Chapter 24

Chapter

Twenty-Four

“ W ow. You look like…” Zane smiles and shakes his head. I’ve been fitted with a cloak. It’s the kind that has a hood and sweeps the floor and ties at my chest.

I shrug because the compliment is everything a girl wants to hear from the guy she likes and, witch or not, I’m still that girl and he’s the guy. “If I move wrong it chokes me.”

“I would say don’t move that way,” and his smile is everything, “but I’m busy trying not to drool.”

I laugh and shiver at the same time. I never would have been able to imagine Zane Bradbury looking at me like this, saying sweet or flirty things to me.

Although, since it started, I’ve wondered what would happen when this is all over. I want to ask, but I’m afraid of the answer. I’m afraid it will all be over and I’ll go back to the Institute, finish school, and never be thought of again. I don’t want to hear that answer, although I doubt he would say it so harshly.

When I don’t speak for a few long seconds, he asks, “What are you thinking about?”

“About what happens when this is all over.” Honesty.

“You’ll be a hero.” He looks down and takes my hand. “I’ve been thinking about it, too.”

“And what do you think?” My breath catches and I hold it.

“When everyone is after you, likes you, I mean…” Red creeps up into his cheeks. “I wonder if you’ll still like me enough to let me hold your hand.”

I don’t know if it’s the cloak or the magic or what has given me the confidence to smile, move closer, and slip my arms around his neck. What I do know is that the move shifts the cloak and the cord holding it around me slides up my arm and to my throat. The cloak itself weighs a lot and it pulls me backward.

He smiles and unfastens the tie but holds the swirled fabric—it reminds me of a curtain but in gold and a deep blue—at my shoulders so it doesn’t fall to the ground. And then he lowers his head and kisses me. His mouth brushes mine, then comes back for a second go-round. And this time, it isn’t a brush. It’s more a caress, hot and wet, and he’s holding me with his fists in the robe still pressed against my shoulders.

I tilt my head and the kiss deepens. It’s a once in a lifetime kind of rush and I savor it, soak it in. When he finally pulls back, I take an extra second before I open my eyes.

“I won’t care who else wants me.” I smile, proud I’m able to come up with words, glad I don’t have to lie.

He leans his forehead against mine and smiles. “Good.”

Being at the Institute—my parents have decided it’s the only place I’m safe—and not being in classes is odd. I spend all of my time in the training room. It isn’t really a training room. It’s actually the physical education part of building four. With hoops on each end of the hardwood, it’s big enough to play basketball, too small for quidditch. Plus, we don’t have flying brooms. I didn’t spend a lot of time in this building prior to this week because I’m not what one might call athletic. I trip. I fall. I cause others to do the same. Since I was a child, I was the final pick for teams.

Today, though, I’m here, kissing Zane at the tipoff circle—just because I don’t spend much time here doesn’t mean I don’t know the lingo. I watch TV.

There is an entire obstacle course set up for me to use the scepter to practice. I’ve asked a hundred times if it’s dangerous, if the magic will become less because I’m wasting it to train, if putting so much said magic in the air isn’t a calling card for the syphoner to come find me, but my parents and several of the other parents who are working with me have assured me that the Institute is a safe space, the only place where the use of magic doesn’t send up a storm of mystical energy.

I don’t know if I believe them but I’m here working, unbothered by my syphoner auntie, so perhaps it’s true.

Zane holds my hands in his. “How many more nights do you have left of training?”

It’s a good question, but I have no idea. I’ve been doing this all week, learning, harnessing the power of the scepter. Doing everything I possibly can to ignore the call of the power.

“I don’t know.” I shrug. No one has really told me the plan. “Can I ask you a question?” I look up at him, hopeful. I’ve been scared to ask him or his friends or even Aimee, but I have to know. “Does knowing what I am change things?”

He stares. “Things?”

I nod .

“You mean you-and-me things?” He smiles at me and my skin heats because it’s exactly what I mean. “No.”

My breath whooshes out. “You’re not afraid I’ll drain your power?”

“No. You’re risking your own life to get mine back for me.” His voice is low, deep, intimate, the voice in my dreams when I dream of him. “And if you wanted my power, I would give it to you anyway.”

I sigh. If I had any Scarlett O’Hara in me, I would swoon.

He grins and lowers his head again. I like that he’s taller. I like looking up at him.

When Zane Bradbury kisses, he uses his entire body, wraps it around me—or that’s what if feels like. Sensual. Seductive. At least, I think so.

This kiss is every bit as enchanting as the last, but is cut short when my father clears his throat from the doorway. Zane smiles at me, gives Dad a wave, then backs away and exits out a door on the other side that leads to the walkway to building three.

Dad has what looks like hula hoops in his hand and he walks toward one of the archery targets that is set up near the door Zane just exited. He sets it in a stand about ten feet in front of the target then smiles at me as he sets another off to the left of the first and a few feet closer to the target. The third he puts on a pedestal stand that is closer to the target but three feet taller.

When he turns to look at me, he smiles and pulls the scepter out of a pocket that doesn’t look nearly big enough for a three-foot scepter to be in, so I assume he’s using something dimensional—a way to transport something that uses other dimensions to absorb weight and size. It’s a trick he only just taught me. My cloak is equipped with such a “pocket,” one that my mother calls a “portal. ”

I stare at my father as he holds it out to me. They take it away from me after training, probably because they can sense how much I want it. Trust is one of their big themes. Some of them trust me, some don’t. They need me, but this isn’t their first go around with a syphoner, so I can’t really blame anyone for how they feel.

“RJ, I want you to loop your magic through the hoops then strike the target on the third blue ring.” He walks to each hoop and then touches the target where he wants me to strike. “Right here, okay?”

When I nod, he comes back to me and hands me the scepter. I have a moment—it’s a short one—where the magic surges through me, and I exhale slowly because the feeling is so…incredible. Almost erotic.

“Focus, RJ.” Nothing like my dad’s voice to snap me out of the moment.

I shake off the lust for power and envision myself guiding the magic in the scepter through the hoops to the target.

“Go,” I whisper and send the bolts of magic from the scepter out. I can see them in the air—three separate pieces—and I will them together into one and then weave them through the hoops to the target and it explodes in a poof of green foam and red, white, and blue melted plastic.

Dad claps, jumps, and does a fist pump. “Do you feel it, RJ? You’re ready.” He comes to where I’m standing, takes me by the shoulders, and pulls me into a hug. It’s the first time he’s touched me at all since he’s been back, and for a second, I’m a child. I want this hug.

But that fades and he’s just a stranger who needs something from me, hugging me as if he has the right. I push him off. “What are you doing?” My voice is pure venom, infused with the thousand questions I’ve been saving for him since he disappeared.

He steps back and holds up his hands in surrender. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

I nod then drop my head so my chin is very near my chest, and sigh like I’m being forced to endure more than I should. “No, I’m sorry.” I hold up my hands and wave them back and forth. “I shouldn’t have snapped at you.”

“I’ve been gone. And now that I’m back, you deserve all the explanations, all the moments you need to collect them and analyze the words.” He sighs, but his is faster, an almost chuckle with a smile. “I owe all of you, but most especially you. You shouldn’t have grown up thinking you were less. You should know that you’re more than every witch here. You should’ve been told that from the beginning and I’m sorry you weren’t.” He moves toward me again as if to hug me and I feel every bit the spoiled asshat I’m acting.

His story is that he went away to protect us, but a part of me wonders if having a daughter like me is the real reason. If it’s the guilt of knowing that he made me this way or the fact he made me this way then let me suffer for it without a single word of explanation about why I couldn’t cast a spell without Aimee or the Institute, why my magic always went so wrong, why my life has been what it is. I don’t know anything at this point, except the weight on my shoulders lessens with every skill I learn and every touch of the scepter.

“It doesn’t matter now.” I shake my head as if I can shake the subject out of it. I cannot. Thoughts I’ve been plagued with since the day I was old enough to realize I was different aren’t going to go away through the sheer force of my will and their explanations. Time is all that will ease me.

“It matters to me.”

“What matters to me right now is that I have to find Auntie Elizabeth”—a woman I had no idea existed until a week ago—“and I have to kill her.”

My father nods. “Yes.” The silence is charged with all the questions he wants to ask but doesn’t.

I wait for more from him, but he only stands silent. “Is there a plan? A way to draw Elizabeth to me, or am I to go hunting her?” Either way, we’re almost at the end of this whole thing.

His chest rises and falls on a deep breath before he meets my gaze. His is stormy, dark. Mine is loaded with patience I wish not to be false, but most certainly is. I want this finished so I can move forward, have a life, take my exam, become what I have trained for years to be.

“We’re going to draw her here, to you, where you will be waiting. The scepter will be infused with magic from your friends and the first families.” He speaks softly and I picture it in my head, me in my cloak and Elizabeth in…something more modern likely, since she’s being drawn here.

A thousand times since I’ve seen the scepter’s magic, I’ve pictured her falling, pictured myself dying, pictured neither of us being stronger than the other and all of this for nothing. But in all those times, I’ve never imagined her wearing anything memorable or specific.

“Are we to be dressed like Merlin and Gandalf, or can I wear something comfortable that doesn’t weigh thirty pounds and might strangle me before I fulfill my destiny of murdering my aunt?” I think, with everything that could go wrong, I should stack the deck in my favor and clearly that cloak with its beading and its hood and the length and awkward weight is not a garment that will work in my favor. “Isn’t someone in the first family able to use a needle and thread and give me one of the dimensional pockets as well?”

My father considers, or pretends to, at least, my question. “Your mother sews. And the pocket is a spell only.” He stares at me for a moment. “You can ask her.”

“Are you not talking to one another?” It probably isn’t my business, but he isn’t going to get by saying that to me with no explanation. Not now, when I’m expected to risk my life for all of them.

“Things are difficult.” He shrugs. “I’ve been away and she’s more used to being alone than having me under her feet.”

He’s been sleeping on the sofa, though they try to act as if everything is as it should be between them, although only the heavens know what they think we believe it should be.

I nod. “Well, you’re going to need to clean that up because…if I fail, Aimee and Mom are going to need you.” And it’s a very real possibility.

“We should get back to work so that doesn’t happen.” He smiles and moves to replace the target I blew up. He adds more hoops. “Make the magic tighter this time, RJ. And relax. You need to feel the magic inside of you.”

Oh, I do. So much.

But I get back to work because this is my destiny and I’m going to give it everything I have. Starting right now.