Watch Me Burn: The December People, Book Two Read online

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  © 2014 Sharon Bayliss

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  ISBN 978-1-62007-724-5 (hardcover)

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  For my husband, who shines bright enough for the both of us.

  What is to give light, must endure burning.

  -Viktor E. Frankl

  avid Vandergraff could smell magic in the air, as clearly as he could smell the motor oil and burned coffee. When the news report began, the volume on the television became much louder, and the screen glowed as if demons would claw their way out at any minute. However, none of the other patrons in the waiting room of the mechanic’s shop noticed anything different. They continued staring at their phones, looking pale and sick in the fluorescent light and excessive air conditioning. Before David had known he was a wizard, he dismissed such oddities as “just one of those things you can’t explain.” But now, he knew better.

  The image of the missing girl on the screen shined so intensely, he could see her outline burned into the blackness behind his eyelids when he blinked. The girl posed in her volleyball uniform, displaying a radiant, white-toothed smile. She looked about fourteen or fifteen. She had blonde hair and golden skin and a strange radiating quality, as if the pixels in the television gave her an extra glow.

  David shook his head. Since he had learned he was a wizard, anytime he noticed anything strange, from bad weather to a headache, he feared magic was involved. His daughter Emmy was blonde, around the girl’s same age, and played volleyball. So, the missing girl reminded him of Emmy—and of course, that would upset him. Besides, his heart always raced when he saw a missing child. Two of his own children had been missing for a long time. And even though they were now safe at home, the fear and grief would never leave him.

  He tried to turn his attention back to scanning job listings on his tablet, but he couldn’t focus his eyes on anything except the television report and all the other sounds turned into a whirring buzz.

  David usually dreaded hearing “Vandergraff” called over the loudspeaker, because that meant he would be asked to pay a large bill with money he didn’t have. But this time, he appreciated getting away from the television. The report about the missing girl had played three more times while he’d waited.

  He had memorized every word. Julie Prescott, age fourteen, 5’3”, 120 pounds, blonde hair, green eyes, last seen on July 22 in Sugar Land, Texas.

  He stood at the counter and thumbed through credit cards, trying to remember which one he hadn’t maxed out yet. Their SUV had broken down three times this year, and the truck, four times. He believed all the dark, and therefore destructive, magic floating around his house caused their vehicles to self-destruct. And the water heater, and the AC unit, and the dishwasher. Either dark magic was at work, or the rental home they had moved into was a piece of crap…probably both.

  As David had suspected, or at least hoped, practicing dark magic hadn’t turned them all into raving lunatics or given him a Voldemort-esque snake face. However, the destructive power of dark magic, even unintentional dark magic, should not be trifled with. In any case, dark magic had many limits. For example…he couldn’t fix the transmission. He had to rack up more credit card debt and leave it at the mechanic’s for days while they puzzled over it and ordered the wrong parts, just like a Mundane.

  Reveling in the smoothly-running engine of the fixed Expedition, he pulled out of the service center and Julie’s face assaulted him once again. A billboard. He idly wondered how much money her parents dropped to get her face on a billboard. Whatever they had to pay, they did it at least twice, because he saw another billboard as he pulled into Fuzzy’s to grab a bag of tacos for his kids.

  While he waited for his order, he saw Julie’s face again…on a bulletin board flyer, and no longer found it surprising. Her face had permeated his world. He didn’t know why, but he could no longer comfort himself with the thought that he might be overreacting. Magic was in play. Julie Prescott was following him.

  As he got out of the Expedition at home, he noticed something white on the ground. He plucked a missing person flyer off his shoe. She had followed him home. Julie Prescott with David’s footprint on her pretty, smiling face. He half-folded, half-crumpled the flyer and stuffed it into the pocket of his cargo shorts.

  “Hello?” David opened the door to a too-quiet house. He shivered in the aggressive air conditioning. If they were spending this much electricity on the AC, they better at least be home.

  In some ways, he didn’t mind that the house was small. That meant he could keep track of the kids. They had nowhere to go. The backyard consisted of nothing but a tiny square of dead lawn marred with a large stump. This also meant Xavier and Patrick shared a room, and Evangeline and Emmy shared a room, which felt cruel and unusual, but he couldn’t think of a better alternative.

  David looked through the rooms and only found Patrick, in his bedroom playing a video game.

  “Hey,” David said. “Where is everybody?”

  “I don’t know,” Patrick replied, not taking his eyes off the game. “Did you check the living room slash kitchen?”

  “Of course…” When Patrick didn’t say anything else, David continued. “The Expedition is fixed.”

  “Okay.”

  “You could show a little more enthusiasm. You’ve been complaining about sharing your car all week.”

  Patrick shrugged, still not looking away from his game.

  “I brought lunch.” David held out his bag of tacos.

  “Okay. Thanks. You can leave it.”

  “Is everything okay?” David asked.

  Patrick paused his game and turned to scowl at David. Patrick was the only one in the family who wasn’t a winter wizard. His magic fell in the Fall, perhaps as warm as September. But when he wanted, Patrick could give a glare as deadly as the other Vandergraffs.

  Patrick always glared when asked if he was okay. David knew Patrick heard the unspoken question—are you turning dark like Jude? Before Jude had surrendered to the darkness, he had been withdrawn, depressed, and different from his usual self…much how Patrick had been lately. Patrick seemed to sense and loathe the comparison. David understood why, but he had to keep asking. He didn’t know what else to do. He had no intention of ignoring it and letting his children fall to darkness one by one.

  Amanda had put it quite sensibly when she said, “He may not be likely to surrender to darkness, but he can still be a depressed teenager. That’s bad enough.”

  The front door opened, so David had an excuse to escape Patrick’s oppressive glowering, and walk back into the living room slash kitchen.

  Amanda and Emmy came in the front door, looking wilted from the summer heat. They had strange red splotches on the backs of their knees and tops of their toes—anywhere they’d forgotten to apply sunscreen on their pale skin. They had their light blonde hair pulled back in sweaty, frizzy ponytails. He didn’t know much abou
t women’s hair, but he had heard them complain enough to know Houston summer humidity was a bad thing. He understood, in a way—it made him feel like he would suffocate every time he went outside, as if the hot steam in the air had replaced the oxygen.

  They carried double their body weight in grocery bags. David winced. More money they didn’t have.

  “Hey,” Amanda said. “I see we have the Expedition back.”

  “Yep, finally.”

  Amanda leaned across her cocoon of bags to give him a quick kiss. “Well, that is great,” she said with no enthusiasm.

  “Hi Dad,” Emmy said, as she unloaded her bags into his hands.

  “I see you’ve been shopping.”

  “Obviously,” Emmy said.

  “So, where are Xavier and Evangeline?” David asked.

  “Head doctor,” Emmy said. She had taken off her shoes and sprawled out on the floor under the ceiling fan.

  “Oh,” David said.

  Emmy pulled her shirt over her head and tossed it across the room.

  “Emmy!” Amanda scolded.

  “What? It’s hot.”

  “At least go to your room to take your clothes off.”

  “Fine.”

  When Emmy closed the door to the girls’ room, Amanda groaned. “Ugh. I’m glad she’s gone.”

  “Can you say that again, so I can film it? I want it for your mother-of-the-year nomination video.”

  “Ha ha. Besides, I think we already used all the tape for your highlights reel.”

  “I’m messing with you. I know how she is.”

  “I really miss volleyball camp. When we had money, we got to pay other people to spend time with her in the summer.” Amanda said. “This is why in England they have Hogwarts. There you get to ship the kids away when they turn eleven, I mean, how awesome would that be?”

  “Hogwarts isn’t real, is it?”

  “You did not seriously just ask me that.”

  David didn’t reply.

  Amanda rolled her eyes. “No, David. It’s not real…well, at least I assume it’s not. All I know is, I never got an owl.”

  David followed Amanda the short distance to the kitchen. Ridiculous appliances—like a rice steamer and a food dehydrator—cluttered the limited counter space, so he put the bags on the floor. Only a fraction of their possessions had survived the move, but the house still busted at the seams. They had boxes of fine china and other things too valuable to throw away still stacked in the living room. David had sold the big things, including his Mercedes and the boat, but that still left an endless sea of things too useful to throw away, but not worth selling.

  It had hurt at first, but then he became numb to it, and finally he realized he liked it. If Amanda hadn’t played defense, he would take every useless item—starting with the fancy soup tureen, the wine decanter, and the porcelain gravy boat—and chuck them into the street just to watch them break. He used to care about possessions so much, and now he couldn’t remember why. Sometimes he fantasized about burning the house down so all the boxes of crap would turn to ash and they could start fresh, but that would cause more problems than it would solve.

  They crammed as many of the groceries into the refrigerator and pantry as they could, and left the rest for Xavier, who had a magical knack for stacking things the right way.

  “Have you seen this?” David asked.

  The moment they had stuffed the last partially-melted food item safely in the freezer, David handed Amanda the crumpled flyer with his footprint on it.

  Amanda examined the photo. “Should I? Do we know this girl?”

  “Not that I know of. But I’ve been seeing her everywhere today. More than should be normal. I’m thinking, maybe…there is some magic in play. What do you think?”

  “I think she’s a cute little blonde girl from a family with money, and that’s why you’ve seen her picture everywhere.”

  “Have you seen her picture before now?”

  Amanda squinted at the photo. “She looks familiar…maybe. But I haven’t seen this flyer before.”

  “Well, I’ve seen it five times in the past hour.”

  “Okay. So?” Amanda

  “I thought we agreed to stop pretending magic doesn’t exist. You really don’t think it’s odd?”

  “I think you’re bored.”

  He didn’t know if he wanted Amanda to be right or wrong. If right, he could go on with life as normal. He could feel scared and horrified that another child in the world was missing—in danger…maybe even dead. But he could move on.

  If she was wrong and he reacted to a spell, then that meant he had some part to play in this girl’s story. Someone had cast a spell to protect her or bring her home, and somehow David was a part of that. That was how magic worked. If someone wanted to find her, they couldn’t cast a spell to levitate her back home. Magic worked within the bounds of normal reality. Magic could twist fate to its will, but it couldn’t do the physically impossible. He had learned the hard way you could never fully anticipate how a spell would work. The means might not be worth the ends. However, someway, somehow, the magic needed to use David to save the girl—a frightening, but also warming prospect. He would like to be the hero. He wanted to save a child after she’d been missing for days…instead of twelve years.

  “Huh,” Amanda said.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  She looked closely at the photo.

  “Seriously, what?” David asked, again.

  “Well, she is a witch.”

  David looked over her shoulder at the photo. In person, he could sense another wizard, but didn’t get the same “pull” from a photo.

  “How can you tell?”

  “Look.” She pointed to a charm bracelet on the girl’s wrist and chuckled. “She really wants people to know she’s a summer witch.”

  “You can tell that from her bracelet?”

  “Oh, yes. This circle shape with lines, that’s the sun. I’ve definitely seen this one before.”

  David thought he had too. He remembered that symbol on the badges of the summer wizards who had almost taken Samantha away.

  “And this one,” Amanda continued, “This triangle shaped thing, that is the elemental symbol for fire.”

  “Fire?”

  “Sure, summer wizards worship the light. The sun. Fire. Anything that can burn the crap out of you. Light isn’t always warm fuzzy goodness, sometimes it’s just hot.”

  “So, I’m not crazy.”

  “Mmm…I think the jury’s still out on that one.”

  “Think about it, if her rich wizard parents put up posters everywhere, billboards even, to find her, you think they would have also cast a spell to bring her home.”

  “Maybe, if they thought it was worth the risk. You know a spell like that is dangerous. You never know how you’re going to get what you want, or if you’ll still want it when you do.”

  “Are you listening to yourself? To save their kid? Hell yeah, that’s worth the risk.”

  “You’re probably right. But I don’t think you should get involved. It’s not our concern. You never know how the spell wants to use you. It might not be what you think. In fact, it’s almost never what you think.”

  “I don’t know what I think.”

  “If the spell is working through you, what do you think it wants you do to?”

  “I don’t know yet. I figure I’d stay open to it, and see where it leads me.”

  Amanda opened the freezer and stared into it, letting the expensive cold air spill out into the kitchen, and closed it again without taking anything.

  “You know, if it were the other way around, they wouldn’t help you,” Amanda said. “And if you did somehow find this girl and bring her home, they would probably attack you on sight. A winter wizard anywhere near this girl would be considered automatically guilty.”

  “Yeah well, I’m better than that. I’m not going to go out of my way not to help save a little girl, just because she�
�s a summer wizard.”

  “That’s sweet. Also, naïve and stupid.”

  “You know, you’re basing this on what happens when a dark wizard casts a spell. Since our magic is destructive, bad things seem to happen no matter what our intention. With summer wizards, it would be different, right? Their magic is good. Good magic with good intentions wouldn’t leave a wake of destruction in its path. If we assume it’s the opposite, then it would leave a wake of good fortune in its path.”

  “I honestly know as much about summer magic as I do about theoretical physics,” Amanda said. “I don’t know how it works, or what it does. But I don’t want you thinking summer wizards are good wizards. If winter wizards aren’t bad wizards, then summer wizards aren’t good wizards.”

  David scoffed. “I think as a group, anyway, we’re bad enough.”

  Amanda shrugged, and now opened the refrigerator and stood in the cool air for a while before finally grabbing the gallon of sweet tea she had bought.

  “I’m going to take this photo and start asking around about her,” David said. “Maybe I’ll find something.”

  Amanda shook her head. “Can you at least wait until I get paid next? I might need money to bail you out of jail.”

  avid couldn’t focus on anything the next day—not that his current state of unemployment required much focus. Or, as Amanda said, he was not unemployed—he was a stay-at-home dad—always with a hint of a smirk. She missed the money, but she also liked being the breadwinner. She loved having that power over him. She had worked in the public relations department of an oil company for years, and specialized in saying “we’re sorry about the oil spill” in as many ways as possible. She made a decent salary, at least enough to pay for bills, groceries, and rent on their dramatic downsize in Missouri City.

  In principle, he didn’t mind the idea of stay-at-home dad. He hadn’t been the best dad so far, and now he could spend all his energy making it right. However, staying home with the kids had not turned out as Father’s-Day-card-perfect as he’d hoped. He sucked at housework, and he had trouble interacting with his kids without buying them things or taking them on expensive vacations. He didn’t bring in money and didn’t do anything else useful either. He didn’t know how much longer he would stay sane living like this.