Chapter 8
a world away
Callie’s visions were starting to grow teeth. Each day, or night, they were coming with increasing frequency and frightening clarity.
Again in the midnight forest, the witches stood in a circle, hands clasped in silence. Someone had just finished speaking, but Callie felt the tension differently. This was anticipation, as if an answer would finally be found to a much larger question.
They had trained together and separately, all bringing skills to the task ahead.
But now, Callie just watched. And listened. The forest wasn’t asleep. It was singing in a language older than words and far less polite.
There was the constant shimmer of crickets, ticking like clocks on their own time. The low resonant croak of tree frogs, hidden somewhere in the wet shadows.
Every so often, the snap of underbrush. A deer, maybe, or something smaller and less vigilant. And overhead, the lonely sweep of the night wind through the trees, some leaves, some pine, whispering secrets to mask their approach.
The resulting hiss grew into a roar, and the trees disappeared into smoke. The scent of pine was replaced by the smell of propane and popcorn. Callie recognized the thrumming of her heart.
A hockey game. She heard the trees fluttering as low crowd noise. Dressed in bold away colors, her team stood quietly in the locker room to share a moment of silence before the game that had brought them halfway around the world, so far out of her comfort zone that Callie, then twenty-one years old, couldn’t concentrate. They were bracing for history.
Sochi, the Olympics, she thought, just before the puck drops, that same pressure in my chest. I can’t catch my breath. Fighting to inhale, Callie’s eyes snapped open, seemingly awake, then she lay in her bed panting. But too late. The thought had left another mark, as it always did. The memory of losing in the championship 3-4.
Then, the deafening sound of the horn at the end of the game. Loud enough to shatter a dream at full volume. The medal ceremony gave the winners a taste of medal-biting gold.
Callie remembered standing on the second step of the podium, trying not to cry.
Silver tastes like failure.
She woke up sobbing.