She looked at the doorway, where the huge black schnauzer watched the room like a silent sentinel, more a silhouette than a natural presence.
“Are you able to control the vines at all?” he asked.
“Not really. It’s more subconscious, situational.”
Malcolm frowned. “They seemed to loosen up once you calmed down a bit. Um… do you know box breathing?”
“What’s that?”
“Breathe in deep, hold, breathe out slow, hold. You do each part for four seconds. It slows the heart down and shifts your focus. Give it a try.”
He reached for one of her hands and curled his warm palm around hers. Something blossomed in the dark between them, a spell so ancient even the oldest witches of the Endor line would not remember the words. A call of wildness, mixed with a yearning peacefulness that in any other moment would make no sense… except to someone who had magic deep within their heart.
What was it her grandmother used to say? The oldest spells needed no words; they existed in something as simple as a touch. A look.
Malcolm stroked his thumb over her skin while she breathed. Four seconds in, hold, four seconds out, hold. She thought his quiet, intense focus on her would have been unsettling, but instead it soothed her. Little by little, the vines retreated back into the tattoos on her forearms.
“That must have been one hell of a dream,” said Malcolm. The vine tattoos rippled as he traced the leaves on her skin. “Do you want to talk about it?” He got up and sat on the side of her bed as she propped herself up. He kept a hold on her arm. The touch was grounding, comforting. Hades entered the room, jumped up on the bed and settled at the foot of it with a deep sigh.
Calli wiped at her eyes. Fragments of the dream still lingered, making her feel small and weary, but as long as Malcolm was there, touching her, sitting with her, she felt safe.
“I was dreaming about the night my parents died.” She pushed her hair back from her face.
“Oh…” His eyes widened. She hesitated. Telling him about their deaths was too intimate, too dark to share with a stranger, wasn’t it? It wasn’t his burden. But then his expression changed. He leaned forward.
“Were you with them when it happened?” A lock of hair fell across his eyes, and Calli had an urge to stroke it back into place.
She nodded. “I was only twelve. We were coming back from the Halloween Festival when we got into a car wreck. I saw them die…”
“Shit, you were just a kid. I’m so sorry.”
She glanced down at her arms to see the vines had fully retreated to their usual form of tattoos. “That was when the vines first showed up. They carried me out of the wreck. I’d had magic in me since I was born, and I could use it on purpose since I was six, but the night of the accident was when my real power emerged, the night that I made my first acquaintance with death.”
Malcolm nodded. “Trauma is a common trigger for that kind of awakening,” he said. “Especially death.”
Death was such a strange thing for those who lived with magic. It came often in the night, like an old friend, to come for someone who was ready to move on. But at other times, it was no friend at all, it was a nemesis, tearing loved ones away with the relentless violence of a hurricane, leaving behind only pain and misery.
Humans could sense death, like all creatures could, but witches? Ahh, witches saw death the most clearly, because life and death were miracles of nature’s most ancient magic, and one did not exist without the other.
Malcolm stroked a fingertip over her tattooed skin, and that simple, innocent touch went clear through to her soul. Their eyes met, and his lips parted to say something, but then he shook his head, as if he had just talked himself out of it.
“I’m sorry you went through that. I can’t even begin to imagine,” he finally said.
The last tendrils of that nightmare still clung to her. “I was out in the rain. It was so cold.” She shivered as she remembered standing there in the darkness, hoping that time would rewind itself. She’d felt magic all around her, spinning faster and faster until everything was out of control. Her skin had felt like ice as she’d turned numb standing there, waiting to be rescued, waiting to wake up, waiting for anything to make that night be over.
“My grandmother lived in town. I moved in with her, and she raised me.” She touched the pendant. “She gave me this that night. I wear it whenever I feel out of control.” Calli held the pendant up for him to see and he reached out to touch the moonstone with gentle fingers. “But now she’s gone too.”
Malcolm’s green eyes were bright and intense. “I’m sorry you lost her.”
They shared a quiet moment where the silence had no need to be broken. Then Malcolm gave a mischievous grin. He turned his left palm over and showed her the long scar across his palm. “This is one of my least favorite brushes with magic.”
She took his hand and examined the old scar. “What happened?” The scar cut across all the major lines, something which Moonstone Falls local fortuneteller Zelda Murphy would call a bad omen. A shiver passed over her skin. His lifeline was broken in half. She suddenly pictured her own gravestone, years from now, in the Moonstone Falls Cemetery. Dead leaves rustled over the grass, and then a footstep pressed down upon the soil above her, a trespass even the dead could not ignore…
She shook the strange premonition from her mind. Malcolm seemed not to notice.
“It’s stupid really, but I don’t mind talking about it. My dad gave me my first broomstick on my fourteenth birthday. I was trying to ride it, but brooms are only as strong as the witch or warlock riding them, you know. And, well…” He jerked his head in the direction of the pumpkin disaster outside. “My magic gave out. I was really far from home, passing through country roads and fields. I lost my confidence when a storm stirred up around me and I shot up to regain some lost altitude, and somewhere along the way, my broom dropped out from under me. I tried to grab the nearest thing I could reach as I was falling and that happened to be a barbed wire fence. I got hurt and my magic just…left me. I couldn’t fly home. It took me all night to get back to Boston.”
Her heart clenched in sympathy. Magic could be very frightening, and without the confidence to wield it, it was easy to get hurt.
