Trial by Fire (Covencraft Book 1) (6 page)

“I hope to see you soon, Jade. Goodnight.”

“Um. Yeah. Whatever,” she mumbled back.

He released her hand and nodded once more before turning and walking down the hallway. She closed the door firmly behind him and then bolted the lock. She looked down at the card in her hand and its simple, bold script, wondering what the hell she was going to do.

Chapter 4

Paris tried to focus on his computer, ignoring the tense posture in Callie’s body as she stood at the window and stared at Jade’s apartment across the street. His partner turned, looked over at him and back again out the window. Out of corner of his eyes, Paris saw Callie open her mouth to speak and then close it. She crossed her arms and drummed her fingers on her biceps.

“She’ll call,” he said not looking up from his email.

“I didn’t say anything,” she protested.

He looked up at her. “Not out loud, no. It’s only been two hours. I wouldn’t expect to hear from her until tomorrow morning at the earliest. You should just go to bed.”

Callie chewed the inside of her lip. “Maybe you should have brought me with you when you went to go see her. Maybe-”

Pairs grinned unexpectedly as he recalled Jade’s peculiarity. “I thought it went well.”

“I know. I’m just saying. It’s so weird. Ever since we realized someone was wielding magic outside a coven, I’ve been trolling through old volumes and grimoires and there’s just no record of it – not spontaneously like this. Do you know what that means, Paris?” she asked rhetorically. “There’s a long history of this never happening before. So why now? Why her?”

“There has to be a first time for everything,” Paris replied, his words more even and calm than he felt about it. He knew exactly what Callie meant. For all that magic was elemental and based in nature, it still tended to follow certain rules and structures. When something happened outside the expected norms, it was generally one of two things: extraordinarily fortuitous or catastrophically disastrous.

Strangely, while his intuition scored a favorable reaction to Jade’s magic, Paris found he was torn on the situation as a whole. And that unnerved him. The amount of power she already brandished was worrying. When he’d been in her apartment, trying put out the fire, she’d fought him. Her magic had fought his. Even after he realized what was happening, he hadn’t expected it to effectively put up any kind of real resistance.

Yet her magic did.

If he hadn’t been trained as well as he had, Jade could have easily bested him. She could trounce half their Coven as she was right now and she’d never had a day of formal training in her life. Paris wondered if it was her panic, her emotions fueling her power in that moment but later on, when he’d been trying to get her to coax a small flame out of her hand, she hadn’t even needed a spell-word to set it off.

Jade had done it because she wanted to. She’d
willed
it to happen without casting a spell.

He didn’t know anyone else in the Coven that could do that other than himself. He generally used spells because they were drilled into his memory by his mother, by his teachers, by his mentors. But in many cases, he didn't actually need the words to make the spell work. His intent was enough - but that was after years of study and growing up surrounded by magic.

Jade had done it on her first willful try.

That petrified him. He was worried she’d turn down the offer to come to the Coven, forcing him to
attempt
to break her. He could damage his own magic in the process, or worse, kill her trying to strip her of her power.

On the flip, he was worried she’d say yes, come to the Coven and he’d be responsible for training someone with arguably more power than they’d ever seen firsthand. He’d be responsible for containing her spell-work, if it ever went wrong, or counter-hexing it if it wasn’t stoppable.

As Coven Leader, he was accustomed to keeping a tight rein on his emotions both to control his magic and to soothe the rest of the members, but this whole situation threatened to unravel him. He felt frayed at the edges, raw and uncertain.

Callie chewed on the edge of her thumb and for a moment he couldn't tell if it was her own distress or if he was bleeding uncertainty into the air. He cast a quick
sight
spell to check and saw her aura spiking and swirling with worry.

“I thought you were trying to quit that,” he said.

She pulled her thumb out of her mouth. “Nag.”

“Jade will call when she is ready.” He could hear the calm, sure tone in his voice and was glad for it. Even though Callie turned back to watch the window, she visibly relaxed at his words. He was glad to see that even if he felt uneasy, he wasn’t projecting it onto her.

He turned back to his computer and tried to settle in and focus on some coven business. Paris was always amazed at the amount of administration and minutiae running the Coven entailed. Keeping in touch with other covens around the world was a big part of his job as well as informal contact with other supernaturals. There was also dealing with the human side of things where the Coven was based. It seemed the city was always asking the Coven for help with some minor crisis. The Coven was clearly able to help with some things, like keeping tabs on new supernaturals coming into the city. Other items were just outside their ability and expertise, like problems with the power distribution grid. Sure he could cast a spell to flush out the grid and override it if there was a need, but that didn’t solve the long term problem of the city needing a better one.

Magic was not there to be used as a stopgap when humans didn’t want to be bothered fixing something and a lot of his time was spent explaining that. Repeatedly.

The mundane tasks soothed his mind and before he knew it, he looked up to see the clock read two in the morning. Callie was no longer staring out the window. Paris cast his magic out quickly and located her sleeping on the sofa just out of his line of site. He shut his laptop and stepped over to the window.

The lights in Jade’s apartment were still on, the first time he’d seen the place illuminated past ten o’clock. She was likely awake right now thinking about his offer.

He dared to hope she said yes.

*

After Paris left, Jade decided she probably wasn’t going to sleep anyway and finished the pot of coffee she’d made.

She wasn’t much of a drinker, but she seriously considered taking it up now.

A witch.

It made a sort of sense, she supposed. She couldn’t deny that she’d been able to control the fire for the first time today once she’d gone ahead and tried to focus on it, as Paris had instructed her. Nor could she deny that she could feel something about him when he created his electricity ball. She hadn’t mentioned it to him, but it was like she could hear his brain humming while he worked. It had been a calming, droning sound and something about it niggled at the back of her brain.

But picking up her whole life and just leaving was… Much. Not that she was overly attached to her apartment or her job. Sure, she liked her apartment, she didn’t loathe her job, but she wasn’t emotionally invested in either one. The idea of abandoning her life and starting a new one had a strange, romantic and carefree appeal to it.

But she also liked the structure of her life, the routine. She recalled, growing up, how chaotic things had been. Unstable and unsafe. Her mother had been emotionally absent from life in general and her father…

When it rained, Jade still felt every single one of her broken bones ache with the weather change.

She didn’t like being out of control. She swore when she was younger that when she grew up, she would have a nice, steady life and she’d never be held captive by anyone else’s terms again.

What would life with magic be like? What did it mean to live in a coven? Would people treat her like family and how would she react? Would she have a home, finally?

She’d always sensed she was different. When she was little, she wondered if that was why her mother had been so cold and indifferent, why her father hit her. As she grew, Jade realized those things weren’t her fault, but she still couldn’t help but wonder what it was about her that set her apart, even from her own parents.

Maybe this was it. Maybe the same way she’d known she was different, they’d known too.

But there was something that Paris wasn’t telling her. He wasn’t lying, not outright, but there’d been something hesitant in the way he spoke, something reluctant in his eyes. She didn’t know what to make of it.

She could always go, she supposed, and see what she thought. If she didn’t like it or it felt wrong, she would leave. Just walk away and come back to her steady, simple life.

Where she had no close friends and no contact with her family.

She didn’t mind being alone. In fact, she generally preferred it. While there were times when she got lonely, it passed quickly enough. If there were other times when she felt the pang of loneliness deep in her chest, late at night, well, the sun always came up the next day and she lived. It wasn’t like she was going to die from loneliness.

Jade looked around her apartment, wondering, if she went, what she would take with her. She wasn’t surprised to realize there wasn’t much she felt particularly attached to. She could list the possessions she absolutely couldn't live without on one hand. Her laptop, her phone, her special shoebox, her favorite sweater.

That was about it. Everything else, she could probably leave and decide to take it later.

She could take some vacation time at work as she had plenty banked. There was never really anywhere she wanted to go and staycations were already stale for her. She liked staying busy so she worked.

With some mirth on her lips, she wondered what she would say to her boss about finally going on vacation.

Hi, I’m having a personal emergency of the supernatural sort. Turns out I’m a witch, which I’m sure many of you already thought. So, I’m going to run off for a month with these people who say that they’re witches too and figure things out. By the way, the stats for the chemical corporation account are on my hard drive, and I’ve configured my email to send a vacation response. Buh-bye.

She snorted to herself. Yeah, that’d be awesome.

Jade was back on her computer, combing the internet for information about covens and witches. Unfortunately, her searches revealed the same things repeated over and over again: witches were born into covens, able to use magic for simple spells, generally weren’t too powerful but could band together for more difficult and complex spells, were governed by a coven which in turn answered to the representatives that sat on the Council for Supernaturals. Articles and information after that tended to devolve into political mumbo-jumbo on how the Council worked and who was involved.

As far as researching actual magic, Jade came up empty. Constantly. Apparently, covens diligently sniffed-out unsanctioned magic and blocked it - most humans couldn’t work a spell but there were some who apparently had enough residual magic in them - likely from ancestral witches - to wield a minor spell or two. Covens around the world were dedicated to detecting unsanctioned magic use and they cast counter-hexes, essentially nullifying any residual magic.

It seemed like a full time job for some covens.

Jade wondered if they’d tried that at all with her. That Paris guy hadn’t mentioned it but maybe she should ask.

That thought implied she would be contacting him. When she sat with that thought, it felt right. She nodded to herself.

She didn’t look at the clock until she’d already picked up the phone and dialed. Three o’clock? What was she doing? She considered hanging up but realized that if someone called her and woke her up in the middle of the night, they damn well better stay on the phone so she could curse them out at the very least. She toughed it out and stayed on the line.

When Paris answered, his voice wasn’t sleep rough or unclear in any way. She wondered if he’d been awake still or if he always woke up so alert.

“Yes?” he asked.

“Uh, yeah. So it’s me. Jade.” She rolled her eyes at her own inanity.

“Hello, Jade,” Paris intoned.

“So, I’ll go. To your coven. I’ll check it out.”

“I’m glad to hear that.”

She could hear some kind of rustling in the background but couldn’t tell if it was paper or if it was bedclothes.

“Sooooo,” she said, drawling, “when do we go?”

“How soon could you be ready to leave?”

She thought for a moment about packing, taking some leave from work, clearing out the perishables in her apartment. “Um, tomorrow afternoon, I think? Say, around three?”

“Callie and I will come by your apartment. I’ll make the necessary arrangements.”

“Sure. You do that.” She tapped her fingers on the computer in front of her restlessly. “Okay. So tomorrow.”

“See you tomorrow then.”

She hung up without saying goodbye, tossing her cellphone onto the couch cushions.

It appeared, for the next month, she was visiting a coven.