Post by StoryGirl83 on Nov 6, 2011 21:25:15 GMT -5
Chapter Sixteen – The First Ingredient
Brianna reached up and grabbed a small leafy plant from the crag. She turned around and handed it to Chris. “Are you still woozy?”
Chris glared at her.
“It’s not my fault that you can’t deal with being blinked somewhere,” Brianna retorted. She looked at him for several more seconds and started laughing.
Chris glared even harder. “What’s so funny?”
She shook her head smiling. “Oh, nothing. I was just thinking of one of Toby’s more bizarre contests.”
“Contests?” Chris asked, finally accepting the plant. “What do you mean?”
She shrugged. “Well, in the particular case magical transportation.”
Chris groaned. “Any chance we can walk to the next ingredient?”
“Unlikely,” she informed him. “It’s usually found in Ireland. Good luck walking there.”
“My stomach’s only just quit turning,” he protested.
“Not much I can do about that,” she admitted. “Pity you can’t get there under your own powers.”
“In case you forgot, my powers are gone.”
“Can’t you do anything without magic?”
“I can walk,” he informed her, sarcastically, “and I know some self defense.”
“Wow,” she returned, equally sarcastic. “You really raised the bar high. Stripping someone’s powers . . .”
“Is that what you think happened?” he asked as he started climbing down.
“I don’t know,” she admitted with a small shrug as she followed behind him. “I wasn’t there. What do you think?”
“I don’t know,” he echoed. “Yesterday I had powers. Today I don’t.”
She sighed. “That’s tough, but whoever or whatever did this to you, left you alive, so there’s always hope.”
He chuckled. “You are an optimist, aren’t you?”
“You’ve met my friends,” she reminded him. “Someone needs to balance CT and Max and it sure won’t be Toby. And Aka doesn’t need optimism. She sees everything and everyone as they are. It’s a very black and white world . . . well, not really with all the colors she sees, but everything is very clear as to if it’s good or evil and pretty much everything else.”
“That doesn’t mean she doesn’t need optimism,” Chris retorted. “After all, she doesn’t see everything. And she doesn’t know the future.”
Brianna shrugged. “I think she’s too busy figuring everything out that’s right in front of her to think about the future.”
He inclined his head. “Fair enough, I suppose. So what’s this contest you were talking about?”
She laughed at that. “Well, all of us have some form of magical transportation, but only Aka and Toby could use theirs during the time without witchy magic.”
“Witchy magic?” Chris laughed.
She shrugged. “What else can you call it?” she asked. “I mean magic didn’t stop. Only certain magic stopped. Toby could dark orb, but he sure couldn’t create the acid so associated with his demonic mother’s kind. That was kind of amusing actually, last January when he woke up screaming because his mouth was burning.”
Chris looked at her concerned. “You mean, his powers were harming him.”
“He’d never really had them,” she informed him. “When he was little all he had was magical transportation. He was too small to have anything else, for that very reason. They genetically are formed to wait to get those types of powers, because if they can’t control them, it will kill them. We’d had a long night and it’s hard to get back to their home, so while Max went home, the other three spent the night at my place. What a way to learn that magic was back, let me tell you. How’d you learn?”
“I closed the Book of Shadows with my telekinesis trying to stop my brother from wasting his time trying to cure me as the me from another time line joined the me from this one and brought along mortal wounds.”
Brianna winced. “Ouch. You look fine though, so I guess he wasn’t wasting his time.”
Chris grinned. “Yeah, turns out I called that one wrong. Let’s get going. I think I can handle more of your blinking.”
She shook her head with a smile. “I just don’t get it. Why is it that you and CT can’t handle blinking? It’s a witch power and you two are witches.”
“Don’t know,” he scowled, again. “Can we just get this over with?”
“On it,” she informed him as she wrapped her arms around him and blinked. Just like that, they were gone.