DARKER WISHES chapter one

Darker Wishes

A sound came from outside where the boys and Orielle were. One of the boys with bright blonde hair—Roobio—edged up towards the old abandoned hut across the way. He gestured to it. Trade could hear the tips of his voice, but not enough to make out what he was saying.

Orielle was shaking her head; they wanted her to do something. Trade gripped the windowsill. Finn and the boy whose name he couldn't remember joined Roobio at the door, cackling their well-fed little heads off. She looked nervous. Wayde or Wyle guided her with a kind facade to the house, Orielle still obstinately shaking her head and planting her feet. Trade wanted to run and stop those boys, to tell them how one treats a girl, to knock their smirks off with the broom handle. But it was too late.

He saw Orielle's muscles relaxing and her head ducking in submission before it even happened. She edged up the side of the abandoned hut, her eyes darting back and forth in anxiety. When she was sure nobody was coming, she moved to stand right outside the door.

Finn looked in the window (to check if anyone was there, Trade presumed). Orielle tensed up. Then she made a sharp and sudden motion with her hand as if she was chucking an invisible ball at the house. She backed away, shielding everyone else with her arms spread wide.

Trade's eyes popped. The house had burst into purple flames, smoke rising like a flock of birds escaping a sound. It engulfed the whole hut in moments, burning away what was left of the infrastructure and causing Orielle to stumble backward and block her eyes. The scent almost knocked Trade out, and he could see smoke fogging up his window. He instinctively turned around to make sure his mother hadn't somehow appeared without him noticing.

The boys ran in an instant, tripping over the steep hillside into the valley before Witch Wanessa's hut. The fire roared onward, still a brilliant magenta. Trade ducked his head out of their view only for a moment, but he had to make sure that Orielle was okay. She was also standing, horrified by what she had done. Her arms flew in front of her body, and water sprayed in massive pumps out of her hands. At the sight of this, the boys in the valley stood up one by one and raced to the now drenched abandoned hut. A few were clapping, pretending like they didn't run fearfully from the fire a second ago.

A cockroach scuttled out from a crevasse in a wall. Trade pressed his heel down on it without unsticking his eyes from the scene, unable to stop watching.

Orielle rubbed her forehead as if she was in pain. Maybe she was. Trade had never seen anyone do magic of that magnitude before. Although the blaze had lasted only about twenty seconds, it left everyone watching awestruck. Especially Trade.

Trade didn't know that Orielle could do magic, and he wasn't sure what to make of it. By the impression he got from her family, they were strict Dociles, unyielding to anyone in possession of magic (or of magic descent, he remembered grimly from his own experiences). And by the look of it, Orielle was a practiced Purple magic wielder, the same kind as his mother the Witch. Trade's eyes grazed across the scene, taking in the sopping wet house and the boys raking their hands on Orielle's back, whooping loudly. She still looked glum and a little sick. Trade felt the same way.

Every nerve ending on his body wanted to rush out to the scene. He didn't even know what he would do when he got there, he only knew that he needed to be there. To show that he was watching. The way she shivered in fear of herself, the way they ignored her feelings... it was almost too much for Trade to handle.

But of course, he couldn't. The more the flames of loneliness irked his young brain, the more the invisible barrier rose higher, challenging him. All he wanted was a friend, but a friend meant that he would be disobeying his mother, and he couldn't afford to do that. He relaxed his shoulders and returned to the broom lying on the ground. The floor was far from done, and if his Witch mother were to find evidence of his laziness, he would resemble the doused, charred house before long.