Vampires & Vinca (Hawthorn Witches Book 4) (5 page)

Chapter 4

Charlie brought me a lot of books to read and spells to practice. Kendra figured out pretty quickly what I was up to, and rolled her eyes in disdain that I would “stifle my heritage” in such a fashion.

But it wasn’t my heritage. I hadn’t been involved in this world at all until very recently, and I had no desire to dally there further.

When she started going through my reading material, and came across a book on werewolves, things went sour quickly.

“Werewolves?” She stopped, holding the book in both hands as she looked up at me. “You’ve been in contact with werewolves?”

I stared at her, trying to think of a way I could answer the question while skirting my relationship with Vince, but I failed to find one. Martha, now permanently a cat, had taken to sitting near me whenever I was around, and she gave a high-pitched meow.

When I didn’t answer, Kendra turned and looked at Charlie, who promptly held up both hands before walking away. Then she directed her gaze at Lyssa, who was focusing a little too intently on the potted rose bushes she was cutting back for the winter.

“Lyssa?” Kendra asked. “Werewolves?”

“She has a boyfriend,” Lyssa said quietly. I closed my eyes, cursing her. “They were together before he was cursed.”

Kendra looked back at me with narrowed eyes.

“Before I was cursed, too, before we go crazy with the superstition,” I added. “Though that was some bad timing, now that I look back…”

“Break it off,” she said coolly, setting the book down. She walked away in the direction that Charlie had gone, her long skirt sweeping the path behind her as she went.

“Not breaking it off!” I called after her.

Thankfully, she didn’t stop to fight me.

Left alone, I wanted to go back to my reading. Unfortunately, Lyssa wasn’t done talking.

“She can help you make it better,” she said. “Not back to normal, Annie, but nothing is ever going back to normal. She can help you make it as good as it will ever get, though.”

“Thanks,” I said dismissively. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

Lyssa sighed in frustration, and looked up at me. I kept my eyes carefully focused on my book.

“I am trying here,” she said. “I am really pissed at you for lying about the demon thing, because I think it’s pretty evident that it’s caused a lot of trouble for both of us. And I’m your sister. That was something you should have told me.”

“And the fact that you think I
caused
any of this is exactly why I didn’t tell you!” I snapped at her. “What would you have done different, Lyssa? If I had told you, would you have bailed right off the bat and gone away with Josh and Rosie? Is that what you would have done as my
sister
?”

I saw her lip curl a little. “No, I wouldn’t have done anything different. But it’s the principle. And that’s fine. If you think you can handle it and you don’t need to tell anyone anything, then that’s fine. But there’s a lot that can go wrong out there, and you’re going to wish you had a friend when it does. But you don’t need anyone. Tell me how that works out for you.”

I gave her a steely glare. “I won’t need to. The answer to magic isn’t more magic, but if you’re going to shove it down my throat, the only way I want to use it is to make things go back the way they were. We were all a lot happier before.”

I stewed the rest of the day, and even through my computer science class with Vince.

He came back to my place after. When he offered to stay the night, he seemed a little disappointed when I declined. I didn’t think it was a good idea to make a habit of it, and things ended on a cold note between us when he left.

I left for my astronomy lab in a bad mood. Vince and I shared a class on Fridays, but we generally didn’t have time to socialize. I was sure Kendra would steal my weekend, which meant we were leaving things off-center until Tuesday.

When I set my bag on my desk and plopped down into my chair, I didn’t realize how much of my mood was showing on my face.

“Rough day, Hawthorn?”

I looked up to see Tristan, the TA who led the lab hours, standing in front of my desk.

“Huh,” I responded. “Yeah, rough day.”

“Not related to the class assignment, I hope?” he asked with a charming smile.

“No.”

“I like your necklace,” he said with a wink.

I nodded, and felt a little smile slip onto my face. He had a habit of complimenting people when they looked like they needed it, so I wasn’t sure how genuine the sentiment was. I appreciated it all the same.

“Thanks,” I said.

The other students started filing in, and he went back to the front of the room. The assignment that day was to go out and set a stake in the field in front of the planetarium. The goal was to get the angle of the shadow to point directly at a guide post the professor had set up earlier on the winter solstice; he had also set up a guide post to show the correct angle at the summer solstice. The closest three students would get an A for the semester.

We spent the hour doing calculations and trying to determine where the sun would be on the horizon at the solstice. While other students formed small groups, I worked alone. I wasn’t in a mood to deal with anyone else, so I quietly did my work and wrote down some figures on the tilt of Earth’s axis. In the last ten minutes we went out to set our stakes.

I used my protractor and a yard stick to try and gauge about where I thought my stake should go, and luckily, it appeared to be right in the middle of a forest of other stakes set by students with lab earlier in the week. If I was wrong, so was most of the class.

Tristan had just finished saying good bye to another student when I picked my spot and set my stake, hammer poised.

“That’s your guess?” he asked me.

I stopped, looking up at him. There were still four other students on the sidewalk nearby, second-guessing their answer and re-checking the angle. Tristan was stretching his neck in an odd fashion, craning it to the right, and it took me a minute to get what was happening.

He was nodding with his chin, nearly rubbing his ear on his shoulder like he had an itch, but he kept staring at me.

I picked up my stake and moved it just a little further to the right. He nodded again, so I kept inching it, and then he wordlessly held a hand up to stop me and stood straight.

I nearly laughed, but settled for a quiet grin as I hammered the stake in, then the last group of students came after me and did the same. I busied myself by pretending to sort papers in my notebook until the last student left, and was a little dismayed when Tristan turned to go, too.

“Hey!” I called after him, running to catch up. He was going toward the west side of campus, away from where I lived, but I couldn’t let the interaction go without some sort of closure.

He stopped, turning to face me. “Hawthorn?”

“Annie,” I said. “You didn’t have to do that. I’m not a cheater, and I’m making an A already.”

He smiled, tilting his head a little. “Oh, no worries. There’s nothing in the rules that says you can’t ask me. I’m here to educate, and I might still be wrong. I’ve done this quite a few years now, but I could still be wrong.”

I shook my head, still smiling at how ridiculous he had looked with his head craned to the side. He had long brown hair, and it had a nice curl to it, but one side fell to the other making it look like a strange wig when he held his head at such an angle. I didn’t know what to say.

“Well, you were having a bad day,” he said cheerfully. “I hope it gets better. See you tomorrow in class?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, sounds good. Thanks again.”

We went our separate ways, but I couldn’t help but think about Tristan as I walked. He was a nice guy, and a normal guy, and his wild hair never ceased to make me smile. It was really nice of him to go out of his way like he did when he saw someone looking down. He was going to be an excellent professor someday.

I didn’t even know if that was a career goal for him, but I thought it all the same.

When I got home, I called Vince to invite him back to my place. We had already spent the night together a few times without letting temptation get the better of us, so I guess I didn’t see the harm. It didn’t even bother me that Blake answered his phone for him, because he was on within moments and at my door in less than thirty minutes.

I locked the door to the greenhouse, because my life wasn’t any of Kendra’s business. We ordered a pizza, stayed up too late, and when things got a little hotter than they usually did, it almost made it better to think that Kendra would disapprove of what I was doing.

Vince woke me up early the next morning to say goodbye, giving me a longer and more passionate kiss than was probably wise considering that I hadn’t brushed my teeth yet. When I finally dragged myself out of bed, I leapt in surprise when I walked out to find Charlie sitting at my breakfast table.

He kept it simple this time, with just tea and a bagel.

“Lyssa and Gates are trying very hard to make this work,” he said with a neutral expression. “Even Kendra is trying to make this work, and she isn’t someone who likes group activities. And then there’s you, going out of your way to get in bed with the enemy.”

“The enemy is vampires,” I said. “Not werewolves. I don’t care if Kendra has screwed up apparently every relationship she’s ever had, because they’re my friends. You should watch your back with a track record like hers, Charlie. And if I start getting along with Kendra, I may not be so willing to help you behind her back, so there’s that, too.”

“Noted,” he said. “As it happens, we had a fight yesterday over Vince, and she felt guilty after, so today she’s in Stonefall trying to get me things for my spell.”

“You don’t need me anymore?” I asked, suddenly worried that he was going back on his offer to help me learn the spells I wanted to learn.

“On the contrary,” he said. “We need to work while the cat’s away.”

He snapped his fingers and we were in the Other Side, sitting in the library-like study room he usually brought me to. It had been a while since we had hung out there, and I was surprised to see that the overcast skies and drizzling rain were absent from the atmosphere.

“What are we after this time?” I asked.

Charlie’s smile broadened. Not long ago I would have balked at the strange things he wanted me to collect for him.

“I need something very old,” he said. “And I need you to steal it.”

Chapter 5

I cocked an eyebrow. Thievery had never been on the request list before.

“You need me to
steal
it?” I asked, just in case I had missed his real meaning. “Why?”

“Human souls are complicated, and I’ve never found one that’s entirely honest,” he said. “I need you to break into the geology building on campus and steal a piece of gneiss. It’s more than four billion years old.”

“A piece of what?” I asked. “Is it valuable?”

“It’s very valuable to me,” Charlie said. “But no, you likely wouldn’t even be able to sell it. It’s a common rock.”

“And you need me to risk a criminal record for it.”

“I would intervene before that ever happened, Thorn,” he said with another measured smile. “And for your trouble, I’ve managed to dig up some old journals Stark left in my position. One of them contains sketch work he never completed on stealing a witch’s magical powers. He couldn’t get it to work completely, but you might give it a go if you ever want to be a mere mortal again.”

And that was how I found myself standing outside the south end of the geology building at two in the morning, holding a crow bar and waiting for Charlie’s word on when campus security had moved far enough away.

He’d developed the plan himself, and I had repeated it back to him three times because he couldn’t come with me—I had to steal it myself. I knew where I was going and where the rock was kept. He assured me it was labeled, because I had worried I wouldn’t know one rock from another if they were all in a box together.

He appeared at my side and whispered,
“Now!”

I jammed the crowbar between the double doors and tried to force them, but nothing happened. The alarm didn’t even sound, and with Charlie standing next to me saying I needed to move faster, I started to sweat bullets.

“Come on, Thorn!” he said. “You only have ten minutes until they swing back this way!”

I tried again, fixing my angle and jamming the crowbar in next to the locking mechanism. The doors didn’t budge.

The alarm went off.

Cursing in unison with Charlie, I pulled back the crowbar and tried to smash in the window, but the bar bounced back at me. Taking a deep breath, I smashed my fist down on it in frustration, and the window exploded inward in a million shards.

I froze. Charlie froze.

Then I hoisted myself through the window and ran like mad down the hall and up the stairs to the office he had told me about. The glass on that door gave much more easily, and I was inside the filing cabinet, fumbling with the flashlight as I dug through bagged samples of rocks.

Fluorite… quartz… halite… copper… feldspar… gneiss!

I grabbed the bag and made a mad dash back for the stairs, but someone was already there. I skidded to a stop and turned to run the other direction. There was a set of stairs at the opposite end of the building.

I ran as fast as I could and took the stairs three at a time. When I tripped at the last five feet, I went flat onto the tile floor below and landed broad. The air rushed out of my lungs and my palms and stomach burned as I tasted blood in my mouth, but I knew Charlie could heal me.

And if he hadn’t intervened yet, it meant I wasn’t caught.

I got back to my feet and felt my knee give a sickening crunch as I pushed through a fire door and out into the night. I saw Charlie standing in front of me, but then he disappeared.

“Anise Star Hawthorn.”

The words came from behind me, and they froze my blood in my veins. The person who had confronted me before wasn’t campus security.

My knee wasn’t throbbing anymore, and I silently thanked Charlie for at least doing that much before he had run off. I turned to face whatever was behind me.

He was much more normal looking than I had anticipated, with short, light hair and a tall, thin build. But his eyes flashed a strange, red glow, and when I saw campus security zoom past us on the right, I knew we had become invisible to the outside world.

“My name is Samuel Geiger,” he said. “I am here to confront you for the crimes your family has committed against the Luthor Coven.”