Page 2 of To Hell and Back
While her friends usually shut the bullies up pretty damn quick, sometimes they were unavoidable. She’d been subject to several spells, charms, and hexes over the years, though most of those had been pretty harmless. It was difficult being part of the supernatural community when she didn’t really belong, but that was simply a reality she had accepted.
It wasn’t until the day her parents died in a horrible accident on her twenty-first birthday that her powers finally manifested. She’d made a surprise visit home to see them but had discovered they were spending the weekend scouting a new location for their latest film project. Instead of staying where they were, her parents had immediately changed their plans and caught a flight home to celebrate her birthday with her.
Thathad ended up being a fatal mistake.
During their flight back, they encountered a storm that turned out to be far more intense than originally predicted. Seneca had been on her way to the airport to pick them up when she’d been notified about the plane crash. She didn’t remember driving off the road or tumbling down a steep embankment but had woken up when the rain started flooding into her damaged car.
At first, she hadn’t been able to figure out how she had survived. The rescue team that had found her on their way to another accident had called it amiracle, but she knew better. The situation had been impossible to escape without some sort of magical intervention.
The trauma of losing her parents had triggered her awakening, allowingher to live through what should have been a fatal accident. She had walked away with barely a scratch, but she would have gladly traded places with her parents if it had meant they could have lived.
Losing them was a hell of a price to pay to finally come into her magic. Instead of being something to celebrate, it had marked the beginning of the end for her.
Besides dealing with the death of her parents, she also lost several friends that same night. Shadow had flown home with her that weekend. She’d claimed she wanted to visit her own parents, but the truth was she had arranged a surprise birthday party for Seneca at an exclusive club located in a private mansion on the outskirts of town.
The Manor had ended up being directly in the path of a devastating mudslide that had been triggered by a flash flood caused by the raging storm. Since the venue had been filled with a combination of supernaturals and humans, those with magic had done their best to save people and counter the flood. Unfortunately, the mudslide had hit so fast that there hadn’t been much of a warning before disaster stuck.
The chaos might have been caused by an act of nature,but Seneca still felt responsible for her best friend’s death. If she hadn’t gone home that weekend, Shadow could have remained safe at school. Their other friends wouldn’t have been at the club that night either. Knowing that everyone she loved would still be alive if she’d made a different choice had wrecked her.
For months after the accident, she had lived in a haze of guilt and grief. She stopped going to school andbarricadedherself in the house where she was surrounded by the memories of her parents.
When her mother’s sister, Clara, and her husband, Mark, had shown up, she hadn’t protested them staying at the house with her. Even though she had never been close to them, they were the only family she had left.
Initially, she’d been grateful to have them around. They made sure she ate and took care of running the house since she was barely able to function. But before she knew it, they had completely taken over.She hadn’t realized what they were doing until she’d woken up one day and barely recognized her beloved home. Almost every trace of her parents had been removed from the house, and the warm, cheerful atmosphere had been altered into a cold, ostentatious showpiece.
Looking back, she should have put a stop to things then and there. Unfortunately, she hadn’t. She had trusted them, and that had allowed them to manipulate her into doing exactly what they wanted.
Despite experiencing her awakening, Seneca hesitated to use her magic. She knew it didn’t make much sense, but she couldn’t help blaming her powers for what had happened the day her parents died. Logically, she understood she hadn’t been the cause of what had happened that night. However, she wouldn’t have survived if her magic hadn’t manifested, and the guilt she felt made it impossible to truly enjoy finally becoming a real witch.
When she hadn’t shown any interest in learning how to use her magic, Clara and Mark had insisted on teaching her some of the basics. She had initially rebuffed their attempts but had finally agreed when they pointed out she could inadvertently hurt someone with her magic if she wasn’t careful.
She hadn’t known it at the time, but their training had been an excuse to try to figure out exactly how she had survived. They had been certain something magical had saved her, but they didn’t actually want her to learn how to use her magic. If she grew to be too powerful, she wouldn’t have been as easy to control.
She had been curious enough to comply with their various tests. During training, a spell had backfired, but instead of hurting her, it had somehow been deflected before any of them could react. She had always believed that she didn’t have magical abilities, but the truth was magic had been influencing her life all along.
She just hadn’t realized it at the time.
Her ability wasn’t exactly something that was easy to figure out. It wasn’t an overt power, like controlling fire or the wind. It wasn’t even something tangible, like being able to make it rain.
Seneca had literally been born lucky.
If she wanted to accomplish something, she managed to do so with minimal effort. In school, tests had always been easy for her, even if she had barely paid attention in class. She always thought she had a good memory, but it was more than that. She’d also never taken more than a cursory art lesson, but she had somehow figured out exactly how to draw the images she wanted to create for her graphic novels.
When it came to physical injuries, she had miraculously avoided being hurt in every sport she had ever played. Sure, she had gotten bloody and bruised a few times, but she had somehow evaded suffering any major damage.
Looking back, she could see that her luck had saved her from countless mishaps over the years. She’d always trusted that sinking feeling in her gut that told her not to walk down a certain street or to turn right when she was supposed to go left, but she had always considered it basic intuition. Her lucky magic had probably saved her from numerous dangerous situations, but she had been oblivious to it all.
To test her theory, she had put herself through several risky training exercises, which she easily passed. Her uncle even bought her a bunch of different scratch-and-win lottery tickets. When more than half of them were winners, they realized she really had been blessed with luck.
Because her ability seemed so peculiar, it wasn’t easy to understand exactly how it worked. The best way to describe it was to imagine she had a magical lantern inside of herself that only lit up when there was enough power to turn it on. Once it was on, the light from the lantern made her one of the luckiest beings in the realm.
After doing more tests, they discovered that she could also give luck to someone else, albeit temporarily. Using the light from the lantern, she could produce a few drops of blood laced with golden light, which was essentially pure liquid luck. A single drop of her golden blood could grant someone luck for a limited amount of time, but there was a catch. The blood had to be given freely, and it wasn’t something that she could produce that often.
When she kept the luck for herself, it lasted a lot longer than if she gave it to someone else. Because of that, she could have spent every day living a magically lucky life. On the flip side, once she started giving out her golden blood, it left her feeling weak and drained of energy until her inner light could be replenished.
It almost felt like a punishment for sharing.
With enough time and rest, she was able to fully recover, but there were other dangers that came with being able to grant luck to people. At the time, she hadn’t been worried about any of that because she had trusted her aunt and uncle to keep her secret. Unfortunately, that had been a mistake since their greed had outweighed any familial bond they shared.
