daniel died, but now I had to keep going. His death had stopped Luciana’s attack. For all her evilness, she still loved her son. As much as someone like Luciana could… But the quiet after the battle wasn’t going to last. The nightmares alone proved she wasn’t sitting still. She was going to come after us, and now she wasn’t just drunk on power, she was angry too. Her ally had killed her son, but there wasn’t a doubt in my mind that she believed the wolves and those of us who’d left her were at fault.

Now we had to be ready for whatever hell Luciana was going to throw at us. When this was over—when Luciana’s threats weren’t hanging overhead like an anvil about to crush us—I’d give myself more time to grieve for my closest friend. For now, I had to ignore the ache in my heart.

I miss you so much, Daniel.

“Ready to go?” Raphael said as he stuck his head through the doorway.

I’d showered over an hour ago, and it was past time for my morning cup of coffee. “I’m ready whenever everyone else is.” I flattened my hands against my short jean skirt.

“Everyone’s good to go. We’re just waiting on Cosette.”

I grinned. How fey of her to take the longest.

“I’m ready,” Cosette’s voice rang out from the hall. “I’ve been ready.” She appeared in my doorway, her aura a glittering rainbow. The first time I’d seen it, I’d stared, dumbfounded. I’d like to be able to say that I didn’t feel that way every time, but that’d be a lie. I was used to seeing different colored auras on witches, depending on what kinds of magic they specialized in, but her aura was breathtaking. Like holographic glitter. A bright shining silver, but then all colors of the rainbow all at once. It was unlike anything I’d ever seen.

“Oh… Well…” Raphael said as he practically drooled.

I raised a brow at him. He knew she was majorly off limits. Cosette was always vague about her background, but I’d spent enough time with her to read between the lines. She’d never revealed what kind of fey she was or where her abilities lay, but I could sense the undercurrent of her power. It was
a lot
of power. She had to be much deeper into the fey courts than she let on.

Cosette flounced ahead of us, all tall and willowy in a mini skirt and tank top. Raphael tilted his head to stare at her butt.

Gross.
I shoved past him, shooting him a look. “No,” I mouthed over my shoulder.

He shrugged.

Lord help me. Raphael getting tangled in fey intrigues was the last thing I needed to worry about. Cosette was on our side, but Raphael wouldn’t last a minute in the fey courts. Because of his straightforward nature, he’d never learned how to be diplomatic about things. And, if what I knew about the fey was right, they were all about politics.

As we followed Cosette outside, the group of us was quiet. I scanned my friends’ faces as we moved across the well-manicured quad. Yvonne looked tired, but that could just be because she was older. Her hair had turned gray before I was born. This was a stressful situation for us, but that was possibly more true for her. She’d betrayed something that she’d spent her long life supporting.

Elsa was quiet, but then again, she was always quiet. Now the way her shoulders hunched and her feet dragged along the freshly mowed grass told me this quiet was different than her normal demeanor.

Dark shadows hung under Tiffany and Beth’s eyes. Only Shane had managed to break his oath, and I was beginning to wonder if he’d even made an oath to begin with. The rest of us were lagging light-years behind him.

It was worse than I’d thought. I’d assumed Raphael looked tired because he kept saving me from my bad dreams in the middle of night, but what if that wasn’t it? Was he hiding the effects of his own oath from me?

I barely held in a frustrated sigh. No wonder he wanted me to go to Peru. He knew that I’d saved our parents from Luciana. It pissed him off. He hated them for leaving, but he’d push me away if he thought he could save me from sacrificing anything else. And I would. I’d go back to her if that meant saving him.

There was no way I was going to Peru now. Not when my brother was in danger and trying to hide it from me.

“It’s Samhain today,” Elsa said.

I stumbled for a step before catching myself.
How did I miss that it was Samhain?
It was an important holiday. The coven always celebrated it with a feast and a nighttime ritual. It was a time when the veil between our world and the next was thinnest.

“Do you think we should do something for it?” Beth asked, turning to me.

I hated to let anyone down, but I doubted that the wolves would let us outside in the middle of the night to do any magic. “Not this year, but next year—we’ll make it good.”

No one questioned it, but the silence from the others spoke volumes. I ignored it. There wasn’t anything I could do. Not right now. We had so many other things to worry about right now.

As I stepped into the cafeteria, my anxiety rose to a record-breaking high. The way everything stopped as we entered made me beyond uncomfortable. The students paused with their forks halfway to their mouths, staring so hard that their auras washed over me in a wave of golden yellow energy. Even the man flipping pancakes at the grill station stilled to study us.

Raphael was right. The wolves didn’t trust us, and I didn’t blame them. Helping them once wouldn’t erase all the animosity they felt toward us. But they hadn’t bothered us. Yet.

From the way they watched us and kept us separate, if we stepped even a little out of line, they’d be all over us before we could breathe a word of protection. Raphael stepped closer to me, and it seemed like we were on the same page as usual. With our seven witches and one semi-fey against hundreds of werewolves…

It was only when Cosette stepped into the room, her head held high, that the rest of us felt confident enough to enter. I wasn’t sure how she did it—maybe it was the fey in her—but she always commanded a calm, confident presence even in the most tense situations.

She nudged my shoulder. “Want to split an omelet?”

“Sure. Should I go with you?” The werewolf guys weren’t shy and a few of them were eyeing Cosette like a different kind of meal.

“I’m not worried about a few wolves.” She gave an enigmatic smile as she flipped her dark blonde curls. “If anything, they should probably be afraid of me.” She strutted off to the omelet station like there wasn’t an army of Weres ready to pounce on us at the slightest inclination. The one thing I knew for certain was that fey didn’t lie. So the wolves probably
should
be afraid of her.