Touched, Chapter 5
"Lady, are you crying, do the tears belong to me
Did you think our time together was all gone
Lady, you've been dreaming, I'm as close as I can be
And I swear to you our time has just begun
Close your eyes and rest your weary mind
I promise I will stay right here beside you
Today our lives were joined, became entwined
I wish that you could know how much I love you"
-John Denver, "My Sweet Lady"
"You are a fool to have let her go," Bella said as she sat across from Alina in the fox's office. Her eyes did not leave Alina's form as she sipped her piping hot coffee.
"I haven't a clue what you're talking about." Alina could feel Bella trying to probe into her mind, trying to glean the slightest incriminating evidence out of her to find reason to overthrow her. Bella had always had it out for Alina since the day Alina had probed her mind and had her punished by the sisterhood for dabbling in the dark arts.
Few ever dared put themselves in the way of Bella. She was an intimidating female, standing six and a half feet tall. She was a proud African lioness with hard, yellow eyes and smoothly furred head that matched the rest of her brilliant golden-hued form. On top of her stature and grace, she carried a particularly wicked knack for all things magical. She was incessantly over-achieving, and had outmatched her own mistress in five years flat. Most witches couldn't match that feat in thirty years. But, as a result, she always carried a superiority complex that made her wildly unpopular, though nobody would say that to her face. She coveted the Grand Empress position, everyone knew it. But nobody would dare put her there, so long as another witch was powerful enough to keep Bella in check, at least.
"You know damned well I don't need to probe your mind to know you're lying. The others may willingly wear a veil of ignorance when it comes to this supposed break-in committed by your pet. But if anyone should know how impenetrable your office is when you leave it behind, it's me."
Alina smirked. She knew Bella was always testing her magical boundaries, many of which were of her own making and design. After all, why use boundaries to which anybody could simply look up the counter-curses to? "And if, perhaps, I trusted Norgia more than you, and she knew perfectly well how to get into my office?"
"You're saying you're guilty, then?" Bella said, her eyes glittering dangerously.
"I said no such thing. I am simply admitting an error in my judgment," Alina smirked, eyes flashing to Bella's own significantly. "After all, we all make mistakes from time to time. Forgiveness is the best policy in these situations. Don't you agree, Bella?"
Bella's teeth involuntarily showed themselves in an almost-snarl before Bella clamped her jaw shut. "Like you did me any favors, telling that to the council."
"You're still here because of me, don't forget that," Alina said, her voice now going cold. What is Bella getting at? She wondered silently to herself. This was far outside Bella's style. She liked working behind your back, in secret places. Plotting and scheming were her style, not up-front confrontation. "Are we done here? Have we dispelled any doubts you might have about my questionable connections to Norgia?"
Setting her saucer and cup down on Alina's desk, Bella stood, her body rigid and tense. She gave the slightest of bows as she said, "Your reign will not last so long as you think, Alina."
Alina's eyes flashed even more dangerously than before. "Perhaps I have been too lenient with you, Bella. Perhaps addressing me as Grand Empress from now on will suffice to remind you of your place." Rarely did Alina like to pull rank, but some witches just didn't respond well to any other method of making them recognize the way of things.
Again, Bella bowed, this time much lower. "Yes, Grand Empress..." she said, her voice turning to a bit of a hiss as her right hand flashed up her left sleeve.
Alina stood, hands in battle poise, and was already casting a protective charm before her words stopped dead. She was staring at what Bella had whipped out of her sleeve with horror dawning in her eyes. "No, you wouldn't dare awaken those magics again," she sputtered as Bella raised a fourteen-inch silver rod.
"Oh yes, I would," Bellasaid, leveling the wand at Alina's chest. "It's fascinating, how well one can modify modern technology to mimic the great wand-building materials of ancient lore," she said, and with a flick of the wrist Alina was soaring up to the ceiling, pinned there painfully. Bella smiled darkly, her yellow eyes piercing Alina's. "I don't need to overthrow you anymore, Alina. Not only can I see now everything you've told Norgia, I can see your entire mind. You are no longer the most powerful sorceress in the sisterhood." She turned, pulling her wand away from Alina and letting her fall to the floor, hitting against the back of her own chair in a painful glancing blow.
Bella did not wait for Alina to recover before she started to speak again. "You will remain in your position for now, Alina. You will be more useful to me there." Alina had just managed to lift her head over her desk, wincing in pain, when Bella lifted the wand again and a silver light flashed into her line of sight.
It was all just a dream, Yesenia realized as she walked up to her house. There was no gaping, fiery hole where her bedroom used to be. The windows of the cars were all intact and normal. Running up to the front door, Yesenia tugs it open and rushes into the house to find her father and mother there. Miraculously, no others are there to interfere in this moment as her father stands and pulls her into a huge hug. Once she is set down, her mother kisses her on the cheek happily.
Even as they sit down, Yesenia's mother produces a huge pile of steaming hot macadamia nut cookies. Yesenia feels ravished at the sight and smell of them, and begins devouring the cookies. "Yesenia, we're so happy you are home," her father said. "I'm sorry we treated you the way we did when you came out. You'll always be our little kitten, Jessie."
Jessie. Yesenia hadn't been called that since she was a kitten. She smiled happily to her father as she devoured another cookie. "Thank you, daddy."
Both of her parents smiled warmly to her. But just then, she seemed to feel the tone of their reunion shift noticeably. It was like the room had become just a little bit colder.
"Yesenia," her mother said, in an all-too-timid voice for her. "If you could, though, just tell them where you are?"
Yesenia dropped the cookie she was halfway through inhaling into her maw when she heard these words. Cold realization washed through her veins. This was a trap, and was in her own dream. It seemed her parents took her silence as unwillingness.
"They say they're going to hurt us," her mother continued to plead. "They won't hurt you, though, if you tell. They promised us that. They don't want to harm you. They just want to bring that witch to justice."
Yesenia was already standing and backing away from her parents as they gave pleas for her to help them. She shook her head in horror of what she was hearing.
"Yesenia, please, listen to your mother," her father said, joining in on it.
"Yes, hija preciosa, please help us. They are going to hurt us."
"Yesenia, please..."
"Yesenia."
"Yesenia!"
"Yesenia!"
Suddenly Yesenia snapped awake, finding herself staring at the roof of the BMW they had escaped in only the night before.
"Yesenia, wake up!" Norgia was yelling down at her, panic touching her voice.
Sitting up with a quick motion, Yesenia looked around her groggily, trying to discern where they were. Her head was still ringing with the sounds of her parents' begging. Before she even knew what was happening, Norgia roughly grabbed her by her upper arms and forced her to stare right in her white-furred face. "Did you tell them anything?!"
"Wh-what?" Yesenia said, still partially conscious. "What do you--"
"They were trying to get in our heads, find out where we were. Did you tell them anything?" she demanded, her brilliantly bright eyes staring deep into Yesenia's own.
In the back of her head, Yesenia felt a kind of squirming feeling before she finally managed to break her gaze away. "I didn't say anything," she said grudgingly, pulling herself out of Norgia's grip and cowering into the far corner of the bench seat in the back. "It was just a dream, anyway, how did you know what was going on?"
Norgia looked over Yesenia impatiently. "It wasn't just a dream. They are trying to manipulate us to give up our location."
Yesenia felt a certain amount of cold dread fill her chest. "Does that mean they really have my parents?" she choked out, immediately regretting she even asked. She realized she may not want to know the answer.
"It's probable. They're resorting to some very dark magic here," she sighed, shaking her head and collapsing into the seat on the other end from where Yesenia was curled up. "I have a bad feeling about this. Alina would never use such tactics to track us down. We're going to have to close off our minds."
"Even if my parents are being hurt?!"
"Especially then!" Norgia shot back. In that instant, both of their eyes met with a brilliant intensity. The air within the BMW seemed to fill with electricity. "Your parents are useless to them dead. And you're useless to them if you haven't trained up your powers."
"I don't want this!" she spat back. "Take them away, let me be with my family again. I don't want this to be happening."
Norgia suddenly seems to have all the air taken out of her as she falls back into her seat, looking down at the floor of the cabin of the car. "If I could, I would. I never imagined any of this happening."
The sudden change in Norgia disarms Yesenia, and she stares at her, almost wanting to feel guilty. Almost.
"What do you mean, if you could?" Yesenia asked with as much steel in her voice as she could muster.
Norgia sighed, looking to Jess with guilt written across her face. "You were in such a state when I saw you in the break room. I thought you of all people deserved better than your lot in life. I know what the people back at the store said about you, and I simply observed from a distance."
"Observed? What the hell am I to you?"
"One of many potential candidates to the sisterhood," she said solemnly. "I was working there for years because you showed such promise. But you had your own path ahead of you, the sisterhood decided it best not to awaken your abilities, in spite of the fact you had a great number of the signs."
Even as Norgia spoke, Yesenia could see Nicky coming out of the woods that surrounded their car, carrying a bundle of wood in his arms. She didn't even know where they had hidden themselves. They could be as far as Georgia, considering the time.
"The signs?" Yesenia asked, the hardness gone now from her voice as she turned her gaze on Norgia.
Norgia simply nodded. "All potential candidates have signs that they'll be particularly potent sorceresses. But we make sure to only initiate those who have little else going for them in life, those who would most appreciate the abilities, once awoken."
"And you thought I had so little going in my life?" Yesenia asked, offended.
"No! That's not it at all. There was a time, before the wars that swept this world early in the last century, where we would give the gift to anyone who would truly appreciate the meaning of it. I still hold to that. I don't believe you should be a lost cause just so we can have the opportunity to shape you ourselves. After all, the witches who formed the sisterhood long ago were not desperate, broken cases. They were more often than not headstrong and bold women of their times. I saw how you were back at the store. I was afraid you might lose that flame inside yourself."
Yesenia sat back, fighting back tears as she watched Nicky set up a spot for a bonfire. "Why is it such a crime, then, what you did?"
Norgia shook her head solemnly, the golden locks of her hair swaying as she does so. "I wish I could tell you. Ever since the Second World War it's been difficult to act on one's own accord. The sisterhood tightened up, established a laundry list of new rules we'd never seen before. Only a few sisters now remain who knew what it was before that time."
"And you're one of them?" Yesenia asked skeptically, her eyes studying Norgia.
"I'm far older than you think, dear," she replied in a voice that was altogether not unkind. "I'm afraid the sisterhood has gone further off the tracks than I realized. Perhaps I've been out of the loop from the council too long."
"If you're so old, why aren't you in the council? It sounds like something that should be run by the older, wiser witches."
"It is and it isn't. Many witches tend to move on in their lives when they start hitting the triple digits. Plus, I'm sort of an outcast in their eyes."
"I suppose for the same reasons that made you awaken this power in me?"
Norgia smirked, turning to Yesenia and patting her arm. "Jess, you are quite an intuitive young witch."
Smiling weakly, Yesenia placed her hand on Norgia's own. "I suppose all that college education had to be good for something, right?"
Something was wrong. Yesenia always answered her phone when she called. Or, at least, she'd call back within a quarter hour, apologizing for being in the shower or some other inconvenience. Considering how upset she had been the night before, and the fact she had promised to call in the morning, Melinda was justifiably nervous. She glanced at her clock and swore; noon already. At 12:30 she had Ops Management, and that was on the other side of campus. She shouldered her back and stuck her phone in her left jeans pocket, already having set it on vibrate. She was always cursed to receive phone calls on the rare occasions that she forgot to turn off her ringer.
It wasn't until she'd crossed nearly the entire campus, regretting wearing jeans in this Florida heat, that she felt her phone going off. She quickly glanced at her watch. 12:20. She slid the phone from her pocket, saw it was Jess' house phone, and quickly answered.
"Hey! Is everything okay? I've been waiting for you to call all morning!"
"You have?"
A coldness went through Melinda's spine, down to the very base of her tail. "Who is this?"
"Carlos, Yesenia's cousin."
That would make sense. Yesenia never called from the house phone unless she succeeded in killing her Blackberry's battery... or managed to break yet another phone.
"How did you get my number."
"I've been contacting AOII sisters all morning, they finally told me if anyone knew about Jess, it'd be you."
"What do you mean?" Now Melinda's toes were numb. She'd stopped dead in the middle of an open pathway that ran along a patch of woods notorious for certain murderous acts decades ago, the sun beating on her relentlessly. "Where is Yesenia?"
"I was hoping you'd be able to answer that," Carlos said, concern edging its way into his voice. "Matter of fact, I was hoping you'd know where her parents were, too."
The moment of frozen inactivity was brief. Before Melinda knew what she was doing, she was marching back towards her dorm, demanding every detail of Carlos that she could. Carlos explained about the burned-out bedroom, quickly verifying there was no body in there. He spoke of how Jess' parents were gone, too. There had been a commotion the night before, but mysteriously enough, nobody seemed to be able to escape their own bedrooms, the locks on their doors being mysteriously jammed. Firefighters and police responded, and were baffled by the fact there was not a stray bit of fur or mark left behind by whoever did this. By 1:15 that afternoon, her beat-up hatchback Civic was rocketing down Interstate 75.
On the other end of that phone call sat Alina, smiling to herself after hanging up the phone. It was much easier to get your bait to come to you. "Anything else I can do for you today?" she asked the lioness sitting across from her."
"No, my dear, that will do for now," Bella answered, her yellow eyes the only things visible from beneath her hood. "Have her picked up as soon as she arrives at the house."