THE HOPI MASK (Boundless Magick Book 2)

CHAPTER ONE

“PUNCH BUGGY BLUE!” Patrick crowed from beside me in the back seat of my family’s Ford Escort. He drove his fist into my left bicep. 

Though I was buckled into my seat, I lurched sideways into the car door. My head thumped against the window. “C’mon!”

He startled me out of a dream. The last thing I remembered after closing my eyes was the unmistakable sense that I’d been called to by a means beyond sound or words. Then I was flying—not on a broom but with arms outstretched, soaring over the Arizona desert plains with the same unstoppable pull I felt during my astral travels: fast, weightless, and rarely gentle upon return.

A heavy fog wrapped around my head, making me wonder whether I had been astral traveling rather than dreaming. I still had trouble telling the difference between the sudden rejoining of my body and spirit and the sensation of being jolted out of a deep sleep by an outside force.

The pain radiating through my arm cut my thoughts short. My focus shifted to the bruise blooming beneath my skin—another souvenir of Patrick forgetting his own strength. It merged with all the others he’d given me since we’d left Rhode Island, some aching all the way down to the bone.

“Such fun!” Mom flashed me an amused grin in the rearview mirror.

Why should she care if Patrick repeatedly misjudged his own strength during his ridiculous travel game, leaving me bruised and aching? She was safe in the passenger seat beside Gramps, who was too busy crooning along to Frank Sinatra to intervene on my behalf.

“How many is that?” Mom asked brightly.

I rolled my eyes and droned, “Forty-three.” This was the same number of times she’d congratulated herself on coordinating our cross-country drive.

We were on our way to northeastern Arizona to visit Patrick’s parents on the Hopi Reservation’s First Mesa. Mom had framed the trip as a special gift to Patrick for saving me from the Dragon King’s Enchanted Fire on Christmas morning. I’d barely recovered from nearly burning to death, yet she pulled me from the Block Island Medical Center before my scheduled release so we could “share in Patrick’s joy” as he reconnected with his Native American roots. He’d asked us to take this trip with him many times, but Mom had always cited our responsibilities at Stone Manor as an excuse not to join him. Funny how quickly that had changed once my return to Adehya was staring her in the face.

Another Volkswagen Beetle zoomed by, this one yellow.

Patrick’s fist came hurtling at me.

I jerked my hands up to block it.

Wham! It was like catching a cannonball barehanded.

“Shit, Patrick,” I grunted, shaking out the sting.

“Watch it,” Mom warned.

She liked my foul mouth about as much as she liked Aldred, her former flame and my father. He’d been ringing her cell phone since the moment we’d left Block Island. He’d only granted me Christmas Eve and Christmas Day to spend with my family in the contemporary world. I was supposed to return to the sixteenth-century Kingdom of Adehya, my Wiccan home, before midnight on December twenty-sixth.

That was two days ago.

Aldred didn’t have a clue where Mom was taking me—yet. He would eventually pinpoint our location. A powerful warlock with a nasty penchant for meddling in my personal business, he was known to employ the Empire’s intrusive magical devices to monitor my every move. Given his increasing desperation to speak with Mom, his methods weren’t yielding results.

“Punch buggy red with a black top!” Patrick called out. His fist slammed into my battered arm, and the pain rippled through my entire body.

“Damn it!” I hissed.

Mom swiveled around to face me. “Abigail Stone, keep cursing, and I’ll—”

“You’ll what?” I asked, arching boldly forward.

Despite the Council’s offer to reinstate her powers after I’d accidentally, and illegally, recovered mine, she’d maintained she wanted nothing to do with Wicca, mostly because of Aldred. She’d sworn she was perfectly happy milling around Block Island, managing our family’s inn, far away from anything otherworldly.

Her eyes narrowed at me in a way that warned, magic or no magic, she was still my mother, and I was still a minor. She had the power to make our impromptu holiday as miserable for me as she liked. No doubt she would make good on her unspoken threat if I didn’t smarten up and behave.

Grudgingly withdrawing from her, I slumped in my seat and scooted as far away from Patrick as possible. The space between us seemed to shrink with every passing mile. His six-foot-four-inch, two-hundred-and-eighty-pound frame shifted, and his thighs pressed outward, pinning me to the door.

Unreal.

“Look, a trucker!” Patrick exclaimed as an eighteen-wheeler approached our elfin Escort from the oncoming lane. With a downward tug of his arm, he signaled for the driver to honk his horn.

An earsplitting MERRRMP! blared as the truck barreled past us in a rush of wind and chrome.

Patrick whooped with delight.

At twenty-two, Patrick was anything but a typical guy. That was what endeared him to me. He had Down syndrome, and with it a kind of joy that never dulled, no matter how old he got. He was also clairvoyant, the sole grandson of his tribe’s late medicine woman. More importantly, he was the most loyal and trustworthy soul I’d ever known, my nearest and dearest friend.

“This is the best vacation ever!” Patrick’s elbow knocked into me as he attempted a fist pump.

“Seriously?” I massaged my latest injury. “Mom, why did we have to take the Escort?” I whined. “The Cadillac would have been way more comfortable.”

“The Escort is a stick shift, remember?” she said. “Grams can’t drive stick. She needs a car when she visits the mainland, which is why we left her the Cadillac.”

I scoffed a laugh. The idea of Grams cruising the mainland in a boat-sized luxury vehicle was as preposterous as me parading around in a dress—neither of which happened unless we were forced, and thankfully, that was rare. As sure as I was a tomboy, Grams was a homebody. Ever since the Council had binded my family from practicing magic seventeen years ago, she’d stayed put. She had no use for ordinary travel, and neither did I—not after discovering how easy it was to get from place to place with the turn of an Enchanted Key.

The glove compartment groaned and swelled. Mom groaned with it. Nikolas had transformed the Escort’s dashboard storage space into a magical letterbox, the compromise he’d insisted on before letting Mom take me—his girlfriend and the one he’d sworn to protect—to an undisclosed location against Aldred’s wishes.

Mom fetched the latest dashboard delivery. “Yet another love poem.” She passed the message over her shoulder to me. “I can tell because it’s in Spanish.”

Knowing she disapproved of him, Nikolas penned his most revealing letters to me in his native language, enchanting them so that only a Seer like me could interpret them. His messages weren’t inappropriate, just deeper than most people would expect, considering we’d just begun dating.

Mom didn’t know that Nikolas and I had spent the past six months quietly devoted to one another while betrothed to others. Our forbidden romance had been the driving force behind the Oracle of the Dragon King.

Had she known any of that, Nikolas would have been totally off limits to me, and I would have been under lock and key in a tower somewhere no one, not even Aldred, could reach me.

That I temporarily had to settle for Nikolas’ written sentiments instead of his adoring touch had transformed my normally upbeat, agreeable self into a one-hundred-and-four-pound heap of sour grapes. He and I had finally gotten together, only for my mother to wedge half the country between us.

I unfolded his latest message and sighed softly as I read it over.

My love,

Every hour we are apart reminds me how long I have known you, and how carefully I have loved you in silence. I once told myself it was enough to stand near you, to guard you, and want nothing in return. Now that I have you, even the very thought of distance feels unbearable.

I carry you with me in every breath, every thought, every moment I am forced to pretend restraint still comes easily. I ache for the sound of your voice, for the warmth of your touch, and for the simple certainty of being allowed to love you without fear.

Until we are together again, I hold fast to you. To us. To the truth that I have waited years to claim—that you are mine, and I am yours, whatever the world demands of us next.

Love,
Nikolas

Patrick, who was more into romance than most girls I knew, sighed along with me. His gift of clairvoyance also allowed him to interpret Nikolas’ message. Unlike my mother, Patrick knew everything about my budding romance with Nikolas. I’d confided every detail to him, with his promise never to repeat any of it to another living soul, particularly to my mother.

“Do you think he’ll propose soon, Abs?”

“Over my dead body,” Mom interjected.

She’d marked Nikolas as her enemy after I’d broken my bind and he’d summoned me to my Wiccan home on Aldred’s orders. Mom had no choice but to let me go or face the horrifying consequences—the Wiccan Council’s call for my death. She hated not being in control, especially where Aldred was concerned.

What further fueled her contempt for Nikolas was the revelation that he’d spent years monitoring me on contemporary Block Island, using his shapeshifting skills to disguise himself, yet she’d been none the wiser. Usually, few secrets got past her. The truth, it seemed, always found her. Unless magic was involved. Then the truth only surfaced when it had no other choice.

I shrugged in reply to Patrick’s question. “He’ll eventually propose, but he knows as well as you do that I’m not in any rush.”

I’d only gotten a taste of what it felt like to be someone’s girlfriend by choice, rather than by royal obligation. When I first arrived in Adehya, Aldred had paired me with Drake Williams, the emperor’s nephew, at Drake’s request. While Drake had fallen for me, I could only offer him a deep affection in return. After that, everything unraveled. He stole the gods’ powers, morphed into the Dragon King, and tried to enslave me with a potion to force me to love him.

Nikolas would never resort to such an outrageous method to win my heart. Nor would he need to. He was the love of my life, yet I still had things to discover about myself and my magic before binding myself to him forever.

Even so, the Council expected our kind to marry young. I wasn’t just a witch, but Wiccan royalty, a princess. Nikolas was a prince and the new heir to Adehya’s throne. He was also three years older than me, which came with its own quiet pressure to settle down. I hoped he wouldn’t put that same pressure on me.

Mom was about to shut the glove compartment when it coughed up another letter. I leaned forward, eagerly anticipating another deliciously lovesick verse from my sweetheart, when Mom scoffed loudly in disgust.

Gramps broke from his whistling rendition of “Fly Me to the Moon” to ask her, “What is it, Angel?”

After twelve straight hours of listening to Frank Sinatra’s Ultimate Sinatra Collection, I could honestly say that his music was making me ill. Unfortunately, Mom and Gramps had decided that whoever was driving got to select the ear candy. Since I didn’t have a license, the driving perks weren’t mine to enjoy. Mom had chosen Empowered Love Radio as her entertainment. The station churned out endless hours of mind-numbing lectures on “The Law of Attraction in Action: Recovery of Narcissistic Abuse” and “The Definition of Sacrifice.”

“Aldred has uncovered our letterbox address,” Mom said sourly. “He sent me an urgent message.” Her tone reeked of sarcasm.

She opened the letter and froze.

“Mom?” I poked my head between the driver and passenger seats to get a better view of the letter.

Aldred’s penmanship was uncharacteristically sloppy, as though he’d rushed the words onto the page. I was able to make out the opening scrawl: I must speak with you about— The letter was creased down the middle from being folded in half, distorting the center of the page into near-gibberish. Still, his last words were clear as day, slicing through me the same way I’d sliced through the Dragon King with the diamond dagger that had sent him to the underworld and set the cosmos free.

They’re alive.

Mom crumpled up the note.

© 2015 Lowvee Cole. All rights reserved. 

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