Bloodlines Read online

  Chapter Two

  The next day Marissa picked her up, meaninglessly chatting away, again. Adeila wasn't listening, the feel of the day was charged. She'd gone out onto her deck like she had every morning, but even yoga and meditation didn't help. Everything just felt different. Like there was electricity in the atmosphere, but there wasn't a single cloud in the sky. It was utterly gorgeous, clear weather, unusually warm for a late October morning in northern California.

  A peculiar prickling ran along her skin as she got out of Marissa's car, she looked around but saw nothing suspicious other than a black pickup truck she didn't recognize a row behind theirs.

  Maybe it was the leftover feelings of how she'd moved her pillow, again, that morning.

  In her waking moments when she'd felt the pillow slide off her bed, she'd put out her hand wishing it would come back, and... It had. Again. As it did every time. Things like that always seemed to charge her skin, leaving her feeling edgy.

  “Adeila!”

  She looked over and shook herself out of her thoughts. Marissa was staring at her.

  “You coming?”

  Adeila took a calming breath, grabbed the strap of her bag and got out of the car. Another day to trudge through, but this one just felt completely off.

  .~.

  Adeila had been accidentally “moving” things, apparently with her mind, in the past year. First time it had been the TV remote. It happened one night when she'd been home alone. A rarity that she ate up every chance she got. Her parents were having a date night and her younger brother and sister were over friends’ houses. She'd sat on the couch, bowl of buttery popcorn in her lap, with plans of binge watching her favorite teenage werewolf drama when she'd been unable to locate the remote. Finally she'd spied it, on the mantle of the fireplace where the television was mounted. She remembered thinking at the time, what a completely useless spot for the remote to get placed. She'd blamed her father, who left things scattered about the house pretty often.

  Cursing him, she'd harmlessly reached out her hand in innocent, lazy desperation and asked the remote to come to her; just as she was getting ready to lower her hand and get up from her comfy cocoon to get the remote, it had shakily lifted from its spot on the mantle and drifted slowly, haphazardly towards her. In utter horror, she had leapt off the couch and sprinted into the kitchen. The remote had dropped onto the floor as soon as her concentration had been broken.

  She'd refused to touch the remote for days, insisting to herself that the hallucination had been brought on by lack of sleep and too much studying.

  Two weeks later she'd done it with her pillow for the first time. It had fallen off the bed, and she'd woken up with her head on the mattress. She'd blearily looked around and then held out her hand and wished for her pillow, and it had shakily floated to her outstretched palm. She'd dropped it instantly to the ground when she was awake enough to understand what had happened.

  She'd tried to remember anything she had eaten that night that could have given her hallucinations, or where she'd gone that someone may have laced her drink or something.

  After that she tried to do it on purpose just to make sure she really wasn't actually hallucinating. Every time she'd stretched out her hand and really focused and asked for something, it had come to her. An electrical current like buzzing, humming along her skin, was the only indication that made her truly comprehend that it was her moving these objects. It was entirely her doing, and it wasn't exactly easy either. It was a process, and never a smooth one, but it always worked for her as long as she focused her energy on the task.

  Completely freaked out by the entire thing, she'd learned to just not ask for anything. It may have been a useful power, but it was a power nonetheless, and that was just too weird. She hadn't dared to tell anyone of it. She made sure every day when she was around people, she was very careful about what she said. The saying “be careful what you wish for” had taken on a whole new light. She was too scared to tell anyone, afraid she'd be labeled a freak and her parents would send her to a shrink or mental institute or worse. The whole situation, as interesting as it was, scared her witless.

  She had no idea how to explain this phenomenon. She'd tried to ask her mom about their ancestry, maybe she had some Wiccan practicing women in her bloodlines or something to explain this, but her mother had completely shut her down. Somewhat rudely, so she'd dared not breach that subject again. Those ancestry websites hadn't gotten her anywhere either, so she'd given up and just began watching her words each day to make sure no one saw her little use her “powers” or whatever the heck they were.