Darker Paths (The Witches of Canyon Road Book 2) Page 10

  Did everyone’s magic look like that, or was there something special about mine, something about being born of a prima mother and a primus father?

  Simon’s voice was almost a whisper. “Do you see it?”

  Afraid to open my eyes, I nodded.

  “Good. We’ll try something simple, something you’ve already done before. Miranda, send yourself into the kitchen. You know you can do it — it’s only a few yards away. It’ll be easier than the teleportations you’ve already performed. Send yourself into the house.”

  Part of me wanted to argue, to tell him that I’d already tried this sort of thing and failed miserably. The magic did what it wanted; it didn’t come on cue. And yet….

  There it was, coiled and gleaming within me. I’d never seen it before. Maybe it had been waiting for this moment to reveal itself.

  All right, magic. Send me into the kitchen.

  At once the sensation of the sun beating down on my head was gone. Cautiously, I opened my eyes, saw that I stood next to the kitchen counter. The water glasses Simon and I had drunk out of earlier were still there.

  “Goddess,” I breathed.

  I’d done it. I’d reached out to my magic and asked for it to do as I wished…and it had.

  Footsteps at the back door, and then Simon was walking across the kitchen floor, coming toward me. He paused a foot or so away, then said, “You did it.”

  “I did, didn’t I?”

  “Hey.” He reached toward my face and I almost flinched, not sure what he was doing. One finger touched my cheek and came away shimmering with moisture.

  “Oh, jeez.” At once I raised a hand to wipe away the tears, tears I hadn’t even realized had been rolling down my cheeks.

  “Are you okay?” Simon asked, dark eyes filled with concern.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “These are happy tears. I guess — I guess I just hadn’t thought I’d really be able to do it.”

  He didn’t say anything, only put his arms around me and held me close. It felt different from Rafe hugging me — the two of them were about the same height, but Simon was thinner, not as well muscled. As if that mattered. What mattered was the reassurance and compassion I could practically feel flowing from him into my own body.

  Once or twice I’d thought about giving Simon a hug but had always stopped myself. Now I wondered why the hell I’d been holding back.

  Still, I didn’t want to give him the wrong idea. I knew I certainly wasn’t ready to do anything more than exchange a hug. This embrace had been more to share the wonderful feeling I was experiencing, not an invitation to further intimacy.

  I stepped back but made sure to smile at him so he’d know the small distance I’d put between us wasn’t any sort of rejection.

  Clearly, he wasn’t offended, because he returned my smile as he said, “I’m proud of you. I knew you could do it, but it’s not easy to overcome years of negative reinforcement.”

  “Now what?” I asked.

  “Now,” he said, “we practice some more.”

  It was strange to think of magic as something that needed to be practiced, but my magic apparently wasn’t like anyone else’s, and so I had to work with it in a way that was different from the way every other witch and warlock approached their powers.

  Simon wanted me to do something simple at first. “Change your hair color,” he said.

  I lifted an eyebrow at him. We were back out in the garden, enjoying the sunshine. “I really don’t think I’d look good as a blonde.”

  He grinned. “No, probably not. But that isn’t the point. Your father can do illusions, right? So try casting an illusion over your hair.”

  That sounded easier than actually changing the color right down to the cellular level. I pulled in a breath and thought of my favorite color, a deep, deep green tinged with blue, almost teal.

  Right before my eyes, I saw the long locks of brown hair that hung over my shoulders shift over to that same greenish teal. Wondering, I ran my fingers through it and saw that every single strand was that color. Or rather, there were variations in that teal green color, emerald and turquoise and dark aqua, just as my own hair varied, with glints of dark mahogany and near black buried within the brown. It amazed me that my magic could do something so complex and yet so real-looking.

  “I like it,” Simon said. “It’s very anime…and it brings out the green in your eyes.”

  “Maybe I should keep it,” I suggested, and he laughed and shook his head.

  “Nah, I think I like the natural color better. But that does look cool. You could always change it up if you were going to a comic convention or something.”

  “Yeah, because I always hang out at those.” I paused, and slanted him a sideways glance. “Do you?”

  “I’ve gone a few times. It’s fun. They have one here in Santa Fe, but you just missed it — it’s held in the middle of October.”

  The words slipped out of my mouth before I stopped to consider their implications. “Well, maybe next year.”

  Simon’s expression turned speculative, as if he was thinking over what I’d said and deciding whether or not he should comment on it. All he said, though, was, “Maybe.” A lift of his shoulders, and he added, “Try turning it back now.”

  That was easier, since all I had to do was think of the way I looked every time I saw myself in a mirror. At once my hair shifted back to its regular brown.

  “Good.” Simon reached up to rub at the back of his neck. “It doesn’t seem as though illusions are too much work for you, which is good. Sometimes they can come in really handy.”

  “Can you do them?” I asked, genuinely curious. He’d mentioned before that he had command of more than one power, but I still had no real idea as to the true extent of his magical talents.

  “Sure,” he replied. For just a moment, his appearance shifted to that of a popular actor, someone my cousin Jessica Rowe had a massive crush on, a man with warm brown hair and strikingly bright blue eyes. I blinked, startled, and once again Simon was standing there, the sun glinting down on his black hair.

  “Wow, that’s pretty good.” Actually, it had been flawless, as far as I’d been able to tell. Since I’d never been around the real-life actor, I had no idea whether Simon had gotten the height right, but his face and general build had been perfect. “I guess if this warlock gig doesn’t work out, you could always be a celebrity impersonator…or a stunt double.”

  “I’ll take it under advisement.” He was smiling now, clearly amused by my comment. “For now, though, I think the warlock thing is working okay for me.” A pause, and then he said, “How are you with fire?”

  “Well, I’m not a pyro or anything,” I replied, my tone cautious.

  “I meant, could you always call the fire, even though you didn’t have any other magic?”

  “Yes.” That, and unlocking doors, had been about all I could do. But at least I’d been able to touch my finger to the wick of a candle and make it light, or get a fire going in a hearth without having to use a lighter or kindling.

  “Good. Then that much magic has always been a part of you.” He looked around at our surroundings, at the frost-yellowed grass beneath our feet. “Let’s move over to the driveway. It’s probably safer.”

  At first I wasn’t sure what he was driving at, but then I realized that the spot where we stood was pretty combustible. “Right.”

  I followed him out of the garden and over to the driveway, which was very wide at that spot, spreading out from the narrow, nearly one-lane trail it was near the gate to the property, to an area wide enough to match the large three-bay garage. The gravel here was so immaculate, it looked as though it had been refreshed right before we moved in…or rather, right after the actor who’d occupied the place before us had vacated the property. It was so smooth and perfect that I really, really hoped I wouldn’t scorch it too badly.

  “Let’s try a small wall of flames first,” Simon said, stopping about twenty feet from the garage door.
<
br />   I gave a half-hearted chuckle. “Oh, is that all?”

  He didn’t smile. “You were able to perform an illusion without breaking a sweat, and also to teleport yourself into the house. This shouldn’t be a problem.”

  Easy for him to say. Even though I had seen the evidence of my growing powers for myself, I still worried that I wouldn’t be able to pull this one off. But I knew I had to try. I had to see just how strong my magic really was.

  I drew in a breath and focused on the section of driveway where I wanted the flames to go. Nothing big, just something a few feet high and a few feet long. Enough to show that I could do it, but not so much that the fire I’d called would get out of hand.

  And…nothing.

  “It’s not working,” I said.

  Simon came up to me, placed his hands on my shoulders. “You’re tense. Why does this task frighten you so much?”

  “Because….” I paused, trying to figure out why I couldn’t bring the fire the way I’d been able to perform the other stunts he’d asked of me. According to Simon, it was only a matter of degree; I’d been doing something similar for half my life. “I guess because I’m worried about what will happen if I can’t control it. There’s no chance of anyone getting hurt if I cast an illusion on my hair, or even if I teleport into an empty kitchen. But fire….”

  “You don’t need to worry about that,” he said, fingers digging into the taut muscles of my shoulders. He wasn’t being gentle, but it still felt good…except that I still had to do my best not to tense up because of his closeness. Only a few inches more, and he would have been pressing against me from shoulder to groin. And yet his touch was almost impersonal, more like a massage therapist doing his job than someone who was looking for any kind of physical intimacy.

  Since I didn’t quite know how to react, I decided to do my best to ignore the fingers kneading the back of my neck. “I’m a worrier. It’s what I do.”

  He chuckled, the sound warm and throaty at my ear. “Well, I suppose sometimes that’s helpful, but right now, it’s just getting in your way. I’m here. I’m watching. The second it looks as though you might lose control, I can take over. There’s really no risk involved.”

  Those words did reassure me somewhat. I hadn’t stopped to think that Simon could step in if the experiment went sideways…literally.

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll try again.”

  Another breath, another glimpse of the core of magic that burned deep within me. It knew it had the power; I just needed to get out of its way.

  At once a wall of flame three feet high burst into existence a few feet from where we stood. No illusion here — I felt the heat of that fire coming toward me in waves.

  “Awesome,” Simon said. He let go of my shoulders and stepped back a pace. “Make it a little taller.”

  I nodded, and the fire rose another foot. However, it didn’t advance, didn’t move except for the natural flickers of the individual flames. “Good enough?” I asked.

  “I’d say that was a more than adequate demonstration. Can you put it out?”

  A blink, and the flames were gone. There weren’t even any scorch marks on the gravel surface of the driveway, which made me let out a little sigh of relief. I supposed we could have fixed any damage one way or another — maybe by creating a helpful illusion — but better that we didn’t have to go to those lengths in the first place.

  “Perfect.” He extended a hand, and I took it. “I’d say this calls for some lunch.”

  I was ravenously hungry. Was my hunger caused by all the magic I’d just been playing with, or simply because I’d eaten only an English muffin for breakfast, and that was now hours earlier? I couldn’t say one way or another, but it definitely felt good to pull a bunch of sandwich makings out of the fridge and pantry and proceed to create quite a mess in the kitchen.

  “I knew you could do it,” Simon told me as he spread dijon mustard on some whole wheat bread. “You just needed to have more confidence in yourself.”

  Well, I would have been the first to admit that I was sorely lacking in confidence, at least when it came to magic. Then again, I’d had every reason to believe my powers…gifts…whatever you wanted to call them…were basically nonexistent.

  “I think it’s more than just confidence,” I replied, carefully placing a slice of provolone on top of the mound of ham I’d slapped on a slice of bread. “It has to be something else.”

  “Like what?”

  Since Simon appeared to be done with the dijon, I reached for it and spread a thin film of the mustard on a second piece of bread. Satisfied with the result, I finished assembling the sandwich and put it on one of the plates he’d set out. “I don’t know for sure,” I said. “Maybe it’s this place.”

  One eyebrow went up. “Santa Fe?”

  “I know that sounds crazy, but I just didn’t show any signs of magical ability until I came here.”

  He was quiet for a moment, appearing to consider my words as he finished up with his own sandwich. Once he’d put it on a plate, he said, “I never thought of Santa Fe as being particularly powerful that way.”

  It was my turn to raise an eyebrow. “Places are magical?”

  “Of course they are. You’ve been to Sedona, right?”

  “Lots of times.”

  “And you’ve never felt the energy there?”

  Well, I always thought I could sense something special in Sedona, but I never knew for sure whether I was falling prey to all the hype about its supposed energy vortexes. Then again, the one thing the Wilcox and the McAllister clans had agreed on back when they were feuding was that neither clan could establish a branch there, supposedly because they didn’t want either family to gain an advantage by gaining access to Sedona’s mystical powers.

  “I guess so,” I said slowly. “But it isn’t something I tried to actively work with, probably because I never thought I had enough magic for it to matter one way or another.”

  “Maybe it wouldn’t have worked for you. I don’t know.” Simon picked up his sandwich and took a bite. “Let’s go sit down.”

  We took our sandwiches and some glasses of iced tea we’d poured for ourselves over to the kitchen table. After we’d both taken our seats, I said, “You think it wouldn’t have worked because my powers weren’t ready to wake up?”

  “Possibly.” He took another bite of sandwich, washed it down with some tea, and added, “Yours is a really rare case, so it’s hard to say what would have worked and what wouldn’t. Maybe Sedona’s energies weren’t the right kind to mesh with yours. I don’t know about Santa Fe — I mean, it’s a place that artists and musicians and writers have been coming to for more than a hundred years, so it has to have its own kind of energy, even if it isn’t talked up as much. Maybe, for whatever reason, that energy did speak to you.”

  I wondered if that was what Rafe’s grandmother had seen, the vision that had come to her while I was still in the womb. But then, if she’d seen that it would be this place that would finally bring me to my powers, you’d think she would have also seen that things between Rafe and me weren’t going to work out so well.

  Or so you’d think. Visions could be tricky things. My cousin Caitlin, who still functioned as the McAllister clan’s seer even though she was married to a de la Paz and living in Tucson, had once said she really didn’t have control over hers, that they’d come on her when she least expected them. And although her visions mostly did seem fairly literal, they weren’t always helpful because they showed her things and places she didn’t necessarily recognize. It must have been rough to have those strange images intrude whenever they felt like it, and although I’d bemoaned my lack of powers, I also was secretly relieved that I hadn’t turned out to be the McAllisters’ next seer.

  As to what had awakened my own powers, I supposed in the end it didn’t matter. What mattered was that they were definitely alive and kicking now, and I could control them. It was also gratifying to know that I could use several differen
t talents, too, that, like my parents, an array of magic seemed to answer my commands. Even the two of them hadn’t been able to manage anything more than the single innate power they’d been born with, until they’d figured out how to combine their energies. I wasn’t like that, though; clearly, I didn’t need anyone’s help to teleport one minute and call the fire the next.

  “Maybe it did,” I said. “If that’s the case, then I’m glad I came here, even with everything that happened with Rafe.”

  Simon ran a finger along the edge of his plate, not quite looking at me. “I thought you were going to let that go.”

  “I am,” I said. “I will. But I also can’t pretend that it didn’t happen. For now, yes, I can ignore the Castillos. Eventually, though, we’re going to have to come to some kind of reckoning, if for no other reason than our clans need to find a way to get past this.”

  He looked up, and his gaze met mine, dark and searching. It was hard not to look away, because I wasn’t sure I wanted to see what I might find in those night-black eyes. However, I didn’t detect much of anything, except possibly a bit of rueful surprise. “Spoken like the true daughter of a prima,” he said. “And you’re right, of course. But it will definitely help that when you talk to them again, you’ll be coming from a position of strength. You won’t be someone Genoveva Castillo can boss around.”

  Hopefully not, although I could still see how it might be hard to face down the Castillo prima, even if armed with a whole new set of magical talents. “Well, I doubt she’ll want to have much to do with me,” I told Simon. “I’m pretty sure most of the negotiations will take place between her and my parents. Since I’m not engaged to Rafe anymore, I should be mostly out of the picture.”

  “Good,” Simon said, and I looked at him with some surprise. He went on, “That is, it will be good if they leave you out of their crap. Then you’ll be free to do what you want with your life.”

  That would be a blessing. I’d spent so long thinking I had no control over anything, that I had to marry Rafe and try to make a life with him, that it was almost dizzying to contemplate what my future might be now. My life would no longer be shaped by plans made before I was even born. I could do anything, go anywhere.