Soulbound: A Lone Star Witch Novel (17 page)

“What the hell happened to you?” Her voice is shaky now and there are tears in her eyes.

“I don’t know.” But then I think back to those agonizing minutes when I relived everything Lina went through. “Are there any cuts?” I demand, craning my neck to get a look at my back.

“No. Just bruises. But these look like whip marks. And I swear this is the imprint of a fist.” She swallows audibly. “Were you attacked, Xandra? Were you—”

“No! I swear, none of this happened to me.” I rush to tell her what happened and as I do, her eyes grow wider and wider.

“Dear goddess, dear goddess, dear goddess.” She repeats
the words over and over again as I strip off my jeans and stand before her in my wet bra and panties. Then she looks me over, writing down every injury she finds. Most are bruises, like the whip marks across my back but every once in a while there’s a cut like the one on my face.

I have a shallow slice on my left thigh, a welt on my right hip. There are some scrapes on my breasts and ribs that I know I got from the tree branches near the lake, but all the other injuries seem to be shallow imitations of Lina’s.

“Psychic echoes,” Lily breathes, running her hand lightly over the array of bruises that decorate my ribs.

“Watch it!” I yelp when she presses a little too hard.

“With physical manifestations. I’ve never heard of anything like this before,” she whispers. “It’s definitely not white magic doing this.”

Like I need to be a Heka scholar to figure that out? If she’d been there, if she’d seen and felt what that monster had done to Lina, then it wouldn’t even have occurred to her that it could be anything but the darkest magic that did this.

I shudder at the thought. I don’t like that it was this close to me, that it got the chance to mark me like this. “What does it mean?” I ask, forcing my voice steady by will alone.

“I have no idea.”

“Is it inside of me? I thought magic like this could only touch you if you open yourself to it. If you let it inside.”

Lily must hear the rising panic in my voice, because she grabs both my arms with gentle hands—enough to get my attention but not to hurt. “Xandra, you’re one of the best people I know. Whoever did this, however he did it, his magic isn’t inside you. You don’t have to worry about that.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I know what dark power feels like and what I feel coming from you is nothing like that.”

I’m abruptly ashamed. I’m so caught up in freaking out that for a moment I forgot Lily had lost her only brother to the lure of dark magic. “I’m sorry,” I tell her.

She shakes her head. “You have every right to be concerned—there’s nothing to apologize for.”

“None of this should be happening at all. I’m latent!”

“You were latent. Now I don’t know
what
you are. But you’re definitely packing some kind of power.”

“The belladonna—”

“I don’t think so.” She shakes her head. “I mean, I’ll do the research, but that’s pretty much an old witch’s tale. Your mom got suckered.”

“Then what’s going on?”

“I have no idea.” She gestures to the bathroom. “Go take a shower and while you’re in there, start at the beginning. You need to tell me everything. I have two weeks before I head back to school—I’m going to run this to ground before then, or die trying.”

What Lily doesn’t say but what hangs in the room is that if we don’t figure out what’s happening, she won’t be the one who dies. After all, how many times can I go through what happened to me tonight?

I start the shower and she turns her back while I strip off my muddy bra and panties, dropping them in the garbage bag with the rest of my clothes. Then I step into the shower and let the boiling hot water wash away the dirt and the blood and the tension. If only it could wipe away the memories as easily.

But they’re still there, pouring out in fits and starts as I wash my hair and scrub my body again and again and again. Lily doesn’t say much, just listens. But when I reach for my bottle of Amber Romance shower gel for the fourth time, she quietly says, “Enough, Xandra. You’re clean.”

“I don’t feel clean.”

“I know. But you are. You have to trust me on this or you’ll peel your skin right off your body.”

That doesn’t sound so bad. Maybe then I’ll finally stop feeling her cold, clammy body under my fingers. Against my legs.

“Besides, that can’t feel good against those bruises.”

Funny, but I barely notice them. It’s not that they don’t hurt—because they do—but they’re nothing compared to the anguish that threatens to rip me apart every time I think of Lina and the girl back home in the forest. I try to block the pain, to focus on the rhyme and reason of this whole situation, but it isn’t easy. Not when I keep thinking I’m to blame for their deaths.

The way I see it, either there’s some strange connection between the killer and me, which allows me to feel things about the murders, or those poor women were just pawns, a way for him to strike at me without actually going after a member of the Ipswitch royal family. I really hope it’s the former, no matter how scary and twisted that is. Because the alternative—that I’m responsible for the brutal deaths of two young women who look an awful lot like me—I don’t know how I’ll live with.

At Lily’s continued urging, I finally flip the shower off. When I turn back around, Lily’s arm has crept around the edge of the shower curtain and she’s holding one of the big, fluffy red towels I love.

“I’ll make some tea,” she says.

“You don’t have to do that. I know you’re tired.”

She snorts. “Don’t be a martyr. Besides, I want to do your tarot again.”

“I’m not being a martyr. And there’s no way you’re doing my tarot, ever again.” I climb out of the shower wrapped in the towel, then turn to get my hairbrush off the sink.

Lily gasps. I’m about to tell her to knock it off—I
know the bruises are bad and don’t need to be constantly reminded of them—when she says, “When did you get a new tattoo?”

A sick feeling starts in the pit of my stomach, separate from the knot that’s already there. “What are you talking about?”

She doesn’t answer. Instead, she lays her fingers gently on my left shoulder blade and traces a star into my skin.

And not just any star. A Seba.

“I swear these weren’t there before your shower,” she murmurs. “But I suppose they could have just been covered by mud.”

Completely freaked out now, I rip off the towel, disregarding modesty as I whirl to look at my back in the mirror. Sure enough, on my left shoulder blade—underneath a colorful array of bruises—is a silver Seba. And then, about an inch over, arching like it wants to follow the curve of my upper back, is a second one. They are identical to each other, and more importantly, to the one I already have in the middle of my palm.

The one I got from Declan eight years ago.

I
don’t sleep. Though I escape from Lily’s coddling, and slightly claustrophobia-inducing clutches, sometime around two thirty, I don’t bother trying to sleep. One, because I have to be up at four to get to work and two, because I’m terrified that if I close my eyes I’ll be bombarded by images of that poor woman. Of Lina. Or worse. I’ll get sucked into a world where I’m fascinated, instead of repelled, by Declan Chumomisto.

Instead, I sit in the center of my bed, iPod blasting old Aerosmith and Metallica songs, while I play game after game of Mah-Jongg. If I work at it, if I play fast enough, then I can’t think. Can’t feel.

Except, every once in a while I’ll click on a tile and it will remind me of something. The trees down at Town Lake. The bridge. The number seven, which started this whole mess twenty-seven years ago.

Every time they creep up, I push the thoughts away. I concentrate harder on the game, on the music and the lyrics pouring through my earbuds. It almost works. Except I know I can’t run forever. Sooner or later, I’m going to have to decide what to do. Who to trust and who to run from, because the more I don’t think about this, the more I become convinced that I am in really deep trouble. Trouble that pleading ignorance isn’t going to get me out of.

Finally, the longest hour and a half of my life draws to
a close and I spring out of bed. I’ve never been so relieved to get to go to work in my life. I dress quickly, in a clean pair of jeans and a bright red turtleneck sweater. I can use the pick-me-up from the color today, plus both garments do a decent job of covering my bruises.

Except for a little cover-up on the cut under my eye, I don’t bother with makeup. Just brush my teeth and run a quick brush through my hair. I look like hell, but I didn’t expect anything else. Combine everything that happened yesterday with a night of no sleep and I figure I’m doing good not to look like a flesh-eating zombie. Although, now that I think about it, my eyes are awfully glazed…

Shrugging it off, I slip into a pair of comfortable red flats and head for the door, picking up my backpack on the way out. Normally, I walk to and from work every day—it’s only about a mile and it saves a parking spot for customers in Beanz’s small lot—but after last night’s horrific stumble through downtown, I find myself craving the safety of my car.

Besides, it’s raining again and I have no desire to ever walk in the rain again.

I’m at work in less than five minutes—there’s no traffic at this time of the morning—and it’s not until I’m locked in the shop, music blasting and baking ingredients spread out in front of me, that I finally relax.

I have a little more than an hour before Beanz opens and plenty to do to keep me busy. I mix up a big batch of pumpkin muffins and get them in the oven before starting on the blueberry streusel ones. I pop them in the second oven, then work on a huge batch of chocolate cookies.

Normally, I love to make cookies. I love the mixing of the dry ingredients, the mixing of the wet ingredients and then the combining of the two to make something wonderful. Maybe it’s because it reminds me of potion-making
with my mother, which was my favorite activity when I was young. She always mixes different parts of her potions in different containers before combining them at the end. She swears they’re more powerful that way, and having been the recipient of more than one through the years, I tend to agree with her.

Cooking, especially baking, isn’t much different from making a powerful potion, really. You have a recipe to follow—a little of this, a lot of that—all combined in perfect, preset proportions. But at the end, when the main dough, or potion, is set…that’s when you get to experiment. Add a different kind of nut or some butterscotch chips or maybe a few ground-up toffee bars for the cookies. Play with the herbs and flowers and magical binders for the potion. And suddenly, depending on the talent of the cook, you have something amazing. Something just a little bit better than the competition.

My ability to turn experiments into something wonderful is what’s made Beanz the most popular coffeehouse in Austin and it’s that same ability that has made my mother the most revered potion-maker in our coven and several others. Though I know it won’t get me anywhere, I often wonder if I wasn’t latent, if I actually did have power, would I have followed in my mother’s footsteps?

Not that it matters, I suppose. It’s just interesting to think about. Especially when Lily’s voice echoes in my head, telling me that while she might not know what is going on with me, she does know that I’m no longer latent. I’m not sure that I believe her, but I could just be burying my head in the sand. It’s a popular pastime of mine, after all.

I relax as I cook, fall into a familiar rhythm where the motions are so second nature to me that I don’t have to think. I can just be. Normally, I love that rhythm, but today it’s dangerous. I’ve barely gotten the wet ingredients
into the mixer when a picture of Declan flashes into my mind. Only it’s not the Declan I know, dressed all in sophisticated and expensive black. Instead, he’s draped in the red robes and golden crown of the Magician, the infinity sign on his pointy hat with a wand in one hand and a crystal ball in the other.

I blank the image away, focus instead on how the sugar and eggs and butter and vanilla blend together. But when I start to add the dry ingredients, Lina’s body flashes into my mind’s eye, only with my face in place of hers. I blink a few times, shake my head—as if it’s that easy to get the image out. It’s just a daymare, I tell myself, a daydream gone horribly wrong. And I might actually believe it if that damn five of swords didn’t float right at the edges of my consciousness. Taunting me with my inescapable future defeat.

Again, I don’t set much store in tarot by itself, but Lily is a powerful seer. When she reads tarot, you can’t help but pay attention. It’s why she was so nervous last night before the show and why I’m nervous still, even after everything that’s happened. A sick feeling in the pit of my stomach tells me that all this is only the beginning.

The buzzer at the back door of the café goes off, and I glance at the clock. It’s five fifteen already and I forgot to unlock the door for Meg and Travis, the two UT students who help me handle morning rush every Monday through Friday. I rush to the door, let them in, then hurry to get the muffins out of the ovens and the cookies into them.

“Big night?” Travis asks, as he slips into an apron and starts brewing coffee in the four large carafes we always keep fresh during open hours.

“Why? What have you heard?”

As soon as the words are out of my mouth, I know I’ve said the wrong thing. His eyes gleam with interest as
he fills one of the carafes. “Nothing yet. But please, do tell.”

“Nothing interesting, I swear.”

“Why do I doubt that?”

“Doubt what?” asks Meg, sticking her head through the doorway from the front of the house, where she’s getting milk ready to steam and checking to be sure that everything’s stocked for the morning rush.

“Boss lady’s holding out on us.” Travis winks at me. “She had a scorching hot date last night and refuses to share the details.”

“Sorry to disappoint you,” I say, slipping the muffins from the tins and onto a platter for the front display cabinet. “But there was no hot date.”