The Amber Lee Boxed Set

  “That was close,” Jackal said. She and Frank were holding onto the seat backrests and looking out of the front of the van.

  “Too close,” Aaron said. “We need to find a place to get out of this, an overpass or something.”

  Another hailstone flew at the van and embedded itself into the windshield with a loud crack that sent little shards of glass flying inwards. It was as if this one had come on the heels of the previous one to strike the exact same spot.

  “Dammit!” Aaron said. The hailstones were getting bigger. The one wedged in the windshield was the size of a golf-ball, but Aaron saw another slam into the ground up ahead and smash into golf-ball sized pieces. “C’mon, there has to be somewhere we can hide!” he said.

  “We won’t reach one,” Amber said, “We need to use magick.”

  “Magick? No. We can’t risk it.”

  “We have to!”

  “We may have been able to take you on out in the forest, but you’re gonna fry us all if you change in here,” Jackal said.

  “Amber’s right.” Damien’s voice came out of the back of the van. “Something about this isn’t right. I can feel it.”

  Frank turned his head and regarded Damien through narrow eyes. “Amber has to do it,” he said, “She has to use her power to stop the stones.”

  “If she goes berserk I can’t stop her,” Aaron said.

  “And if she and Damien don’t do something about these rocks they’re going to smash our van to pieces.”

  Aaron ground his teeth and nodded, and then Damien came rushing forward. He took Amber’s hand and together they closed their eyes and started to hum. It was low at first. Aaron glanced out of the corner of his eye and saw them both, hand in hand, and he felt the charge they were starting to generate. They were like dynamos, and his skin was reacting to their magick.

  “Look out!” Jackal said.

  A projectile the size of a football came out of the sky like a bullet from a gun. Aaron swerved and the van screeched and spun out of control, into a tailspin, the tires unable to keep a hold on the icy road. He struggled with the wheel, wrestling the van back onto the road while Damien and Amber continued to hum as if nothing was wrong.

  “We call the clouds to do our will,” they said, “Show us the sun that stands still.”

  Aaron managed to get the van moving in a straight line again, but the football sized hailstone had knocked the passenger side mirror clean off. That one was really close, he thought. It would have had enough force to punch through the windshield and pulverize anyone unfortunate enough to have gotten hit; including the werewolves.

  But as the sound of Damien and Amber’s chant filled the van, Aaron noticed the hiss of the hailstones start to diminish. The bigger fragments stopped coming in an instant, and within moments even the smaller ones seemed to have dwindled off. When Aaron felt the warm touch of the sun on his face and the road before him brightened, he couldn’t help but stare half surprised and half struck with awe and wonder at what Amber and Damien had done.

  Damien let go of Amber’s hand and exhaled his relief. Aaron didn’t stop the van until they had gotten to Amber’s parent’s house—cracked windshield be damned—for fear that their spell may wear off and the weather might turn again, but it held. The sun lingered in the sky, and the hail and even the snow subsided completely.

  It wasn’t until Aaron stepped out of the van that he saw the extent of the damage the hailstones had caused. They were only bumps and knocks, sure, but he would have to work overtime to hammer them all out. The worst part about all of this wasn’t the thought of having to sit in a garage with a hammer for a couple of hours, though. That wasn’t even an issue.

  The worst part was when Aaron retrieved the thing still wedged into the windshield. He realized it should have melted on its own but noticed it hadn’t melted yet, despite the rise in temperature, so he decided to yank it out and find out why.

  It wasn’t a hailstone between his fingers; it was a rock. An honest-to-God rock.

  Chapter Sixteen

  I would have been lying if I had said the incident on the road hadn’t left me a little shaken up. Using magick again in that way, allowing the power into me and feeling the vibrations in my muscles, my bones, it was dangerous. The sensation was similar to changing shape, and as the seconds passed I could feel the beast beneath the skin sniffing around as the feeling came. Curious. Keen to learn.

  The wolf, I suspected, didn’t know what magick truly was. Whatever magick had come out of me when the wolf took over was… I didn’t want to say instinctual; more like accidental. That, already, was cause enough for concern. But to imagine that it could think and react, even while I was in control? The thought that, maybe, it could influence my actions even from the depths of my psyche?

  I didn’t want to dwell on it.

  This is why, despite the number of months that had passed since I had last visited my parents, I was relieved to have arrived at their farmhouse. The fields around the house were mostly deep green with lines cut through them. Proud sycamores dotted the landscape, a barn sat off to the west, and to the north the horizon stretched into hills and then mountains behind it. Winter in most parts of California was just a couple of days of rain, but Raven’s Glen was an exception, so I wasn’t surprised at the lack of white in the scenery. But the air was cool, the sky bright, and my spirits high.

  “Are you ready?” Aaron asked.

  The others had stayed behind. I didn’t want them crowding the house anyway, not for the initial talk I wanted to have with my mom. I wanted that to be the first thing I did with her, and then everything else could come after.

  I nodded. “Ready as I’ll ever be, right?”

  “I guess it’s a little too late to turn back anyway.”

  “I don’t want to turn back. I want to do this.” I reached for his hair and brushed it with my fingers, tucking some of his long blonde locks behind his ears. This was, after all, the first time I was going to introduce a man to my mom since… well, since Kyle. There had been Damien, too, but my mom was more aware of Aaron than she was of Damien as a person purely because we had gone to the same school growing up.

  I wondered if she’d be happy to see him considering the way he treated me in school.

  Aaron walked in front of me, climbing onto the porch and proceeding to ring the doorbell which sang loudly. A wind-chime started blowing as I stepped upon the porch and it drew my eye, distracting me for the briefest of moments. It was during that moment when my mom opened the door, so when I turned to look at her I was just as surprised as she.

  She stared at us, wide-eyed and frozen.

  “Hi mom,” I said, putting on my best smile.

  “Amber,” she said, her face softening. Her arms opened and I fell into her like water against a shore. Her hug was everything I had remembered; warm, kind, and full of love. The kind of love only a mother could give. It was the special kind of love which came not from the heart, but from somewhere entirely spiritual; from a place which could never be destroyed by time or space, or even death.

  “It’s so good to see you,” she said into my hair.

  “You too, mom,” I said, fighting back the tears. Why had I waited so long?

  We pulled away from each other and she examined me from head to toe. I did the same. My mom was almost a spitting image of me, albeit with a few more wrinkles and slightly less vibrant hair. Hers was more of a dirty carrot kind of copper where mine was the blazing fire kind. But her eyes, they were as green as the fields around the house in the summer. Time had changed a lot of little things about her, but not her eyes.

  “You remember Aaron Cooper,” I said, introducing the man at my side.

  My mom stretched out her hand, smiled, and said, “There’s a face I haven’t seen in many, many years.”

  Aaron’s lips curled into a smile which exposed his pearly whites. “It’s great to see you, ma’am,” he said.

  “Please, call me Rebecca. Ma’am makes me feel like
a senior citizen.”

  “You’re not that old, mom.”

  I can smell it on her. The fear. The apprehension. Does she know why I’m here? Does she know what I am now?

  “You never said you were coming,” she said, “I would have made things more comfortable for you and your friends. Don’t they want to come in?”

  “No, they’re fine,” I said, referring to Jackal, Damien, and Frank who were hanging around the van and checking out the rocks that had hit the windshield. “I was, uh… wondering if dad was home.”

  “Your father? Oh, sweetie, no, he’s out on business.”

  No. “What? I mean, where is he?”

  “Gosh, well, he’s in New York with your sister right now. He left day before yesterday.”

  “Do you know when he’ll be back?”

  “Not for a couple of days. You should have called!”

  “I’m sorry. I guess I came over in a hurry.”

  “Hurry? Why?” she asked, reaching for my shoulder with her hand. “Is everything okay?”

  I didn’t have a couple of days. I was sure I didn’t. Were we supposed to turn around now and come back when my dad was in town? What if something happened to us before then? What if something happened to them? I didn’t want to do this without my father present, without allowing him his say, but the distinct possibility existed that my mom hadn’t told him anything about me. In fact, I was almost sure of it now.

  My dad was the one who didn’t even want her practicing Wicca, after all.

  That snapshot of a memory from the time when I was young, of a fight between my parents which had gone horribly wrong, came surging forth. My stomach went cold first, and then my chest, and then the dreaded heat came. Aaron noticed and grabbed my hand, squeezing it tightly to help me fight the anger away and I managed, but barely.

  “It, uh… it is,” I said, “And I wish it could wait for dad to be back, but it can’t. I just don’t have a choice.”

  “Amber… you’re starting to worry me, sweetie,” she said.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to. Can we just, can we go inside and talk?”

  “What about your friends?”

  “They’ll be fine. This shouldn’t take long anyway.”

  My mom nodded and stepped aside. I led Aaron into the house as if I had done it a hundred times, though in truth I had only been here a handful of times. The house didn’t seem familiar to me at all, didn’t smell like home, and didn’t vibe well with my aura. That was a pretty vague explanation of how the house felt immediately upon walking in, but vagueness was all I had. Something about the place didn’t feel entirely welcoming, as if there was an invisible hand putting resistance against my chest with every step I took.

  Maybe I was imagining the pushback, or maybe it had something to do with the fact that in the short walk from the front door to the kitchen I had seen four pictures of Corey—my sister—and none of me.

  ***

  “It smells like piss and rotten eggs.” Jackal said.

  “Piss?” Frank sniffed the rock. “Jesus, it does. And that’s not eggs; that’s Sulphur. Neither of these smells is good.”

  “A rock fell from the sky; what’s good about that?”

  “If it was a normal rock we could work with it, but this rock isn’t normal. Damien?”

  Damien took the rock, worked it between his thumb and forefingers, and sniffed it. Yeah, that’s piss alright, he thought. But there was something else about the rock. It wasn’t entirely mineral. Damien could feel the organic components inside of it as if the rock had a heartbeat. It didn’t, of course, but this was the way the information translated in Damien’s brain.

  The skin on his forearm started to tingle.

  “It’s not exactly alive,” Damien said, “But this didn’t come from a meteorite or anything, and it’s too big to have been picked up by the wind.”

  “We all saw it,” Frank said, “It came out of the sky along with all the others. One of them took the God-damned mirror clean off the van!”

  “Do you have any ideas?” Jackal asked.

  “Only one; magick.”

  “You think she did this?” Damien asked.

  “I don’t know,” Frank said, “It’s possible. Ever heard of apportation?”

  “Apportation? As in, teleportation?”

  “Sorta. Some bullshit mediums and psychics started using the term back in the eighteen hundreds to give a name to what they considered gifts from the spirits or poltergeist activity. In reality, they were just scamming people with wires and lies.”

  “What does that have to do with this,” Jackal asked.

  “These psychics dirtied the word by using it to scam people, but apportation is real; and it sees way more use in the religious community.”

  “Religious?” Damien asked. He didn’t like where this was going.

  Frank took the rock and pressed his lips into a thin line as he inspected it. The rock was warm against his fingers, and it made his stomach twist in revulsion. It was like holding a piece of petrified crap. His instincts told him to put it down and wash his hands with soap. Repeatedly. With scalding hot water.

  “I read a story once about a family in Connecticut,” Frank said, “Story was as old as time itself; family moves into new house, none of them notice the demon living inside of it, isn’t long until someone lets the evil attach itself to them. Then boom. They need a priest or a bullet. Sometimes both, but in this case just the priest.”

  “You’re saying the rock has something demonic about it?” Damien asked.

  “Demonic,” Jackal said. “Really?”

  Frank turned toward her and examined her stature. She was tall, this one. Hair the color of blood, lips as full as the moon, and hips designed to birth legions of werewolf babies. The curves on her had no effect on him, but they drew Damien’s eyes well enough. She had a strong mind on her, too. He figured she probably held a wealth of knowledge about werewolves and her culture, more so than what Aaron could. But her skepticism gave Frank pause.

  She could change shape whenever she wanted to, had seen magick in use, but balked at the word demonic?

  “Among the symptoms reported by the priest,” Frank said, ignoring her skepticism, “One of them was rocks falling from the sky and slamming the house. One of them was the size of a basketball; tore a line right through the house. Smelled like a bag of shit dipped in vomit and stopped only when it hit hard concrete.”

  “What do you mean when you say symptoms?” Jackal asked.

  “Listen, honey, you’ve gotta catch up here. I said a whole bunch of things just now and if you’re going to hook on to basic stuff and ask a lot of questions we’re gonna have a hard time getting through this.”

  “Ooh, the claws are out,” she said. “You planning on fighting me? Because otherwise you’d better pull them back.”

  “Queens don’t fight; we send pawns like you to fight for us.”

  “Enough,” Damien said, slamming the argument into the ground before it erupted. “It was a symptom of demonic attack, and we’ve been through those before. Just not to this scale.”

  Jackal simmered down like she had turned self-control into an art-form. Frank, likewise, was able to bottle emotions away in order to use later in his magick. This sliver of annoyance would be the first in a new bottle he had just opened; a bottle with the word Jackal on it.

  “Yes,” Frank said, “We’ve had experience with demons before. This is new, though.”

  “The question still stands,” Damien said, “Was it a demon or was it her?”

  “I don’t know,” Frank said, turning his eyes toward Damien—into Damien. “If it was a demon, it didn’t do a very good job, wouldn’t you say?”

  Frank could feel his heartrate starting to rise as he attempted to confront what he thought was living inside Damien, coiled around his soul like… like a snake. But even a snake in the grass could get flushed out. Creatures of vice take to heart insults against their pride. What Amber had told
him the night before had troubled Frank enough, but when he coupled that with the snake he had seen in the Nether, it started to paint a picture.

  “What do we do with the rock?” Jackal asked, “Is it dangerous?”

  Frank retrieved the rock from Damien’s hand. “Nah,” he said, “It’s about as dangerous as a baby with a plush toy.” Putting all his might into his arm, Frank hurled the rock out into the field—away from the house—and then spat at the ground after it. “Fucking piss-ant little dipshit demon. Like to see it try something else.”

  The skin on the nape of his neck started to prickle, and his chest was warming up. When he turned around, Jackal looked poised and ready to defend herself, as if something had startled her. Damien was cool, though. Perfectly collected and staring out in the direction Frank had thrown the rock in. He rubbed his chest, then his shoulders, and said “We should go into the house or get back into the van. It’s cold out here.”

  “Yeah,” Frank said. He took the sudden surge of fear, which had crept into his heart, and swallowed it down. “We should.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  It wasn’t until I sat down at the kitchen table that I decided not to leave any details out of my story. I didn’t want to lie to my mother about my life, about the things that had happened to me and were still happening. If she was a witch, on some level, she must have already known something was going on with me, realized that something was different even if she couldn’t put her finger on what. Mothers had that instinctual connection to their kids, didn’t they?

  Aaron sat down at the kitchen table next to me. The design of the place was simple, but homely; a checkered tablecloth on the table, a bowl of fruit next to the fridge, a calendar on the wall marking important dates. The air was heavy with the smell of freshly baked pastries—croissants, in fact—and a hint of rosemary. A cuckoo clock on the wall counted down the seconds.

  “Tea?” my mom asked, “Coffee?”

  “Tea, please,” I said.

  Aaron said “No thank-you.”

  My mom nodded and proceeded to boil a kettle on the gas stove, preparing two cups each with a tea-bag and two teaspoons of sugar. You can take the girl out of New England but you can’t take New England out of the girl. I didn’t know many folks around where I lived who drank tea, but there was something about a warm cup of tea with a splash of milk in it that just seemed modest and cozy.