If Caitlin intended to argue further, that resolve appeared to have faded. She wrapped her hands around the glass of lemonade but didn’t drink. “I’m going to try, anyway,” she murmured, then added in clearer tones, “I’m not sure how much good I’ll be. Not really. I’ve spent way too much time trying to repress my gift, and now I don’t even know how to use it properly.”
“It’ll come to you,” he said, trying to sound encouraging. “Our gifts, talents, whatever you want to call them — they want to be used. A little practice, and you’ll be amazed at what you can do.”
At first she didn’t reply, only stared at her fingers where they still encircled the tall, moisture-beaded glass. She had pretty hands, with strong but delicate fingers, although the pale pink polish she was wearing had already started to chip off. No rings, which relieved Alex a little. She did seem a bit too young to be married or even engaged, but witches and warlocks tended to marry early, so it wasn’t outside the bounds of possibility for her to already be committed to someone.
Like that should even matter. No matter how pretty she was, they’d only just met. He didn’t know anything about her.
Well, except one thing. He thought he liked her, liked her odd combination of toughness and vulnerability. As if she had a lot more to her than even she realized.
“What about you?” she asked, and he tilted his head.
“What about me?”
“When did your gift show up?” A shy smile. “It’s a pretty cool talent. I’ve never heard of it before.”
Neither had anyone in his clan. He rocked back in his chair and grinned. “I was eleven. I was playing soccer with some friends from school and some other kids from the clan. Nothing formal — just kicking the ball around on a Saturday afternoon. Well, Humberto Almeida — he was this big kid, older than most of us, almost fourteen — he launched that ball right at me. Hard. I could tell it was going to hit me right in the face, probably break my nose. You know how you can see something about to happen, and you know there isn’t anything you can do to stop it?”
Caitlin nodded, a small smile playing around her mouth. It was a pretty mouth, with that defined Cupid’s bow at the top and the full lower lip, all overlaid with a faint gleam of soft peach lip gloss. And Alex realized he’d better stop staring at it.
Somehow he managed to tear his eyes away and drink down the rest of the lemonade in his glass. “Well, it was like that. This ball coming right at my face. And then at the last minute, this shield or whatever you want to call it shimmered out of thin air and surrounded me, and the ball bounced right off. At first everyone was too shocked to say anything, but then the kids started calling out, ‘Do it again! Do it again!’ and running for the spare balls we had sitting off to one side so they could start throwing them at me.”
“Ouch,” Caitlin said.
He grinned. “Yeah, something like that. Because the shield or whatever it was didn’t come back. I took off for home, running like I had the zombie horde or something after me, and told my mom what had happened. I asked her why the shield hadn’t come back, and she thought about it for a minute and said it was probably because I didn’t think I was really going to get hurt, not like I would have if the ball Humberto had kicked had really gotten me in the face.”
“So how did you start practicing with it? Have someone throw knives at you?”
Her tone was wry, but really, she wasn’t that far off from the truth. “Not knives. Not at first, anyway,” he added, and her blue-green eyes widened. “But having Diego come at me and threaten to pile-drive me was pretty effective. He was in wrestling in high school.”
“Double ouch.”
“I might have had a few bruises that needed explaining away. Gradually, though, I got control of my gift instead of having it control me. And now I can summon it when I need it, instead of having it pop up out of nowhere while watching the 3D version of the latest Avengers movie or whatever.”
Again she smiled slightly at that image, but her expression turned thoughtful as she said, “I like that. Having control of my gift instead of letting it control me. I guess that’s what I was letting it do when I was so afraid all the time of what the next vision would be, and when it might show up.”
Privately, Alex wondered how pleasant the next round of visions would be for her, considering she was going to use them to track down the warlocks who’d kidnapped her friends. He decided it was better to let that go for now. “It makes a huge difference. And maybe you’ll find out that being the McAllister seer isn’t so bad after all.”