Embrace (23 page)

He didn’t look at all happy to owe Isaac anything.

“I don’t want these powers,” he repeated. “They scare the shit out of me. I’m afraid of what I might do. Next time, there won’t be anyone there to stop me.”

Kevin’s pain rolled off of him to me. I ached with him. “Do you mean it? You don’t want them?”

He nodded.

“Then promise me you won’t use them until you’re ready and properly trained.”

Kevin snorted. “Like I’ll be able to keep that promise.” Yet something in my expression made him sit a little straighter. “I’m sorry Madison, but when it happens, I don’t have any rational thoughts. I’m not going to stop to say, ‘Hey, I promised Madison I wouldn’t use my powers
.
’ I couldn’t even stop myself from trying to kill you.”

That was definitely something he was going to keep throwing out there. “I knew you weren’t doing it on purpose.”

The look in Kevin’s eyes made me recoil. “That doesn’t make what I did any better.”

Josh must not have told him. “Kevin, knowing about your powers, using them, means that you have embraced them, whether you want them or not. That makes your promise binding.”

I told Kevin what had happened when I’d promised not to use my powers until I was shown how. I told him about the sting that had followed when I’d almost broken that promise, and how my spell had fizzled and failed.

“If you mean it,” I said, “if you don’t want the burden of these powers, then promise me you won’t use them until you’re ready and properly trained, or unless your life depends on it.” After what I had just been through, I felt he had to have a get-out-of-your-promise-free clause. “If you change your mind, if you feel you are ready to embrace them again, then you have Josh and me to help you. You have
my
promise on that.”

Silence blanketed the room as Kevin considered what I was saying. He leaned forward and kissed my cheek. “I promise.”

When he stood to leave, it was as if a part of me was leaving with him. “Do you have to go?”

“Yeah, my flight’s in a couple of hours. I really should have been on my way to the airport, but I promised you I wouldn’t leave until we talked.” Kevin raised a hand in a half-wave. He made it to the door before he turned to face me one last time. “I kept that promise because I wanted to. Not because I felt compelled to. I’ll call you when I get home.”

I lay back down and closed my eyes when I heard Kevin’s car door slam shut.

“That was a brave thing you did.”

I opened one eye to find Isaac leaning on the doorframe. He looked exceptionally sexy standing there. His hair, which was usually spiked, was tousled as if he’d run a towel over it after his morning shower and nothing more. He wore a loose-fitted, long-sleeved shirt and black jeans.

“You heard?” I asked.

“Sorry,” he said, obviously feigning remorse. “I couldn’t help myself.”

The spell Isaac had cast over my father must have been a strong one. So far he’d let two boys upstairs before I was dressed. Part of me wanted to be mad at Isaac for eavesdropping on my conversation with Kevin, but another part of me knew I would have done the same thing if Isaac were in his bedroom with an ex-girlfriend.

“Do you think he’ll be okay?” I asked.

Isaac came and sat down on the bed next to me. “Yeah. He’ll be fine.”

I wasn’t so sure discussing Kevin with Isaac was the best idea. I knew what I’d seen coming from them when we’d been connected. If their emotions had flowed into me along with their powers, my emotions would have flowed into them. I loved them both. Not something easily explained to the guy you’re hoping to get to know better.

I changed the subject instead.

“How did Emma become so strong?”

“She made a deal for a taste of power. My guess is she made it with a demon, so her problems have just begun. Whatever she was given, it wasn’t enough. She wanted more. Like Kevin said, dark magic is seductive. Emma went looking for more, and she found it in the lady who used to own my house.”

“Mrs. Lawson?”

“It makes sense, doesn’t it, that power ran through the veins of the family who built the house. Just look at my room.”

Like Isaac had said, he couldn’t have designed his room better if he’d tried. “It’s the perfect place to practice magic,” I said.

Isaac nodded. “My parents were sold on the house as soon as they saw it. Mrs. Lawson’s magic was good; we could feel that much. Her health declined quickly, didn’t it?”

“Yeah.” I remember my dad being surprised at how quickly her mind had gone.

“That happens when your powers are slowly siphoned from you.”

I cocked my head to the side. “People can siphon powers from each other?”

And here I thought having powers would make a person close to invincible.

“It’s not a good thing, but I’ll get to that. After Josh robbed Emma of the powers she had—”

“He what?” I blurted. “Isn’t that bad? I mean, Emma was bad, why would he want her powers?”

Isaac held up a hand as if to say,
Calm down
. “He did a spell that takes what isn’t rightfully hers. Her powers didn’t flow into him, though. The spell isn’t like the one she used on Mrs. Lawson. Once I knew you were okay and Emma could no longer cast any spells, I asked her a few questions.”

“And she answered them?” You can bet your last dollar that if someone had asked me about something I shouldn’t have been doing, I would have lied my ass off.

“I used a little persuasion.”

“Oh.” I wished I could have seen Emma’s expression when she’d woken up to find that her powers were gone and someone had put her under a spell. I bet it wiped the smug smile she’d had the last time I’d seen her right off her face.

“Emma realized she was killing Mrs. Lawson, she saw how her health was deteriorating, but she didn’t care. Each time she took a little more of Mrs. Lawson’s powers, the stronger she felt. The final phase of the spell required a sacrifice. Remember the rabbit we found the night we met?”

“The dead one?” I asked, but it really wasn’t a question. I’ll never forget the sight of that poor animal lying in a pool of its own blood.

“Yeah, Emma went just about as dark as you can go. Not only did she make the deal, she stole powers from another witch, killed, and cast with the intent to harm others.”

One of the articles I had read when I’d first suspected Kaylee might have been cursed talked about the responsibility that came with the gift of magic. It talked about how a witch’s actions were what made her good or evil. At the time, it had seemed more like common sense than anything else. The whole
Do unto others as you’d have done unto yourself
thing. I hadn’t stopped to consider just how ruthless people can be.

“I still don’t understand why taking Mrs. Lawson’s powers killed her.”

“Mrs. Lawson was a natural witch; her powers came from within her, and they were connected to her life force. She wouldn’t have been able to survive without them.”

“And you think Emma knew she was killing her?” I asked. I already knew the answer, given that I’d witnessed how ruthless Emma had become, yet it still shocked me.

“She admitted it when I questioned her.”

“And the doctors wouldn’t have known what was happening to Mrs. Lawson.” What an awful way to die. “Is Emma dead, now that Josh took her powers?”

Isaac shook his head. “She was working on borrowed powers, so taking them from her won’t kill her.”

“So she just gets to walk away, even after murdering Mrs. Lawson and trying to kill me?” I’m not normally an eye-for-an-eye-type person, but that was totally unfair.

“She’s getting what’s coming to her,” Isaac said. “She woke up while Josh was draining her powers. She tried to fight him, but I’d bound her before he started. She couldn’t move.” I’d been bound by Isaac before; when he didn’t want you to move, you didn’t move. “But her struggling to hang onto her powers while Josh was casting the spell caused something inside of her to snap. It turned the spells she cast back on her threefold. All the mean things she did to others are coming back on her.”

I pictured Kaylee screaming for me to get the spiders that hadn’t been there off of her and how terrified she’d been of demons that hadn’t existed. Emma had killed Mrs. Lawson, and who knows what else she did. She was in for a rough time if her spells were going to come back three times as badly as the ones she’d cast on others. I couldn’t bring myself to feel sorry for her.

“We dropped Emma off at the hospital’s front entrance before we brought you home.”

I pictured Emma propped against the door to the hospital, a sign taped to her chest that read,
Psycho Bitch
. It almost made me laugh.

“What about Paige?”

“She was less resistant. After seeing what Emma was capable of, she didn’t want to have any powers. She wanted to go back to being who she was before she became friends with Emma.”

I was less angry with Paige, mainly because I’d been able to sense her remorse and fear back in the classroom. The things she had done were harmless pranks, not life-threatening acts of evil.

“What if she tells someone? Won’t we be in danger of being exposed?”

A sly smile pulled the corner of Isaac’s lips up. “You’re underestimating my powers. She’s bound not to speak of it.”

“I’ve been wondering, how did you become so strong?”

Sure, his parents had been teaching him spells since he’d been small, but so had Josh’s, and Josh could only do a fraction of the spells Isaac had already mastered. And maybe having two parents with magic coursing through their veins gave a person an edge over others, an instant power boost, but Isaac’s abilities were off-the-chart superb. He’d healed the bones in my wrist when I’d fallen off the stepstool and kept me from dying at the school. He’d ghosted us through a semi and beamed me from one spot in my room to another.

His hand went to his chest, touching the charm he wore on a silver chain. The one his grandfather had given him. “He had cancer, and treatments were only making him sicker. One day, he stopped going and moved in with us. Doctors gave him six months, but he lived with us for six years.”

“Did he teach you how to heal?”

Isaac shook his head. “Healing takes years to master. He did teach me things like how to teleport an object from one place to another and how to fix a flat.”

I smiled, thinking I wouldn’t mind learning either of those tricks myself. “If your grandfather could heal, why didn’t he heal himself?”

“He couldn’t. I’m not sure if the cancer was spread too far or if he just didn’t know how.”

I nodded, waiting for Isaac to go on.

“One day he woke up and knew he didn’t have long. He said he could feel his life force draining from him. He didn’t want my last memory of him to be him lying on his deathbed waiting to take his last breath. He willed his powers to me.”

I did my best not to let my eyebrows shoot upward or my mouth drop open in shock, but I was pretty sure Isaac heard my sudden intake of air. “He gave you his powers?”

“Yeah.” For the first time ever, Isaac actually looked like a small boy caught with his hand in the cookie jar before dinner. “He said he couldn’t stand the thought of his powers dying with him. He passed away the next day, and my parents were stuck with a twelve-year-old who could do spells they’d never dreamed of.”

“Were they mad?”

“Not really.” He paused. “Though I think they would have appreciated a heads-up. Time to prepare.”

“You mean time to make sure you promised not to misuse you newfound powers.”

“Exactly.” His brown eyes met mine. “I’ve never told anyone that before.”

“Mum’s the word.” I made the gesture of locking my lips with an invisible key. How Isaac’s powers had grown to be what they were was really none of my business, and keeping his secret was the least I could do after all he’d done for me.

Emma and Paige were taken care of. They’d never hurt another person with curses or hex bags. That left one person unaccounted for.

“What about Mark?”

“He has no idea what Emma was, or what we are. His actions have all been sincere.”

“Really? I would have guessed he was one of the elements in Emma’s coven.”

Isaac shook his head. “The other corners were Natalie and Lauren. But Paige told us they didn’t want anything to do with Emma or her coven after Kaylee became sick. They felt responsible for what happened to her and gave up the powers Emma had gifted them that same day. They’re not going to mention it to anyone.”

They should feel responsible—and guilty—at the very least
.

Then I remembered the look on Natalie’s face when Kaylee had been crouched on top of her desk screaming, and the apology that made more sense now than it had when she’d said it. It was Emma who had made the curse on the necklace more potent. Maybe their guilt was punishment enough.

I wracked my brain for another question, anything to delay the conversation that was sure to come once we’d finished talking about everyone else. I came up empty. The silence between us was not a comforting, pleasant silence. My hands shook knowing I would have to broach the subject sooner rather than later.