Succession of Witches (8 page)

Cassie got to work close to an hour before her shift on Friday afternoon, feeling on edge. She and Sam were supposed to start training today, whatever that meant, and then she had to get him to agree to something he wasn’t going to like at all.

After Khalil finished serving a customer, he turned to her and grinned.
“Ready to start training? Sam’s in the back, but be careful; that whip of his looks pretty sharp.”

It took concentrated effort to keep her expression frozen. “You are making that up.”

“Yes, but I had you for a second there.”

“No you didn’t,” she muttered as she walked past him to the back.

“Diiiiiiid,” he crooned, turning to another customer. “Hi, what can I get for you?”

When Cassie entered the break room, she saw that the plain metal table in the center of the room now featured three candles: one black, one red, and one white. They were large, almost the length of her forearm. There was also a flower pot filled with dirt, but it seemed to be missing a plant.

“I wasn’t sure you’d actually come,” said Sam, wiping his hands on a hand towel over by the sink. Apparently he had just been doing something with the dirt. “Ready to learn more about magic?”

“Sure. Who’s afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” said Cassie, stepping forward to put her palms on the table. She wasn’t even sure why she said it; it just came into her head.

He laughed nervously, taking up a position across the table from her. “Before we start, I…I have something for you. ”

Cassie raised an eyebrow.
A present from Sam? This could be ugly. “It’s not a rat for a potion or something, is it?”

He pulled a jewelry box out from behind his back. Cassie barely suppressed a gasp as he flipped open the lid with his index finger, revealing a pair of beautiful earrings. They were large, almost the size of one of her fingernails, and seemed to contain shimmering hints of every possible color. As she looked at them, they seemed to change color from light blue to pink, then back again.

“Take them,” he said softly.

Cassie licked her lips. This
, she really hadn’t expected. “Sam, they’re really beautiful, but I can’t…I can’t accept such a nice—”

“Shut up and take them,” he said a hint of a smile playing on his lips.

She obeyed, cradling the box in her hands, still not quite sure she believed what she was seeing. “Why?” she finally asked, looking up at him.

He averted his eyes, and put his hands in his pockets. “If you put them on, I won’t be able to read your mind. I thought they would make you feel more comfortable with…with our situation. They should stop you from receiving my thoughts by accident too.”

Cassie’s eyes widened. Having her thoughts be guaranteed private again, truly private, was like a dream come true, but it still seemed so very unlike him.

“Ser came up with this, didn’t he?”

His face colored slightly. “Why does no one ever believe this was my idea?”

“This is for real, right?” she said, running her pinkie finger over the creamy surface of one of the precious stones. “You’re not just saying that you won’t be able to read my mind when you really can, right? Because it’s not like I have any way of knowing whether they work or not.”

He scowled. “Do you honestly think I would lie about this?”

“Uh, you’ve lied to me before about reading my mind. You’ve lied to me about a lot of things, actually.”

“It’s the truth,” he muttered. “I spent an hour slaving over a hot cauldron Wednesday night to make them. If you don’t believe me, ask Serenus.”

Satisfied that he probably wasn’t lying, Cassie quickly took out her small silver hoops to put on the enchanted earrings. She stopped with one of them halfway to her ear. “Um, you didn’t put any other spells on them, did you?”

“Yeah, one to make you stop asking annoying questions,” he snapped, turning his back to her. He began arranging the candles, moving them so they were more evenly dispersed on the table. “No, I didn’t. Now put them on and let’s get started.”

Cassie did put them on, noting that the
regular buzzing sensation between her shoulder blades intensified briefly when she did so. Well, clearly they were enchanted with something, at the very least.

Sam motioned for her to sit down at the table, which she did. He sat across from her,
then pointed to the white candle.

“Drakan,” he whispered, and a flame sputtered to life. “Did you feel that at all?”

Cassie blinked. “No. Was I supposed to?”

Sam raised his palm to his forehead and sighed.
“Of course, the earrings. You actually have to take them off for this, otherwise our mental connection is too muddled.”

As she took them off, Cassie voiced a question that had been on her mind for some time. “You always say a word before you do any kind of magic, even if you’re just mouthing it; do you have to do that to use magic?”

“Yes. I’m Wordlocked.”

Cassie plunked the earrings down on the table. “What does that mean?”

“It means I’m cursed so that I can’t perform any magic without authorizing it with a word first. I have been from birth.”

Cassie processed that for a moment. “That’s for your own protection, right?”

“And everyone else’s. You know how when someone tells you not to think of the word ‘Elephant,’ suddenly all you can think of is elephants?”

She nodded.

“Well for me, if my magic were completely thought-activated, it would be  ‘try not to think about cursing everyone in the room.’ Constantly.”

She leaned back in the metal chair, thinking. “I get it. So by having you need to say a specific
word, that makes it so that you can only use magic when you mean to. Are all demons like that?”

“A lot are, I don’t know about all.”

“So the words themselves aren’t really spells, right? They don’t mean anything…they’re just like…a password to unlock the real spell.”

“Exactly, and everyone has their own. My mother h
elped me pick out a set of words for different kinds of spells from the time I learned to talk,” he said. Something flickered over his face and he looked down; Cassie wondered if he felt like he’d shared too much.

“Anyway, let’s try again. Drakan,” he said, pointing to the black candle.

Cassie squinted; she might have felt a prickle of energy in her back, but she may have just imagined it because she thought she was supposed to feel something. “I don’t know if I feel it or not,” she confessed. “If I feel anything, it’s slight.”

“Okay. To be honest, I didn’t really expect you to feel that. Let’s try something else. May I tap in?”

He extended his hand to her, which Cassie looked at. It would be the first time they’d shared magic since London. “O-okay,” she said, taking his hand. There was a sudden warmth, her back prickled, and then it was over. He hadn’t taken very much at all, leaving her relieved.

“Okay. How about now?” said Sam, pointing to the last candle and igniting it, mouthing his code word. Cassie felt a subtle tug in her stomach.

“Okay, that I felt,” she said. “It was like I felt a pull as soon as the candle lit.”

“So you can feel it when I use your magic. Let’s try something else,” he said, shifting the flower pot over so it was between them on the table. “Hollis,” he whispered, holding the sides of the pot with his hands.
“And now?”

Cassie watched in awe as a tiny tendril of green shot up through the dirt, budding into a purple blossom in a matter of seconds. The flower was growing normally, but thous
ands of times faster than usual.

“This is something I could never do by myself,” he said quietly as she watched the head of the flower pivot towards the beam of sunlight coming in through the window. “It takes white magic to do this.”

“I…” Cassie started, waiting to feel a tug in her stomach, an itch in her shoulder blades, anything. “I can’t feel it at all.”

Sam’s eyes widened.
“Really? That’s strange. I thought if you would be conscious of anything….” He looked down at the flower and pulled his hand away, but it was too late. The flower started to blacken, covered with a layer of soot. A moment later, the blossom dropped to the dirt.

They both sat in silence for a moment. “Sorry, looks like I ran out of white magic,” he muttered.

She knitted her brow. “Hey, if you can’t do white magic, why do you even have a code word for making a plant grow?”

Sam slid the flower pot over to the side of the table, not meeting her eyes. “That’s a word to make anything grow.
Including a tumor.”

“Oh,” she said. She didn’t really want to know if he had much cause to use that one. “What’s next?”

He steepled his fingers and rested his chin on them, thinking. “I was planning on trying different things with white magic and having you rate how strongly you felt them on a scale of one to ten, but if you can’t feel it when I use white magic at all…” he trailed off. “I don’t know. I’m confused, honestly.”

“You want to stop for today?”

“Maybe we should,” he said, standing up. He looked down at her and smiled, and her stomach did a little flip flop that she briefly hated herself for. “Nothing with you ever goes as planned. I’ll clean up here, get in the front and help Khalil.”

“Uh, actually, before I do that,” said Cassie, putting
in her new earrings quickly. “I have a favor to ask you.”

“What?” said Sam, putting out the candles by pinching the flame with his
fingertips.

“Remember that boy I told you about, Ethan? Well, his master is going to be away this weekend, so I was thinking it would be a good time to rescue him.”

Sam stopped what he was doing with the candles and met her eyes. It took an effort of will to continue meeting his gaze; she had a powerful urge to look down at her shoes. “Cassie. You’re talking about stealing another demon’s familiar.”

“Not really. He’s 11 years
old, he shouldn’t even be a familiar.”

“That doesn’t matter in court. You know I have that blood status hearing coming up in a few months. I can’t be running around stealing people’s property.”

“He was kidnapped from his parents, Sam. They think he’s dead, and if we don’t do it this weekend we may not get another chance—”

“Look,
I understand how you feel, but—”

“Do you?” she snapped.

Jay picked that particular moment to swing open the door to the break room. “Did training start?” he asked brightly, then took a step back when he got a look at Sam’s expression. “Um, I can leave if you want.”

Sam completely ignored the brown-haired teen. “We’re not rescuing him this weekend. Maybe if the blood status hearing goes well, I’ll consider negotiating with his master to get him released, but I just can’t take that kind of risk right now.”

“Oh, that kid,” said Jay, hands behind his head. “Did he get up to level 99 in BHM yet?”

Cassie balled her hands into fists. This was too important for him to just shut her down without even considering it. “We sat through a lot of familiar-snatching hearings at court, it seems like it’s a pretty normal thing. Maybe this is what you need to do to prove you’re just one of the guys.”

“I love the way you’ve been to court once and now you’re the expert,” he muttered, turning to pace away from her. “Cassie, they’re looking for anything they can use to pin on me. I don’t need this now.”

“It’s not that big a deal
—”

He turned and slammed his hands down on the table, making the candles shake in their holders and startling both her and Jay. “Do you know what they’re going to do to me if they decide I’m a full demon?”

Cassie blinked; she honestly hadn’t thought about it.

He glared at her. “A group of them will bind me,
then they’ll lock me up for the rest of my life. Either that, or they’ll curse me to the Realm, and I’ll never be able to come back. My life will be over.”

Cassie crossed her arms, suddenly feeling cold. “That won’t happen.”

“Yeah? Easy for you to say,” he sneered, turning back towards the candles. “We’re not rescuing him and that’s final, so drop it.”

An icy rage came over Cassie. “
You just don’t get it, do you? They’re the ones who are scared.”

He kept his eyes on the red candle and didn’t respond. Cassie continued.

“You’re one of the top demons, and they need you in case the Eastern Court decides it wants to have another stupid war. They also need you to train me, because they need a strong witch really badly. They’re terrified because you don’t have to follow all their stupid rules, and everyone can see it but you!”

Sam didn’t acknowledge her for a moment. When he fixed his eyes on her, she took an involuntary step back. He looked perfectly calm; that was actually a bad sign. He tended to get pretty quiet, just before getting really, really angry.

“You…” he started, then bit his lip, as though stopping himself from whatever he was going to call her. Cassie glared at him, defiant: she was right about this. She had to be.