Speak (Witches & Warlocks Book 1) (15 page)

“That doesn’t mean she deserves to die.”

“She’s hidden me from the truth. Not just the truth of the world, but the truth about me! I’ve been locked up inside myself forever and it’s been torture. I’ve wanted out but every time I tried it didn’t work because
if
I said something I said it wrong or weird. Do you know what it is to live constantly aware of all the things you’re
no
t? To second guess everything you say and even all the things you don’t say?” I drop my voice and speak through clenched teeth. “Do you know what it feels like to live totally in someone else’s shadow? To live on their whims? To care only about what makes them happy and nothing for what makes you happy?”

“No, Zoe, I don’t.”

“It’s hell! All my life I’ve only wanted to be normal and accepted and it turns out normal was a pipedream but maybe, just maybe, I could have been able to, I don’t know, talk to people! Not feel like a total pariah for my whole life! Except she” I spit the word and send another magical thrust at Becca, eliciting another gasp of pain, “hid me from myself. My life is empty because of her.”

All the times before tonight that my magic tried to make itself known, it felt like Noah’s. Warm and golden like sunshine and happiness. Right now, it’s swirling around inside me and it’s green and bruised. It doesn’t roll like Becca’s or shine like Noah’s, it’s spikes and it’s red and it’s venom and fire. It doesn’t give off light, it devours light, just like I’m about to devour her.

I rear back, gathering a great ball of energy that will suffocate and destroy and decimate and a smile smears itself across my face. I’m dark and it’s good. I’m mad and I have been for a long time and finally,
finally,
I get to let it out.

Becca gasps and twists to look up at me. “Zoe, please…” Her voice is as small as I’ve felt for my entire life and I can’t wait to extinguish it.

Noah’s eyes go wide and he points at me and screams: “Evigilabit!” A lance of golden light shoots from his fingertips and strikes me in the forehead. There’s a pop, another bubble of magic unlocking inside me, and the tiger roars awake. It feels like she jumps from my head, a thought come to life, and she lands on the floor in front of me.

She turns her massive blue eyes on me and swings her great head back and forth. No. she’s telling me no.

I’m confused. What does she mean ‘no?’ I’ve been mistreated my whole life and I’m about to get vengeance and she wants me to stop? She nuzzles her great head against my leg and calmness radiates up from her touch and I pull my thoughts out of Becca’s head if only just a bit. The relief on her face is nearly palpable. She sighs, and it speaks of pleasure, of the recession of agony.

I look down at my tiger and I feel this great swirling ball of energy inside me, so many colors and different kinds of movement. There’s gold and red and purple and green and a blue so serene I swoon. Crazy thoughts flit through my mind:

I am all things.

I am all kinds.

I am the beginning and the end.

I think my eyes are rolling up in my head, but I can’t be sure. The world is spinning and I can’t make sense of what I see. I’m falling.

Just before my head hits the floor, I see Noah racing to catch me, and just behind him is Luke, his eyes blazing a deep, blood red. They reach for me at the same time and there’s an explosion in my heart and then my head hits the floor with a resounding thud. First there’s stars. Then there’s darkness. Then there’s nothing.

Chapter 17

My dreams are like nightmares and truths all wrapped up into one. I am dark and I am light and I am right and I am wrong. I see both sides of the coin, or rather, all sides of the coin because there are as many different ways of seeing things as there are people in the world and besides, what you see is all a matter of perspective anyway.

I swim in and out of consciousness for what feels like days. My soul is in flux. I am a coin tossed in the air, flipping and spinning, light glinting off both sides. At this point, nothing about me is decided and I’m nothing but possibility. But when I fall to the ground I will be what I am. Heads or tails. Right or wrong. There’s no going back now.

That’s why, each time I surface, each time I feel my eyes fluttering open, each time I feel light warming my face and the touch of something cool on my forehead, I submerge myself back into the depths of my sub-conscious. I’d rather sleep away the rest of my days than open my eyes and face whatever it is I’m going to be when I wake.

But that can only last so long. After a while, my body needs nourishment and my bladder needs emptied and my eyes refuse to stay closed. I blink awake and find myself in my own bed, in my own bedroom, in my totally ordinary apartment. I guess somehow, after everything that happened, I expected to wake up and find myself in some crazy magical village, where people wear white robes and braid their hair and speak in hushed tones.

But I guess that’s just what happens in the movies.

I’ve got guests. Three of them. Becca, Luke, and Noah. They’re surrounding my bed, leaning in, their faces totally obscuring my view of the rest of my room. Someone’s holding my hand, someone else is stroking my hair, and someone else places a reassuring hand on my arm. They smile in unison as I focus.

“Hey,” Becca says in a long, drawn out, breathy whisper. “There you are.”

It’s Luke who’s holding my hand. He gives it a little squeeze. “We were starting to worry about you.”

Noah tucks one last strand of hair behind my ear and smiles. What the hell is this? Do they think I’ve forgotten? Did they try to cast another forget spell on me and don’t know that it didn’t work? ‘Cause I haven’t forgotten and if there was a spell, it totally misfired because I remember everything and none of these three people hovering over me are exactly my favorite person right now.

I scramble into a sitting position. “You three were trying to kill each other just last night, and now you’re all hanging out together all buddy buddy like?” I flick away Becca’s worried hand. “Nope. Not falling for it.” My head throbs and the world spins as I sit upright, but I ignore it. No way am I showing any weakness around these three.

“How long do you think you’ve been out?” That was Luke and when I look at him, all I can see are his eyes, burning a smoldering red as he raced towards me at a speed that wasn’t quite attainable by a normal person to catch me before I hit the floor.

And when he touched me …

… there was a …

… something happened to me.

“I don’t know,” I say, ignoring that strange feeling of forgetting something important. “How long
have
I been out?”

They each exchange glances and Noah touches my hand. There’s the ping of golden contact, that strange feeling I got the very first night I met him, that feeling I dismissed as me being strange and again, I’m drawn to that last moment before my head hit the floor. Noah reaching for me, his fingers grazing my arm as I went down…

… the tiger roared …

… and …

… what was it? A flash? An explosion?

My head’s swimming. I draw my knees up to my chest and rest my cheek on them. Becca sits on the edge of my bed, careful not to disrupt me and waits until I peek up at her. “You’ve been unconscious for a little over a week.”

Shock feels like nothing. Like everything goes on pause. Your heart, your lungs. The world itself just freezes. Then there’s a burst of adrenaline and everything goes on fire trying to catch up with itself. I know my mouth is hanging open and the world is starting to go all fuzzy again and I think I might just give in and never surface again. There’s too much confusion out here in the real world.

My trio of nurses flip into action. There’s water pressed to my lips and a cool compress against the back of my neck and soothing words and what the hell is going on? If anything, I refuse to fall back asleep simply so I can figure out what happened. What am I? Why are they suddenly working together?

My God. Did I dream it all?

I give into the ministrations and let them clean me, feed me, stroke my hair. When I grow tired, they let me sleep and I do so without a single dream. When I wake, it’s dark and I’m alone in my room. Careful not to rush things, I sit up and wait for the world to spin. When it doesn’t, I slide my feet off the bed and press them to the floor. Someone’s in the living room, watching TV. Maybe all three of them are in the living room, who knows? I stand, testing my balance and find that while I feel heavy with fatigue despite having slept for days, I’m not woozy anymore. I wander into the bathroom and splash water on my face.

The fact that Noah’s here means that I didn’t dream the stuff that happened to me. If I’d just kind of silently lost my mind, or gotten sick and had a string of bad dreams, it’d be Becca and Luke and
Carter
— not Noah. And let’s be honest, I’d be in the hospital. The fact that Noah’s here and I’m home after being unconscious for a week means that I have a very serious conversation waiting for me out in the living room.

Nothing I know about life is true.

Nothing I know about my best friend is true.

Nothing I know about my boyfriend is true.

Hell, I bet even Noah’s attraction to me all those nights ago at Flannigan’s was fake.

My entire existence is counterfeit, designed to keep me in line and fit me into the lie they’ve been trying to feed me.

I meet my eyes through the mirror, my blue upon blue eyes that match Noah’s. I have so many questions. As I think through them, my emotions flare from angry to confused to excited and I swear to you, my eyes shift color with the emotions. Red, to dark, and back to blue. There’s that pop from inside that I’ve come to recognize as my magic flaring to life and I hold up my hand.

A memory kind of unburies itself. A memory from the night I met Luke. I’d held up my hand just like this and golden energy had come out of nowhere, surrounding it. It happens again. As I think about it, energy coalesces around my hand. Except this time it mutates as it spins. Golden vapors and purple fog and sick green gas consumed by bright red fire. It’s a thunderstorm of possibility. The coin is still flipping.

I squelch the magic in my hand by making a tight fist and then letting it drop to my side. Whatever happened, I’m so very ready for answers. I pull my hair back away from my face and wander into the living room.

I expected to see Becca and Noah and Luke sitting on the couch watching TV, maybe eating some Chinese takeout, maybe drinking a beer, hell, maybe even playing some video games. I certainly didn’t expect to see them leaning over an open book on the dinner table, taking notes and arguing over what they found. The TV isn’t even on. The sound I heard that I thought was the TV is coming from the book. It’s whispering and calling out in a thousand different voices and languages and I think the sound is mostly in my head.

“Do you guys hear that?”

Apparently they had no idea that I’d come into the room. They each jump back, pens clattering to the table. Becca knocks over a glass and water spills and runs toward the book. The clearly very ancient book. Except instead of running into the cracked leather binding and leeching up into the old parchment pages, the water diverts around, missing the book entirely, and falls off the other side of the table in a steady stream.

Becca sighs and waves her hand over the table and the water evaporates and in that moment she looks ever so old. “Hear what, Zoe?”

“The whispering. The murmuring.” I take a few steps towards the table, but I don’t exactly feel like getting much closer than that.

Noah and Luke exchange a look before turning to me. “What’s it saying?” I can’t meet Luke’s eyes when he speaks, but I don’t know if that’s because I’m hurt by his betrayal or because I remember how they looked last night.

I wrap my arms around my waist and hope my tiger shows up soon. I might be too tired for this. “I don’t know. There are too many voices, and I think they’re all speaking in different languages.”

There’s another tight look exchanged between the three of them — my supposed friends gathered at the table — and then Becca flips the book shut. The voices go instantly quiet and I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding. The crazy thing is, now that the book’s closed, it doesn’t look old at all. It looks familiar. My mouth falls open when I realize I’m looking at my journal.

“What the hell is that?” I ask, pointing at my journal. Incredulity has my face all twisted and I don’t do much to hide what I’m feeling.

Becca purses her lips and studies me. “It’s your journal.”

“No,” I say, drawing out the word. “What the hell is it, really?”

Becca sighs and then kind of shrugs. “Whatever, we’re screwed, so I guess it can’t hurt if you know. It’s a Memenderat. A memory catcher. It lets me know your deepest secrets.” She says the last bit as if she were explaining something to a two year old, intentionally widening her eyes and just generally being a condescending bitch.

Whatever. I’m not taking the bait. “Well, why was it … whispering?” Whispering isn’t exactly the word I need, but it’ll have to do.

“Because you’re transitioning in the worst possible way.” Becca crosses her arms over her chest while I try to puzzle out what she just told me. “I wish Carter were here,” she says as she picks at her nails. “He’d know what to do about that.”

I look at the gathered trio. “Where is Carter?”

There’s another flicker of glances between them and anger starts to spin my stomach. At least it’s not worry. It’s almost a pleasant change of pace.

“Carter’s dead.” Becca doesn’t exactly look distraught but she doesn’t look relieved either. In fact, she just really looks pissed.

“How?”

“Maybe we should get you to sit down,” Noah’s standing and looking like he’s gonna try to pacify me and I’m so not in the mood. “I’m sure you’ve got tons of questions.”

“Oh, I have questions, and I’ve already asked one.” Who is this new Zoe who speaks what’s on her mind and rages and boils instead of simpers and doubts? “I want to know how Carter died.”