The Coven Read Free Page A

and cranking the engine.
    “Morgan!” my dad yelled as I squealed out of our driveway, the car lurching like a boat on rough waters. Then I roared forward, watching my parents on our front lawn in my rearview mirror. Mom was sinking to the ground; Dad was trying to hold her up. I burst into tears as I wheeled too fast onto Riverdale.
    Sobbing, I dashed my tears away with one hand, then wiped my nose on my sleeve. I turned on Das Boot’s heater, but of course it took forever for the engine to warm up.
    I was turning onto Bree’s street before I remembered that we were no longer friends. If she hadn’t left those books on my porch, I wouldn’t know I was adopted. If Cal hadn’t come between us, she would never have left the books on my porch.
    I cried harder, shaking with sobs, and spun into a sloppy U-turn right before I reached her driveway.Then I hit the gas and drove, my only destination to be away, away.
     
    The next time my vision cleared, I had managed to fish a battered box of tissues from beneath the front seat. Damp, crumpled ones littered the passenger side and covered the floor. I had ended up heading north, out of town. The road followed a low valley, and early fog clung heavily to the asphalt. Das Boot plowed through it like a brick thrown through clouds. In the distance I saw a large, dark shadow off to the side of the road. It was the willow oak that we had parked under just last night, for Samhain. Where I had parked the first time I did a circle with Cal, weeks before. When magick had come into my life.
    Without thinking, I swung my car off the road and bumped across the field, rolling to a stop beneath the oak’s low-hanging branches. Here I was hidden by fog, by the tree. I turned off my engine, leaned against the steering wheel, and tried to stop crying.
    Adopted. Every instance, every example of my being different from my family reared up in my face and mocked me. Yesterday they had been only family jokes—how the three of them are larks and I’m a night owl, how they’re unnaturally cheerful and I’m grumpy. How Mom and Mary K. are curvy and cute and I’m thin and intense. Today those jokes caused waves of pain as I remembered them one by one.
    “Dammit! Dammit! Dammit!” I shouted, banging my fists against the hard metal steering wheel. “Dammit!” I whacked the wheel until my hands were numb, until I had gone through every curse I knew, until my throat was raw.
    Then I wept again, lying down in the front seat. I don’t know how long I was there, cocooned in my car in the mist. From time to time I turned on the heater to stay warm.The windows fogged and steamed with my tears.
    Gradually my sobs degenerated into shaky hiccups and the occasional shudder. Oh, Cal, I thought. I need Cal. As soon as I thought that, a rhyme came into my head: In my mind I see you here. In my pain I need you near. Find me, trace me, where I be. Come here, come here, now to me.
    I didn’t know where it came from, but by now I was getting used to the arrival of strange thoughts. I felt calmer hearing it, so I said it over and over again. I draped my arm over my eyes, praying desperately I would wake up in bed at home to find it had all been a nightmare.
    Minutes later I jumped when someone tapped on the passenger’s-side window. My eyes snapped open, and I sat up, then cleared a space on the glass to see Cal, looking sleepy and rumpled and amazingly beautiful.
    “You called?” he said, and my heart filled with sunlight. “Let me in—it’s freezing out here.”
    It worked, I thought in awe. I called him with my thoughts. Magick.
    I opened the door and moved over. He slid onto the front seat next to me, and it was amazingly natural to reach out, to feel his arms come around me.
    “What’s the matter?” he said, his voice muffled against my hair. “What’s going on?” He held me away from him and searched my tear-blotched face with his eyes.
    “I’m adopted!” I blurted out. “This morning I told