The Prophecy of Shadows (4 page)

“I guess it was my bio-dad,” I said bitterly, finishing setting up the game by plopping the last pile of cards where it belonged.

“Oh.” Kate shifted in her seat and straightened the piles of cards, not meeting my eyes. I suspected she wanted to ask what I meant, but that she didn’t want to make me feel uncomfortable.

“My bio-dad left before I was born.” My throat tightened, and I swallowed to make the lump go away. I barely talked about this—let alone with someone I’d just met. But Kate seemed to genuinely want to help, and she couldn’t do that if I wasn’t honest with her. “My mom hasn’t heard from him since. But she married my step-dad a few months later, and he’s my dad in every way but biologically.”

“Wow.” Kate picked at her nails. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine,” I said. “I barely think about my bio-dad. Like I said, my step-dad is my dad. But from what you told me so far … it sounds like my bio-dad might have been a witch, and never mentioned it to my mom.” I laughed at how ridiculous it sounded. “That is,
if
any of this is true. I’m still unsure about it.”

“Well, you’ve gone from being positive it’s not real to being ‘unsure,’” Kate said. “So that’s a start. But you’re allowed to talk to your family about it. Immediate family members without abilities are the only humans allowed to know about what we can do.”

“I can’t tell them,” I said. “Because even if this is real, I have no proof. Without proof, my mom and dad will think I’ve lost my mind, and my sister will make fun of me forever. Or she would be jealous that I have powers and she doesn’t.”

“I know what you mean.” Kate laughed. “My brother’s in seventh grade, and he hates that I’m allowed to use my powers and he isn’t. He’s already started a countdown for how many days he has left until high school.”

“He’s not allowed to use his powers until high school?” I asked.

“None of us are,” Kate said. “The Elders don’t want kids messing around with abilities they don’t understand yet.”

“But what’s to stop him from using his powers, anyway?”

“The same thing that stops us from driving a car before we’re sixteen,” she said. “It’s the law. If a witch is caught using powers underage, the Head Elders—the most powerful witches in the world, who enforce our laws—block their powers so they have to wait a year until they can start learning. If they’re caught twice they have to wait two years, and so on.”

“So why don’t the Head Elders block everyone’s powers until high school?” I asked.

“That would make sense, wouldn’t it?” Kate said. “But they wouldn’t do that, because our powers aren’t developed enough at that age to cause any harm, and the Elders are testing us to see if we follow the rules. Of course, some people use their powers underage and don’t get caught, but I never thought it was worth the risk.”

“But other people did,” I said, leaning forward. “Does Danielle happen to be one of them?”

“You catch on quick.” Kate smiled. “She does. And of course she didn’t get caught.”

“So that’s why you don’t like her?”

“Not exactly.” Kate’s eyes darted around the room, as if she were worried someone was listening. “There are some of our kind who don’t like humans—mainly the ones from pure-blood witch families—and Danielle is one of them. She sees humans as a lesser species. She doesn’t care if she hurts them or not.”

“What does she do?” I rested my arm on the table, way more interested in gossiping than studying.

“Nothing that’s been confirmed.” Kate chewed on her lower lip and pushed her hair behind her ears. “But last semester I heard a rumor that she caught a junior girl flirting with Blake at a party, so she used gray energy to make the girl disoriented before she drove home.”

“I didn’t see gray energy on the board this morning,” I said. “What does it do?”

“Most of the energy colors are positive, but gray energy makes people disoriented and confused,” she said. “It wasn’t on the board because we’re not encouraged to use it. Gray energy is the second worst one to pure black energy, which is extremely difficult—and illegal—to use.”

“Wow,” I said. “That sounds dangerous.”

“It is,” Kate agreed. “Which is why we’re not taught how to use it. Only the strongest witches can access black energy, and if the Elders find out that someone’s using it, that person risks having their powers purged completely.”

“So the Elders can take powers away?” I asked. “Permanently?”

“Yes,” Kate said. “It’s the most excruciating experience one of our kind can go through, and it’s a punishment for only the worst crimes. Danielle’s not strong enough to use black energy, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she knew the basics of using gray. Gray energy is frowned upon, but not illegal, and we all suspect that Danielle and her friends study it in private.”

I nodded, remembering what Blake had said to me in ceramics—about how if I spent time with him and his friends, I could learn better ways to use my powers. Was this what he’d been talking about? Did he, Danielle, and their friends secretly practice using gray energy?

“So, the girl who Danielle made disoriented before she drove home,” I said, returning to the earlier conversation. “She’s okay, right?”

“Barely,” Kate said, her expression grim. “She lost control of the car and hit a tree. She was in a coma for two weeks, and the doctors weren’t sure if she was going to make it. Luckily she woke up, but she had brain damage, so she’s home schooled now. She might never get back to the way she was before the accident. And there’s no way to prove that Danielle did anything.”

I sat back in my chair and breathed out slowly. “That’s awful,” I said. “Danielle didn’t strike me as a particularly nice person, but that just sounds … evil.”

“Yeah,” Kate agreed. “Which is why you shouldn’t get on Danielle’s bad side—especially when it comes to Blake.”

“If she’s that jealous, maybe she should worry more about her relationship with Blake than the girls he talks to,” I said.

“I agree,” Kate said. “But I still think it’s best to keep your distance.”

“Right,” I said, even though I had a feeling that I wouldn’t be able to resist sitting next to him in ceramics again. “But if Danielle does something like that again … couldn’t we take her on if we wanted? Do something to stop her?”

“That’s a strong statement from someone who claims not to believe in any of this.” Kate laughed, although it came out as an awkward squeaky sound. “In order to ‘take someone on,’ you have to know what you’re doing. And you’re just getting started. So, what do you say that we get back to the basics?”

“Yes.” I nodded and sat straighter. “I’m ready.”

“First you need to learn how our control over energy works,” Kate said. “We can absorb it from the Universe, and then throw it back out to the Universe to create change. But we can’t put out more energy than we take in, and absorbing energy requires us to use energy. You’ll know when your body needs to stop—you’ll start feeling weak and tired—and you have to listen to it.”

“I don’t understand.” I frowned. “I thought energy is endless.”

“It is.” She nodded. “But our bodies can only do so much. Think about it like a battery. We need time to recharge.”

“And what if we use up more energy than we have?”

“You’ll fry out your battery,” she said. “You’ll die. Energy is our life force. Without it, we can’t survive. But barely anyone has ever gotten to that point, because if you got close, you would feel so exhausted that you would
want
to stop. You would probably collapse before you would be able to deplete your energy and fry out.”

“So we only have a certain amount of energy, and we can use it to conduct the energy around us,” I said, wanting to make sure I was getting this straight. She nodded, and I continued, “You said that humans can’t conduct energy. But if there’s energy in everything, then they have some in them too, right?”

“Yeah.” Kate picked at her nails and looked down at the table.

“So if they can’t use it, is there any way that we can … borrow it so we can have more of our own? As long as we don’t take enough to kill them?”

“Technically we can,” she said, lowering her voice. “But taking someone else’s energy is illegal. If the Head Elders find out, the punishment is death. You see, once a witch takes someone else’s energy—from a human or another witch—their body stops producing energy on its own. They become leeches, dependent on the energy of others forever. And once a witch starts taking someone’s energy, it’s so consuming that it’s nearly impossible for them to stop until they’ve taken it all.”

“You mean they end up killing the person?” I drew back in my seat, my eyes wide. “Like a vampire—but by draining energy instead of blood?”

“Vampires don’t exist, but that’s where the legends come from,” Kate said, her expression grave.

“How many of them are out there?” I asked.

“Not many,” she said. “The few who are out there live in hiding, and the Elders hunt them down and … take care of them. Anyway,” she said, “They’re rare—they’re more urban legends than anything else. And we still have so much to cover today. Are you ready to continue?”

“Yes,” I said, feeling more determined now than ever. “Let’s do this.”

Kate drove me home after the study session, and soon enough she was pulling into my driveway. The house still didn’t feel like mine. The gray wood panels, thatched roof, and blue shutters reminded me of a grandmother’s cottage. I missed my bright, sprawling house in Georgia. Every time I saw this house, I was reminded about how different it was from what I left behind.

“Thanks for showing me around today and helping me out after school,” I told her as I hopped out of the car. “And for driving me home.”

“Any time,” she replied. “I’ll see you in homeroom tomorrow.”

She backed out of the driveway, waving again before she turned around the corner.

I hurried down the sidewalk and up the steps to the porch. The freezing air numbed my body to the bones, and I pulled my jacket tighter around me. I was never going to get used to this weather. People were not supposed to live in places as cold as the arctic tundra.

Silence greeted me when I stepped inside. Becca was probably in her room messaging her friends, and my dad didn’t get off work until later that evening. My mom was most likely painting, so I walked up the back steps to the “bonus room” above the garage that she’d turned into an art studio. Music echoed through the hall, confirming my suspicions that she was painting. She normally wasn’t thrilled to get interrupted while working, but since it was my first day at a new school, she would want to hear about how it went.

I also had to somehow figure out if she knew about my bio-dad being a witch—without telling her about what I’d learned today.

I opened the door, and paint fumes filled my nose, making my eyes water. Just as I’d expected, my mom was hard at work, her back towards me, her hair pulled up in a messy ponytail. A few splatters of paint had already landed on the cloth beneath the easel.

“Hey, Mom,” I said, knocking on the open door.

She swiveled around on her stool, and a glob of paint fell to the ground. “Hey,” she greeted me, waving the paintbrush in the air. The freckles splattered over the bridge of her nose made her look younger than she was, and in her baggy green t-shirt from an old Clash concert, she looked like she could still be in her twenties. “How was your first day?”

“It was fine.” My throat tightened at the lie, and I swallowed, trying to relax. I would tell her the truth—eventually. “There were a few people I met who showed me around.”

“That’s good.” She smiled and placed the paintbrush down. “Any cute guys?”

“Maybe.” I rolled my eyes. Of course that would be one of her first questions. “But he has a girlfriend, so it doesn’t matter.”

“You’re still in high school.” She laughed and pushed some wisps of hair off her face, getting a smudge of blue paint on her forehead. “As long as he’s not married, he’s on the market.”

“It seems like they’re pretty serious.” I tried to keep my tone light. “Besides, the school’s big. He’s not the only guy there.”

“But he’s the only one who caught your eye?”

“I guess.” I shrugged. My cheeks heated at the thought of Blake, remembering the intense way he’d looked at me during our short conversation in ceramics, and I focused on the ground.

“You should go for him.” Her voice softened, and her eyes went distant. “You don’t want to look back and regret not knowing what might have happened.”

I sat down on the wooden chair next to her and took a deep breath. “You’re talking about
him
, aren’t you?” I asked. “Aidan?”

I didn’t usually say my bio-dad’s name out loud, but after my discussion with Kate, I had to. I needed to know more about him.

“Yes.” She nodded and studied the painting she’d been working on. It was only halfway done, but once finished, it would look perfect with the vibrant, abstract pieces in her collection.

“What was he like?” I asked, not for the first time.

“He was charming,” she said, her eyes sad. “And he was very handsome—like an ancient statue brought to life. You look so much like him.” Her eyes watered, and I knew I should stop now.

But I tightened my grip on the edge of the chair and asked, “How did you two meet?”