Flames in the Midst (The Jade Hale Series) (20 page)

I know this sounds like I am warning you not to become a Shadow Ruler.  I guess in a way, I am.  I know you will never knowingly head down that path, but sometimes we can’t see far enough down the path we are on to know where it will ultimately lead us.  I know you will seek out Evan and Cameron.  I know nothing I write here can stop that.  Please let Amy and Madilyn help you, and help them in turn.  They are fairly certain that one of the two is a time traveler and that they are back in Salem.  Amy will tell you the night of the fire also caused a sort of rift in
time.  History changed that night, and many more people died in Salem who never had before.  These were innocent people.  Go back and set that right, but please try not to let your hatred consume you. 

Now that you know the truth, I hope you will continue with your studies.  It is my hope you will choose to be a Guardian, but it will have to be your choice.  At the very least, learn to protect yourself.  Now that you are officially a time traveler, there will be Shadow Rulers and others seeking you out.  They already knew about you, but you weren’t as valuable to them until you had completed your first journey through time.  It is dangerous for you almost anywhere, but Amy and Madilyn have promised to keep you safe.  They cannot force you to stay with them, but I hope you will make that choice.  If you do not, they will assign a Guardian to look out for you, at least for as long as they can. 

Jade, there is no getting around this.  You are incredibly special.  Rare gifts in a witch are called rare for a reason.  Not every witch has a rare gift.  Very few have two rare gifts.  Probably only a handful have three.  No one has ever known a witch to have four.  I know you possess at least two.  You are a firestarter and a time traveler.  However, I have suspected for some time that you also possess a third gift.  I am not sure what it is, but it gives you the ability to read people very well.  Even as a child, you seemed to be able to sense things about people.  There are several gifts that would give you this ability, so I tried to have you study all of them as a child. 

If I am right, and you do possess a third gift, do not tell anyone about it.  Not Madilyn, not Amy, not Anastasia, not anyone.  You are already being hunted by Shadow Rulers and Hunters alike.  I cannot imagine how things would be for you if anyone were to suspect you had a third rare gift.  Keep this a secret.

Now, you should have the family book back if you are reading this letter.  If not, you will need to get it from Anastasia.  Anastasia, if you have not met her yet, will turn out to be a good friend.  Apparently, she met you back in the 1500s, but you will meet her for the first time in 2010, if you have not already had this meeting.  Anastasia and her family own the house we rented.  They have owned it for a very long time.  She is not officially a witch, but she has gained certain abilities with the ages she has lived.  Her mind does not work the way a normal person’s does, but you will see that over time.

Finally, Jade, please know I love you.  I wish there had been a way for us to have this conversation before I died, but you had to go through things on your own first.  I wish you could continue to live as a normal student and then young woman and live your life like all the people around you, but you will forever be different.  Part of your fate involves taking another path, apart from the rest of the world.  Please be careful which way you choose to turn down that path each time you approach a fork in the road of your future.  No matter what, your path now must lead you away from Zach and his family.  If you are with them now, you must leave—the sooner, the better.  I cannot thank them enough for taking you in, but it would not be right to repay them with the danger you bring with you.

Take care of yourself, Jade.  We will see each other again.

             
                                                                                                  Love,

Aunt Lynn

By the time I finished reading the letter, my fever had subsided to low grade, and I finally felt lucid enough to begin reading the book, if only I could concentrate on it.  Aunt Lynn’s letter shook me to the core.  No wonder she had to wait and deliver things this way.  If she had laid this
on me before I had experienced the past several weeks, I would have simply shut down and shut her out.  I could hardly imagine my reaction since I wasn’t doing too well with all of this information as it was.

How could I leave Zach and his family?  If I had put them in danger, then the danger already existed.  I had to stay to protect them.  She couldn’t expect me to leave.  Yet, that was exactly what her letter told me to do.  I struggled with this, but I couldn’t find a way to leave them without putting them in more danger, at least for the time being, so I
chose to ignore my aunt’s request.

Then there was the bit about the rare gifts.  I knew I had never met another firestarter.  The only other time traveler I knew was one of the two men responsible for my mother’s death, though I wasn’t sure which one.  Since having two rare gifts seemed to be somewhat of an anomaly, I assumed that Evan was the time traveler—Cameron having already confessed a gift for premonition.  And here I was.  Three gifts.  Extremely rare.  Well, I didn’t need the warning from Aunt Lynn to know not to share my third gift with anyone.  I counted myself lucky that I had made the decision not to share the gift with anyone as a child.  Aunt Lynn may have suspected, but in truth, no one knew I had three gifts—a freak of nature even amongst witches.

I mulled all of this over while lying in bed under a light blanket.  I listened as the house emptied, closing my eyes and feigning sleep when Zach’s mother came in to check on me before leaving for work.  When silence filled the empty space, I pulled back the blanket and stretched in the thin beams of sunlight making their way into the room through the closed blinds.  I walked to the dresser and grabbed a pair of shorts and a plain white T-shirt.  I considered grabbing a bikini and spending my first day feeling better lying out by the pool, but then I settled on hanging out in the shade so I could focus on the book.  I grabbed a set of undergarments and headed to the shower.

After l
ying in bed sick for a few days, it felt immensely good to stand under the warm water.  I washed my hair twice to get rid of the slick, oily feeling.  The brunette hair of May had almost entirely faded out.  I could see more red than brown as I dried my hair in front of the mirror.  I made a mental note to buy more hair dye.  Since I was so focused on seeking vengeance, I mused over the idea of dying it black.  Dark hair for a dark purpose.  I almost laughed aloud at the thought.

Before I started studying, I had to clean the room I was sleeping in and clear out the air of sickness.  I threw the sheets in the washer downstairs, turning the water temperature to hot.  I left the thin comforter in a heap on the floor of the laundry room, patiently awaiting its turn at purification.  Even though it was insanely hot and humid outside—July in Florida is really no fun, but it’s better than August—I opened the bedroom window and turn
ed the fan on full blast.  I needed some fresh air in the room, but I would have to close the window after an hour or so.  Zach’s mom would not be happy about her a/c pushing cool air into the great outdoors.

I grabbed the book from under my bed—I know, not a creative hiding place—and went downstairs.  After indulging in jelly toast and a glass of apple juice, I settled into the large leather couch in the living room.  The couch was a sectional that wrapped around half of the room.  I sat in the corner.  A large white, brick fireplace took up the opposite wall—crowned by an equally immense flat screen television.  I turned on a music station and turned the sound down.  I wanted background noise, but not something distracting. 

Opening the book, I could see it was divided into sections: General Laws of Magic, Origins of Magic, Spells, and Rare Gifts.  I knew a little bit about family books of magic.  Every one of these, regardless of the family, would have some of the same things in it.  There were general spells that all witches shared.  Our ancestors wrote these spells and shared them with each other.  Sometimes a witch would write a new spell and decide to share it with others.  If she or he wrote it on the communal spell pages, the spell would appear in all family books.  I guess witches had their own Internet system long before computers.  If the witch wrote the spell on the family pages, the spell stayed only in that book.  Not many new spells appeared on the communal pages.

The General Laws of Magic would also be identical no matter which family book you opened.  However, these were not so easy to change or add to as the communal spells.  No one knew of a witch powerful enough to write a new law.  There were stories about witches who had created addendums and changed, ever so slightly, current laws, but no one who had been able to write a new law.  I remembered Aunt Lynn telling me about this and stressing it.  The General Laws of Magic were the guiding code of witches.  There were other laws, specific to rare gifts, but the laws that applied to everyone were in the front section of the book. 

The history of witches filled the pages of the Origins of Magic section.  This, too, remained the same regardless of the book you opened.  Aunt Lynn had made me study this section on more occasions than I cared to remember.  She insisted I learn our history before I could learn how to harness my abilities fully.  Basically, the gist of the story is a group of people long ago found an unusual object.  This may have been thousands of years ago, but it was somewhere in the European continent.  When they touched it, it filled them with magic.  When they went back to where it had been, they could no longer find it.  It sounded a lot like Anastasia’s story about the Fountain of Youth. 

Except, unlike Anastasia and her family who have eternity to contemplate their encounter, these witches lived the normal life expectancies of anyone else, but with unusual benefits.  They formed the first coven, and vowed to keep their new abilities a secret.  They assumed, since the object apparently vanished, the abilities would vanish with the end of each person’s life. 

Then they began finding spouses and having children.  They met in secret frequently and soon discovered their children also had these strange abilities.  They wrote out the first rudimentary book of witchcraft and placed a spell on it binding all in their coven and all of their descendants to the book.  As their families broke off from the coven, they were granted a copy of the book.  The language in the books has changed, but all family books have come from that first coven of witches.

I thought I should review the first section.  I flipped to the General Laws of Magic.  The introduction boasted the warning, “Violating any of the laws of magic will result in severe consequences relative to the offense.”  I could tell even this warning had been changed by someone, a powerful witch at some point in history who decided that severe consequences needed to be amended.  The words, “relative to the offense,” were in a different script than the initial warning. 

This was followed with the information, “Laws may be added or amended if the law is just and the witch has the abilities to substantiate the change.”   This was vague, but I knew the gist of it.  Only a powerful witch could change or add to the General Laws of Magic, and he or she also needed a good reason for doing so.  The book mentioned nothing about removing laws.  If a witch added a law or amended a law to the book, then the assumption stood that the law needed to be in the book, all magic books, for a reason.

The General Laws of Magic were fairly simple.  Since the amendment about relative consequences, each law included a consequence, some more severe than others.  I read on to the first three laws.

“No spell may be created or used that will kill a person by means of the spell alone.  Consequence: Death.”  Again, the first part of the law was in one script.  The consequence was in another script.  The addition of “by means of the spell alone,” was in a third script.  This one law had been changed twice.  It made sense to me, but it chilled me to the bone at the same time.  Witches should be able to protect themselves and in a situation where it required either killing or being killed, a witch should be able to use his or her abilities to help the odds in their favor.  However, that addition of “by means of the spell alone,” is what enabled Evan to kill my mother.  His spell merely propelled the knife that killed her to snake through her body, so he did not simply kill her with a spell.  He murdered her with a knife, not a spell.  The spells he used on her to paralyze her and to twist the knife through her body did not directly kill her in and of themselves.  Therefore, he did not get the consequence of death.  The law remained unbroken.

I gained more resolution reading this first law.  Evan deserved the consequence even if it didn’t come from directly breaking the law.  The beauty of being a firestarter was that by the nature of my rare gift, I could kill.  I was a lethal weapon, and that, combined with the fact I could also time travel and apparently take others with me, made me a prize for Guardians and Shadow Rulers alike.  I imagined I would also be pursued by Hunters if they knew of my existence.  I would deal with that when it came time.  For now, only Anastasia and Chase knew where I was.  I moved on to the next law.

“No spell may be created or used to permanently alter the state of another without consent.  Consequence: Permanent reversal of desired state or permanent mental incapacity for offender—whichever the offender deems worse.”  This law contained five different scripts.  It appeared that the original law merely stated, “No spell may be created or used to alter the state of another.”  Everything else represented additions made by powerful witches.  I wondered how long ago the original laws had actually been written.  More importantly, I wondered how long ago anyone had been able to add or change a law.  Apparently, there were several witches powerful enough to do so, but I had never heard of any of them specifically.  Not like that was saying much since I had spent most of my life trying not to be a witch.