Page 4 of The First Trial
‘It’s us,’ he said gravely, all levity leaking from him as we gazed upon what could only be a prophecy. Our prophecy. The awe I felt before morphed into a spine-chilling realisation that whatever curse was placed upon us had been long-since foretold. Our path forward was written in the stars, but if history had taught us anything, it was that nothing good ever happened to those whose fate was recorded.
‘What does it mean?’ I asked, but unless he’d been able to gather some information I had yet to see, then I doubted he had those answers just yet.
‘I think we need to decipher the texts before we can figure that out, Junie,’ he confirmed. ‘I have a feeling the answers we seek are right here. We just need to figure out how to translate them.’
I inhaled deeply before tearing my gaze from the tomes to lighten the mood with a smile. This was work well done, and he deserved a break before we cracked down on our research once more. ‘Well, we’re not going to get that done in one night. Isay we continue deciphering the Fae language in our spare time and put it aside for today. I don’t want to spend our one night together poring over musty old books.’
He huffed, but the smile hiding on his lips let me know he was thinking along the same lines. We could have spent our time together working, but both of us would rather have spent it enjoying the moment. These Friday nights were all we got, and it was only these past few years that we’d even managed to figure out that little workaround to the curse.
We’d been raised separately our entire lives, ignorant of the other’s existence until we’d both started at Aurora Academy for Witches and Warlocks. The middle school campus was where we learned who we were to one another after we’d been partnered up for a project in class and discovered we couldn’t speak, at least until we’d met in private and the words flowed without a hitch. A rapid-fire mutual interrogation revealed we had the same birthday, we’d both been adopted, and an awkwardly thorough inspection of the other’s unusually similar physical features allowed us to connect the final dots. Yet, when we had re-entered the general population of the campus for classes, the magical gag was back in place. Magic was holding our tongues, and it made absolutely no sense, so we’d put our heads together to dig deeper into the cause, and we’d been working on it in secret ever since.
What we’d found back then had rocked both of our worlds to the core, turning everything upside down and destroying any sense of peace we had ever known. Confirmation came in the form of Ozzie’s father, who had apparently been friends with our bio-dad. We were twins, separated at birth and adopted into families from different covens, though Oz’s adopted family were unaware I was the other twin.
Only one question remained: why?
Well, that one was a doozy, but we’d long since processed those emotions and moved on from the absolute betrayal we’d felt from our birth parents. As it turned out, Oz had been adopted by a close friend of both of our parents, not just our father, but I’d been tossed aside completely by everyone and adopted into a family with zero connections to either of them. It was why Oz and I had taken so long to find one another in the first place, which we’d later learned through his reluctant adoptive father was by design.
It had hurt at first. I’d wondered why him and not me? Why did they want him closer to them, only to send me as far away as they possibly could? I’d long since determined that I didn’t particularly want the answers to those questions, but I’d also accepted that they were undoubtedly a necessary piece to this puzzle we were still piecing together twelve years later.
It was the reason why I chose to focus on the positives whenever I could. I may not have been capable of speaking with my twin in front of others, but we had developed a relationship many siblings would have been envious of, choosing each other time and time again throughout the years until we had become each other’s person. I couldn’t have imagined my life without my Ozzie.
We may have only had our Friday night sleepovers to truly connect and spend time with one another, but that was still one day a week we got with each other uninterrupted while our friends went out a partied without us. They’d long since learned that we were homebodies on Fridays, using the excuse of our jobs teaching at the middle school. We’d decided to apply for teaching positions as another way to be closer to each other during the week, our connection like a living creature that needed the proximity to keep it docile.
It was becoming harder and harder to be apart the older we got, like a ticking time bomb counting down the minutes untilour curse destroyed us. Yet another reason why we were so desperate to break it. We could feel its malevolence growing each day, slithering beneath our skin like a serpent preparing to strike.
‘What do you suggest, sis?’
He flinched when I smirked, already knowing what I was about to say, but I was jumping on the bed with excitement before he could protest. ‘Dance party! Dance party!’
His groan echoed around the room, but the fondness in his eyes let me know he wasn’t truly upset with me or the suggestion. Soon enough, he matched my energy with a grin of his own and waved a hand to turn on the music, a thin stream of his magic shooting from his palm to connect with the speakers. I grinned when I recognised the opening guitar strums of The Proclaimers’I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles), my head already nodding along. This was our song, and while he may have griped about a dance party, we both knew he loved being goofy with me. He didn’t even complain this time, immediately putting on a truly terrible Scottish accent that clashed with mine as we sang and danced along.
Even if our secret came out, I doubted he would ever admit to these moments, but that was okay. I liked that his goofiness was for me, and me alone, but I would forever tease him over his too-cool-for-fun attitude. With me, he may have let loose and met my weirdness with his own, but in public, he had perfected the quiet, mysterious bad-boy persona that made my nose wrinkle in disgust. It wasn’t that I didn’t appreciate a bad boy, but I hated the way the girls here threw themselves at him simply because they thought they could change him. There wasn’t anything about him that needed changing. He was my perfect little brother, because yes, I was a whole two minutes older, and I was never letting him forget it.
Song after song played while we danced like no one was watching until we were breathless and laughing. It was like we were making up for time lost as kids, and we milked it for all it was worth.
Eventually, we crashed onto his bed and turned on a movie. He tucked me under his arm and I snuggled into his side, more content than I had been all week.
That was how we fell asleep.
* * * * *
Bright light filtered through the window, burning my retinas through my eyelids and forcing me to move away from the assault on my senses with a tired groan. A deeper voice mimicked the sound before a heavy, muscular arm draped over my waist, the bony elbow digging into my stomach.
And then a big, smelly foot kicked into my legs and shoved me right off the bed.
I fell to the floor with anoof, barely catching myself before my forehead could smack into the solid wood flooring.
‘Ass!’ I shouted, staying where I’d fallen because I was too lazy to move.
Ozzie’s eyes blinked dazedly down at me as he peeked over the edge of the bed, and then he chuckled when he realised what had happened. ‘Sorry, sis. I was just trying to starfish.’
I pouted, then an idea came to me, and my pout turned into a wide grin. He pulled back warily, and rightfully so, but he didn’t put enough distance between us to escape.
‘Starfish this, bitch,’ I mumbled before I grabbed onto his fingers that still clutched to the edge of the mattress and added a little extra assistance with my air affinity to push him over the rest of the way over while I yanked.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t the most well-thought-out plan, because he landed right on top of me and knocked the breathfrom my lungs. His elbow jabbed so hard into my ribs it was a wonder they hadn’t shattered inside my chest. I wheezed.
‘Oh, shit. Junie, you okay?’
