Born Wicked

I

I sit as far from the windows as I can get. The sun's rays dance in the stale air of our classroom. Drafts from the loosened panes carry the brine of the sea, since Salem Sound isn't far from our school. I stay away from the elements in any way I can. I huddle in the shadows and cloak myself in the shroud of unpopularity. I'm invisible.

I'm not a weak-willed heroine. I'm not a hero at all. As far as my willpower... well, I honestly couldn't say. I've never exercised my own will. Never made my own choices. Not the ones that matter.

I never chose to be a pariah. Didn't choose to be a loner. Which sounds way cooler than isolated freak. I didn't choose to be an orphan, either. Didn't want my parents to die, and I never would have chosen to be the one to kill them.

I hate it when people pretend they don't know who they are. I know exactly who and what I am. I am a Sorcer, for you non-magic users (mundane humans), that means I'm something like a witch. I am human, just... with bonuses. I am not without flaws. I killed my parents when I was twelve.

Not on purpose, let me assure you. I am not a sociopath. I was literally playing with fire. I got burned. The house got burned and my parents, well, they got burned, too.

I say that to say this, when you accidentally kill your parents, the fact that it was an accident doesn't absolve you of any guilt. It kills me every day. It also doesn't make you, you know, popular. The kids like me, the Sorcers, were told to stay away from me, I'm dangerous. The mundanes were told to avoid me, too, but that doesn't matter insomuch as I stay away from them.

I killed my parents. Parents who were powerful Sorcers with a helluva lot of magic powers and they just... died. Yeah, I stay away from the mundane kids at all costs.

I figure it like this, I have just under two years left of high school. I'll graduate, I'll go to college with my stellar grades, and I'll get as far from Salem, Massachusetts as I can. Are you chuckling a little? I am. Salem, right? Witches? Real original, I know.

The truth is, it's the safest place to be if you're practicing. There are Sorcers everywhere really, all over the world, but you'll find most of them, the ones in the U.S. anyway, either in Salem or New Orleans. Salem's a lot safer than the bayou I hear, but I honestly don't know. Either way, whether you're in the clans in the South or the covens in the Northeast, there is strength in numbers.

I wasn't supposed to know anything about this stuff. My parents were something of a modern day/Sorcer Romeo & Juliet. It was all bad. I mean, the comparisons just don't end, so it was destined for tragedy, y'knowwhatImean?

There are two types of Sorcers. Get ready to stretch your mind a little and wrap it around this: Spiritus and Tempore. Latin, ugh, I know. Literally meaning spiritual and elemental. There are histories thicker than my gran's grimoire, seriously. So, my dad was a Spiritus and my mom was a –you guessed it, Tempore.

Never supposed to happen.

They met in high school, fell in love, and ran away and got married. When they surfaced back in Salem years later, they had me with them. What all when down in the early years of their marriage and my life, I'll never know. They're not here for me to ask and Gran doesn't know.

They were defiant teenagers breaking all the rules. There are mundanes who know about us. Eons ago, Sorcers were powerful, scary and really, really dangerous. So, a band of people got together and hunted them. If you abused your power, you were killed. Straight up. And then there were the Witch Hunts which eventually led to the Salem Witch Trials. Europe, parts of Asia, the U.S., Canada... I mean we were almost obliterated.

That's when the Sorcers went underground. Rules were put in place and any survivors were told: No mixing colors, Spiritus and Tempore were to stay the hell away from each other. They told us to form governing bodies to oversee clans or covens, and keep your shit to a minimum. mundanes need to believe the myths.

We don't exist.

Stay invisible or die.

My parents had broken the rules. They had colored outside of the lines and then pranced in with me. The thing was, I was never supposed to exist. So, in order to save my life and theirs, they agreed that I would never know what I was, what they were, or learn to practice EVER.

So, fast forward and I'm twelve. It's my birthday and like any other kid, I have a cake with candles. Fire. One of the elements. What I know is that the Tempore can manipulate and bend the elements –air, earth, fire, and water. How they do it or what they do with it, I don't know. But my twelfth birthday, I'm sitting at the dining room table with my parents and the candles are lit and I feel it.

I don't know how to describe it, but it was like the heat from the twelve, thin candles curled around me. I felt something blossom inside me.

Something ancient and hungry and I was fascinated.

Curious, I remember staring at the flames and thinking my name. In the space of one single heartbeat, there it was. Twelve candles, twelve individual points of light, each one spelling Jayme-Lynn in flame. The letters, a neat and pretty cursive, just danced in the air above the cake.

My parents threw a fucking fit.

The candles went out. I hadn't blown them, maybe my mom had done it. I don't know. It doesn't matter. They tried to calm down, but face it, the moment's over. Birthday ruined. I cried, not able to understand what the hell I'd just done. What I'd done wrong. What had been so cool was now frightening.

I went up to my room that night, but couldn't sleep. I tried to figure out what was happening, I remember wanting to ask so badly. I burned with questions. I just couldn't wrap my young mind around it. After hours of lying there, staring at my ceiling, my parents finally went to bed.

I heard them on the stairs. My dad opened my door and peeked into my darkened room. I watched him, in the dark, motionless. He stayed a few moments and then shut the door softly. I heard him pad down the hall to their room. I heard them talking, muffled, through the wall. I honestly don't know how long I'd lain there that night. Eventually, I couldn't stand it anymore, I had to at least know if what I'd done was real.

So, clad in my pjs, I tiptoed out of my room

Inched down the wooden stairs

Slid into the kitchen to retrieve the matches out of the drawer, the candles still in my cake.

I lit them.

I felt powerful and curious and a little afraid. Yet, I played.

I played with fire.

It played back.