Page 17 of Ward
And there it goes again.I love you. I love you. I love you.
Fuck.
Six
Yvette
“Tell me about magic.”
We’re on my back porch sipping coffee, the most tranquil place I have ever lived. It faces the Great Smoky Mountains, which called to me for years. Not the Rockies, or the Cascades, or Sierra Nevada.The Smokies. They yanked me from Texas the moment I had enough saved up to make the move. I left my best friend, mydad, the only “home” I ever knew. I left my mother’s resting place. I left all my trauma, too.
“You actually cast spells and stuff?” Ward continues his line of questioning. He doesn’t judge anything I say, even though I know how new all of this is to him. He just takes it in and lets it be what it is.
In some ways, we’re not all that different.
“I cast spells. There are many different ways,” I tell him. “The main thing about spellcasting is to set your intention. To know what youwant, in clear terms, precisely, exactly. To be pure of mind and heart when you do. Never base it on fear.”
“Pure of mind and heart…so you can’t cast a spell to like, hurt anyone?”
“Do you think that I would?”
“I really don’t.”
I take a long sip of my coffee. “No. Hurting people, selfishness, power-hunger, it’s all in the domain of black magic.”
“So, you’re a good witch.” He flashes me a smirk.
“Good at heart. Not very good at…not setting fires.” I grimace.
“True story,” he confirms, nodding. I brace for a lecture to be tacked on to that, or for the questioning to now go down that path, but he sidesteps. He’s really into the magic. Or he’s reallyinto me. Or we’re just sex drunk from last night and wish to stay far, far away from potential conflict.
“You can’t make people fall in love?” Ward asks next. “That seems like a noble intention.”
“No. No one can. Not truly.”
I watch as he does that thinking dance with his eyeballs. They touch everything, the clouds, the trees, the dirt, the coffee. Then finally when he’s ready, he looks keenly at me. “You can’t…bring people back?”
“Of course not.”
“Ah.” He brings the coffee to his lips, lingering there as if communing with it.
“Who would you want to bring back, Ward?”
“My entire family,” he says to the coffee. “My parents, my older brother and our little sister.”
“Oh my god, Ward.”
“It was a long time ago.”
“Car accident?”
“Yeah.”
“Where were you?” I ask.
“I was there, I was the only one who…” He stops right there. “I made a covenant, never get too attached, never get married, definitely never have kids. Never love something so much it will hurt too much to lose it.”
There it is. The source. The weight he carries. The reason he’s the first to run into my house to face who-knows-what kind of catastrophe. It’s never that bad. But it could be, and he wouldn’t do a damn thing different.
