Tales of Aradia The Last Witch Volume 1 (5 page)

“Or she,” Aradia added
through a mouth full of Belgian waffle.

Ross nodded his
agreement with his daughter while he replied, “It is silly. The
press is silly. That was the name that stuck though.”

“So you’re on the
case?” Aradia replied with real interest. “That’s huge! They
brought you in to solve it before it becomes a cold
case!”

Ross let a glimmer of
pride show in his eye. “That’s more of a police term, but kind of.
It’s not as big as it seems. You’re right that the DA’s office is
at a dead end. I think they are hoping a fresh set of eyes might
help.”

“I bet the DA wants to
prosecute somebody, and fast,” Aradia surmised.

Ross smiled inwardly at
his daughter’s astuteness. “Well, I won’t speak to that, but I know
that if I were the DA, I’d want to set an example.”

“Well,” Aradia said,
“if I were the DA, I’d be happy you were swooping in to save the
day.”

"I plan on it,” Ross
said boldly, confidence returned. “This case won’t be my only
challenge, though. There’s a real East-West mentality to overcome.
Since we moved from Arizona, I’ll have to contend with other ADA's
thinking I am some glorified backwater cowboy. If I want any
respect, I’ll have to show results. Until I do, they’ll probably
expect my only value will be making them look good."

"So you’ll do what you
always tell me to do,” Aradia replied. “Prove them all
wrong."

Chapter
Three

As Ross drove his daughter to school, he
absentmindedly flipped through the radio stations on his car’s
steering wheel. He’d been meaning to choose his preset stations,
but at the moment he wasn’t even listening. Aradia, likewise,
hardly noticed. They were sitting together physically, but both
their minds were elsewhere.

When Salem’s last ADA
unceremoniously and unexpectedly retired after getting his hand
caught in the cookie jar, also known as as the evidence locker on a
drug bust, it truly did open a great opportunity for Ross. However,
the Prestons had a deeper reason to leave their old home. Her
parents denied it when she made any such allegations, but Aradia
knew she was that very reason.

When Ross and Liza had
found her in that cave, they had lived in Ohio. They stayed there a
short while longer before her father’s career led the family to
Arizona. She was only about three years old when the they moved
west, so she didn’t really have much memory of the Ohio years.
Arizona was basically all she’d ever known.

Aradia clenched her
fist, digging her nails into her palm. She didn’t draw blood, but
she let it hurt a bit. No matter what her parents said to reassure
her, she knew she had made the atmosphere in Arizona so
uncomfortable that leaving was the only viable option.
It’s my fault,
she
repeated in her mind for what seemed the ten thousandth
time.
It won’t be any different here. I
can’t run away from myself
.

She gazed through the
passenger side window at the passing structures and landscape.
Later she would admit that Salem really would be a neat place to
live, but for now she was twenty-seven hundred miles away where she
had grown up.

When her parents
enrolled Aradia in kindergarten, the trouble started. At first she
was just taken as a bit peculiar, as any kid could be. But people
noticed she was stronger than she should have been, stronger than
several larger kids combined. Fairly early on, a larger kid, a boy
named Jensen who was the iconic bully of the class, decided it was
her turn to get pushed around.

For an hour in the
afternoon the kindergarteners had “Stations” they could explore on
their own. Aradia was at the Art Station drawing with crayons. The
fact that her drawings often were of bodies hanging from rafters
was an issue all on its own, but fortunately this time she was just
drawing a giant butterfly.

“I want to sit here,”
Jensen said, as tough as a six year old can be.

“You can sit next to
me,” five year old Aradia replied as she kept filling in her
butterfly’s wings.

“I want to sit
here
,” Jensen
replied, shoving Aradia with all his might.

She hadn’t been
expecting it, and had no experience in combat of any sort, so he
nudged her enough to wobble her a bit. He did manage to jerk her
arm, which drew an ugly red gash of a line across her
butterfly.

“My butterfly!” she
screamed and promptly started bawling.

Jensen, seeing her
crying, was satisfied with his result, but knew she should have
fallen over. She was small for her age and he was large for his. He
took it as a challenge.

He tried again and
again to knock her over, and never could. Aradia took it to be a
game of sorts, laughing when he failed to hurt her, which angered
him even more. That was when he began the name-calling. Soon the
other children were in on the cruelty as well. By that point,
Aradia didn’t laugh at it anymore.

One day, Aradia pushed
back.

They were on the
playground, because of course such a showdown would occur on a
playground. A large group of kids were playing King of the Hill, a
dodgeball variant, and Aradia wanted to play too.

“You’re not allowed,”
Jensen had said. Recognizing the will of their leader, the other
kids backed him up.

“I wanna play King with
you,” Aradia repeated.

“You can’t play with
us!” Jensen yelled at her. “You have a stupid name.”

It wasn’t even much of
an insult, but it was enough. She looked around at the circle of
kids which had formed around them. They were all laughing. She felt
like she was spinning out of control. That was when she screamed
and shoved Jensen as hard as she could.

For a second or two he
was actually airborne, before crashing to the earth and rolling
several meters.

The other kids stopped
laughing.

By now the teachers
were finally involved, and they broke up the commotion. It turned
out Jensen had broken his arm in the fall, and he had a cast for
six weeks afterward. For those six weeks, that cast was a constant
reminder to everybody that Aradia was different than they were.
Jensen asked every student in class to sign it, other than
her.

There wasn’t any
official fallout with the school. Everybody knew Jensen was a
troublemaker, but now Aradia was on the radar too. Perhaps more
devastating was the fact that Jensen was the youngest of four
siblings, and his parents were well established members of the
school community.

Ross and Liza were
none-too-popular themselves after the skirmish.

There were other
oddities as well, of course. Aradia never got sick; she never even
got the sniffles. The most off-putting display of her powers, to
most people, was that she often seemed to know if something was
going to happen just seconds before it actually did.

As she grew she learned
to control and hide these abilities, but as a young girl she
couldn’t help herself.

Needless to say, she
was familiar with being isolated from her peers.

The bullying was hard
to deal with, and it didn’t end with kindergarten, or with Jensen.
Much worse than that, though, was that in her heart she believed
the other kids were right to be afraid of her. She really had hurt
Jensen, and as she grew, so did her powers and her strength. As a
five year old, she broke a boy’s arm. What would happen if she lost
control again when she was much more powerful? How could she be
anything but an outcast?

Aradia’s memories fast
forwarded six years. Jensen was long gone, but she doubted there
was a shortage of Jensens in the world. She was in middle school,
and there had been another boy who had taken to calling her names.
This one, named Kasey, went the extra mile of mockery and spread
horrible rumors about Aradia.

For more than a year,
Aradia had begrudgingly put up with his behavior. Contradicting the
rumors proved fruitless, and confronting him was not an option that
she allowed herself.

Then he went further
than he should have.

Aradia had been walking
down the halls, just like she always did and just like always, all
the other students were arranged in their groups of exclusivity.
Unlike normal, however, they all seemed to notice her. Most days
she doubted anybody even remembered she was there.

And she recognized the
look in their eyes, the way their mouths curled up in malicious
smiles. Something was going on, something very bad.

She knelt down to set
her bag in front of her locker. It wasn’t until she rose turn the
combination that she noticed a flyer taped on her
locker.

It looked like the
cover of a Playboy magazine.

“Charming,” she
muttered to herself.

She was just about to
tear it down and wad it up when she realized it wasn’t quite what
she’d first thought. It was indeed the printout of a Playboy cover,
but whoever had made it had photoshopped onto the model the face of
Aradia's mother.

She hadn’t made
anything of it at first, but she’d seen dozens of students either
holding or looking at handouts on her way into school.

For the first time
since she was five, she did not hold back.

A group of three girls
had been passing her way, holding a flyer and giggling. Aradia
grabbed the leader of the pack by her sweater with enough force
that she dropped the flyer and her notebook.

“Hey!” the girl, whose
name Aradia neither knew nor cared about, protested. “Lay
off!”

“Not the mild-mannered
bitch you’re used to, huh?” Aradia said. The girl struggled, but
Aradia’s fists might as well have been steel vices. “Who gave you
the flyer?”

“Lay off,
freak!”

“Who gave you the
flyer, hmm?” Aradia demanded.

Her anger was such that
she was well beyond shouting. No, her voice was amazingly level in
tone, but just as firm and unyielding as her grip.

“Kasey gave it to me.
He gave out all of them. Let go of me!”

She didn’t really need
to add the last bit. Aradia was already on the move.

She used a more mild
form of her summoning ability to find her foe. It didn’t have any
visual manifestations, and was weaker than her bright, glowing
light, but it could lead her in the right direction if she was
close to what she sought and her will was strong enough.
Unfortunately for Kasey, her will was strong, and she was very
close.

He saw her coming. He
was on the second floor of the Stevens Library, which was probably
where he’d made the copies of his flyer.

“Heya Rai,” he gloated,
knowing that was a nickname her mom used for her. “How’s
it–”

He didn’t get the
chance to complete his sentence though. Aradia accelerated to a
full sprint in the few final steps between the two of them. She
flung aside the table he’d been sitting at and barreled right
through him with a tackle that would have made an NFL linebacker
proud.

Aradia wasn’t thinking
about how strong she was or how far her lunge might propel them.
She also wasn’t thinking about the fact that they were on the
second floor and in front of a window. In the moment, lost in her
rage, she just didn’t care.

Both she and Kasey
plunged straight through the window and down, landing with two hard
thuds on the concrete parking lot below.

Aradia was actually
hurt far worse than Kasey. Yet, with her enhanced healing, she
recovered from the worst of her injuries in just a few
days.

Kasey, miraculously,
suffered far less than he could have. He took some cuts to his neck
and arms from the glass of the window and broke three ribs, but
that was the extent of his injuries. The doctor who examined Kasey
impressed upon him how much worse it could have been.

Given the nature of the
situation, it was difficult for the Prestons to convince Kasey’s
family not to press charges. For them it was Jensen all over again,
only older now, and with potentially greater repercussions.
Ironically, Aradia would have probably ended up in juvie if not for
Kasey himself. He had strongly urged his parents to let the whole
situation go. Partly, he recognized he’d been a jerk to pull the
stunt he’d pulled. Stronger, though, was that he didn’t want to
draw any more attention to the fact that he’d been thrown through a
window by a girl.

After that episode, her
parents, who had already been discussing leaving Arizona for
Aradia's benefit, decided enough was enough.

The Prestons would have
accepted the first jobs that came their way. It worked out, by
chance, that the first jobs to open were actually pretty promising.
Ross’s career had plateaued in Arizona, and Liza found a very
fitting position at Salem High. Not only were they expanding their
art department and looking for a new art teacher, but their
guidance counselor had, on short notice, decided to make her
maternity leave permanent. Liza’s experience and education made her
a very qualified candidate for both positions.