Fearless The King Series Book One - By Tawdra Kandle Page 0,101

And she said she wanted to be my friend.”

Amber paused, lost in thought. “I didn’t want to believe her. It was easier to go on hating her. But she said that she’d really changed, that she had—I remember clearly how she put it, she’d found a new way. And it required her to make amends where she had left hurt. I thought she meant she’d found religion, and when I asked her, she laughed. Not a mean laugh, like before, but real, genuine. She said, no, it wasn’t precisely religion. She’d tell me more about it later, but she wanted to make sure we could be friends.

“So that’s when I started hanging around with her at school, eating lunch with her friends—and we’d even do things after school. It was—” she drew in a deep breath, and even now, after all that had happened tonight, her eyes were bright, remembering, “—the best time. For the first time in so long, I had friends.”

She turned pleading eyes on me. “So you understand, Tasmyn, right? You know what it’s like to be lonely. We talked that day in English, and you said you knew what it was like. And then to suddenly have friends—the world opened up to me. I didn’t hate school anymore. I started to do better in my classes. It was what I dreamed high school could be.

“I knew that they were all involved in some kind of club. There were days when they met after school, and I knew there were things they weren’t telling me. But they weren’t mean about it.

“Then one day Nell asked me if I wanted to join their chemistry club. She said Ms. Lacusta had started it up last spring, when she first got here, and they were learning so much. I wasn’t much into Chemistry; I barely passed the class freshman year. But Nell said it wasn’t like that. She convinced me to try it, and she was right. It wasn’t like any class I’d ever taken.”

Amber stopped again. We were getting into the more intense part of her story, and I knew it would be difficult for her.

“Ms. Lacusta—she told us that Chemistry was so much more than just formulas and test tubes. She told us there was real power in it. I remember that. Real power. And the other girls, they were so enthusiastic about it all. It was easy to get caught up.

“Nell told me that they were meeting one night. She told me that Casey would pick me up, because she had to go early to talk with Marica—outside school, Ms. Lacusta wanted us to call her by her first name—and we were meeting in the woods. I was a little spooked, but more than that, I needed to keep these friends.

“So Casey and I got there—it was where we were tonight, the clearing near Lake Rosu. And I saw that the girls were different. Everyone was in a circle, and they were wearing dark robes. Nell gave me one, and I joined the circle. I was scared, sure, but I was also kind of excited.

“Nell drew the circle—that was the first time I saw her with the athame. And then they all started chanting—not in English, and I didn’t know what it was at first, but Nell told me later it was Romanian. She said it was something Marica had taught them. After the chant, in the middle of the circle, Nell started a fire. I don’t know how she did it—I didn’t see matches or anything—but suddenly there was a fire there. And Marica handed her a pot that she hung over the fire. They chanted some more, then Marica stood up. She told us that what was in the pot was what we’d been working on in Chem. club that week, and that it was a potion that would make us more powerful.

“She said something else in Romanian over the pot, and then she scooped some out. We all had to dip our fingers in it, then touch it to our lips. I was scared—I kept thinking that I had no idea what she was giving us. So I didn’t actually touch it. It was dark, and I figured no one was really going to notice.”

Amber took a long drink of her tea and closed her eyes over the mug. I could feel her exhaustion.

“Amber, was what they were doing—was it like a Wiccan ceremony?” Marly was doing an admirable job of keeping her voice