Earth (31 page)

“Well, no…”

“Then shut up,” Jodi finished for me.

“Fine, you may feel comfortable with a blade
but I don’t.”

“I thought of that and actually I think maybe
I’d like you to go to church tonight and get some holy water and
bring it with a Bible or a rosary or whatever you’re most
comfortable with,” I said and then finished off my pie.

“What?” Steven asked, clearly confused.

“You’re still a devout Catholic and I think
against a demon your faith will be a really good weapon.” I smiled
at him. Mixing our magic with his Catholic ideals always bothered
Steven, but I believe that good versus evil transcends all
religions and beliefs. Quite frankly, enough of pagan beliefs were
adopted into different Christian faiths that it really wasn’t that
far of a leap of faith to incorporate them when battling a
demon.

Our magical powers are perfectly natural and
for the last few years I’d had to council Steven many times to help
him come to terms with the fact that the magic we performed wasn’t
a sin. We didn’t work against the laws of nature, we worked with
them, and more often than not we only used magic when trying to
help someone, like what we did for Tracy. And, quite frankly, if
you ignored your abilities they just began to fester inside you
like a virus. If you don’t do something about it, the virus
eventually infects your whole system and your abilities will
manifest themselves somehow. Many people get diagnosed with
schizophrenia and all kinds of other disorders just because they
don’t know they have magical or psychic abilities.

“That’s brilliant!” Jodi said with a little
more enthusiasm than she had shown yet. “Steven, that really would
be good for you.” She was actually smiling at Steven and I saw some
of the skepticism slip away from his face as he considered the
idea.

“Good. I really think that’s all we’ll need.
If you want to wear any amulets or something, that’s fine. Like,
Steven, if you want, you can wear a cross or crucifix. Jodi, if you
want to wear your star necklace, just be sure to recharge it
tonight.” They both nodded in agreement with me.

“That doesn’t seem like much,” Steven said
with uncertainty.

“We don’t need a lot of bells and whistles,
Steven. Seriously, since the circle is already laid and I really
don’t think we’re going to have a lot of time to use anything once
we’re there, this is pretty much going to be an ambush,” I said as
calmly as I could. I wasn’t trying to scare them, but I wanted them
to know what we were getting into.

“So you still think it’ll be close to
midnight when he starts summoning the demon?” Jodi asked me.

“Yeah, because then it’ll be Halloween when
the thing is actually brought here.”

“Are we going to school tomorrow?” Steven
asked then.

“Yeah, I think it’ll look funny if we don’t
and we don’t want the school calling our parents to tell them we’re
not there.” They both nodded in agreement. “Besides we’ll have
plenty of time after school to center and draw up any power we may
need before we get there. And we don’t want to get there too early
and tip him off.”

We put money on the table and left. It was
well past eight o’clock now and we didn’t want our parents to get
suspicious of us so we headed home. I hugged them both tightly in
the parking lot and apologized again for going off on my own today.
They were both more gracious this time around. I reminded Steven to
go by his church and get some water. His church had a nine o’clock
mass so it wouldn’t look odd for him to be there tonight. Jodi said
she’d go with him but I knew it was to make sure he didn’t have
second thoughts about taking the water.

When I got home my parents weren’t happy with
how late I came in, but they bought the lie that I had told them I
would be at school late for a club meeting and they must have
forgotten. I said a quiet prayer of thanks that it worked and
trudged back to my room to fall gratefully into bed.

It was a blessedly dreamless sleep; at least
I couldn’t really remember any dreams. I had flashes of forests and
fire and unrecognizable faces. But I had been so bone-weary when I
fell into bed last night I couldn’t even muster up the energy in my
sleep to pay enough attention to keep memories of the dreams. When
I woke up I was a bundle of nerves, so much anticipation and
anxiety bottled up inside of me I was actually charged with it. I
shocked my mom when I said good-bye to her as if there were static
electricity in the air. We both laughed it off but I stared out at
the sky as I stepped off our front step for a moment and knew there
was no static electricity in the air; the fog was thick on the
ground and the sky was gray and swollen with clouds. There was far
too much water in the air for static electricity to build.

When I picked Steven and Jodi up, a wave of
relief flooded through me. Jodi staggered backwards before she was
able to get into the car behind Steven, who I heard fall into his
seat rather than just slip in. “Whoa… what the hell was that?” Jodi
asked, her eyes gone round with shock, gripping the car door for
support so much that her knuckles had gone red and white against
her skin.

“What was what?” I asked, looking between her
and Steven in the rearview mirror. Both of them had been hit with
something strong enough to take them off their feet.

“Seriously? You didn’t feel it?” Steven
asked, visibly pulling himself together and shaking his head as if
trying to clear his vision.

“What?” I asked a little more anxiously.

“I don’t know… it was kinda like a head rush.
Umm, wow, I feel all tingly now,” Jodi said, her voice bubbled like
it was hiding a giggle and Jodi would be the last person you’d ever
hear giggle.

“Yeah, me too,” Steven said, staring at his
hand as he flexed his fingers. I watched his face in the rearview
mirror and could see inspiration dawn on him and he extended his
arm to point at Jodi who was still standing outside of the car,
holding onto the door and roof to steady herself. Steven tilted his
head to the side, furrowed his brow in concentration, and I heard
Jodi make a small sound, drawing my attention to her just as a
flush of heat creeped up her face, coloring her cheeks and ears.
“Niiiice,” Steven whispered with a smile. I could almost see
something extending from his outstretched arm towards Jodi; the air
between them shimmered like heat waves rising off the road.
Something told me that is exactly what I was looking at.

“What just happened?” I asked, leaning across
the seat to look at Jodi.

“I got warm….” she said in awe.

“Jodi, try to do something!” Steven said
excitedly.

“Like what?”

“I dunno, something with air, c’mon!” He was
practically bouncing in the back seat.

“Um ok…” Jodi’s voice was uncertain but she
looked around to see if anyone was watching and then she copied
Steven’s actions, pointing her hand into the car and concentrated.
A moment later sparks erupted at the ends of her fingers.

“Shay? You sure you didn’t feel anything?”
Steven asked.

“When I woke up I felt charged, like with
electricity, I even shocked my mom with static build up…”

“And? What about right now like me and Jodi,
the rush?” He was clinging to the back of my seat now, as if he was
ready to crawl over it into my lap.

“No, nothing like that… I mean, I felt
relief,” I shrugged at the end.

“Do you still feel all that electricity built
up?”

“Um…” I stopped and thought about it,
remembered feeling the almost burning tingle on my lips and
fingertips and the visible spark that erupted between my mom and me
when I touched her. I felt fine now, not exactly normal, but
better. As if the power was better distributed throughout my body
and close to the surface waiting to be called rather than
overflowing to the surface, forcing itself out. “No… I feel power,
like, inside,” I motioned to my stomach, the right words failing
me, “but it isn’t like it was. I thought my nerves were going crazy
and like I was gonna explode with it.”

“Dude, remember last night?” Steven asked and
Jodi finally fell into the car, pulling the door closed behind her
and effectively cutting off the cold air from outside. I could
still feel the heat radiating off of her from when Steven had
called it.

“What?” Jodi asked, pulling her scarf off
from around her neck.

“When Shay said that we’d be there acting as
her anchors? Maybe it’s already started!” Steven explained in a
rush. “This is all that power she called up yesterday and the
excess has come to us. I can access air now and Jodi can tap into
fire.”

“Why wouldn’t that have happened last night
then? When she saw us right after she did the spells?” Jodi asked
Steven, but I answered.

“Because I was too tired. If the power had
risen in me last night, it might’ve killed me. I couldn’t have
handled it. But now, now that I’m rested and the power has settled,
it rose and the excess was waiting for you. Thank God we decided to
go to school, I couldn’t have carried it with me all day.”

“So you think Steven’s right?”

“What else could it be?” I asked and she
shook her head. We didn’t have any other answer for it. I had
called a magnitude of power, too much for me to contain, and now
Jodi and Steven were feeling the effects of years of study and
practice at their elements. I hoped they didn’t get used to it;
something told me that once tonight was over the power wouldn’t be
sticking around.

Chapter 18

I couldn’t even begin to tell you what
happened that day in school. I moved through my classes and the
crowded hallways in a complete and total daze. In three different
classes Jodi and Steven had to whisper answers to me when teachers
called on me and I didn’t even hear them. I was vaguely aware that
I needed to get a hold of myself and focus, but I kept slipping
into daydreams of what we were going to be facing that night and
the work I had done yesterday. Analyzing what had happened when I
picked Jodi and Steven up for school this morning.

At lunch I huddled into the base of the tree
we liked to eat lunch under. The ground was still a little wet,
like it would never dry in this winter weather, and I had Jodi and
Steven play look out. I sat Indian style with my knees resting on
the knobby roots of the tree and took slow, even breaths and
grounded myself into the Earth’s energy. I sent out a shield to the
archway of the hall that would lead to where we were that would
make any wandering students suddenly feel like they didn’t want to
go down that hallway. I kept my eyes closed so I wouldn’t be
distracted, but I opened all my magical and psychic channels and
was able to see the world around me without my eyes.

Like an out of body experience, I rose up
from myself and stepped out of the protection of the tree. I turned
and found Jodi and Steven just a few feet away from me. Steven was
less of a body and more of a raging column of fire in the shape of
a human. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought he had set
himself on fire. I turned and saw that Jodi was no longer just a
body; she seemed caught in a cyclone of swirling air and
lightening. She reached a hand out to pluck a fallen leaf off of
Steven’s shoulder and when her energy neared his, the air and fire
spiked out from each other, reaching to the other power, growing in
ferocity and feeding on each other. But as I watched their faces, I
knew neither of them was aware of what was happening.

I was fascinated by them and could have
studied them all day, but mundanely I knew I needed to get back to
myself and, with that realization, I was suddenly overwhelmed and
excited to turn and look upon myself. I turned so slowly I felt
like I was caught in honey. I steeled myself and forced those last
few inches of the turn.

I knew I was looking at myself because I
could see my face, but I was so confused. I didn’t know what I
expected to see. Knowing that my true element was earth would I be
a mound of earth? Or perhaps had become a tree? It sounded silly to
me, but this I did not expect to see. White light radiated off of
my body, swirling in a color spectrum. It would seem red, but as
soon as I decided it was red, the color would shift and ripple and
would suddenly be blue or green or orange and all came back to
white. I could have accepted that it was just my aura on steroids
after the power I had summoned and clearly affected Steven and
Jodi, but nothing could account for the huge black and sliver wings
that curled and folded around my body.

The feathers were well and truly black but
the edges bled into each other and shimmered in the false light of
my aura to gleaming, perfect sliver. I concentrated on them, taking
a few steps closer to my body and reached out a hand to stroke the
edge of one wing. Just as my fingertips slid over the nearest
feather I heard a deafening crack of thunder over head and I
flinched, snatching my hand back just as the wings burst open and
spread wide behind my body as if the tree wasn’t in the way. They
were glorious, seeming too big to fold down around my body and not
drag on the ground. I traced the length of one of the wings with my
eyes to the tip and saw on the right tip the slow and steady drip
of blood that fell to the ground only to disappear into the
earth.

I walked around my body and the tree to
examine the bleeding wing and saw that there was no open or healing
wound for the blood to come from. I knelt in the grass and looked
up at the wing and could see that the blood looked like a splash of
paint against the feathers, as if the wing had been too close when
a fatal blow had taken someone down. I breathed a sigh of relief
and came back to myself in a rush, gasping for breath and clutching
at my chest to calm down.

“Terra!” I heard Steven’s strained voice as
the two of them heard me gasp and scrambled to my side. Jodi
reached out a hand to my shoulder and I could feel the build up of
power between her hand and my shoulder. She felt it too, looking
down at her hand and had to force it through that build up of power
to close those last few inches between us.