Awakening (9 page)

I left a note for my mom saying that I’d be back for dinner, then drove over to Hunter’s house. As much as being around him upset me, I realized Hunter needed to know about the dark presence I’d sensed at Unser’s and the dark magick I had felt on Monday night. He might be able to tell me what it was, where it had come from, how I could protect myself from it effectively.

I started up the narrow path. Even in daylight it was hard to be sure that there was a house tucked away behind all the trees. The porch was even ricketier than it had seemed at night. A post was missing from the railing, and the stairs had a split tread.

I reached the door and hesitated. Should I knock? I suddenly felt reluctant to bring my troubles to this particular door.

I chickened out. I’d turned and started off the porch when I heard the door open behind me. “Morgan,” Hunter’s voice said.

Caught. I turned to face him and felt myself blush. “I should have called first. Maybe this isn’t a good time.”

“It’s fine,” he said. “Come in.”

Inside there was no sign of Sky. I settled myself in one of the living room armchairs. The house was as cold as it had been last night, the fire in the little fireplace giving off hardly any warmth at all. I was shivering, growing more uncomfortable by the second. This had been a bad idea.

“So,” Hunter said as he sat across from me. “Why are you here?”

To my surprise, I blurted, “I didn’t feel anything at our circle last night. I’m the one who always gets swept away, but . . . Everyone else was transported, but I didn’t get anything. I don’t know if Cirrus is right for me anymore.”

“Wicca isn’t about getting things,” Hunter said.

“I know that,” I said defensively. “It’s just—it’s just that it doesn’t usually happen to me.” I studied his face, wondering how much to confide in him. “It scared me,” I admitted. “Like my powers would be gone forever.” A thought occurred to me. “Did you do something to damp down my power during the circle in any way?”

He raised his eyebrows. “If I were trying to control your power, you’d have known it. And it’s not something I would do unless it were an extreme emergency.”

“Oh.” I sank back into the chair.

He crossed a booted foot over his knee. He tapped it a few times. “Perhaps . . . my style doesn’t bring out your potential.”

He sounded disappointed. In me, I wondered, or in himself? “Everyone else, it worked for them,” I said grudgingly. “They really liked how you did things.”

His face brightened, making him look more like an ordinary teenager. Extraordinarily handsome, maybe, but less intense. “They did? I’m glad. I haven’t been that nervous since . . . well, never mind.” He pressed his lips together as if he wanted to make sure he didn’t say anything else. He looked almost startled—as if he hadn’t meant to say those words aloud.

“You were nervous?” I couldn’t help enjoying that. “The mighty Hunter?”

Hunter leaned forward, gazing into the hearth. “Don’t you think I know how highly you all thought of Cal? Especially you. I knew no one really wanted me taking over. And a part of me thought: Well, maybe they’re right. Maybe I can’t lead a circle as well as he did. God knows he’s more at ease with people than I’ll ever be.”

I stared at him, stunned to hear him admit to so much vulnerability. I thought back to times when I’d watched Cal move from one clique at school to another, fitting in wherever he went. It was part of what had made him so good at manipulating people—he could present them with what they wanted to see. And what made it so powerful was that at some level, it was real. Hunter, on the other hand, could only be himself.

He and I had that in common.

A sadness clouded his clear green eyes. “I always thought my father would be there when I took over as a coven leader. It feels strange to take the step without him.”

I nodded, aware of another connection we had. “Like my trying to learn about my birthright without my birth parents. I feel like something is missing.”

“Yes,” Hunter agreed. “Without Dad, being coven leader is all that more daunting.”

“What made you decide to do it, then?” I asked.

He gave me a sudden, lopsided grin, gazing up at me from under a shock of pale hair. “The thought that
you
might try to lead them. I couldn’t risk that.”

If that was a joke, I didn’t find it particularly funny. “Hey, I didn’t come here to be insulted.”

“Oh, stop.” He laughed. “I didn’t mean it as an insult. I only meant that you’re a bit of a loose cannon because you’ve got all this power and no training. It’s not an incurable condition.”

“Glad to know it’s not terminal,” I muttered.

He looked at me more seriously now. “Morgan, listen to me. You have so much potential—it’s very exciting, I know. But you’ve got to learn how to rein in and focus your power. For your own good as much as anything else. All that power makes you like a beacon. You’re a walking target.”

Abruptly I remembered the real reason I’d come here. I sat forward in my chair.

“There’s something I need to tell you about,” I said. I described the dark force I’d felt after my dream and then again at the garage. “I tried to get it to reveal itself by drawing Peorth, but it just sort of evaporated,” I said. “Do you have any idea what it was?”

He was frowning. “This is not good. It could have been another witch, cloaking him, or herself. It sounds more like some sort of a
taibhs
, a dark spirit, though.”

“The first time, when I sensed it in the middle of the night, I had the impression that whatever it was, it wasn’t aimed at me,” I said. “But after what happened at the garage, I’m not so sure. Do you think it’s been following me?”

“You would have sensed that, I think.” Hunter got to his feet, went to the window, and peered out into the trees that surrounded the house. “But we’ve got to assume that it wasn’t coincidence, either. It was looking for you. And it found you.”

“Did Selene send it? Or . . . Cal?” I asked in a low voice, not really wanting to know the answer.

“More likely Selene,” Hunter said. “To her your power is an irresistible lure, almost as much as Belwicket’s tools are. If she can’t coerce you to join her group, she wants to absorb your power. It would increase her own to the point where she’d be practically invincible.”

My skin crawled. I thought of David, saying that we had to take Selene’s intentions into account as well as her actions. Maybe he was right, but her intentions sounded pretty awful in themselves. “They’re really evil, aren’t they?” I asked. “Selene and . . . and Cal?”

He took some branches from the box of kindling, snapped them in half, and added them to the fire. “Cal . . . is his mother’s creation. I don’t know if I’d call him evil.” Glancing up, he gave me that quick grin again. “Besides, that’s not a nice thing to say about one’s own kin, is it?”

I grinned back. Hunter did have a sense of humor, I realized. It was just an offbeat one.

“As for Selene,” Hunter went on, getting serious again. “She’s ambitious and ruthless. She studied with Clyda Rockpel.”

I shook my head, indicating that I didn’t know the name.

“Clyda Rockpel was a Welsh Woodbane who was legen darily vicious. She’s said to have murdered her own daughter to enhance her power. And it’s certainly true that wherever Selene goes, witches tend to disappear or die. Destruction seems to follow in her wake. Yes, I would agree that she is truly evil.”

I felt a wave of pity for Cal. With a mother like that, he’d never really had a choice. Or a chance.

As if he’d read my mind, Hunter said in a quiet voice, “Poor Cal.” His eyes met mine, and I was startled by the depth of compassion in them.

We stared at each other, and then we were both suspended in a strange, timeless moment. I felt like I was falling into Hunter’s gaze, and again I remembered the night when he’d almost kissed me. Of the profound connection I’d felt with him, the lightness I’d experienced when he and I had done
tàth meànma
, the intense sharing of minds I thought of as the Wiccan mind meld.

I wanted to feel Hunter’s mouth on mine, his arms around me. I wanted to kiss away that sadness, all that had happened to him before we’d met. To tell him that his father would be proud of him if only he could be here. I could feel him wanting to do the same for me; I could sense his aching to stroke my face until he had wiped away all the tears I’d shed over Cal.

Then I blinked. What was I
thinking
? Here I was, talking to my ex-boyfriend’s half brother and fantasizing about making out with him. Was I insane?

“I—I’ve got to go home,” I said.

A faint flush had risen under Hunter’s clear, pale skin. “Right,” he said, standing up. He cleared his throat. “Wait just a moment. I’ve got some books for you.”

He strode into the hallway and began pulling books off the shelves. “Here,” he said, his voice back to its usually proper tone. “An advanced compendium of runic alphabets, Hope Whitelaw’s critique of Erland Erlandsson’s numerolog ical system, and a guide to the properties of stones, minerals, and metals. Start with these, and when you’ve finished them, we’ll talk about them. Then I’ll give you more.”

I nodded, not trusting myself to speak. When I took Hunter’s books, I was careful to not allow our hands to touch.

Outside, the late afternoon sky was a harsh, glaring white. I drove home in a daze, my mind whirling, barely noticing the cold at all.

9

Almost Normal

Thursday and Friday, I worked really hard on keeping things normal. I went to school. I talked to my friends. I worked at my mom’s office—I’d made a deal with my parents in which they’d front me the money for my car repairs in exchange for my getting all my mom’s real estate listings entered into the computer. I cheered when the news came that Aunt Eileen and Paula had closed on their house and that they would start moving in over the weekend. I tried not to think about Cal. Or Hunter. Or the bad news about Practical Magick. Or dark forces that might be out to get me. I made it through the days like other teenage girls.

On Saturday, Robbie picked me up in his red Beetle. By now everyone in the coven had heard about Practical Magick closing, and Robbie had suggested a trip over there to see if there was anything we could do to help. I didn’t think there was, but I was glad to go, anyway.

“So, how’d it go last night?” I asked as I buckled my seat belt. I knew that Robbie had gone out with Bree. It was a new direction for their age-old friendship.

Robbie shook his head, gazing through the windshield. “Same as before. We hung out, watched a video. Then we made out, and it was great. Fantastic. But the second I tried to talk about how I felt, she got all squirrelly.” He grinned. “But this time I had the sense to shut up and kiss her again before she kicked me out of her house.”

I laughed. “Quick thinking.”

The fact was, Robbie had been in love with Bree for years. But Bree was gorgeous, while Robbie . . . well, he’d been a pizza face. It had made him afraid to approach her. Then, in trying out my newfound power, I’d made a potion to clear up the acne that for years had obliterated his looks. The potion had worked and kept on working in an almost frightening way. The scars had disappeared completely, and then his poor vision had improved, to the point where he no longer wore the thick glasses that he’d had ever since I’d known him. Without the acne or the glasses, he turned out to be amazingly good-looking and was now considered a major hottie at school.

With his new looks, Robbie had found the courage to go after Bree. But the results so far were uneven. They weren’t exactly seeing each other but were definitely more than friends. On Robbie’s side, it was love. For Bree . . . it was impossible to tell. Even back when we told each other everything, she’d always been hard to figure out when it came to relationships.

Thinking about Bree, I felt another pang of loss. With all that had happened to me in such a short amount of time, it was painful not to be able to confide in her. But the wounds were still too fresh. Maybe, just maybe, with Cal gone, we could begin to be friends again. I hoped so.

Robbie and I talked about Practical Magick’s problems for the rest of the drive. Robbie’s brow creased as he hunted for a parking space in front of the store. “There’s something I don’t get,” he said. “I mean, we’ve got you, David, Alyce, Hunter, and Sky—that’s five blood witches. And I assume you’d all like Practical Magick to stay open. Why can’t you just all do a spell together so David hits the lottery or something?”

“I’m sure that kind of thing isn’t allowed under Wiccan law,” I said gloomily. “Otherwise David and Alyce would have done it already.”

“That’s a drag,” Robbie said. He squeezed into a space behind a minivan, and we started for the store.

I nodded, but I couldn’t help thinking—there must be some kind of spell to increase wealth. After all, going by the listings I’d seen in my mom’s office, Selene Belltower’s property must be worth at least a million dollars. And although Cal had told me that Selene’s employers had transferred her to Widow’s Vale, I never had found out what she supposedly did for a living. I had a feeling her money didn’t come through any of the usual channels.