Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
It was dark and cold. Raindrops left silver webbed lines along the windshield as an oncoming car passed by her parents’ vehicle.
Calli was tucked in the backseat, a warm blanket wrapped around her and the plush mummy toy in her arms. She’d always loved everything Egyptian.
Her mother’s familiar, a calico cat named Pixie, was curled up against Calli, purring.
Her father’s familiar was a peregrine falcon named Archie, and was somewhere high above the car, flying in the night.
They had just left the Halloween festival.
The rain had ended the activities an hour early.
She was happily exhausted, having run through the hay bale maze and trick-or-treating up and down Main Street.
Her parents talked quietly in the front of the car and Calli was lulled to sleep by her parents’ comforting voices and Pixie’s loud purring.
A screech of tires. Her mother’s scream.
Calli jerked awake just as the world turned upside down.
Shards of glass cut her face and arms as she tried to shield herself.
The car tumbled off the road, rolling to a stop on its side.
Nausea rolled through Calli. She coughed, trying to catch her breath.
The engine hissed. White and gray smoke flooded the cabin, then slithered out of the shattered car windows.
“Mom…?” Calli croaked. She stared at her mother in the passenger seat.
She wasn’t moving. Pixie also lay still next to Calli, her fur started to shimmer as though stardust was falling on it…
no, as if it was becoming stardust. The cat familiar was vanishing before her eyes.
She didn’t know what that meant…or rather, she wished she didn’t.
“Mom?” Calli reached out, trying to touch her mother, but she was trapped in the backseat. She turned to her father. “Dad?”
He was facing away from her, blood matted the side of his head.
“Calli…” he rasped. “Don’t be afraid… everything…
will be… okay…” His words, merely a gasp as he tried to sooth her were the last thing he ever said.
His body sagged, his head lolling to one side an instant later.
Calli, her face wet with tears saw Archie’s winged form fall from the sky, vanishing into stardust before it could hit the ground.
No…
Calli felt the something leaving her parents. This beautiful, bright power that had been there…suddenly vanished from the glowing pulse of all living things around her.
Pain exploded from the skin on Calli’s inner forearms. Vines, like English Ivy, burst out of her, reaching out to her mother and father. Her mother’s head tilted toward the back seat and lay unmoving. Sightless eyes stared past Calli into the storm-drenched night.
Death was in the car with her. A bleak, quiet, hollow shadow that seemed to expand itself around Calli until she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think.
How could something be both present and yet itself was an absence at the same time?
The pain in her arms was too intense, the shock of seeing the English ivy crawling out of her skin was terrifying and the lifeless bodies of her parents filled her head with a deafening roar.
She screamed, the sound knifing through the air.
The ground beneath the car shook and her new magic roared to life.
The vines coming out of her arms sprang coming to her rescue.
They wrapped around her, tearing the seatbelt off of her and carrying her out through the window of the car, wrapped up safely as though she was tucked into a verdant casket.
They laid her upon the ground before they slid back into her skin.
She sat there, alone, clutching her arms to her chest as she stared at the battered sedan.
From up on the roadway, she heard someone yelling for help as they stood next to a semi-truck which had dragged itself along the guardrail, but it was too late…
Calli jolted awake, a scream in her throat. Hands grabbed her shoulders and she shouted, terror flooding her body. Magic exploded out of her in a powerful blast of witch wind.
Crash!
Something broke as the person who’d touched her hit the opposite wall and collapsed to the ground.
The portrait of her great grandfather fell face forward onto the ground beneath the window.
A weak patch of moonlight illuminated the back of the frame and the delicate spiderwebs that covered it.
A large spider clung to its cluster of the webs and Calli could sense its frightened vibrations.
“Calli, it’s me! Malcolm!” the crouched figure said.
It took Calli a moment to remember where she was. She was at home, and she wasn’t twelve years old staring at her mother’s lifeless eyes. She squinted at the powerful masculine figure keeping a safe distance from her.
“Mal—colm?” It was the warlock who ploughed through her garden like a maniac earlier tonight and wrecked all of her pumpkins. That Malcolm.
He slowly stood up. “Ow. You threw me into a damned wall.” She flinched as he turned on the lamp by her bedside.
That’s when she saw the vines springing from her arms had strapped her down in the bed like a straitjacket.
She’d told Malcolm they hardly ever came out, but the truth was they always emerged when she was afraid or startled.
Had she been afraid of Malcolm or the dream?
And why had the vines trapped her arms at her sides?
Was that to keep her from casting another hex that would hit Malcolm, maybe?
Were they protecting him from her? Why would they do that?
Calli’s head hurt as she tried to process what that could mean.
“Are you okay?” Malcolm knelt by the side of her bed, eyeing the vines warily.
The expanse of bare skin her eyes suddenly zeroed in on made her catch her breath.
He was practically naked, wearing only a pair of boxers.
He must have come straight from bed to check on her.
For some reason the idea sent her skin sizzling with a feminine awareness.
Her gaze swept over his tan pectorals and bulging biceps.
She wanted to wrap her legs around him, to feel all the delicious dark things that his bare skin promised her.
Calli had the sudden urge to nibble him, to sink her teeth into his skin and then lick away the sting of her bite.
Okay, maybe she’d dated one too many vampires.
“Calli?” Malcolm asked again, shaking her out of her fantasy. She hadn’t answered his question about whether she was okay or not. The vines were slowly retreating into her skin and her arms were finally freed again.
“I um… I don’t know. The vines have never done this before.
I was having a dream.” Calli reached instinctively for her grandmother’s moonstone pendant on the bedside table.
She wore it whenever her magic felt a little out of control, and tonight certainly qualified.
She slipped the necklace around her neck, feeling centered the moment the stone touched her skin.
“Dream? Sounded more like a nightmare,” Malcolm said, his green eyes softening in the muted golden lamplight. Lord, he could look at her like that forever… “You were screaming your head off. Hades and I woke up.”
She looked at the doorway, where the huge black schnauzer watched the room like a silent sentinel, more a silhouette than a natural presence.
“Are you able to control the vines at all?” he asked.
“Not really. It’s more subconscious, situational.”
Malcolm frowned. “They seemed to loosen up once you calmed down a bit. Um… do you know box breathing?”
“What’s that?”
“Breathe in deep, hold, breathe out slow, hold. You do each part for four seconds. It slows the heart down and shifts your focus. Give it a try.”
He reached for one of her hands and curled his warm palm around hers.
Something blossomed in the dark between them, a spell so ancient even the oldest witches of the Endor line would not remember the words.
A call of wildness, mixed with a yearning peacefulness that in any other moment would make no sense…
except to someone who had magic deep within their heart.
What was it her grandmother used to say? The oldest spells needed no words; they existed in something as simple as a touch. A look.
Malcolm stroked his thumb over her skin while she breathed. Four seconds in, hold, four seconds out, hold. She thought his quiet, intense focus on her would have been unsettling, but instead it soothed her. Little by little, the vines retreated back into the tattoos on her forearms.
“That must have been one hell of a dream,” said Malcolm.
The vine tattoos rippled as he traced the leaves on her skin.
“Do you want to talk about it?” He got up and sat on the side of her bed as she propped herself up.
He kept a hold on her arm. The touch was grounding, comforting.
Hades entered the room, jumped up on the bed and settled at the foot of it with a deep sigh.
Calli wiped at her eyes. Fragments of the dream still lingered, making her feel small and weary, but as long as Malcolm was there, touching her, sitting with her, she felt safe.
“I was dreaming about the night my parents died.” She pushed her hair back from her face.
“Oh…” His eyes widened. She hesitated. Telling him about their deaths was too intimate, too dark to share with a stranger, wasn’t it? It wasn’t his burden. But then his expression changed. He leaned forward.
“Were you with them when it happened?” A lock of hair fell across his eyes, and Calli had an urge to stroke it back into place.
She nodded. “I was only twelve. We were coming back from the Halloween Festival when we got into a car wreck. I saw them die…”
“Shit, you were just a kid. I’m so sorry.”