Catalyst (Forevermore, Book Two) (8 page)

The restaurant was filled with
people and their noise. I was surprised just how busy it was for a random weekday. Didn’t any of these people have jobs or school? Then again, what was I doing there?

Mathias
sat across from me with a loose strand of frosty white hair escaping from behind his ear, only to be brushed back with annoyance. He had just given his order for a bacon and cheese omelet, along with my apple cinnamon pancakes and a side of hash browns, and now was rolling his straw wrapper into a ball and looking thoughtfully in my direction. I looked back at him with a smile, and my eyes couldn’t help but wander to the rim of silver around his irises.

“
Has that always —”

He interrupted me mid-sentence and said,
“The snow’s really piling up out there.”

Blinking, I glanced out the window beside us, where the curtains were drawn down to where only
a few inches of the outside world was visible. Sure enough, there was a thick blanket of white, shimmering snow covering the roads and sidewalks; it hadn’t been that way when we’d walked over. The color of the snow reminded me of everything that was Mathias — his hair, his silvery eyes when he used his ability, the pure gentleness that was him.

“
Penny for your thoughts,” he said after setting down his glass of cola.

“
What? Oh ...” I sat there looking dumbfounded. “Just thinking about ... the snow. Have you ever seen an up-close picture of a snowflake?”

He shook his head.
“No. Just little white flecks, right?”

I grinned and watched him resume pushing around the rolled up wrapper.
“They are so much more than that. They’re gorgeous; they look like tiny glass sculptures, and are exactly what cutout paper snowflakes look like.”

“
I always wondered why snowflakes were cutout into shapes like that, actually. I seriously just always thought that was an artistic way of showing it.”

“
Well, now you know,” I said and paused. “When I was little and it would snow ... it always felt magical to me. The way it fell from the sky as if in slow-motion and landed on the ground, sticking there. The way it sparkled under the sunlight ... that was magic to me. And now, now magic is that and so much more.”

Mathias stared at me with a crooked smile and there was amusement lighting up his eyes.
“You have a wonderful way of looking at the world.”

“
I don’t really think so. My mom — Eila, I mean — she thinks snow is a nuisance. It covers the streets and causes people to miss school and work or slip and crash, it builds up so high that it keeps you locked up in your house. But while she complained about it, I just admired it. I think she just holds a grudge against it because one time when I was eleven she slid on a patch of ice in the driveway and broke her ankle.”

I wasn
’t surprised when he laughed, because even I did — mostly at remembering the moment. There was a pang of sadness at the memory of my adoptive mother, and I wished she was still a part of my life.

“
She’ll come around, you know.”

“
What?” I muttered, looking at him in shock.

“
Eila. She’ll get through this, and you’ll be on speaking terms again. She’s still your mom, after all.”

“
For a second there, I might have thought
you
could read minds.”

“
You don’t have to read minds to see it in your eyes. The sadness. You miss her.”

I nodded and scooted my hands off of the tabletop so our waiter could set down our plates. Before he had a chance to leave, I quickly asked for ketchup and he promptly returned with a bottle.
“Thanks,” I said and sprinkled a light dash of salt onto the crisp potatoes, followed by a layer of ketchup, which I spread over the top with my knife.

“
It’s strange being apart from her, when all of my life she was the one I went to when I was upset or scared. Now it’s like there’s this chasm between us that I can’t find the way around and it was so sudden. My uncle took me to her house to pick up the rest of my things and ... it was almost like she wasn’t even there at all, even though she was. Her eyes had this empty vacant look to them, and she barely responded to a word I said. It hurt to see her like that.”

Mathias nodded while chewing a forkful of omelet.
“Like I said, she’ll come around. It’s only been a few days and it’s a lot to process. She’s lost not only a husband but a daughter as well.”

“
She hasn’t lost me,” I said with a sigh.

“
Maybe not literally, but she probably feels like she has. You chose your real mom over her.”

My heart ached at his words and my shoulders slumped.
“I didn’t ... I didn’t choose her over her ...”

He frowned.
“You did, Madison, even if you don’t want to admit it. And even if that’s not how you intended for it to be, you did. Give her some time, and I guarantee you she’ll be back in your life and things will be like she never left.”

I picked idly at my pancakes and thought of Eila
— the cheery, hardworking woman that had raised another woman’s baby and sacrificed her time selflessly to caring for that child. Had I made a mistake in going behind her back and rescuing my biological mother? No. She was preventing me from having Alex in my life, and that was wrong — all because she was jealous of the feelings Jason had for her. I wondered if she had made it to work at all since the day she found out my mom was out of Littlehaven, and worried about the consequences this might have on her bakery.

“
You’re lost in thought again,” Mathias noted. He was already more than halfway through eating his omelet.

“
I’m sorry,” I said and frowned at my plate — I’d barely made a dent in the pancake. “What was it like growing up without parents? I mean ... growing up in an orphanage? Is there a difference between that and a foster home or ...?”

He looked at me thoughtfully and didn
’t seem uncomfortable with my question, as I feared he might have been. After one last bite of omelet, he set down his fork. “I’ll make you a deal,” he offered.

My brows arched in curiosity.
“Yeah … okay.”

“
If you continue eating your food, I will tell you.” His lips quirked into a smile.

“
Fine,” I said and laughed, then gathered a forkful of fluffy cake. “Go on.”

He took a sip of soda and then cleared his throat.
“According to the orphanage, I was dropped off there as a baby — and by that, I really do mean
baby
and I really do mean
dropped off.
I don’t know how old I was exactly, but it was likely a few months, if not less, after I was born. Someone, I’m guessing my mother, left me at the door. And yes, there’s a difference between the two. I’ve been in both.”

“
That’s terrible,” I said between bites. “And what do you mean by ‘both’?”

“
For the first few years of my life, I was with the orphanage. It was a strict Catholic orphanage, and we were taught verses from the
Bible
and we all knew of demons and the Devil, everything like that. I’ll explain more later about why I brought that up.”

Now I was definitely curious.
“No one ever came to adopt you?”

He shook his head.
“It’s rare for abandoned children to be adopted,” he explained. “I was a good kid, for the most part. That is, until I was about seven ... that’s when I realized I was different.”

“
Different how?”

He smiled faintly and said,
“I realized that I knew magic. Either that or that I was being possessed by a demonic presence as others would later suggest.”

“
You were
that
young when you developed your gift?”

“
It’s different for everyone. If you recall, Elijah was ten when he was brought to Haven. That’s only a few years’ difference. There are tons of witches out there that probably don’t even realize they have a gift, especially if they were raised by non-magical people. Maybe when you were an infant you were summoning pacifiers and extra milk into your crib,” he suggested with an amused grin.

I laughed and nearly spat out the orange juice I had just sipped from my glass.
“I doubt that.”

His expression changed from amused to serious.
“As I was saying ... when I was seven, things started to change. I would participate in playful races with other children, and won them, when before, I never could. I didn’t just win them though, I was at the finish line seconds after we started, regardless the distance. At first I thought that maybe I was just really fast all of a sudden, but then other kids began saying that I was doing magic or using the ‘Devil’s gift’. Those kids were punished for lying and even speaking of witchcraft. But once I had heard the others kids talking about it, it dawned on me that I really was doing magic as they had said. I spent all of my free time practicing and trying to control it. It was around then that a family actually came to pick me up as a foster child.

“
I stayed in my room most of the time there, secluded from the unfamiliar family that had picked me out of a bunch of random children. There was a girl there, also. She was the parents’ real child. While I was living with them, I started putting this ‘gift’ to the test. I would shimmer downstairs at night and grab cookies from the kitchen and rush back to my room, unseen or heard by anyone. Being seven at the time, I didn’t take the time to consider that there would likely be evidence left behind. I was discovered with chocolate smeared on my cheeks and fingers, and crumbs on the bed. Not to mention that in my haste, I left the jar of cookies open. They scolded me and spanked me, and that only taught me not to get caught.”

I listened intently as I finished my pancake, then worked on the
hash browns.

“
I practiced more and more, but I ended up caught awake after hours with Halloween candy in my room. They punished me yet again and installed a lock on my door, on the outside, assuming that would prevent me from escaping. After that, I stopped bothering for a while ... until one night when I desperately needed to use the restroom, but my door was locked. I wasn’t about to go in my bed ... so I shimmered downstairs to the bathroom —”

“
Wait,” I interrupted. “You can shimmer through things? Like doors and walls?”

“
Not through everything, but yes ... kind of like teleporting. It takes extra energy to do so, however.”

With a nod, I remained quiet and let him continue.

“Anyway, I shimmered downstairs to the restroom, and to my surprise
and
hers, my ‘foster sister’ was using the bathroom,” he said and his cheeks turned rosy. “She started screaming and flailing her hands out at me, slapping me away and calling me a pervert. I tried to explain that I didn’t know she was in there, but her parents came rushing down from their room and burst through the door. My foster father took me by the collar and dragged me out of the room, yelling furiously at me. No one would listen to my side of the story, and I was called ... brutal names for a then eight year old. The mother kept mumbling about how there was no way I could have gotten the lock open, and she checked my window and knew that it would have been impossible for me to have jumped out, or else I’d have been injured. That’s when the girl started pointing at me accusingly, yelling ‘Demon! Pervert!’ and told her parents that I had just appeared in the bathroom without even opening the doors and that I was evil.”

A pained expression swept across his features.

“There was no hesitation in their decision. The mother’s eyes bulged in horror, she screamed and told her husband to take me away. He dragged me out the door, bruising my wrist with his grip, basically threw me into the back of their truck, and drove me straight to the orphanage where he pushed me out and shut the door without even a glance back in my direction before he rode away.”

“
That’s terrible ... I’m so sorry,” I said, reached out a hand and laid it over his.

He smiled, which wasn
’t at all what I expected. “It was, but I am glad that I got out of there.”

“
But going back to the orphanage must have sucked ...”

“
I never went back, not really.”

“
What do you mean ... ?”

“
That’s when Artemis found me.” His eyes twinkled at the mention of our Clan leader. There truly was a connection between the two of them.

“
He was just ... out there waiting for you?”

Mathias seemed to be thinking and
then nodded. “Yep.”

“
How did he know you’d be there?”

“
I have no idea.”

The waiter brought over our check and cleared our dishes from the table. I was stuffed and certain I
’d never need to eat again.