Something Witchy (Mystics & Mayhem) (24 page)

“What about me?” I asked Grams, shaking off the sad thoughts of my mother’s childhood. 

“You’re very special.”  When I snorted skeptically, she turned and gave a weak smile over her shoulder.  “You’re a powerful witch, Ember, born to parents who don’t have a mystical bone in their bodies—though there has been some debate over the years about your father.  Even with my blood running in your veins, that shouldn’t have been possible.  Still, like your mother being without any power, it does happen.  Those children are revered.  Most witches hold only one true power, but those children, children like you, are a veritable fountain of power.”

Revered?  What a joke.  I had been ignored most of my life.  And a fountain of power?  Who was she kidding?  I wasn’t a fountain of power.  The only power I had was the amazing temper I was so well known for.  A temper I had inherited from
her
.  A temper that was about to blow like a volcano.

 “Why am I only finding this out now?” I demanded, torn between screaming at her and crying my head off.  “Do you know how long I’ve felt like I was a freak, Grams?  My entire life.  You should have told me.”

“I couldn’t,” she said miserably, closing her eyes for a second.  “It was agreed by the Council that you would be bound until you reached maturity for your own safety.  They further decreed that you were to have no knowledge of your heritage until such a time as they deemed it safe. 

“To have left you to develop your powers on your own would have been a disaster,” she continued, her face paling slightly as some terrible thought crossed her mind that I didn’t even
want
her to tell me about.  “Very bad things happen to witches who develop their talents without the guidance of a mentor, a teacher, to instruct them on how to control those gifts.  Young bandraoithe, in particular, are a danger to themselves and to others.  We did it to protect you, but I now believe that was a mistake.  I am so sorry, sweetheart.  So very sorry.”

“When?”  I choked out, allowing a tear to slip down my cheek.  “When did you bind me?”

“The night after your mother came for you,” Grams admitted miserably.  “And even my power wasn’t enough to bind you completely, which was why you continued to see the spirits of the dead.”

The night of the fever
, I thought, staring at her like she had become a new and unusual life form.  A dangerous one. 
The night I had the ribbon dream.

I would never forget that dream as long as I lived.  I could still see the moonlight streaming through my cotton candy pink curtains; see the way it had made the pretty white ribbon in Grams’ hand shimmer.

Let’s play a game, sweetheart,
Grams suggested with a smile.

What kind of game?
 Thinking maybe she had come to rescue me, I flung myself into her arms and let her hold me close.

We’re going to dance with the ribbon,
Grams told me, stroking my curls and smiling down at me sadly. 
Would you like to do that, Ember?

Grams tied the end of the ribbon to my ankle and smiled at me. 
Okay, baby girl, just start twirling like the little ballerina you are.

Thinking it was the best idea Grams had ever come up with, I laughed in delight and started to twirl.  The cool, satiny, feel of the ribbon against my legs had tickled, and I kept giggling as Grams began to sing softly in a language I didn’t understand.  As the ribbon wound higher and higher, however, I stopped laughing.  It felt like something inside me was trying to make me stop, like it was making it hard for me to breathe, hard to move.

Just a little more,
Grams told me when I started to slow down, her eyes full of tears. 
Do it for Grams, sweetheart.  Come on, my little love, just a few more twirls.

And because I loved her, I had done it.  I ignored the way my body protested and twirled and twirled until I was completely wrapped in the white ribbon that had seemed so pretty to me when Grams had first appeared, but had turned ugly and scary.

The next morning I had woken up violently ill and burning up with fever.  Until right that second, I had always believed it was a dream, a hallucination brought on by the mysterious illness none of the doctors who examined me could diagnose.

“You bound me with a white ribbon, didn’t you?” I asked, my voice trembling.  “You said we were going to dance with the ribbon.  I remember.”

“No!” Grams gasped, her face paling.  “Oh, sweetheart!  I’m so sorry.  You weren’t supposed to remember.”  

So, the dream
had
been real.  How many of the others had been real? 

The dream of me as a very little girl holding a rose in my hand and giggling as the petals opened and closed like the wings of a butterfly? 

What about the one where I was holding an injured bird with tears streaming down my cheeks as it glowed bright white and then spread its wings and flew away, good as new? 

The one of Grams and I that last summer I had been with her, lighting candles without matches or a lighter as she tried to make me face my fear of the flames? 

How many of the things I had thought were just dreams made up by a child’s imagination had been real memories?

“Were they all real?” I whispered, closing my eyes and my heart against the tears on Grams’ cheeks.  “The rose?  The bird?  The candles?  Were all those dreams memories?  Tell me, Grams.”

“Yes, sweetheart, they were,” she said, sadly, laying her soft hand on my shoulder.  “I shouldn’t be, but I’m glad you didn’t lose those memories.”

I shook her hand off and gave her such a furious look that she actually took a step back, away from me.  I’d heard what she hadn’t said just as clearly as what she had.  I wasn’t supposed to be
able
to remember, because she’d tried to take those memories from me, too.

“I need some air,” I said, knowing if I didn’t get away from her I was going to start screaming and never stop. 

I didn’t give her time to argue.  I’m sure Nathan could have stopped me, but he didn’t even try.  I left the front door swinging behind me, uncaring whether or not Grams would be upset with me.  Grams’ property was surrounded by dense forest, and I dashed toward the safety of the trees.

I ran from everything.  I ran from the fear I wasn’t accustomed to feeling.  I ran from the world I was about to be forced into that wasn’t the world I knew.  I ran from Grams and the anger and betrayal I couldn’t hold at bay that she had allowed such a terrible secret to be kept from me for so long.  I ran from Nathan and the things he made me feel that could only lead to misery for me.

I ran until it felt like my lungs were ready to burst and there was a searing stitch in my side and my hands were raw and bleeding from all of the times I had fallen over logs or tree roots.  It was only then that I stopped, collapsing against the trunk of a giant old oak tree.  I pulled my legs up to my chest and let my head fall forward to rest on my knees.

I counted my breaths as they slowed for something to focus on and cleared my mind of everything.  No matter how hard I tried, though, I couldn’t get Nathan’s face to go away.  Even after everything else was neatly stowed away into little mental cubbies I couldn’t seem to get rid of him.

The memory of how right it had felt to be held in his arms hadn’t left me.  With Nathan I would have found that thing I was looking for.  I would have experienced passion and love and all the things I had envied Kim for the last couple of years.  I would have been the other half of someone. 

Knowing that didn’t help with the ache in my heart; it only made it worse.  It was like catching a glimpse of the perfect future and wanting it so much you can almost touch it, only to have someone come and laughingly snatch it away.  Let me tell you, there is nothing more heartbreaking than having to watch as a dream like that shatters into a million pieces. 

I lifted my head after what seemed like hours to find that the forest had really started to get dark around me.  I was cold and sore, but I couldn’t tell if that was from the chilly wind rattling the dry leaves overhead or from the coldness I felt
inside
and the falls I had taken during my escape. 

Even my chilled skin didn’t prod me into movement.  I could always crawl under a blanket and get warm later.  I could see the very edge of the beginnings of a crescent moon through the tops of the trees and found that if I leaned back just a little, it came into full view. 

I lay back on the cushion of fallen leaves behind me and stared up at it.  It was so beautiful and seemed so fragile against the vast, velvety-purple background of the twilit sky.  As fragile as I suddenly felt myself.  And yet, so many of the mysteries in my life were finally explained.  Even if I was furious that Grams had kept the truth from me, finally having everything make sense made it a little easier to bear. 

“I’m a witch,” I whispered to the moon, trying to make myself believe it.  “I’m a ghost-seeing, psychically voyeuristic, witch.”

I felt it when Nathan arrived.  It wasn’t that I heard him.  I didn’t see him coming.  I
felt
it.  I closed my eyes, letting myself feel him.  There was something different there, something I hadn’t felt before.  It was strong and wonderful and terrifying and heartbreaking, and I realized in a flash that what I was feeling was dangerous.

By allowing myself to feel him that way, I was opening myself up for the kind of heartache that even I wasn’t strong enough to survive in one piece.  But there was also no stopping it.  It was almost like he had become part of me.

And I didn’t know if that was
me
or the mark he’d cursed me with.

Vampire Mind Meld

I opened my eyes slowly.  I wanted to see him, see his expression, and at the same time I was afraid to.  I needn’t have worried.  I couldn’t read his eyes at all.  His thick, dark lashes were lowered, keeping me from seeing more than a glimmer of his eyes in the fading light. 

“You’re bleeding,” he whispered, moving closer and kneeling next to me.  “Are you all right, Ember?”

My burnt leg felt like it was on fire again from all the twigs that had brushed against it, my head was hurting, my hands were scraped and raw, and my heart was broken.  So, yeah, I was just frigging peachy. 

“I fell.”

That about covered it, all right.  My hands were bleeding and bruised because of the falls I had taken while running away from the problems I knew I would have to face and deal with in the long run.  My heart was bleeding because I had been stupid enough to fall for him, despite him branding me like a choice steer.  So, yeah, ‘I fell’ summed it all up perfectly.

He reached for my hands where they rested on my stomach, and I drew them away before he could touch them.  Even in the deepening shadows I could see the flash of anger in his eyes.

“You think I would hurt you?”  His jaw was taut and there was a biting edge to his voice.

I think you already have,
I thought, looking up at him.  I saw him flinch and immediately wished I could take it back.  Knowing I couldn’t, I shrugged and said, “Vampire plus bleeding wounds can’t add up to anything good, you know?”

So fast I never saw him move, he reached out and wrapped his hands around my wrists in a gentle but firm hold.  He pulled them away from my chest and skillfully transferred both wrists to one hand.  I held my breath as he carefully pried open my fists with the other hand and examined the scrapes and cuts on my palms.

“You’ll be fine.  The wounds aren’t deep.  I’m more worried about your leg.  You need to let Shea look at it when we get back to the house.”

“I don’t want to go back,” I told him, using his grip on my wrists to pull my aching body to a sitting position.  “I want to go home, Nathan.”

“You should listen to what Shea has to say,” he said, softly.  “There are things she can do, things she can teach you, to help you protect yourself.”

Then he could go.  That was what he hadn’t said, what had been left hanging at the end of that speech.  If Grams could teach me to protect myself, he could leave.  As far as I was concerned, he didn’t need to wait.  The sooner he was out of my life, the better.

I jerked my hands away from him, a feat that would have been impossible if he had resisted me even a little.  He didn’t.  The second my hands were free, I staggered to my feet rather ungracefully.  I walked a few paces from him and stopped.  My head bowed and my heart screamed for me to shut up, but I forged ahead without any thought to the consequences of what I was about to do.

“I want you to leave me alone, Nathan,” I told him, clenching my teeth to hold back a flood of tears that were inevitable but which I wasn’t about to let him see.  “I don’t need your help and having you around is just…too hard.”

I walked away into the dark, dense, forest without looking back.  I had made my decision and now there was nothing left to do but follow through.  My fingers found the cross around my neck again, and I gulped back a sob as they wrapped around it, the only thing besides a lot of painful memories I would have to remember him by.  I walked without seeing anything or really even noticing which way I was going.  I just knew I had to get away, far away, before I went running back to beg him not to leave me.