Flames in the Midst (The Jade Hale Series) (25 page)

Still, I didn’t know if I could help to put the people I was growing to care about in harm’s way.  Well, maybe I could stand putting Chase in danger, I thought with a tinge of regret.  I might be angry about his deception and I might feel humiliated by the fact I fell for it, but I didn’t really want to see him physically hurt.  I regretted even thinking it.

I sat down on a fallen tree trunk and drank the rest of my water.  Even under the cover of the trees, sweat beaded on my forehead in the summer heat.  I slowly realized I was not as alone as I had supposed.  I could hear voices coming from somewhere behind me.  They didn’t realize I was near them, but I could just make out the voices of the Guardians if I concentrated.  Their
meeting place must be out here in the woods.  Either Stefanie didn’t know this was where they were meeting or she didn’t care if I ran into them.  Maybe she just figured they would be done by now.

“I think we need to focus on another way to fight the Shadow Rulers,” Chase was saying.  “We need to be going after the ones who are here now.  They are working on new spells.  I couldn’t catch that kid back in St. Augustine.  He was on foot, I was chasing him on my bike, and I couldn’t catch him.  We need to be working on what is in front of us.”

“Chase is right,” answered a voice I didn’t know.  “How do we even know we can trust Jade?  You want to put all of this time and energy into training her, and she may end up double-crossing us in the end anyway.  Or maybe she’ll just give up and leave.  We can’t rely on someone who isn’t one of us.  If we need to go back in time to Salem, we can afford to wait for another time traveler to come along.  It’s not like the Witch Trials are going anywhere.”

“That’s not,” Chase began, but then Amy cut him off.

“Chase, you must follow the rules of the meeting.  You no longer have the floor.  You may be a new Guardian, but you are well aware of how these meetings work.”

“Thank you,” the voice continued.  “I just don’t think it is a good decision to take on a witch who clearly has conflicting motives.”

“I acknowledge your concerns,” Amy said as diplomatically as any politician.  “It is true Jade has conflicting emotions.  She hasn’t been raised embracing her skills and her gifts.  She was given a reprieve from that partially in order to keep her hidden.  Now that she can travel through time as well as use her other gift and skills, she will be hunted more than ever.  We have a duty to protect her that extends beyond the promise I made to her aunt.  We would never turn away an Unknown in the same circumstance.

“As far as what she will do after we help her, we can only hope that she will help us in turn.  I will not force her to sign a contract ensuring she helps us.  We don’t believe in that as a principle.  We don’t help people only if they are willing to guarantee their allegiance to us.  She does not have to join us nor does she have to help us get to Salem, but I have faith she will do the right thing.”

After Amy’s speech, she cleared her throat and took on an even more official tone.

“Now, we vote.  Understand we are deciding whether or not to continue offering Jade solace that will include training her.  We are not making any decisions for her as to what she will do with that training.  It is understood the decision to help us or not to help us will be hers when the time comes.”

I had heard enough.  I wasn’t going to hang around for the vote.  I got up from my log and headed quickly away from the sound of the Guardians’ voices.  I took deep breaths in an attempt to calm myself, and I walked with purpose, as if I had somewhere to be deeper within the forest—my own meeting to attend.  Everything Amy said was wonderful and kind, but the other woman and Chase had not been so convinced that helping me was the right thing to do.  The fact was there were enough people who didn’t want me there that they needed to take a vote.  I was hurt and angry, and I just wanted to scream because I was so frustrated and fed up with my lot in life.  They were in the woods voting about whether or not to give me a new home and Stefanie, my biggest supporter, wasn’t even allowed to take part in the vote.  Something seemed very wrong about that.

After walking for another twenty minutes full steam ahead, I began to feel funny.  At first, I thought I had overexerted myself.  I hadn’t been running with Zach except for a handful of times during the past months I had spent with his family.  Maybe I was getting out of shape that
quickly.  I listened to my breathing and felt my pulse.  Everything was relatively under control factoring in my emotions.  With each step I took, the feeling grew.  I might have pieced it together on my own, but I found myself being swung by the arm away from the edge of the property.

I stood a foot away from Chase.  I was so angry with him, but he didn’t seem to have any idea.

“Careful,” he warned me.  “You were getting very close to the end of the property.  The protection ends right there.”  He pointed about ten yards away from where we stood.  I didn’t say anything. 

“So,” he continued, “I’m glad to see that you are up and about.  I was worried you wouldn’t be joining us for another year or so.”

“I’m sure you were,” I shot at him, turning to walk back in the direction we had just come from.  I was angry, but I wasn’t going to risk the lives of those on my side by crossing the barrier.

Chase easily caught up with me.  I tried to ignore him, but I could see his look of confusion out of the corner of my eye.  Was he really that dense? 

“How much of the meeting did you hear?” he asked soberly.

“Enough,” I responded as curtly as possible.  I wanted to ignore him entirely, but that was easier said than done.  He was taller than me, and his longer stride made it easy for him to keep pace with me.

“Did you think they weren’t going to discuss your situation?  Did you think Amy just made all the calls and we followed her blindly?” 

“I don’t know what I thought.”  I stopped and turned to face Chase.  He stepped towards me, but I backed away.

“Did you not hear the final vote?” he asked.

“No, and I don’t really care,” I lied.

“You should.  We voted for you to stay,” he smiled at me as if this was the news I had been dreaming about.  His tan skin blended with the surroundings in the woods.  He looked at home and a lot healthier here than he had been looking over the past few weeks.  He looked rested.

“And which way did you cast your vote?” I asked, angry I had ever believed he could get past his initial hatred for me.

“Seriously, Jade?  Do you really have to ask that?” He looked hurt, but I wasn’t willing to jump back into the game.  I came out to the woods to be alone, like Thoreau.  I wanted to learn something out here from nature, not from eavesdropping.  I wanted to be able to think and sort through the mess that was my life in a real way, a normal way.

“Listen, Chase,” I looked him straight in the face.  “Thank you for telling me about the vote.  I’m sorry I stumbled upon your little meeting.  I came out here to have some time alone, so that is what I am going to do.  I’ll see you later.”  With that, I turned and walked away from him.  After a minute of walking through the trees, I felt a twinge of remorse for treating him so coldly.  I turned around, but he was already gone.

I spent the rest of the day mulling things over.  It came down to a few truths.  First, I could not let my mother’s murder go unanswered.  Evan, and probably Cameron, deserved to be punished for her death and for any other deaths they were responsible for.  Someone had to stop them.  I had a job to do, and that was the most important thing in my life at the moment.

Second, when the situation in Salem was resolved, I still did not want to be a witch.  I would draw up a contract and give away that part of myself.  Maybe I could divide it up.  That way, if the witch I gave my abilities to died, I would not have all of it rushing back to me at once.  Maybe there was another way.  Maybe I could give my abilities to Anastasia.  She wasn’t a witch, but she was immortal.  Then there would never be the risk of ending up back in my current situation.  Of course, then Anastasia would be the hunted one.  Maybe I could give them to Chase.  Let him be the hunted one.  I didn’t know how I would solve this problem and return to a normal life, but I was determined that one day I would return to a normal life free from my supernatural past.

In the meantime, I needed to learn as much as I could.  The coven had voted to continue offering me solace and training.  Amy had been very clear that the decision to help them would be mine when the time came.  They knew as well as I did that I wasn’t ready yet anyway, so I had time to make up my mind.  In the end, as much as I wanted to track down Evan and Cameron on my own, I would have to admit this battle was part of a larger war, and the Guardians in this coven had as much of a right to fight in the battle as I did.

By the time I started to worry about getting back to the house, it was already dark.  I thought I might have to spend the night in the woods, and I was a little nervous about the animals that might be out there with me.  I didn’t want to end up setting a fox or a bobcat on fire to protect myself.  I had been sitting on another fallen tree for over an hour when I heard a noise behind me.  I turned quickly, ready to defend myself if necessary.

“Ready for company yet?” Chase asked.

“You scared the hell out of me,” I reprimanded him.  I wasn’t as angry as I had been, but I would have rather Stefanie or Amy been in the woods with me at the moment.  Chase was not
really the person I wanted to see.  On the other hand, at least I had someone to lead me out of the woods and back to the house.

“Sorry,” he shrugged.  “Can you come and light this?”  He gestured towards a small clearing in the woods a little ways behind where I was sitting.  I wondered how he had set up a fire pit without my hearing, but then I figured
it was just another spell I didn’t know.  I got off my tree trunk and joined him in the clearing.

“I’d rather not.  I’m actually ready to go back to the house now.”  I looked at him and his fire pit with contempt.

“Actually, I think we need to talk,” he said, looking at me expectantly.  “C’mon.  I brought food.”  He held up a bag with hotdogs, marshmallows and drinks.  Being out in the heat all day with only one bottle of water left me feeling parched, so I relented.

I focused on the fire pit and found that it wasn’t hard to release my anger since I still had quite a bit of it from the events of the day.  While I lit the fire, Chase laid out a woven beach mat not too far from the fire pit.  He took out the hotdogs and searched for the right sticks nearby for us to spear them.  He sat on the mat.  With the fire crackling, Chase gestured for me to sit by him.  Reluctantly, I sat down and he passed me another bottle of water.

We cooked our hotdogs in silence.  When mine had cooled enough, I broke it in pieces and devoured it.  I really needed to work on eating at regular intervals. 

“So,” I said, breaking the silence.  “You said we needed to talk.”

“I owe you an apology,” he started.

“No, you don’t.  You don’t owe me anything.”

“Will you just let me apologize to you?” he asked.

“Fine.”  I could feel the anger building up in me again.  I didn’t want to go over this.  I didn’t want an apology from him because I wanted this whole embarrassment to be over. 

“What would you like to apologize for?” I asked him.  “Is it for pretending to be my friend?  Is it for lying about being a Guardian?  What exactly are we discussing?”

“We are friends,” he said with a bit of his own anger, “and I never lied about being a Guardian.”

“No?”

“You didn’t ask if I was one, and I didn’t share the news with you.  The conversation never came up.  I would have been honest with you if you had asked,” Chase insisted.

“Really?  If I remember correctly, I did ask what you were doing in St. Augustine.  I don’t remember you telling me about being a Guardian then.”

“I explained everything to you the way it happened.  It just also happened that I had become a Guardian just before I went after you.  Part of the deal for me to go was that I had to pass their tests and officially join them.  Luckily, I was close enough to becoming one anyway.  Otherwise, it would have been someone else looking out for you.”

The way he said his last sentence made it sound like he didn’t want anyone else looking out for me.  It sounded like he fought more than I realized to be the one sent out to keep an eye on me.

“Maybe it would have been better if it hadn’t been me, though,” he continued.  I just couldn’t figure him out.  One minute he sounded like he had feelings for me, and the next he sounded like he had when we first met—like I was the last person, the last witch he wanted to see.  I was tired and fed up.  If I was going to stay here and train, I wanted to get back to the house and take part in the planning I was sure was happening without me.

“Weren’t you keeping me out here to apologize?” I asked him, trying to change the subject.  “What did you want to apologize for again?”

“Like I said, I’m sorry,” he spoke in a low voice, quiet and somber.  “I obviously wasn’t ready.  I failed you.”

“What?”  I stared at him.  Was he actually saying what I thought he was saying?

“They should have sent someone else.  I was supposed to keep you safe, and it turns out I couldn’t do it.  I sent you into that house straight to a Shadow Ruler so I could chase his underling, and I couldn’t even do that.”