Perilous Waters (2 page)

Angie released another pent-up breath, shivering against the night and wishing she had something on besides her sleeveless, lace-edged pajamas. With a final glance at the faces near the bonfire, she headed toward the parking lot. Whatever had led her here tonight would remain a mystery for the time being. All she could think to do now was find her way home. Maybe there was something in the ancient books about visions leading to involuntary teleportation—

“Oh my God,” a mocking voice laughed, cutting through her thoughts so abruptly she flinched. “Is it that little cheerleader Kaitlyn hangs out with now?”

Angie’s teeth chattered and her body trembled, but not because of the cold. One of Kaitlyn’s friends, though she couldn’t tell which one so far from the firelight. Without another thought, Angie dashed away, but an arm shot out in the darkness.

A whimper caught in her throat. How could she explain herself in nothing but summer pajamas that were little more than underwear? Her face grew hot as she struggled to get away, but the arm that had stopped her now held her firm.

“It’s totally her,” a voice said as she was dragged toward the light. “Too bad. I was hoping I’d caught a mermaid.”

“Look at her,” another voice cooed in a fake-bored voice, “in little-girl pajamas. I think my baby cousin has those.”

Angie shook her head, her throat closing up as a dark face flickered into view.

Rebecca Johnson. She had taken over the job making Angie’s life miserable when Kaitlyn had given up the post after becoming a Daughter of Fate.

And if Angie had thought Kaitlyn was cruel, it was nothing compared with Rebecca.

“Such a pretty little doll,” Rebecca crooned, reaching out for her hair. Angie knew better than to pull away. It would only make Rebecca yank her by the hair, so she stood very still as slow, venomous fingers touched her face.

“She’s going to be a little girl forever,” Ashleigh said. “Look at her…”

Angie’s arms came up to cover her chest. Her face burned so fiercely she wondered if she were glowing.

“Aw, she hasn’t started puberty yet,” Rebecca said, coming around behind Angie and taking her by the arms. “Or has she?”

“Let’s check,” another girl laughed from beyond the darkness.

“See if she’s a real blond,” a guy called.

Angie struggled as someone held her arms back. “Let me go!”

“She’s so little,” Rebecca said, laughing. Angie could smell alcohol on her breath. “I can pick her up, look!”

“Stop it,” Angie demanded, feeling the magic build inside her, even as she tried to keep from letting it show. “Put me down.”

Ashleigh mimicked Angie in a high-pitched voice. “Put me down, put me down!”

“Even her voice is little!”

“Let go of me,” Angie said, unused to the ferocious emotions swelling within her. She needed to get away! But her struggles did nothing against the arms restraining her, and her voice sounded helpless even to her own ears. “Stop.
Stop!
” Why was no one here helping her? Did everyone here think this was okay?

The things she heard became meaner and more disgusting. She shook her head violently, wishing she could shut her ears to the harsh, sickening words.

No help was coming. Not from any of them. She would have to help herself. But that would mean revealing the magic.

She was slammed onto the sand and the wind was knocked from her lungs. Someone poured something cold over her abdomen that smelled strongly of alcohol. She jerked back into the sand, wind picking up as her magic grew.

Her heart lodged itself into her throat, too thick and hot to allow for speech anymore.
Please don’t do this.

As if in response to this thought, more alcohol was poured over her, this time on her face. She sputtered in the darkness. Harsh fingers bit into her ribs and she squeezed her eyes shut. What she had first thought was a vision had become a real-life nightmare. “No,” she whimpered. Groping hands brought tears to her eyes and she thrashed more viciously. “Don’t.”

Magic
, a voice whispered against her feral, panicked thoughts. The caressing murmur repeated itself, causing her to grow still as she swallowed back a choked cry.
Use your powers.

She could. It was the only way to free herself from this situation, and in that instant, her decision was made. The magic slid through her veins from the mark on her arm, sharp and hot. The force of it caused her to suck air in through her teeth as her fingers grasped at the sand at her back.

“I’m so recording this,” someone said.

Video.
The magic had to stay secret. No one could know. Not ever. The power of the Fates was supposed to be guarded. If she used magic to blast her way free of the crowd… if someone took video and posted it on the internet…

She racked her mind for another way, any other way that wouldn’t reveal her magic… she blinked hotly, her audible sniffles sounding fast and choked.
Another way.
Her dazed mind grasped at the thought.
There is another way
, but…
her fingers flexed and tightened against the sand, finding nothing of substance to grip.
Another way.

There was one way she knew of that would be far more subtle than blasting them all with bolts of energy.

And far more powerful.

Spells wrought by dark magic.

Hands gripped her shoulders. Angie froze. Alcohol-stenched breath floated down from above her. Tears slid from the corner of her eyes as someone held her face.

Everything became a blur. She couldn’t move. Her mind seemed locked. Her body paralyzed.

A flash lit the dark sky, making her blink. Briefly, she could see the twisted faces of her attackers. What was she doing? She couldn’t lie here and let them do whatever they wanted.

Video or not, she had to use the magic.

Power pooled in her palms. She could sense the glow filtering from behind her back, but the light from someone’s cell phone disguised it.

Her gaze lifted. She focused on the guy filming her with his camera.

Persuade
, she thought as the mark on her arm grew icy cold.

The young man’s face hovered above her. Angie could make out very little in the darkness. Shadows had turned his eyes into black caves. The spikes of his hair looked like thorns piercing the night.

She visualized the young man turning off the video function to his cell phone and deleting whatever he had recorded so far. Angie held her breath, her heart beating so fast and so hard she thought she might scream as she waited.

The phone lowered as the light disappeared. “We shouldn’t be doing this,” he said.

“What are you talking about?” Ashleigh said.

Angie licked her lips. They tasted like beer and sand. With effort she pushed her head back against the pliant, sandy ground and looked up at Ashleigh, who held her down by the shoulders. “Persuade,” she whispered.

“You’re right,” Ashleigh said, almost the moment Angie thought the words. She let go of her. “This… this is wrong.”

Angie turned to the guy holding her arm and repeated the spell, then stood quickly, nearly losing her balance as she stumbled back. She didn’t have time to catch her breath or steady her racing heart. With so many spells to cast, there was no way to maintain the deception for long. Hurriedly she continued bewitching people, backing away with each new spell in order to put as much distance between herself and the crowd as she could, until at last she regarded a small group of people who were well and truly mind controlled, all of them ready to do her bidding.

She wiped her beer-soaked face with her arm, scraping herself with sand, gasping for air, her pulse thundering in her ears. She hadn’t told the other Daughters of Fate that they had this ability. It was… it was too powerful. And wrong. So wrong. She hadn’t known what else to do, though. It had felt like her only choice.

“Dispell,” she managed in a choked voice, freeing the group before she turned on the gritty, night-chilled sand. And without further thoughts, without emotion, she ran.

It
had taken Angie what felt like forever to reach a gas station, begging to use the clerk’s phone. She could hardly imagine what she must have looked like to him, barefoot in soiled pajamas, rushing into his convenience store in the dead of night. Her mother hadn’t asked questions, hanging up quickly and coming to the street where Angie told her she would wait.

Angie couldn’t force her gaze from the direction of the beach. Her mind felt fractured. Every time she tried to make sense of what had happened, she found herself counting out loud or whispering nursery rhymes, as though her mind would rather forget… or pretend it hadn’t happened. But she had to try and make sense of this night and what it could mean. Involuntary teleportation? Her fingers tapped against her thigh, a relentless drumbeat that both soothed and tormented her.

Her mother’s pale blue eyes had been laced with sorrow and worry when she came to pick her up. Her father only frowned when she explained that the magic had teleported her, and that she had appeared in the middle of a crowd of drunk kids. Angie had left out the details about what the kids had done to her, giving her parents half-truths about someone spilling beer on her by accident. She hadn’t wanted her parents to worry any more than they already did, but not telling them the full truth weighed heavily on her. A lie of omission was still a lie. She had never deceived her parents before. She stared at her hands in her lap, wondering why she had done so tonight.

The entire drive home Angie kept her head lowered, overwhelmed by shame and embarrassment. Shame at her inability to escape her situation without resorting to dark magic, and embarrassment over what Ashleigh and the others had done to her. Why did they hate her so much? What had she done to make them act like this?

Maybe it had been a test by the Fates. If so, she had failed miserably. She had only been a Daughter of Fate for three months and she was already employing dark magic… spells discovered by the Sorceress when she was still a priestess to the Fates. Spells the Sorceress had used, along with the Jewels of Time, to try and create a world of humans enslaved to the will of the priestesses.

In the stillness of her bedroom, before she could turn the light on, her fingers began tapping against each other. Dark was better. She didn’t want to see herself in the mirror, covered in beer and filth. Her fingers tapped more quickly. She didn’t want to move. She didn’t want to stay still. The evening’s events replayed in her mind at high speed, repeating and repeating until her mind was left in a tailspin. She stood for minutes in the darkness, not thinking and at the same time, thinking too much.

She had no idea how long she remained that way before finally forcing her feet forward. It felt as though her senses had been set on extreme sensitivity and she couldn’t find a way to bring them back to normal. She felt every fiber in the carpet beneath her feet. She heard her breath like a jet intake and her heart like a freight train’s roar.

Safe.
She took another step forward, willing herself not to feel the threads of her ripped and ruined pajamas, or notice the throbbing muscles where ruthless hands had bruised her flesh.
I’m safe now. But monsters, demons, David. No. David is safe. Everything is okay.
Fresh tears sprung to her eyes as she longed for the warmth of his arms.

It was soothing to have one normal person in her life. David had nothing to do with the magic. He loved her. He cared about her and she cared about him. She knew she could count on him no matter what, and being there when he needed her made her happy inside.

All of these thoughts rolled through her like a warm, gentle tide, washing her clean of the harrowing events of the evening almost completely. The next time she saw David, she would hug him as tightly as her arms let her. She would caress his face and rest her cheek against his chest, just listening to the sound of his strong heart.

Angie made her way to the bathroom, knowing the peace she felt was only an illusion. The fact that the Sorceress would use David to hurt her was a constant icy weight inside of her. She pressed her lips together and forced the thought from her mind.

She pulled back the shower curtain, not bothering to turn on the light before twisting the handle to send hot water through the faucet. Moments later she stood in a spray of near-scalding water. She scrubbed herself clean of the beer that had been poured over her, foaming herself with vanilla scented body wash until her body stung where fingernails and sand had scraped her.

Her skin was wrinkled and warm to the touch as she curled on her side beneath her blanket in a fresh set of pajamas, trying hard not to think about how it felt to be held down, to hear those awful things.

She wanted to sleep and forget that this terrible night had ever happened, but counting to a hundred didn’t calm her. In the morning, would those drunken kids realize what they had done to her? Her eyes squeezed shut at the nauseous feeling that swooped through her. She would deny it. She would cast Disremember if any of them said anything about it. It would be too humiliating to face them with so much shame burning in her eyes.

There wouldn’t be any sleep tonight. With another deep, shaky breath she pushed herself up on her elbow. The clock on her nightstand showed it was nearly three in the morning.

She lifted her hand and used a trace of magic to brush aside the curtain of her bed as she sat up. The glow of her spell left a soft trail of light along the fabric. She could light up the room, if she wanted to. She could light up the whole house, she thought, sitting on the edge of the bed, but even lighting up the world wouldn’t keep this vision away.

Her nose stung and her lashes grew damp again. In the moonlight filtering from her lace-curtained window, she watched her toe make a figure eight on her carpet. Her face grew soaked with streams of hopelessness as her fingers tapped out their ceaseless rhythm along the hem of her nightshirt. Her gaze fell on her old school lunch bag, sitting where she always left it on the cushioned bench built against the window. The glitter she used to love when she was a little girl shimmered faintly from the bag, reflecting starlight.