Hush (Witches & Warlocks Book 2) (14 page)

“Kill the bees.”

Wait. What?

“Kill the bees, but not the trees.”

Somehow, killing bees is way less intimidating than killing some random man under a bridge, but I still don’t know how to take a life. Hell, even if I knew how to do it, I’m not sure I could. I used to feel bad if I accidentally stepped on an ant on the sidewalk when I was a little kid.

“I don’t know how.” But as soon as I say it, I know that’s not really true. There’s a part of me, a part that used to be hidden deep down, that knows exactly how to do it. The part that wiggled to the surface while standing in an abandoned part of town with Luke.

“You must split your thoughts. Channel your familiar. You’ve done it before, with the lock and your arm.” I nod and blow breath through my mouth, getting ready to give this a try, and Daya touches my shoulder. “Don’t lose yourself, Zoe. You
must
maintain control or your dark magic will take over and you will be lost.” I have just enough time to be surprised at all the different kinds of magic I feel in her touch before she lets go.

So. Kill the bees but not the trees. I can do this. They’re just bees, right? Nasty little stinging insects that no one ever wants around anyway. Right? I walk into the orchard and the buzzing grows louder. There’s no time to think. If I let myself think, I’ll talk myself right out of this and turn around and tell Daya that I want to go home. Whatever
home
means. I mean, I really don’t have a home to go to anymore.

With a breath, I extend my arms and flex my fingers, waking up the flow of magic inside me. As usual, the tiger is there, just waiting for me to need her. She pops into existence in front of me.

“Hey you,” I say and smile. “You keep the trees safe, ok? I’m gonna …” For some reason, I don’t want to say it out loud. “I’m gonna do bad stuff.” I don’t know what I expected. Judgement I guess. As funny as it sounds, I expected the magical tiger that lives inside me to judge me. Thing is, I’d always thought of her as this royal figure, regal and proud, the harbinger of my light magic. But, I mean, she’s a predator. She’s got teeth and claws and she’s designed to use them. Does that make her bad? Maybe if she just went around killing for the sake of killing, leaving a trail of bodies that she doesn’t eat, laughing at the tears of the wounded, that’d make her bad, but that’s not what she does. She uses her teeth and claws, the tools she was born with, to survive. That doesn’t make her evil.

There’s got to be a way I can use my dark magic to … what? Maybe I can put them in stasis, kind of like the time-stop spell I used in the courtyard. Would Daya accept that? My light magic flares to life and the tiger begins to channel it, weaving protection spells around the trees. With a tight sigh through pursed lips I call up my dark magic and it lurches to life, flowing through me like some kind of drug. In this moment, I’m everything and I’m nothing and I’m more than I ever thought I could be and everything I ever knew I was.

It’s amazing.

I send my magic out to the bees, let it expand out away from me, just this wave of death and decay. The sky darkens and lightning crackles around my edges. The tiger roars and there’s a tug from deep inside as she calls on more of my magic to keep the trees from wilting.

I flex my hands and a pulse of energy washes out from me and the buzzing of the bees begins to subside. They drop from the hives and bounce on the ground, dead husks all dried out and shriveled up. I can feel the life draining from them and into me in these tiny little delicious drops of energy. I know I’d said I was gonna just put them into stasis, that I was going to try and freeze them and keep them alive, but this is so much better. I get no benefit from keeping them alive other than knowing I managed to walk a moral high ground.

To hell with that.

If I kill them, I get to feed on their energy.

“The trees! Zoe! The trees!” Daya’s voice seems far away and insignificant and she’s given me a great idea. If the tiny little bee souls taste so good, what would the energy from so many trees taste like? Good. It’d taste good. I expand my magic again and when the trees continue to droop and wilt, I can’t help but smile.

“Anime comedenti!” I scream the incantation and the rest of the bees shrivel up and drop to the ground. The trees sag and dry up and behind me, Daya gasps, a tiny little sound filled with exhaustion and maybe pain. I’m pulling on her life force, too. I don’t really care. I feel magnificent. The tiger is pacing from tree to tree, jumping up into the lowest limbs and she’s pulling on more and more of my light magic, trying to keep the trees alive, trying to do as I’ve asked her to do.

And then, through the trees, I see Celine. Her sweet face is pinched in worry, filled with the judgement I’d thought I’d get from the tiger. She’s shaking her head and holding her hands out towards me in a pleading gesture.

“Don’t lose yourself.” I hear her voice in my mind and there’s so much sadness and grief that it gives me pause. I don’t want to lose myself. I don’t want to let Celine down. I want to learn to control my dark magic, not be controlled by it.

With a great mental heave, I pull it all back towards me. It kind of sucks out of the trees and the grass and the ground and rockets back towards me in a black seething mass of ugliness. The tiger leaps to the ground and goes about reinvigorating the trees, sending life and light back towards them. Celine smiles and fades away.

“Well done.” Daya’s face is pale and sweat has gathered on her top lip and at her hairline. There are dark circles under her eyes and I realize in a wash of guilt and surprise that I did that to her, that I pulled at her energy just like I did the trees. And the bees? They’re all dead. Every last one of them. Not sleeping. Not in some kind of time-stop spell, but dead.

My legs quaver but stay strong enough to keep me upright as I follow Daya back to the ranch. She feeds me and lets me have another shower, this time without a time limit. When I get back to my room, Celine’s perched on the cot, her knobby knees tucked up under her chin.

“I almost lost it.”

“But you didn’t,” she says and it reminds me of Noah.

“I’m so tired.”

“Curl up and I’ll sing you to sleep.” She scoots to the end of the cot, making room for me to tuck myself into a tight little ball. “You’re not alone,” she says as she plays with the ends of my hair and starts singing a mounrful song about love and crows and seas that rage and burn while Bo and the other hollows echo her last words:

“You’re not alone,” they say, their voices stretching out in my head until I fall asleep.

Chapter Sixteen

This pattern goes on for days. Daya waking me, leading me down long hallways that open into empty rooms, tasking me with more and more awful things. Her voice scratches out orders and she berates me when I fail to do them well. Or hell. She berates me even if I do manage to do them well. She tears wounds in my flesh with her magic and wounds in my soul with her words, telling me terrible things about this world, terrible things about why I was created. I am nothing more than a tool designed by those who know more about the world than I do. A tool that’s forgotten and unwanted.

She degrades me as I try to heal myself, purposefully making me mad while I try to stay calm and use my light magic. She flings spells in my direction and forces me to block them and reflect them. We kill the rats that scurry through the halls with single words. We raise things into the light and kill them with the dark. I am a salve and I am a weapon.

I’m getting stronger, but Celine was right. This is not a happy place. She follows me from place to place and task to task, watching me. Her face is all the reminder I need to keep myself in check as I learn more and more about my dark magic.

Each night, I slink back into my room and write pages and pages in the notebook on the table, the cold metal of the chair slinking up my tailbone and into my heart. At first, I write about what I’m feeling. Blither on about being scared and not ready and about wanting to go home. Tears stain the page where I want my mom. The pen tears into the paper on the page where I wish I’d die. And then comes the pages of me wondering
why
. Why am I here? Why is she doing this to me? Why am I alone? Why me? Over and over and over until I stop caring about ‘why’.

Now, I just record the events of the day. Write down the spells I’ve learned and how I expect to use them. Sometimes, I write down conversations with the remnants. Sometimes I draw them. Mostly, I’m not scared any more. In fact, I think I’m becoming something to be scared of.

Celine watches me write each night, flitting around my room like any normal little girl. Sometimes I forget she’s dead, but that’s mostly because it doesn’t really seem to matter to her. When I do remember she’s dead, I mourn the person she could have been, had she been given the chance to grow. The world needs more energy like hers. More light like hers. More people like her. Genuine and sweet and ready to make everyone feel better.

“What did you do today?” she asks from her spot upside down on the cot, legs reaching up the wall.

I wrinkle my nose. “You don’t wanna know.” What I really mean is that I don’t wanna tell her.

“Yes I do.”

I just shake my head and Celine sits up and flips over onto her stomach, still managing to keep her legs up on the wall. “What did you kill?” she asks, widening her eyes, trying to look like it doesn’t bother her even though I know it does.

“Rabbits.”

Her face crumbles despite her best efforts to look brave. “Oh, ya?”

“But I brought them right back to life.”

Now she looks genuinely shocked. “You can do that?”

I was just as shocked when I learned it was possible. Daya’s been getting me to weave my light and dark magic together. I can feel the life force of every creature around me, pulsing with its own unique pattern. By tuning into the pattern, I can increase or decrease the amount of life force. Turn it down too low? Boom. Dead. Turn it up too high? You’ve got one spastic critter. Turn it down super low then bounce it right back up high again? Death becomes life. It makes me wonder if that little vampire, the one who stopped me in the hallway at Flannigan’s and asked me to make her human again was onto something.

“It’s not easy. I can’t always manage it.”

Celine doesn’t say anything for a long time and I’m afraid she’s disappointed in me. Afraid that someone as intrinsically good as her won’t want to be around someone like me, someone who walks the line between good and bad. I don’t want her to leave me. Her company keeps me sane. And I’m afraid, with nothing but Daya and the hollows to keep me company, that I might end up losing myself. The thought of ending up as a hollow … well … I stop thinking about that and suppress a shudder.

“What’s my brother like?” Celine has changed positions yet again, stretching out long on the cot.

I don’t even hesitate. Just say the first thing that comes to my mind. “He’s the kindest person I know.” Celine’s busy worrying a bit of my blanket between her fingers, but I see the smile that settles into her eyes. “He’s a lot like you. He’s done more for me than anyone - other than my parents. Well, the people who raised me. Who still count as my parents.”

“Is he very handsome?” she asks. She knows, by now, how conflicted I am about knowing the people who raised me aren’t my biological parents.

“He’s hot as hell.”

“Zoe!” Celine giggles and widens her eyes, a blush working its way across her cheeks.

“Well, he is.”

I can see that the conversation is making Celine happy, so I continue, painting the most vivid picture of her brother I can. I talk about his intelligence, his protectiveness, his desire to help me even though it put him in danger. I tell her how much respect I have for him, how good it feels to be around him, how much I laugh when we’re together.

Celine’s eyes are alight with this adorable embarrassed mischief and I stop talking and give her a questioning look. “What?”

“You love my brother!”

I just kind of stare at her for a second, dumbfounded. Do I love Noah? I’d never really taken the time to think about it.

“We’re just friends,” I say, not really sure what else to say.

Celine just rolls her eyes. “Suuuure.”

Do
I love Noah? I miss him like crazy. I respect him more than I’ve respected anyone since my dad. I feel better when I’m with him. In fact, I feel like he makes me a better person.

“See?” Celine springs off the bed. “You
do
love him.”

We chat and play and goof off while the sun fades away on the other side of the dingy window high up on my wall. The hollows gather and hang in the corner and say nasty things in our direction. I’ve discovered that if I ignore them, they eventually lose steam and go away, but it gets hard to ignore them sometimes, especially when they start to get mad and fling stuff around the room. I’ve considered trying to help them move on, but I’ve never been able to do that without having some kind of lifeform to feed off of and Daya and I have killed all the rats.

Bo slithers forward on his wobbling legs. “Why don’t you tell her how you died, CeeCee?”

“Shut up, Bo.” For the first time in a long time, the warm glow in Celine’s eyes dims.

“Why? You don’t want to tell her you’re dead because your little brother messed up?”

“It’s not his fault I died!” Celine’s eyes continue to darken and her hair stands out from her head like she’s made of static electricity.

Bo just cackles and waddles around her, pointing and jabbing and doing everything he can to upset her. I’ve never seen anything bother Celine. I would have thought she’s incorruptible, but now I’m busy worrying about the light remnant that went crazy at Windsor Manor, the one that ended up getting me all out whack and making me hurt Tony. Could that happen to Celine?

The rest of the hollows crowd in close and Celine just folds inwards, wrapping her arms tight around her body and scrunching her chin towards her chest, her shoulders pressing up towards her ears. I know that posture. I’ve lived that posture. I can’t stand the thought of Celine looking that way, of her feeling the things that would make her pull inwards like that.