Flames in the Midst (The Jade Hale Series) (29 page)

I sat on the blanket, giddy with the excitement of a new relationship.  Unfortunately, Chase felt this would be a good opportunity for us to talk.  I just wanted a repeat of our first kiss, but it didn’t look like I was going to be getting that right away.  At first, we ate in silence.  Chase kept looking at me and smiling, but I could tell he was also torn.  He knew I was not a sure thing in the ideal relationship department.

“Look,” he started, “I know you aren’t sure what you’re going to do.  I want you to stay here when all of this is over, but if we are going to continue this, I need to know that your staying here is at least a possibility.  I need to know I’m not just a temporary distraction for you.”

“You’re not just a temporary distraction for me, Chase,” I tried to convey my sincerity.  “But I also know I don’t want to be a Guardian.”

“Okay.  I can accept that, even if I can’t understand it.  Are you sure you will be going back to college when all of this is over?”

“I honestly don’t know.  I suppose there is a possibility I could stay here.”

“That’s all I need to know, then.”  Chase smiled and leaned forward, brushing my dark, dyed hair from my face and finally allowing our lips to meet.  I felt the same heat build within me, although it wasn’t quite as intense as our first kiss.  We stayed in the woods, making out, longer than we should have.  Then Chase took me back to the house and we spent several hours practicing starting fires.  No matter how often I practiced, I couldn’t get the focus I needed in order to light just one object on fire.  I wished I could have the calm and focus I got when Anastasia was near me.  I didn’t know how she was able to affect people the way she did, but I was sure she had paid a high price for it with her immortality.  It could not be easy to live forever when you know those around you have only a finite amount of time.

The following day, I actually had fun with Gia and Caylin.  We spent the day practicing spells and hanging out.  It rained, so we stayed inside.  We took over the living room and lounged on the couches, snacking and practicing.  Gia and Caylin took turns showing me spells, and then I would try them out, usually with very little success.  It takes practice to really learn a spell, and since I hadn’t been practicing spells for years, I had a hard time getting the hang of any of them.  Neither Gia nor Caylin seemed to judge me for my lack of skill.  They encouraged me to keep practicing, and by the end of the day, I had about three more spells under my belt. 

I was nervous about my day with Kendra.  Her shadowy purple and silver aura gave me an ominous feeling.  Everyone in the coven trusted her, but I had a feeling their trust may be misplaced.  However, I hadn’t seen anything from her that could give me reason to share my suspicions with anyone without revealing my third gift.  So, when Kendra’s day came around, I was obliged to follow her around.  I tried not to talk to her, but she gushed with enthusiasm from the moment we started our day.

Over breakfast, Kendra asked me what I wanted to do with our day together.  It all seemed like a fun adventure to her, as long as we didn’t have to dwell on why we were trying to train me on the super-accelerated pace. 

“I don’t know,” I answered, as noncommittal as I could be.

“Well, why don’t we work on your firestarting gift a little bit for the first part of the day?  I can show you some tricks I use to focus my levitation gift, and maybe you can use that for your firestarting,” she exhaled all of this at me without taking a breath in between. 

Her excitement radiated off her, but it just made me more suspicious.  Although the thought of learning a new trick to focus my skills was enticing, I just didn’t want her to be any more aware of my gifts than she needed to be.

“I worked on my firestarting with Chase,” I answered without providing her with an alternative.

She was undeterred.

“Well, then I will just demonstrate my trick for you, and you can decide if you want to use it on your own time.  After that, we’ll break for lunch.  Then we can work on some new spells.  I would love to work with you on your time traveling, but Amy said that needed to be reserved for her.  I know it’s not for a really happy reason or anything, but I am looking forward to traveling through time.  It should be exciting.  You must have been excited to realize you had such a truly rare gift, of course, you already had an exceptionally rare gift as a firestarter.”

The way she was carrying on, she was beginning to remind me of an older version of Stefanie.  This was not what I had expected.  For a moment, I thought she might be nervous to be talking with me.  That only made me more suspicious.

“When I realized I could levitate things, I was thrilled.  That’s why my mother decided to stop my father from teaching me more.  I started levitating neighborhood kids in magic shows, so she sent me here.”

She paused to chew a mouthful of eggs.  I didn’t add anything to the conversation.  We sat and stared at each other for a moment.  She seemed to take notice of my apprehension, but I think she misread it as something else.

“Listen, Jade,” she said in a matronly tone of voice.  “Honey, I know you have been through a lot. I want you to know that in a way, I understand.  Probably more than anyone here.  I’ve lost both my parents to tragedy, and my grandmother, who raised me, died of a heart attack just last year.  If you ever want to talk, I’m here.”

“Thank you,” I told her with as much sincerity as I could fake.

The tricks she showed me as she levitated various furniture and knick-knacks turned out to be only minimally useful.  She used meditation to block out all other distractions.  It was a tactic I could use if I had the time for two things: first, to practice my meditations and second to implement them in the instant they were needed.  She insisted with practice, I could call up the focus I needed even in the most pressing of circumstances, but I remained skeptical.  I would practice her meditations on my own though.  I didn’t think they could hurt, but she didn’t need to know about it.

After lunch, she taught me how to cast an illusion spell.  She could create the illusion of an entire person with her spell.  Using her spell, I could create the illusion of a box, about the size of a small cat. 

“The basic spell,” Kendra explained, “is the same for everyone.  You need to modify it for your needs.  However, what works for me, will not necessarily work for you.”

“I thought that if a spell worked for everyone, it just worked for everyone, and if it didn’t, then it just didn’t.”

“Well, that depends on the spell.” Kendra smiled at me, but it only made her appear more sinister.

“The person who wrote this spell only chose to share the backbone of the spell.  It is up to each person who uses it to tweak it to their own needs and skills.  I actually met a witch once who could create the illusion of a full city block.  Most amazing thing you have ever seen.  Of course, he used his skills to cheat unsuspecting tourists out of their cash.  That was before the flood.  Back when I was just a girl.”

She waited for me to say something, but I couldn’t think of anything nice to say about a witch who used his skills to cheat regular people out of their hard-earned money.  I forced a smile towards her.

“Listen to me,” she continued with a laugh.  “You’d think I was in my sixties the way I talk!  I sure feel like it sometimes, though.”

My day with Kendra slowly ebbed to an end.  I couldn’t wait for the ordeal to be over, and I very much hoped she would not be a part of my intense training schedule once Amy and I set that up.  I couldn’t imagine Kendra had anything to offer me.  On the other hand, people often say you should keep your friends close and your enemies closer.  If my suspicions about Kendra were right, then I should probably be trying to spend more time with her rather than less.  I would have to consider that when I had my day with Amy and my chance to put a say into my training.

I spent my seventh day with Garrett.  With his fading yellow aura, Garrett did not seem like an exciting prospect for a shadowing day, but I thought it would be a nice break to spend the day with a witch who had obviously survived so much after spending the day with the murky Kendra.  Garrett let me down at first.  Over breakfast, his conversation approached the same stimulating level as Mercy’s had.

After breakfast, we went out to the edge of the property, among the citrus trees.  We could make out the house from where we stood, but anyone in the house would have a hard time discerning what we were working on.

“Now comes the exciting part,” Garrett began.  I began to become more hopeful for the prospects of my day.

“What are we going to work on today?” I asked, trying to hold back my eagerness.

“Well, I know Amy wants to work with you on time traveling, but she really wants to focus on your ability to create portals in time and move a group with you.  She’ll want to figure out how long you can hold a portal open for and how many people you will be able to move through it.  There is another aspect to your skill that will not concern her as much, and it will be fairly useful to you, not to mention a whole load of fun.”

“Okay, you’ve got my attention.”

“I thought I would,” Garrett smiled.  I could tell today would be a fun reprieve from some of my other experiences over the past week.

“So what are you talking about?” I asked as we sat under the shade of the trees.

“Well, time travel is not just about time.  You are traveling through time and space.  Think about it.  When you first traveled back to that traumatic moment in your life, you didn’t have to be in that location in order to end up back there.  You didn’t just travel back in time, or you would have been at some different party in the 80s in the same apartment Stefanie followed you to.”

I nodded before he continued.

“So, it stands to reason you can use your gift to travel through space as well.  You can, in essence, teleport yourself from one end of the room to the next or from one tree branch to another.”

I had never thought about that fully, although it had occurred to me it would be convenient when I was trying to get out of Zach’s burning house.

“Okay, I’m with you so far, but how do I actually do it?”

“You have to think of time differently.  One way to do it, I would imagine, would be to simply send yourself to a different spot a few seconds away through time.  This is something that will take practice.  I doubt your time travel is down to the second yet.” Garrett winked at me and chuckled.  I realized neither of us had on watches, and I wondered how I could move seconds in time if I didn’t know exactly what time it was.

“Or,” he continued, “You could think of time as more than just those seconds ticking away.  If you think of time and space as threads intertwined on a loom, every time hits every place and vice versa at different points in the same fabric.  You are like the shuttle in the loom. 
You can jump from any connection in the threads to any other connection in the threads, except, unlike the shuttle, you have magic on your side.  You are not just limited to the new connections that are being made.  You are also the weaver’s hand, able to touch any previous connection.  Beyond that, you are the weaver’s mind, able to reach any future connection as well.”

I closed my eyes as Garrett explained all of this to me.  I could see the weaver’s shuttle passing back and forth as the fabric wove together.  I could see the individual connections all of those threads made and all of the connections the threads would ever make.  Time and space had never been described to me in such a way before, and it seemed so clear I wondered for a moment why time travel was such a rare gift among rare gifts.  I wondered why regular people, people who weren’t witches, didn’t just travel through time at will.  At the very least, a time machine did not seem very far-fetched.

“Wow.” I opened my eyes.  The shade of the trees was becoming more narrow and leaning away from us. 

“We’ll practice after lunch,” Garrett smiled gently.

“How long have we been sitting here?” I asked.

“A few hours.  When you really get something, it takes time for you to absorb it all.”

We ate lunch after everyone else.  We ate in silence again.  I couldn’t believe half of the day was already over.  I felt like a new person.  I felt like I could be in control of my time travel to a degree I would not have thought possible the day before.  I couldn’t wait to go back to the cover of the citrus trees to practice.  I had never been so excited about practicing magic.  I practically ran to the back of the property after Garrett finished his sandwich and water.

When we got out to the trees, Garrett simply sat back down and closed his eyes.

“What are you doing?” I asked in exasperation.  How could he teach me a new understanding of myself, of my gift, and then not teach me how to use it?  I didn’t get it.

“I’m giving you more time to absorb your learning.”  He didn’t even open his eyes.

“What?”

“Just sit back and think about it for a little while longer.”

“But I’m ready to use it now,” I insisted.

“Just a few more minutes.  I promise you will get to try it out today.”  He sat, leaning against a tree and absorbing the warmth of late August in Florida.  Actually, no one absorbs the warmth.  You brace yourself against it whenever you open a door.  You trudge through the stickiness of it whenever you have to walk somewhere without a breeze or the shade of a tree.  If you find shade, like we had here, you cling to it because you can feel the heat pressing in on you from all sides, waiting for you to step out of the small respite the shade provides.  By the time September hits, if the summer hasn’t been too bad, you can start enjoying the warmth of the sun again.  That continues through October and sometimes into November.