Free Watch Me Burn: The December People, Book Two by Sharon Bayliss Page A

She slammed her fist on the hood. She turned around and entered the forest at a run, but within a few bounds, she tripped on a root and careened forward in some thick brush.
    “Dammit,” she said.
    If she did make it home without getting caught, she’d have to find a way to explain how she got more red scratches on her arms and face while she slept in bed.
    She shook a branch off her leg frantically. She had thought she would have no problem entering the forest. She had thought since she was dark, she had a free pass, and could just walk in. Instead, she felt…rejected.
    A repulsion or concealment spell existed in this forest. She knew about these. She and her family had cast these spells before. A concealment spell couldn’t actually make you invisible. But it could motivate someone to always look in the other direction. A repulsion would give someone a creepy feeling about a place, like it was haunted. You could also conceal by confusion. Make someone so confused they would forget why they came and left. Wizards had always needed concealment spells, and had gotten good over the centuries.
    However, concealment spells, as all spells, worked within the bounds of reality. You couldn’t make something invisible. You couldn’t set up an actual force field around a place. If Emmy really, really wanted to walk through the concealment spell, she could. She might feel crappy doing it, and all instincts might tell her to run the other way, but she could do it. But if this was a concealment spell, why hadn’t Julie’s family gritted their teeth and walked in?
    Emmy kept working at it, and found she could walk into the forest for a while, but somehow would change direction without noticing and end up at the road. The purplish light of dawn trickled through the trees, so she walked to the truck to check the time. After 6:30am. Mom would wake up soon, but Emmy had a chance of making it home if traffic wasn’t too bad and she left right now.
    Then Nathan’s truck came around the corner, blocking her in. He climbed out of his truck and looked at Emmy. He didn’t look the least bit surprised to see her there.
    “What?” he asked.
    “I didn’t say anything.”
    “Are you okay?”
    “I’m fine.”
    “You called me.”
    “I don’t even have your number.”
    This started out as one of the weirdest conversations she had ever had, but he squinted at her as if
she
didn’t make sense.
    “You called me with magic,” he said.
    “I did? That is so cool.”
    “You didn’t do it on purpose? You don’t have any information or need help or anything?”
    “Uh…no. I’m sorry.”
    “If you called me on accident… that means, you just wanted me to be here?”
    Emmy felt her cheeks burn and she tried to will the blood out of them so she would stay pale and nonchalant. She had no idea what to say. She hated all of it, just as she hated the forest. She had no control.
    “I don’t know. I don’t know how I did it, or why. It was an accident. That’s what an accident means,” she said.
    “You couldn’t go in either, could you?”
    Emmy scrunched her nose. She didn’t want to admit it. “No,” she said.
    He nodded solemnly.
    “What about the Mundanes? The police officers? They’ve searched every inch of the forest.”
    “You know how it is. Magic that’s obvious to us is subtle to them. They
think
they’ve searched every inch of the forest. I’m sure some of them noticed something off about the place. But they wouldn’t know what it was.”
    “That’s not a normal concealment spell, right? I didn’t know they could be that powerful.”
    “Do you want to go get breakfast?” he asked.
    “What do you mean?”
    “Breakfast. It’s a meal people eat in the morning,” he explained. “Pancakes and bacon and stuff like that.”
    “I know what breakfast is.”
    “I came all the way out here. You could at least buy me a cup of coffee.”
    “You want to eat breakfast with a winter witch? Wouldn’t that piss off