Magick (Book 3 in the Coven Series) (11 page)

The few bites of grilled cheese sandwich I took settle like lead in my stomach. “That’s Barrow’s phone, isn’t it?”

Sarah nods. “We retrieved it from his back pocket before Caren disposed of his body. We searched his vehicle, too, but it was clean.”

“What happens when the authorities find it?” Keller asks.

“They won’t be able to identify it,” Sarah says. “We destroyed the license plate, erased the VIN, anything that could be traced. Though I doubt very much that he even had it registered.”

I realize just how easily the Bane can make a person disappear and hope I don’t give them reason to do the same to me.

Egan lifts the phone and looks at it from all angles. “I’ll see if anything is salvageable.”

As I stare at the phone in Egan’s hands, I’m surprised there’s anything left of it. It will be a miracle if he gets any information at all off the thing, let alone useful information.

As everyone sits down and starts eating, Egan ignores the food in favor of starting to work.

“It can wait until after dinner,” Sarah says.

“Actually, it can’t,” I say. “Egan is physically incapable of resisting a tech challenge when it’s right in front of him. Plus, he already downed two sandwiches before you all got here.”

“I believe I wasn’t alone in eating,” he says as he gives me an I’m-taking-you-down-with-me look.

It feels good to tease and joke. It helps alleviate some of the concern that’s been building in me ever since my magic was unbound. It’s making me jittery when I need to be mastering calm.

Egan glances up from where he’s poking around at the innards of the phone and lifts an eyebrow. I wave him back to his work and take another cooling bite of soup. I only half listen to the conversations around me until I hear Egan curse.

“What?” Sarah says.

I feel the well of disbelief in Egan then the feeling that maybe whatever he’s seeing is a mistake. But when he meets my gaze, I don’t think I want to hear what he’s found.

“I found a series of text messages back and forth between Barrow and the person who hired him to kill us,” he says.

Keller leans forward. “Who was it?” I don’t need witch powers to sense the tension in him. “Was it my father?”

But Egan doesn’t shift his gaze away from mine. “No. It was Jax’s.”

I feel as if all the electric energy I possess has suddenly turned on me.

I lie in bed later staring
at the dark ceiling. Light filters around the door from the hallway, illuminating the room enough to see. Toni is asleep in the bed opposite mine, but even my fatigue does not invite sleep. I’m afraid if I close my eyes, the nightmares will come. I’ve dreamed of walking through hell, of killing the guy I love, of Fiona’s death. I don’t want those images replaying in my mind.

But being awake isn’t much better. Part of me still thinks this is the dream, that I’ll wake up and find out that my family didn’t stoop so low as to hire a supernatural hunter to kill me. Did Barrow even know who’d hired him, or was he so blinded by his hatred of the supernatural that it didn’t even occur to him to ask?

I can’t imagine what the other covens would think if they knew, and I wonder how many other things my father has hidden from them. I swallow hard when I think how he must know that I’m like my mother and that he feels he has to get rid of me like he did her.

Unable to lie still anymore, I throw back my blankets and walk quietly toward the door. I ease it open so I don’t wake Toni and slip into the hallway. I think about going to Keller’s room, but instead I wander the halls. My meanderings don’t stop my thoughts from racing, but at least moving around expends some of my nervous energy.

I end up in a hallway that’s new to me. I hear music and walk toward it. At the end of the hall is a small study with a large bookcase covering one entire wall. A large, dark wood desk sits directly in front of the books. I look to the right as I enter through the double glass doors to see a grouping of chairs and couches facing each other in a square. Stretched out on one of the couches on her stomach is Piper. I must make a noise because she looks back over her shoulder.

“Oh, hey,” she says.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to bother you.”

She pulls up into a sitting position and crosses her legs yoga-style. “You’re not bothering me,” she says. “In fact, you’re saving me from physics.”

I cringe as I walk toward the couches. “I hated physics.”

“You’ve taken it already?”

“Yeah. Have to get all that stuff out of the way so we can learn how to torture people.” I try to sound flippant, but I can tell by the look on Piper’s face that she knows how much the circumstances of my time within the coven weighs on me.

She gestures toward the couch opposite where she’s sitting. “Have a seat.” When I hesitate, she gives me a pleading look. “Don’t force me to go back to studying. I think my head will explode.”

“That would be messy.”

She laughs as I slide onto the soft, thick cushions of the couch. “Couldn’t sleep?”

I shake my head. “Too much on my mind.”

“Sucks having to shoulder so much when you should be going to the movies and sneaking out with your boyfriend.”

“I can’t even fathom a life that simple anymore,” I say. “I used to think about doing those things when we took care of the covens.”

“You don’t anymore?”

I grab a fringed pillow and hug it to my chest. “I try not to think this way, but it seems so beyond the realm of possibility now.”

“Because of what happened with Barrow?”

“Yeah. That and the fact we have no idea how to stop them. I feel like every time I take one step forward I then take ten back.”

“At least you’re not in this alone,” she says.

“True. Although I still can’t believe it sometimes. I was prepared to live my life alone.”

“Tell me about how you and Keller met.”

I smile at the memory, though it scared me at the time. “I was hiding in the woods after engaging my magic to speed out of the way of his truck, and I saw that he was holding both a gun and a bloodstone used to track supernatural beings.”

“Did he find you?”

“No, he left. But imagine my surprise when I went to school for the first time a few days later and there he was. But he didn’t realize what I was until later.”

“And it didn’t matter to him?”

“It wasn’t quite that simple, but we eventually got past it.”

Piper sighs in that dreamy way. “I think it sounds so romantic, like star-crossed love.”

“Sometimes it seems too star-crossed. I live in fear of hurting him.”

“I think you would worry less about that if you’d seen the two of you today from where I was standing. I got chills when I saw how he was able to calm you, even with your power so unstable.”

I remember all the times he’s taken the edge off my darkness before, and something about that tickles at the back of my brain. I get the feeling I’m missing something important.

“It’s obvious he’s head over heels in love with you, too,” Piper says. “And I get the feeling it goes both ways.”

I can’t help smiling. “I want nothing more than a normal life where I don’t have to be afraid for either of us. I got a taste of that when we were back in North Carolina, and when I left it felt like I’d ripped the heart from my chest. I know that sounds melodramatic, but it’s the honest-to-God truth.”

“I believe you. I’m envious of you.” She shrugs. “I dream about having something like that.” For a moment, she looks sad. As if she believes the possibility of that happening is about as likely as the moon turning green. She taps her open physics book. “Maybe I’ll become great at physics and get me a hot science geek.”

An idea starts forming in my head, and it has nothing to do with science geeks. I smile.

“What?” Piper says.

“Nothing.” I nod toward the textbook. “Want me to help you study?”

“I thought you hated physics.”

“I do, but I got an A. Plus, maybe it’ll be a cure for my insomnia.”

We spend the next couple of hours alternating between me quizzing her and talking about our two lives. I learn that she wants to be a clothing designer in New York.

“That sounds so cool,” I say. “Your aunt certainly is stylish, at least when she’s not working at the library.”

“Yeah.” A bit of the spark goes out of her voice. “I won’t be able to do it though.”

“Why not?”

She gestures vaguely to the room around us. “When you’re born Bane, there are certain expectations.”

I lean forward with my forearms propped on my knees. “I was expected to conform to the expectations of my coven, too, but I refused. Don’t let anyone else tell you what to do with your life. If you want to go to New York and be a designer, you do it.”

Piper’s reluctant acceptance of her fate lights a fire in me. If the covens are no longer an issue, Piper can go anywhere and be anything she wants. Toni can go back to her family and her band. Keller can go home, mend things with his father, and hunt things that pale in comparison to dark witches. Egan and I will finally be truly free to go after our own dreams and be with the people we love without fearing we’re putting them in danger.

“You know what else?” I say. “I’ll be the first one to buy one of your designs.”

Piper smiles. “Something in all white, perhaps?”

I know she’s referring to the whole white witch thing, but an image of me in a wedding dress pops into my head. I do my best to push it away. Even if the covens were no longer an issue, marriage is way, way down the road. But the image lingers and causes my heart to warm. It makes me feel tingly all over, in a good way.

Piper closes her book. “I better get to bed or I’ll fall asleep in the middle of my exam tomorrow.”

“Good luck.”

“Thanks.” She gets up and heads for the door. Right before she steps out of the room, she stops and looks back at me. “Thanks again, Jax.”

“You’re welcome. Glad to use that physics stuff for something useful.”

“Not just for the help with the studying. You’ve made me believe that maybe anything is possible.”

Long after she leaves, I think about what she said. I am suddenly anxious for the arrival of morning so I can test my own limits of possibility. I’m a white witch, and I’m going to find a way to make that the entirety of who I am. I’m going to become what my mother and so many others before her never got the chance to be. And I’m going to make sure that no one else, human or witch, ever has to die at the hands of a dark witch again.

I end up sleeping
on the couch in the study, and despite only a few hours of rest I head to the training room well before anyone else. The sooner I master my power, the sooner we can move on to the next stage in my plan.

But as I experiment with magic, I find myself shaking and unstable. That mixture of light and dark I felt yesterday has abandoned me. Today I feel mainly dark energy with only the slightest hint of light, as if it’s retreated to some place far away. Determined not to be defeated, I keep practicing. And it must be working because I start feeling more light drifting toward the surface, pushing at the edges of the dark.

“You okay?” Keller says from behind me.

I spin, startled at his appearance. “Yeah. Guess my mind was elsewhere.” Like on the curious changes in my power.