"A little." My chest and throat weren't quite as sore, and my eyes had stopped stinging.
Hunter's green eyes were locked on me. "I need you to tell me what happened."
I took a deep breath; then I told him how Sky and I had scryed together. How she'd helped me to spy on Cal and his mother in their spell-guarded house as they talked to their coconspirators about killing me if I refused to join them. How I saw that Cal had been assigned to seduce me, to get me onto their side so that my power could be joined with theirs. How I'd learned that they were also after my birth mother's coven tools, objects of enormous power that they wanted to add to their arsenal of magickal weapons. How I'd gone to talk to Cal, how he'd overpowered me with magick and taken me back to his house.
"He put me in a seomar in the back of the pool house," I said, a vivid picture of the horrible little secret room rising in my mind. "The walls were covered with dark runes. He must have knocked me unconscious. When I came to, I heard Selene arguing with him outside. She was telling him not to do it, not to set it on fire. But Cal said" — my voice broke again—"he said he was solving the problem. He meant me. I was the p-p-problem."
"Shhh," Hunter said softly. Reaching out, he laid his palm flat against my forehead. I felt a tingling warmth spread outward from the spot, like a thousand little bubbles. His eyes held mine as the sensation washed over me, dulling the edge of my pain to the point where I could just bear it.
"Thanks," I said, awed.
He smiled briefly, his face transforming for a moment. Then he said, "Morgan, I'm sorry to press you, but this is important. Did they get your birth mother's tools?"
Maeve had fled her native Ireland after her coven, Belwicket had been decimated. I had recently found her tools, the ancient tools of her coven. Selene had wanted them badly. "No," I told Hunter. "They're safe. I'd know if they weren't—they're bound to me. Anyway, I hid them."
Hunter poured us each a cup of tea. "Where?"
"Um—under Bree's house. I put them there right before I went to see Cal," I said. It sounded so lame as I said it that I cringed, waiting for Hunter to yell at me.
But he just nodded. "All right I suppose they'll be safe enough for now, since Cal and Selene have fled. But get them back as soon as you can."
"What can they do with them?" I asked. "Why are they so dangerous?"
"I'm not sure exactly what they could do," Hunter said. "But Selene is very powerful and very skilled in magick, as you know. And some of the tools, the athame and the wand in particular, were made long ago, back before Belwicket renounced the blackness. They've since been purified, of course, but they were made to channel and focus dark energies. I'm sure Selene could find a way to return them to their original state. I imagine, for example, that Maeve's wand in Selene's hands could be used to magnify the power of the dark wave."
The dark wave. I felt a coldness in the pit of my stomach. The dark wave was the thing that had wiped out Maeve's coven. It had also destroyed Hunter's parents' coven and had forced his mother and father into hiding ten years ago. They were still missing.
No one seemed to know exactly what the dark wave was—whether it was an entity with a will of its own or a force of mindless destruction, like a tornado. All we did know was that where it passed, it left death and horror behind it, entire towns turned to ash. Hunter believed that Selene was somehow connected to the dark wave. But he didn't know how.
I put my head in my hands. "Is all of this happening because Cal and Selene are Woodbane?" I asked in a small voice. Woodbane was the family name of one of the Seven Great Clans of Wicca. To be Woodbane meant, traditionally, to be without a moral compass. Woodbanes throughout history had used any means at their disposal, including calling on dark spirits or dark energy, to become more powerful. Supposedly this had all changed when the International Council of Witches had come into being and made laws to govern the use of magick. But as I was learning, the world of Wicca was as fractured and divided as the everyday world I'd known for the first sixteen years of my life. And there were many Woodbanes who didn't live by the council's laws.
I happened to be Woodbane, too. I hadn't wanted to believe it when I first found out, but the small, red, dagger-shaped birthmark on the inside of my arm was proof of it. Many, if not most, Woodbanes had one somewhere. It was known as the Woodbane athame, because it looked like the ceremonial dagger that was part of any witch's set of tools.
Hunter sighed, and I was reminded that he was half Woodbane himself. "That's the question, isn't it? I don't honestly know what it means to be Woodbane. I don't know what's nature and what's nurture."
He set down his mug and rose. "I'll see if your clothes are dry. Then I'll run you home."
Sky followed us to my house in her car so that she could drive Hunter home. He and I didn't talk on the way. Whatever calming effect his touch had had on me was entirely gone now, and my mind kept replaying Cal lying to me, shouting at me, using his magick to nearly kill me. How could something that had been so sweet, that felt so good, have turned into this? How could I have been so blind? And why, even now, was some shameful part of me wanting to call to him? Cal, don't leave me. Cal, come back. Oh, God. I swallowed as bile rushed up into my throat.
"Morgan," Hunter said as he pulled up in front of my house. "You do understand, don't you, that you can't let your guard down? Cal may be gone, but it's likely he'll come back."
Come back? Hope, fear, rage, confusion swept over me. "Oh, God." I doubled over in my seat, hugging myself. "Oh, God. I loved him. I feel so stupid."
"Don't," Hunter said quietly. I looked up. His face was turned away from me. I saw the plane of his cheek, pale and smooth in the milky starlight that filtered in through Das Boot's windshield.
"I know how much you loved Cal," Hunter said. "And I understand why. There's a lot in him that's truly beautiful. And—and I believe that he loved you, too, in his own way. You didn't imagine that. Even though I was one of the ones telling you otherwise."
He turned to face me then, and we stared at each other. "Look. I know you feel like you'll never get past this. But you will. It won't ever go away, but it will stop hurting quite so much. Trust me. I know what I'm talking about."
I was reminded of the time he and I had joined our minds, and I'd seen that he had lost not only his parents but also his brother to dark magick. He'd suffered so much that I felt I could believe him.
He made a movement as if he were going to touch my face with his hand. But he seemed to stop himself and pulled his hand back. "You'd better go in before your parents come out here," he said.
I bit the inside of my cheek so I wouldn't start crying all over again. "Okay," I whispered. I sniffed and looked at my house. The lights were on in the living room.
I felt suddenly awkward. After that moment of connection, should I shake Hunter's hand? Kiss his cheek? In the end I just said, "Thanks for everything."
We both got out of the car. Hunter gave me my keys and headed down the dark street to where Sky waited in her car. I walked up the drive, my body on autopilot. I hesitated at the door. How was I going to act normal around my parents when I felt like I'd been ripped apart?
I opened the front door. The living room was empty, and the house smelled of chocolate chip cookies and wood smoke. There were still embers in the fireplace, and I could smell a faint tinge of the lemon oil that my mom used on the furniture. I heard my parents' voices in the kitchen and the sound of the dishwasher being unloaded.
"Mom? Dad?" I called nervously.
My parents, Sean and Mary Grace Rowlands, came into the living room. "Morgan, you look like you've been crying," my mom said when she caught sight of me. "Was the fight with Cal very bad?"