Bad Moon:Book One in the "I Am Chaos" series.

Chapter 5: Ilicon

Chapter 5: Ilicon

"Eva, what the heck are these things?"

I returned home after dropping Amelia off at the Marriott, to find Wynn elbows deep in my grandmother's box of knick-knacks. This is just what I need right now.

"Stuff from Granny's." I resisted the impulse to rush over and grab the box away from her.

Wynn pulled out a giant geode filled with the jagged edges of a milky blue stone.

"I thought it might make a good book-end," I said, defensively.

"These are cool." Wynn held up a small glass ball filled with a sachet of dried grass, a red ribbon, and a smattering of dried red flower petals. "I wonder how they get the little flowers in there." She held it over her nose, staring underneath it.

"Are you staying here tonight or are you going over to Robin's?" I asked, sitting down on the opposite end of the sofa and tucking my legs up.

"Heading to Robin's. You should have Cal over." Setting the ornament back in the box, Wynn looked up, slyly. "Or maybe Sinclair Ash?" Her tone was innocent. Her look was suggestive.

Is the universe out to get me? "Most girls wouldn't encourage their friends to two-time," I said, rubbing at my eyes, tiredly. It had been a long day. Between the strain of trying to act normal for Amelia, the anger over my treatment in the witches' shops, the betrayal I felt over Cal, and the fear that I was having a harder and harder time compartmentalizing... I was fine curling up in bed all day Sunday and dealing with the world again on Monday.

"Yes, well," said Wynn, not sounding at all apologetic. "I'll use any tool at my disposal to get Sinclair Ash to agree to a photo shoot..."

"Did you just call me a tool?"

"...Plus, it's not two-timing unless you and Cal are an item. Are you?"

"Definitely not," I said.

Wynn's mouth rounded in surprise. "Oh dear, I sense anger. Remember Eva, anger leads to hate, hate leads to fear..."

"You've got it backwards, Yoda," I snapped.

"Do I? Darn." Wynn stood, flicking her curtain of black hair over her shoulders. "I gotta run, or I'm going to be late for dinner. You still owe me that story about Ash. And apparently there's one about Cal I have to hear, too. Lunch date sometime this week?"

I waved a hand at her dismissively. "Sure," I muttered.

Wynn left, and I waited five minutes in the silence before willing myself to stand. Then I went around setting up Gran's spells, taping them to doors and windows, the places I remember them hanging in her house.

I reheated some leftover pizza for dinner and tried to sit down with Diana for the New World. I'm not a big reader, and the book was dense. When I got to the section about the importance of ritual, I set the book down in disgust. Boring. It was all about telling the difference between European plants and American plants, how to make substitutions and alter the rituals based on shifts in time zones. And the whole section about rituals was just confusing. The book didn't say anything about why you had to place certain types of stones in certain patterns, just that you had to do it.

I also had this whisper of doubt that was getting gradually louder. Maybe all these glass ornaments and stuff were just Granny's aesthetic. Maybe the books were part of her academic research.

I tried to think back to my childhood, to whether or not I'd ever seen Granny actually perform any magic. To my knowledge, I hadn't. Nor had I seen her with any gaggle of friends that might resemble a witch's coven. She was close to a few colleagues at work. But whenever they came over, they held card games, not séances.