Adamant Spirits, page 27
“Thank you,” I said, setting the flower crown on my head gingerly. “I don’t know how you can make stuff like this so easily.”
“All it takes is the right inspiration,” Jin said with a wink.
I smiled back at him, but my stomach tightened. I could feel it again—that sense of the dynamic within our group shifting somehow. And I wasn’t sure I liked it.
It’d been ages since the six of us had started roaming around my family’s expansive property whenever I had a chance to slip away from my tutors. Since that lonely Saturday morning when I’d been seven years old and sulking on the manor’s front steps. Gabriel had spotted me and swept me up on an expedition to hunt for salamanders in the creek.
Even though I was the only girl and their parents worked for mine, they’d always acted as if we all stood on equal footing. I tied back my long black hair and didn’t care if I got my clothes dirty, so it all worked out fine. Just six kids chasing away boredom together. Until…
I wasn’t sure exactly when it had started. I wanted to say it’d been after my thirteenth birthday a couple months back, but if I was being honest, the change had been creeping up on us for longer than that.
Like right now, Damon shot a quick glower Jin’s way. Then he took a run at a broad pine up ahead, scrambled partway up the trunk, and flipped over in the air to land back on the ground on his feet. He raised his hands in victory, seeking out my gaze again.
He was showing off—because Jin had shown off his creative skills? Damon was the youngest of the guys, only a few months older than me, but he’d never seemed to feel he needed to prove himself because of that until recently. And I wasn’t sure it was because of that, and not… because of me.
The thing was, as soon as Damon’s feet hit the forest floor, Ky was chattering again about some crazy fact he’d learned about the red-and-white mushrooms clustered on a rotting stump. Seth gave a boulder leaning into our path a massive heave, toppling it in the other direction.
And Gabriel, always our ringleader, shook his head and said with his assured air, “Let’s go, guys. We’ll never get there at the rate you dawdlers move.” Knowing the other guys would pick up the pace before he’d even finished speaking.
They were all showing off. All acting like they had something to prove. There was a competitiveness to the atmosphere alongside that, as if they weren’t just playing up their strengths but trying to one-up each other at the same time.
We’d competed before—by the Spark had we challenged each other, over walls to be scaled and fields to be raced across—but I’d participated in those challenges. We’d always laughed about it as we tried to outdo each other. What the guys were up to now, it was happening around me, not with me. The vibe I got suggested they were taking it very seriously behind their smiles.
I didn’t know what exactly had changed or why, but I wished we could just go back to how things had been before. All of us getting along and having fun in each other’s company. They were the only friends I had, and I couldn’t have loved them more. The last thing I enjoyed seeing was them subtly butting heads.
Or not so subtly. “Where exactly is this ‘epic discovery’ you made?” Damon said, prodding Gabriel’s back with the end of a stick he’d snapped off of a low branch. “We’ve already crossed about half the state.”
“Oh, believe me, it’s worth the trek,” Gabriel said. “But if you’d rather hang back on the same old stomping grounds…”
“I’m here, aren’t I?” Damon grumbled.
Ky hopped over a jutting root. “It’s hard to believe there’s anywhere on the property we haven’t been over before. Did you set something up?”
“Nope. Just got lucky and stumbled on it. I’d bet we’ve walked right past it a dozen times without noticing it.”
“Are you sure we’re supposed to be messing with it, whatever it is?” Seth asked, frowning. His shoulders had tensed as if preparing to defend against some threat. I got the sense he was very carefully not looking at me right then. Damon wasn’t quite as circumspect with his glance my way.
Not that I could comment. I didn’t know where we were headed either. I wasn’t aware of any threats lurking on our property, though.
Gabriel chuckled. “From the looks of it, whoever built it is long gone, and everyone else has forgotten it exists. I think we’re all clear.”
Whoever built it. “Did you find some building we haven’t seen before?” I asked. My curiosity had already been piqued, but now I was even more eager. This was my family’s property, but when that property consisted of tens of thousands of acres, I knew there were parts I’d missed uncovering.
“You’ll see,” was all Gabriel would say.
We skirted a tight cluster of saplings and clambered over a low, rocky slope. On the other side of the hill, Gabriel veered to the left. A deeper quiet settled in around us, as if the birdsong and the rustling of the breeze had muted.
A prickle ran over my skin. Suddenly I wondered if he even knew how special whatever he’d stumbled on was.
Gabriel slowed and motioned for us to follow him. We circled a stand of vine-laden trees. After several paces, my gaze caught on a patch of stone amid the leaves. And not natural stone—blocks of it hewn together.
“What the…?” I stepped closer, my lips parting.
The trees had grown up around a narrow stone tower. Its peak had crumbled, but it still loomed several feet taller than my five-foot-six.
No, wait, not just one tower. There was another one, just beside it. With an arch of stone blocks connecting them above my head. The vines that draped the structure and the trees that had grown up around it had hidden it from view.
“Wow,” Ky said, coming up beside me. “Looks like you had a whole castle out here way back when.”
“I’m pretty sure someone would have mentioned that to me if we had,” I said. I pushed through the brush to the opposite tower. “Maybe there used to be a road through here, and this was the old gate?”
Even as I made the suggestion, I could feel I was wrong. This wasn’t some ordinary piece of wall. These towers and the doorway between them had been built with a purpose. A purpose that whispered faintly in a voice I could barely hear—and that the guys wouldn’t be able to pick up on at all.
The structure’s secrets weren’t completely impenetrable to those without a spark, though. Jin set his hand on the stone blocks and rubbed away a layer of accumulated grit to reveal a carving. He let out a low whistle. “That’s some detail to pull out of granite.”
The looping lines he’d uncovered sent a shiver of recognition through me. It was two symbols interlocked—protection and connection, I knew without even having to think. Apparently I really had absorbed all those memorization drills.
“Do they mean something?” Ky asked. He gave me a hesitant look.
All five of the guys were looking at me now, but no one else ventured a direct question. We could joke about the big house I lived in and the size of my family’s property, but that one part of my life, the part that led to magic, we somehow managed to avoid acknowledging.
The Hallowell estate and the town at the edge of it had always existed in a sort of symbiosis. All the unsparked who lived there had some idea. A witching family couldn’t remain in the same spot for very long without the hired staff picking up on hints of what we did, of the power we wielded.
I had no clue how those stories might have evolved and warped as they’d been shared and passed down—and I didn’t really want to know. The thought of trying to talk about the legacy that lay ahead of me with the guys who’d always treated me as so perfectly normal made my chest clench up.
“Every piece of art means something,” I said, dodging the question. “Isn’t that what you’d say, Jin?”
He grinned. “You’ve got it.”
Damon walked around the first tower, eyeing the stones. He tested the gaps between them for a good grip. “If I can climb up there… I’d like to see what’s inside.”
“Watch it,” Seth warned. “Knowing the way you go at things, you’ll knock the whole thing over.”
“Sorry, but I’ve got to agree with the killjoy,” Gabriel said. He clapped Damon on the shoulder. “Let’s admire this place for at least five minutes before we start destroying it, huh?”
“I can be careful,” Damon muttered, which sounded so ridiculous coming from Mr. Daredevil that Ky cracked up. A second later, we were all laughing, even Damon, despite his attempt at a glare.
But even in that moment when everything between us felt like it used to, the aura of the towers weighed down on me. Reminding me that nothing in my life was going to be quite the way I’d liked it—not ever again.
Two
“Oh, good, Meredith,” my stepmother said, looking up from the broad mahogany dining table with a thin smile. Celestine Brixton—now Hallowell—had only been my stepmother for two weeks, but she’d dated my father for three years before that. I knew exactly what she was going for from the moment she beckoned our household manager to the table.
The serving staff had just laid out our dinner plates. The meaty smell of my roast beef in its pool of gravy filled my nose. It was a strange time to call any of the family employees in for a chat. But right now those employees should also have been taking their dinner, and no doubt my stepmother wanted to remind Meredith that while the manager ordered around the lower staff, the lady of the house ordered around the manager.
Celestine paused to straighten her silverware with a clink against her china plate, as if to suggest the settings hadn’t been quite up to snuff. Then she flicked an elegant hand over the sculpted waves of her shoulder-length blonde bob. Her pale blue gaze slid to Meredith.
Our manager had been part of the household since before I was born. I’d heard her tease my father—gently, of course—about mischief he’d gotten up to as a child. She’d stopped a few feet from my stepmother’s chair with her hands clasped in front of her and her head just slightly bowed in deference to Celestine’s higher status.
Celestine looked her up and down. Meredith’s silver-gray hair was pulled back into her habitual French braid. Her face was unexpectedly smooth for her age, thanks to her own witchery. “There’s nothing wrong with a little vanity if you know where to draw the line,” she’d told me once with a wink.
Something about her made my stepmother purse her lips. Or maybe she just felt like pursing them.
“I wanted to make sure you spoke to the grounds people about planting the spring bulbs,” she said. “I have an inkling the frost is going to come on quickly this year.”
“Already done, Lady Hallowell,” Meredith said.
“And the new towels have been ordered for the bathrooms?”
“According to the tracking information, they should arrive tomorrow.”
The reply should have pleased Celestine, but she wasn’t looking to be mollified. Her expression stayed as foreboding as before. It probably didn’t help that Meredith’s tone might have been slightly amused. But apparently my stepmother couldn’t think of anything else to hassle our manager about at the moment, or else she really did want to get on with her dinner, because she moved to dismiss the other woman. At the same time, she waved her hand toward the table.
It was a quick swirl of her wrist, no major magicking, but enough to bring the salt shaker soaring into her grasp. Another power play, nearly as blatant as the interrupted dinner. Meredith might be a witch, but her family’s status was far below ours. She wouldn’t draw on her spark that carelessly. Celestine, her gesture implied, had so much bottled magic she could afford to fling it around on mindless tasks.
“Thank you,” she said to Meredith. “That will be all.”
I cut off a piece of my roast beef with as quiet a scrape of my knife as I could manage. I took similar care as I popped the tender meat into my mouth. Pay no attention to the girl who wishes she was behind a curtain.
At the head of the table, Dad was eating at his usual measured pace. I could tell from the distant look in his eyes that at least half his attention was somewhere beyond this room, probably on whatever business he’d recently been conducting. If Celestine’s behavior had bothered him, presumably he’d have spoken up one of the previous times she’d bossed around the staff.
Across from me, my older stepsister, Evianna, was picking at her meal with mincing bites. She was a younger version of her mother, down to the carefully sculpted blonde bob. When Meredith had left the room, Evianna raised her chin at a haughty angle. “I don’t think she’s really as respectful as she should be.” As if, at just eighteen years old and barely half a month living under this roof, her opinion about our staff meant much of anything.
Dad heard that, at least. “Meredith has been with my family for a long time,” he said in his warm baritone. “I think you’ll find when you’re running your own household that it’s better to have staff who are a little too relaxed than those who are a little too anxious.”
My other stepsister, Anastasia, waggled her fork. “I always heard it’s good to command a little fear.” She glanced at her mother like a kitten seeking a petting. Even though she was sixteen, Anastasia still hadn’t outgrown her gawky stage. Her blonde hair always ended up frizzy. Her eyes were a muddy gray shade instead of her mother and sister’s cool blue. You’d almost think someone had tried to make another facsimile and gotten careless with the details.
It’d been obvious from the first time I’d met the former Brixtons that getting her mother’s approval was Anastasia’s deepest desire. And also that as long as Evianna was around to compete, it was never going to happen.
“I think you’d better wait until you’ve come into your spark before you get ideas like that in your head,” Celestine said. Her younger daughter deflated.
I took another cautious bite and said nothing. My deepest desire during these new “family” dinners was to get to the end of my meal without anyone really noticing I was even there. Between Dad’s perpetual distraction, Celestine’s badgering of the staff, and my stepsisters’ frequent bickering, it hadn’t been very hard most nights. But all good things came to an end eventually.
Anastasia turned her muddy gaze on me. Her eyes narrowed, and my back tensed. If I’d been anywhere but at the dinner table, I’d have made a run for it.
I actually kind of liked my second stepsister about half of the time. I didn’t have a mother; she had one who barely gave her the time of day—there had to be some feelings we had in common. Sometimes, when she came across me on her own, she hung around a bit and asked questions about the estate or my lessons as if she honestly wanted to get to know me better.
The other half of the time, she decided I made the perfect punching bag for letting out her familial frustrations.
“Where were you going in the middle of the afternoon, Rose?” she said. “I saw you heading out the back door all by yourself.”
“Oooh,” Evianna said, latching onto the tidbit immediately, as Anastasia must have known she would. “Sneaking off for secret interludes? A little jaunt around town?”
“I stayed on our property,” I said quickly. I wasn’t meant to go into town without some kind of escort. Which was fine, because the people I wanted to see came here often enough. “I just went for a walk in the forest. Fresh air and exercise is good for bolstering the spirit, right?”
My tutors had prescribed a regular exercise regimen, although it didn’t actually include rambles through the forest. And definitely not company while doing so.
My stepmother cocked her head. “This was an assigned excursion, then?” she said.
Moldy cinders, the last thing I needed was her picking apart my day. “No,” I said. “I was finished with my lessons. I thought it would be a pleasant way to pass the rest of the afternoon.”
“Wandering around the forest on your own?” Celestine’s eyebrows arched.
I could have told her I hadn’t been on my own. But my instincts locked tight around that secret. My father had never forbidden me from spending time with the unsparked staff or their children, but I hadn’t exactly gotten his permission either. When it’d just been the two of us making up our family, slipping away here and there had been simple enough.
I’d spent enough time in witching company to know even friendships outside our tightly intertwined community were frowned on. And Celestine didn’t just frown at the “common folk.” She sneered.
“Yes, on my own,” I said to my stepmother as primly as I could. “I conducted some active meditation. My tutor says my focus is really coming along.”
Evianna snickered. “You’ll walk right into a tree like that.”
I raised my chin. “I didn’t. I never do.”
Snuff my spark, that was a blunder and a half. The second the last three words fell out of my mouth, I snapped my lips together, wishing I could take them back. Celestine had already leaned forward over her plate, her eyes trained on me like a killer eel’s.
“How often do you go ‘meditating’ off into the forest, exactly, Rosalind?”
At least twice a week—both days of the weekend. More if the boys could squeeze in a few hours here after school here or there. As if I was going to admit that to her.
I shrugged as if I didn’t see why my answer mattered. “Whenever I’m in the mood to, I guess. Dad always says it’s a shame we’ve got so much land and barely enjoy it. Don’t you, Dad?” I shot him a winning smile.
It was a childish ploy, calling on his authority, but if they were going to treat me like a little kid who didn’t know how to find her way home from the woods, that was what they deserved. Celestine might be the current Lady Hallowell by marriage, but my father was the primary authority over me and this property.
Dad smiled back at me, fully present at least for a moment. I’d known I could count on him. “I believe I do,” he said, and turned to his wife. “All the Hallowell grounds are safe enough. She’s not going to run into any trouble here.”
“Of course,” Celestine said, withdrawing with a brief preen. But when Dad’s attention returned to his dinner, her gaze slid back to me, and lingered. I dug back into my dinner, pretending I didn’t notice. Pretending I didn’t feel her evaluating me through the whole rest of the meal.
