Amaretto Flame

By

Sammie Spencer

SMASHWORDS EDITION

* * * * *

PUBLISHED BY:

Sammie Spencer on Smashwords

Eagleton Coven: Amaretto Flame

Copyright © 2010 by Sammie Spencer

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I was angry. I was so angry that I felt as
though my body could burst open with that anger. Red, pulsating
streaks of fury rushed through my limbs, building the pressure
until I thought something inside of me might snap.

This is how I felt as I ran…it’s why I was
running. I had knocked over a chair in my haste to get outside, to
escape the confines of the small room I had been sitting in. The
daylight and fresh air didn’t help, and so I kept running over the
grounds of Eagleton. My feet pounded over emerald grass as I sought
some solitude; some place where the concerned eyes of my family
couldn’t reach me. I ignored their gazes as I passed, even as some
deep part of me registered that only my sister, Sylvia, kept her
eyes on the ground instead of looking at me questioningly.

I could hear his footsteps behind me as I
rounded the pond, and it only made me angrier. My coven brother,
Everett—who was also my best friend—couldn’t leave me alone in this
desperate moment, even though that’s all I wanted him to do. My
lungs burned, though my muscles were accustomed to working even
harder than this. I turned my head slightly as I pounded forward,
getting a view of Everett in my peripheral vision.

“Go back!” I yelled. I didn’t want him to see
me like this.

“No,” he shouted back. “I’m not leaving
you.”

His refusal only made me run faster, and as I
reached the forest that he and I both knew as well as our own
selves, I stopped. The anger had built in me too long, and I knew
it actively sought its escape now. With the furious red haze in my
vision, I opened my mouth, looking forward to letting all that
anger go. My hands shot out to either side, and with the last
moment of sane thinking, I made sure Everett was behind me. Then, I
screamed.

A shrieking, high-pitched wail shot its way
out of my mouth. I watched the forest change with clarity that I
usually didn’t possess. The glistening green leaves and carpet of
grass before me turned black, as if they’d met the hot end of a
blow torch. The air shimmered and shifted and I felt for a moment
like I was looking through vapors. Somewhere in front of me, a tiny
sapling snapped under the force of my anger, and a shower of dead
leaves fell to the ground. It was like the whole earth was moving
for a few seconds, and then the scream quieted and died.

I surveyed the damage with sorrow for only a
moment, and then the tears came. This was my power. Olivia Landry,
future high-priestess of Eagleton Coven, destroyer of life. Maybe
that wasn’t a fair assessment. You see, I was born with an
extraordinary power, one that was unheard of. With a scream, I
could obliterate anything and anyone that stood before me. I had
used this power before on people, and those weren’t even people.
They were the deadly Venator, hunters that wanted to track down all
of my kind and kill them, or turn them into slaves in mills. That
had been different. There had been a kind of triumph when that had
happened.

This, I thought as I looked over the
blackened trees and scorched grass, was just unfair destruction.
Then, with a bitter note, I reminded myself that I’d been messing
up a lot lately. Why stop now? Why not just scream until every tree
of the forest was black and lifeless?

Everett was there a moment later, his arms
going around me protectively as he murmured comforting words. He
was shaken. I could see it in his face as I turned to look at him.
He’d never seen me use my power before, and that, combined with
what we had just been told, left him reeling. But he didn’t stop
comforting me.

“It’s okay, Olivia. It’s all out now. You’re
okay,” he said.

“I’m not okay,” I argued.

His sky-blue eyes took me in for a long
moment, and his hands ran down long ribbons of my dark hair. “Yes,
you’re okay.”

I didn’t reply. He wasn’t the one being
forced to leave his home—the only home he’d ever known. Still, it
was my fault. I had broken the rule. Not him; me. I deserved this.
With a deep breath, I collapsed onto the forest floor, Everett
shifting his body so that he could sit with me, his arms still
trying to comfort me.

Today had started well. Everett and I had
been chosen for a special mission. He’d been chosen for his unique
ability and I had been chosen because I needed the experience.
Ivanna, our coven mother and high-priestess, had prepared us in the
usual way. She’d briefed us on the situation and what needed to
happen. With the wave of her hand, she’d disguised our faces,
making us appear years older than we truly were.

Just a few hours away from Eagleton—our
home—a boy was being held in a group facility; an orphanage. The
boy was one of us, a Wise One, born with the ability to wield the
ancient magick. Not long ago, his entire family had been killed in
a raging fire at their home. Joshua, the boy, had been the only
survivor. At just fourteen years old, he’d been turned over to the
state for care. It was our mission to get him, or at least to offer
him the chance to come with us; to learn how to properly control
the magick.

But the boy wasn’t cooperative. It didn’t
surprise me. Each one of my coven brothers and sisters had suffered
through something similar before coming to Eagleton. In what seemed
a cruel cosmic joke, most Wise Ones were born to ordinary human
parents. Imagine walking into the room one day to find your young
child moving things through the air with his or her mind, or
creating a storm in the middle of your living room. I glanced at
Everett. Or, what if your child could speak directly into your mind
with his mind, excitedly telling you about a bug he’d found on the
playground? Imagine that his voice took over all of your thoughts,
making it impossible for you to concentrate on anything else.

It’s not odd that parents of Wise Ones often
thought that their children were evil; incarnates of some black
demon that went against everything they’d been taught in chapels
and churches. That’s why these Wise children often ended up
abandoned or victims of their own parents’ attempts to free the
world of their evil. But Joshua’s fate had been different, maybe
even worse than the rest of ours.

He was a fire-wielder, and in the grips of a
nightmare, he’d inadvertently used his powers. The house had gone
up in flames quickly, destroying his family and his life. The
firemen and police thought it was a miracle that the boy hadn’t
been hurt. They’d rescued him from the charred and burning home,
thinking that he had a guardian angel watching over him. What they
didn’t know was that he had been immune to the flames as he slept,
because he’d created them.

It was absolutely understandable that he’d be
bitter, angry…that he’d hate the world. He’d tried to ignore
Everett and me from the moment the lady had led us out to the
courtyard to speak to him. We had tried gently persuading him that
we could help, using the disguise Ivanna had given us—hopeful
foster parents. Nothing we said got through to him, until Everett
had told him that we were like him, that we understood what was
going on with him.

He’d snapped his head toward us quickly,
those sky-blue eyes burning through me.

“If you’re anything like me, then I hate you
almost as much as I hate myself,” he’d said, his voice dripping
with disgust. After a few more attempts to talk to him, he shut
down completely. His finger jutted out toward the ground. I’d
panicked, knowing what his plan was. I shook my head no, even as a
small flame leapt up from the grass. The other children were in the
courtyard too, some of them jumping rope while others dribbled
basketballs or played hopscotch.

Knowing he wasn’t going to come with us,
Everett and I prepared to leave…to get out of there before we
angered him and pushed him to do something we would all regret. But
something wouldn’t let me leave just at that moment. Maybe it was
the look in the boy’s eyes; the lonely, desolate look. I recognized
myself in him, and my mind went back over the time I’d spent in a
foster home before being brought to Eagleton. I’d remembered just
how lonely it had been; how I thought I’d never be able to pull
myself out of the dark misery. In a last minute, desperate attempt
to do something for the boy, I’d leaned over and given him the
numbers of the phone back in Eagleton.

It was untraceable. Surely it wouldn’t matter
too much, and I was confident that the boy would call when he came
to terms with what was happening to him. We wouldn’t have to lose
him, and we could still keep him safe from them…the hunters. So I’d
said it twice, reciting the numbers slowly so he would memorize
them. That’s where I’d gone wrong. It was absolutely forbidden to
reveal anything about Eagleton to anyone who didn’t live here.

Everett and I had gone back to Ivanna after
escaping the group home without the boy. I knew a punishment was
coming, but I wasn’t prepared for what she would say. She focused
her dark, piercing eyes on me in a way she never had before. Ivanna
was beautiful, with black hair as shiny as glass, and high
cheekbones. She was a tall woman, but even without her height, she
had a presence that made her seem imposing and large. We’d met with
her in her cottage behind the main house, Everett insisting on
going with me although I told him to stay in his room.

Nervously, I told her the entire story as she
perched on the edge of her desk in the small library. She was quiet
as I described the boy’s demeanor, and when I talked about him
using his power on the patchy grass outside the orphanage, she
stayed calm. There was a long moment of silence after that, and
Everett made no move to speak up about what I had done.

“There’s one more thing,” I’d said. “I gave
the boy our phone number.”
Again, I was met with Ivanna's piercing gaze. Her face was
unreadable, the muscles under the skin relaxed. I thought she might
not get angry after all, but then suddenly, her expression changed.
It was as if she just remembered that it was one of the most
important rules in Eagleton not to give out any contact
information. Her brows drew together and she moved to sit at the
desk, clasping her hands together.

“I’ve never been this disappointed in you,
Olivia.” Her voice was as chilling as her eyes. “You have always
been ruled by your emotions, but I expected better from you in this
situation. What if the boy had been a plant for the Venator? What
then? I don’t have to remind you what would happen if the hunters
found our location…what would happen to every single one of
us.”

I wished she would scream in rage rather than
focus her icy quiet wrath on me, but the demeanor with which she
delivered the words didn’t cut as deeply as the words themselves.
I’d trained for years to fight the Venator. I’d seen the trophies
of their kills; I’d heard horror stories about the hidden locations
full of Wise Ones and humans that they’d enslaved. The thought of
the Venator coming anywhere near my family sent an arch of terror
through my bones.

“Ivanna,” I said, “it was just a number. It
was an untraceable number. You can’t think that I’d ever willingly
endanger any of you.” Did I have to say this to her? She of all
people should know that I’d walk out into a crowd of Venator if it
would save my family.”

“But you have endangered us,” she argued.
“When you break a coven rule, you endanger the coven. That’s why
those rules are in place. I could toss you right out for this.”

An odd feeling crept over me as she said
those words. It was as if the words weren’t matching up with her
external display of anger; she should be screaming and shouting,
with her eyes flashing. If her face showed a lack of anger,
Everett’s showed an overload of it.

“If you toss her out of the coven, I’ll be
right behind her,” he said loyally, his hands gripping the arms of
the chair as if he were prepared to jump up at any moment and
follow through on his threat. While he spoke calmly—because he
would never dream of raising his voice at a woman—his jaw was
clenched and the air around the three of us was practically
crackling.