Happy Birthday to You (Birthday Trilogy, Book 3) (14 page)

“Hmm,” was all she said before she
started closing the
door.
But she couldn’t close it
all the way. Before she had a chance to scream, two young thugs with ski masks
knocked her to the ground, the glass shattering against the hardwood and
spinning out into a dozen pieces.

“You go into the bedroom, and I’ll check
out here,” one of the guys said.

Aurora tried to stand up, but one of the
two thugs kicked her hard in the head. She slumped over, blood dripping off her
left ear. She groaned, loudly, before turning over onto her back.

“Take what you want,” Aurora muffled.
“Just please don’t hurt me.”

“Sounds like a plan,” the guy in front of
her said, wearing nothing but black. She could tell in his voice that he
couldn’t have been older than twenty. “Where’s your purse? I want your credit
cards, money. Everything.”

Aurora pointed toward the kitchen counter
and watched as the thug shook out her red purse, her jewelry and cards and cash
falling all over the place. He looked at her driver’s license and
laughed—she didn’t know why—and grabbed all the twenty-dollar-bills
and credit cards he could find. Then he took her one and only necklace and stuffed
it into his back pocket.

“Looking good,” he said. “Looking
good
!”

“Please take what you want and get out of
here!” Aurora shouted.

The guy wasn’t listening to a word she
said. “You have any other jewelry?”

“Found some!” the other thug said,
entering the room and stepping past Aurora’s legs. She didn’t want to make a
move. She didn’t want them to hit her again.

“I found more gold than we’ll know what
to do with.”

“Excellent. Take it to the car.”

Within seconds there was just one thug
left, pulling out all the desk drawers in her bedroom and living room, and
running his fingers along some old artifacts she had cluttering up the shelves
near her old-timey television set.

“These worth anything?” he asked.

Aurora didn’t say anything.

“
Hey
!”
He took a few steps forward and planted his leg against her face. “I asked you
a question!”

Aurora had tears streaming down her face.
She didn’t know if she was going to survive this terrorizing. “The green
statue.
In the corner.
It’s worth at least two
thousand dollars.”

The thug was clearly smiling behind his
ski mask, and as he turned around, Aurora could see his yellow teeth. He
grabbed the statue and brought it over to the kitchen counter to inspect it.

“Looks perfect,” he said. “Absolutely
p—”

He slid the statue to the left and
accidentally knocked over the paper bag with the manuscript on the floor, just
feet away from Aurora’s face. She hoped and prayed he wouldn’t pick it up, but
he did.

“What the hell is this?” he asked,
opening the bag and pulling out her book. “What is this? A
novel
?”

Aurora coughed a few times, and then
said, “No. It’s non-fiction.”

“Non-fiction you say?” The thug stared at
her for a moment. “Wait a second. Does this thing
mean
something to you?”

“Yes,” she said. “It’s everything. Please
put it back.”

“Is it worth anything?”

“It’s worth nothing. There’s no use in
you taking it.”

He laughed. “Don’t worry. I see it means
something to you, so I won’t take it.”

“Thank you,” Aurora said. “I—”

But before she could say another word,
she watched in horror as the thug ignited her stove full blast and dropped the
loose papers right onto the fire.

“Nooooo!” Aurora shouted, wanting to jump
up and save her manuscript, but knowing if she did this madman could strike her
dead.
 

Once most of the papers were burned to a
crisp, the thug guffawed as loud as he could. He grabbed the statue and sped
out of the apartment, slamming the door loudly behind him.

“Oh my God… no… no, no, no, no…” Aurora
jumped up and raced over to the kitchen counter. She could feel her stomach
aching, her head pounding,
her
pulse racing. She hoped
her manuscript would be salvageable.

But it wasn’t. A few select pages hadn’t
burnt through all the way yet, but now her kitchen was a mess of ashes and
smoke, all but ten pages of her book burnt beyond recognition.

Worst of all, she hadn’t made a copy.

“I don’t believe it,” she said, her fiery
temper, which had remained dormant deep down inside for years, returning to the
forefront. Her face turned red, and drool dripped off her chin. She didn’t want
to avoid these thugs now. She wanted to kill them.

As soon as she heard the car ignition
starting up outside, she raced for the front door and leaped through the brown
grass at the front of the complex, one thug already in the driver’s seat of his
pathetic excuse for a truck, and the other thug calmly setting the statue down
in the back seat.

“You burned my book!” Aurora shouted,
rushing up to the thug in the back. She head-butted him and then punched him in
the nose. He looked surprised, of course, and ran his hand along his
bloodstained nostrils.
 

“You… you bitch,” he said, grabbing a
sharp knife from his side pocket and thrusting it into Aurora’s abdomen. He
stabbed her twice more, and Aurora fell to the ground.

“Noooooo,” she said, clasping her hands
against her bleeding belly.

“The world is going to shit,” the thug
said, taking a step closer to her. “It’s the survival of the fittest, babe. And
I’m sorry to say, you’re not gonna make it.”

“Let’s get out of here,” the other thug
said from the front of the truck, and the two were down the street and around
the corner within seconds.

Aurora tried shouting for help, but she
couldn’t speak. She tried to crawl back to her apartment to call 911, but she
couldn’t move. An hour later, a woman walking her dog finally came across her
and called an ambulance, but it was too late.

By the time she reached the hospital,
Aurora Newt was pronounced dead.

Her obituary mentioned nothing about her
being a writer.

9.

“It’s not working,” I said. I was
restless and tired. It had been two days, and I still hadn’t been able to
re-create that original spell. Worse, I could sense that the outside world was
devolving into chaos, and that we were taking too much time with this
embarrassing training.

“It’s coming,” Liesel said. “You’ll get
there.”

“There’s no time,” I said. “Leese, we
have to leave now. We have to find Hannah now. Everyone’s counting on us.”

“Just give us through Sunday, Cameron,”
Liesel’s sister Yolanda said on the other side of me. “By the weekend we’ll
have you ready to go. And then they’ll be no stopping her.”

“I don’t really believe that.” He stared
at the two,
then
shrugged. “OK then. Let’s hurry.”

We tried the levitating spell. Liesel
said it was the easiest to accomplish, although all I’d been able to do so far
was knock a few glasses off the stool in front of me. Yolanda had a bunch of
glasses in her Jeep Wrangler, and she brought yet another one out to the stool.

“I know this is difficult, Cam,” Liesel
said. “But you can do it.”

“Easier said than done,” I said. “I just
found out two days ago that I’m a witch. In a year I’ve seen age one and age
eighty-five. How much can a guy take?”

“Apparently a lot, in your case,” Yolanda
said. “Now stand up straight and concentrate.”

I did as the strict young lady said. I
brought my hands to my sides and stared at the large plastic cup on top of the
stool. It was half filled with water, making it heavy enough not to be blown
down to the ground by a gust of wind.

It still hadn’t sunk in yet, but I had to
believe it. I had to admit to myself sooner or later that in my occasional
moments of anger, I would notice funny things happen. I had never performed a
spell on the level of what Liesel and Hannah could accomplish, but I did
remember the occasional paper getting tossed off my desk or a bird slamming
into my windshield, usually in those moments when I was at my most hot
tempered. I never thought anything of it, though. If a green light had shot out
of my hands, I definitely would’ve taken myself to the local doctor, or the
local psychiatrist. But there had never been anything to make me worry. I found
all the strange happenings before Liesel came into my life to be coincidences.
Little did I realize then, though, that there truly was
no such thing
as a
coincidence.

“Concentrate, Cam,” Liesel said. “You’re
not concentrating. What are you thinking about?”

“I don’t know. I’m drawing a blank.”

“Well if your mind’s a blank, we’re not going
to get anywhere!” Liesel was clearly annoyed by how long the training was
taking, too. “Remember? Whenever I made something happen? It was when I was
feeling really, really good about something, or really, really bad. If you’re
somewhere in the middle, not even the most talented witch can sum up a spell.
The reason Hannah is so good at what she does is because she feels only pain
and hatred and anguish and cruelty. If she has a heart buried deep down in her
body somewhere, I’d be surprised. The girl feels nothing but the negative, and
so she’s able to create a spell that can destroy the world. You need to pick,
Cam. You need to go down deep into the bowels of Hell, or you need to feel the
kind of unconditional love that most people rarely feel. Make a choice, and
stick with it!”

“It’d be easier to go the darker route,”
I said, sort of jokingly. Of course, nobody laughed. I started to concentrate
again. “OK, OK. Just give me a second. I’m going to think about my family.”

“Specifically?”

“My sister. I’m gonna think about
Kimber.”

“OK,” Liesel said. She nodded to Yolanda
and then took a few steps closer to the stool.

I closed my eyes and tried to picture my
sister at the Washington D.C. recital. She looked so confident up there, so
sure of herself on that
wide open
stage. It had been a
thrill of mine to follow her musical journey over the
years,
from the first time she ever picked up the violin, to watching the President of
the United States applaud the talent of my little sister.

Before I could open my eyes, I could
sense the cup rising.

“You’re doing it,” Liesel said. “Just
keep steady.”

I opened my eyes, slowly, to see the
plastic cup
rising
five, maybe six feet up above the
stool. I stared at it now, but I kept my mind fixated on my sister, on the kind
of future she would have if we found and defeated Hannah in time. I managed to
turn the cup to its side and dump all the water to the dirt. And then I brought
the cup back down to the stool. I wanted to applaud for
myself
.

“Perfect,” Liesel said.

“That was perfect!” Yolanda shouted.

“You got anything heavier?” Liesel asked,
turning to Yolanda, who was already running for her car.

“Do I get an A plus?” I asked Liesel.

She raced up to me and gave me a big hug,
the first time she had done so since we had started the training. “I know this
is a lot to take in. But you’re doing great. You keep thinking about your
sister when you do these spells, OK? It’s obviously working.”

“Speaking of…” I trailed off for a
moment. “I really need to call her.”

“No, Cam. You can’t make any contact with
your family. Not yet.”

“I have to know they’re OK,” I said.
“What if something’s happened to them?”

“Nothing has.”

“How do you know?”

“I just do. Not enough time has passed
yet. Your parents are young. Your sister is capable. No matter how much Hannah
may want to see
us and your family suffer,
I think
they’ll be able to pull through this. I think they’re probably going to be OK.”

“Well…” I said, taking a step back and
kicking a rock on the ground, “thinking they’ll
probably
be OK isn’t helping me sleep at night.”

“Sunday, OK?” Liesel begged. “Let’s get
through this week. Let’s get you prepared. And before we leave to track down
Hannah, once and for all, you can talk to your family, OK?”

“I’d at least like to talk to Kimber
before then. You know, get all the scoop on not just what’s happening with
them, but with everyone in Reno.”

“Soon, Cam. You have to stay focused. You
have to keep your emotions out of this.”

I stared at her, dumbfounded. “I thought
it’s my emotions that are the only things controlling these spells.”

She sighed. “You know what I mean.”

I shook my head. “Whatever. What’s she
bringing over to the stool?” I looked up at Yolanda, who was looking ready to
break her back from the weight on top of her. “Is that a clock?”