The Coven

Solstice: Chapter 10

"So he knows everything? And has your entire life?" Hailey asked as the girl bent down to pinch a strawberry off the bush. Somehow the girl had convinced Lilly to come strawberry picking with her, something she was suppose to do with Jake who was now grounded until her was twenty-five.

Lilly nodded her head and held out the bucket. "Yeah, I fell into the water as a kid and got it to like vortex around me."

"Cool! When I was five I tried to blow out my birthday candles but ended up setting the whole cake on fire."

Lilly wasn't sure how that counted as being cool. Hailey started telling her how affinities manifest in children at a young age, though most don't learn how to control them until they are nine or ten. She even recalled stories from other Coven members and their first experiences with affinities.

"Mason blew Sage off the dock, Sage set the curtains on fire, Jake grew a flower in grade 1 for science and overnight it was three feet tall. It's actually really funny all the stories with the first encounters. Jake's was in the local paper."

Lilly wanted to make a comment about the small towns lack of news but Hailey was already bouncing off to another bush talking about how awesome the strawberries were. Lilly huffed and following with the increasingly heavy bucket in her hands.

"So what's going to happen now? Do you have to leave or can you stay?" Hailey asked as she straightened her back and wiped the sweat from her forehead, "Because if it's supervision your dad is worried about Jake has a spare room in his house."

She didn't want to stay with Jake, and not because the thought of spending twenty-four hours a day with him was a little on the unappealing side, or that she would become a burden to his family but because she wanted to prove to her dad, and her mom, that she was responsible. Hell with everything she had dealt with in the last year who were they to say other wise?

How many sixteen year old girls could fight off Sine Anima, how many of those girls could take on a super powerful dark witch, twice and walk away from it? Now at seventeen her family thought she was too immature to handle herself in the Coven world, and the only way she could prove it to them was by telling her parents the truth about everything she had been involved with.

Hailey kept jumping around the strawberry bushes picking up the fruit and mumbling if it was good or not. Thank god the heat wave was subsiding, though it was still overly hot to be standing in the middle of the sun for a couple of hours.

"I am getting burned can we go?"

"No, I have to pick some of these for Jake's mom, Sage's mom, my neighbour and Patty Beckett, the nice old lady who runs the hotel-"

Lilly groaned, "Oh my god why?"

The other girl shrugged, "Because I am amazing." Hailey walked off humming as she went. Lilly couldn't help but smile, Hailey who only a year ago was wearing all black and pissed at the world was now in a white mesh top with a pink bikini top underneath with a big floppy straw hat on her head. Whatever was going on between her and Ace was doing the girl a lot of good.

Her dad was also getting back on his feet after being a raging alcoholic for most of the last decade since her sister died and her mother left. Hailey had told her he was dating someone, working steady and fixing up the house every spare chance he had. Life was finally looking up for the girl who needed it most.

Forty-five minutes and two giant buckets of strawberries later the two girls were in Lilly's car driving to Sage's house, after stopping off at Hailey's to drop off a days hard work. They found the beach babe lounging on her dock with a beer beside her. When she heard the other two girls she grinned and beckoned them to sit down, "Good, I needed some company. What took so long?"