THE HOPI MASK (Boundless Magick Book 2)

CHAPTER ONE

“PUNCH BUGGY BLUE!” Patrick whooped as he drilled his fist into my right biceps.

Though fastened securely in my seat, I sailed sideways into the car door, and my head thumped the window. “C’mon!”

He’d startled me out of a perfectly lovely dream. I was flying—not on a broom, but with arms outstretched—soaring over the Arizona desert plains, like I did during my astral travels. Come to think of it, a heavy, dream-thick fog wrapped around my head, enough to make me suspect I had been astral traveling, but the pain in my arm cut my dream/travels short. My focus shifted to my wound, where a deep purpling bruise spread under my skin, merging with all the others he’d given me, some feeling as if they’d reached the bone.

“Such fun!” Mom cheered, flashing a humored grin in the rearview mirror. Why should she care if Patrick pummeled me during his ridiculous travel game? A wall of fabric-covered steel protected her from his beefy fist. She was safe riding shotgun next to 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. “Seventy. Three.”

The same number of times she’d congratulated herself for coordinating our cross-country drive. We were on our way to northeastern Arizona to visit Patrick’s parents, who lived on the second mesa of the Hopi reservation. Mom called the trip a gift for Patrick, who’d saved my life on Christmas morning. The Dragon King’s blood had barely dried on my hands—I was still weak after having narrowly escaped death and still wearing my hospital bracelet—yet Mom had plucked me from Block Island Medical Center before my scheduled release so that we could “share in Patrick’s joy” as he reconnected with his Native American roots. He’d been asking us to take this trip for years, but Mom’s “busy schedule” had never allowed the time.

Another Volkswagen Beetle zoomed by—this one yellow. Patrick’s fist swung toward me again. I thrust up my hands—and wham!—he nailed both palms with one blow.

“Shit, Patrick!” I snapped, shaking out the burn.

“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 we left Block Island.

He’d only granted me Christmas Eve and Christmas Day to spend with my family in the contemporary world, and only after extracting my promise to return to Adehya—my Wiccan home—by midnight on December twenty-sixth.

That was yesterday.

I think what really bothered Aldred was that he hadn’t yet discovered where Mom was taking me. A powerful warlock with a nasty penchant for meddling in my private life, he often employed the Wiccan World’s intrusive magical devices to record my every move. Judging by his increasing desperation to reach her, his methods weren’t yielding him his desired results.

“Punch buggy red, with a black top!” Patrick’s fist slammed my arm again. The pain rippled through me, clear to my teeth.

“Dammit!” I hissed.

Mom swung around to face me, pointing her finger in my face. “Abigail Stone, keep cursing, and I’ll—”

“You’ll what?” I arched forward, daring her to finish her threat.

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

Her eyes narrowed at me in warning. Magic or no magic, she was still my mother—and I was still a minor. She could make this trip miserable for me if I pushed her too far.

Grudgingly, I slumped in my seat and scooted away from Patrick to claim a sliver of personal space. Unfortunately, his six-foot-four-inch, two-hundred-eighty-pound frame oozed outward, pinning me to the door.

Unreal…

“Look, a trucker!” Patrick motioned eagerly to an eighteen-wheeler roaring past our elfin Escort. With a downward tug of his arm, he signaled the driver to honk. An earsplitting merrrrrmp! blared in reply.

Patrick clapped his hands and bounced in his seat.

At twenty-two, Patrick Robertson wasn’t an average guy, which made him all the more endearing. He had Down syndrome. He was also clairvoyant—the sole grandson of his Hopi tribe’s late medicine woman. More importantly, he was the most thoughtful, giving human being I’d ever met—my nearest and dearest friend.

My family had unofficially adopted him six years ago when his parents left Block Island for their native home. He’d refused to leave me behind—the only friend he’d ever had—so Gramps proposed we take him in. At first, his parents refused what they considered a handout, until Gramps offered Patrick a job as our stablehand, with a living wage and the manager’s suite in Stone Manor’s stables. The Robertsons eventually agreed, and Patrick has lived with us ever since, traveling to Arizona every now and then to visit his parents. Until now, he’d always traveled alone.

“This is the best vacation ever!” Patrick’s enthusiastic fist pump clocked me in the chin.

“Seriously?” I massaged my latest injury. Another blow for his lack of self-control—and our extreme deprivation of space. “Mom, why did we have to take the Escort?” I whined.

“The Escort is a stick shift, remember?” she said. “Grams can’t drive stick. She needs a car when she visits the mainland, so 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 flamboyant dress. Neither happened unless we were forced.

As sure as I was a tomboy, Grams was a homebody. Ever since the Council had barred my family from practicing magic eighteen years ago, she stayed put. She didn’t care for ordinary means of travel. Neither did I, now that I’d experienced the ease of passing from place to place with the simple turn of an Enchanted Key. Magical travel made a lot more sense than bumping along potholed roads in a cramped jalopy with a door handle stuck in my side.

The glove compartment groaned and swelled. Mom groaned with it.

Nikolas had transformed the Escort’s dashboard storage space into a magical letterbox so that he could contact me at will. This was his condition for permitting Mom to take me—his girlfriend—to an undisclosed location, against Aldred’s wishes. As Nikolas was also my primary protector, it was his duty to ensure my safety, which meant knowing my whereabouts at all times.

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

Knowing how she disapproved of him, Nikolas had penned his letters to me in his native language, enchanting them so that only a Seer like me could interpret them. His messages weren’t inappropriate by any stretch, but awfully deep for a couple that had just begun dating. Mom didn’t know that Nikolas and I had spent the past six months pining over one another while betrothed to others. What’s more, she hadn’t a clue that our forbidden romance had been the driving force behind the Oracle of the Dragon King. Had she known, Nikolas would definitely be off-limits to me, and I would be under lock and key in a tower somewhere no one, not even Aldred, could reach me.

That I currently had to settle for Nikolas’s written sentiments instead of his adoring touch had transformed my normally upbeat and agreeable self into a one-hundred-and-four-pound heap of sour grapes. Nikolas and I had finally gotten together, only to have my mother drive a twenty-five-hundred-mile wedge between us.

I sighed dreamily while savoring his latest message:

My Love:

Though miles swell between us, my heart will thunder on, through space, through time, to bring you my love.

Yours in body and in spirit,

Nikolas

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

“You gonna marry him, Abs?”

“Over my dead body,” Mom snapped.

She’d branded Nikolas her enemy the day I broke my bind and he ordered me back to my Wiccan home on Aldred’s command. She had no choice but to let me go or face the horrific consequence—the Council’s order for my death. Mom hated not being in control, especially where Aldred was concerned. And her finding out that Nikolas had spent years watching over me by using his shape-shifting skills—transforming into a horse, a butterfly, or a blackbird—hadn’t helped matters.

I shrugged in reply to Patrick’s question. “Eventually, Nikolas and I will marry, but not anytime soon.”

I’d only just started to understand what it felt like to be someone’s girlfriend by choice instead of royal obligation. When I first arrived in Adehya, Aldred had paired me with Drake Williams, the Emperor’s nephew, at Drake’s request. He fell for me fast, but I couldn’t love him back. So he stole the gods’ powers, turned himself into the Dragon King, and dosed me with Enslavement Potion to force me to love him.

Nikolas would never do that. He didn’t have to. I was already crazy about him.

Mom was about to shut the glove compartment when it coughed up another letter. I leaned forward, expecting another lovesick verse from my sweetheart, when she made a terrible, choking sound—like glass grinding in a blender.

Gramps broke from his whistled rendition of “Fly Me to the Moon.” “What is it, Angel?”

Twelve straight hours of listening to Frank Sinatra’s Ultimate Sinatra Collection, and I could honestly say his music was making me ill. Unfortunately, Mom and Gramps had decided that the ones doing the driving got to pick the music. Since I rarely left Block Island for the mainland because I hated water travel—and because Adehya was rooted in the sixteenth century—I had no need for a license, so I couldn’t drive. Mom had chosen Empowered Love Radio as her entertainment of choice. The station featured endless hours of mind-numbing lectures like The Law of Attraction in Action: Recovery of Narcissistic Abuse and The Definition of Sacrifice.

Need I say more of my suffering?

“It’s from Aldred,” Mom huffed, tearing open the letter.

Then she stiffened.

“Mom?” I leaned between the driver and passenger seats for a better look. Aldred’s penmanship was atrocious, but I could make out the beginning of the note: I must speak with you about— The fold through the center blurred the middle contents, but his last words were clear as day. They sliced through me the same way I’d sliced through the Dragon King with the diamond dagger that freed the cosmos.

They’re alive.

© 2015 Lowvee Cole. All rights reserved. 

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