I first noticed her the way you notice hot girls: out of the corner of your eye, a flash of dark hair and eyes, an urge to turn your head and stare. It was only when I followed that urge and looked closer that I recognized her. The hekamist’s daughter.
The old hekamist came around my family’s hardware store regularly and sometimes this girl came with, trailing behind her, staring suspiciously at everyone. She always wore dark black eyeliner and a long black coat with lots of buttons that swung around her hips, and she had short, messy black hair.
From my position at first base I watched her walking behind the bleachers. She was hot, but who had the time and energy to go after a hekamist’s daughter? You’d have to be looking over your shoulder and guarding your food every second. Besides, there were a hundred other non-hekamist-daughters enrolled in school whose hotness wasn’t as . . . complicated. So I can tell you absolutely that wasn’t why I approached her. My reasons were purely altruistic. Well, mostly.
Win hightailed out after practice, barely waving when I called out “Tomorrow night!” As his best friend, I had his Saturday nights on lock, even when he was lame and didn’t want to come, or was brooding when he did.
He’d been brooding a lot recently, and I knew, as his best friend, it was my job to cheer him up. Ari’d been trying, too, and usually with our powers combined we could pull him out of any funk. He’d always been prone to falling into dark periods, ever since we were kids, so I knew the secret to making him better: You couldn’t ask him to be happy. You had to do something.
Fortuitously, I had almost a thousand dollars burning a hole in my pocket. If I didn’t offload the cash no doubt my mother would discover it and kill me. So watching Win with his head down, silent, tires of his pickup squealing on his way out of the lot, I knew exactly how I wanted to spend it.
The hekamist’s daughter looked like she might be leaving too, so I jogged her way. The rest of the guys stayed away. They knew better than to interrupt me when I was talking solo with a girl.
“What’s up,” I said.
She raised an eyebrow at me.
“I’m Markos. You are?”
“I’m wondering what you want.” She didn’t say it angry, but I got the picture. She was a woman of business.
“I was hoping you could help me out.”
“Oh, I doubt it. You seem fine on your own,” she said. She turned and started walking across the baseball field. My house was in the other direction, but I followed her anyway.
“But you’re the hekamist’s daughter.”
“So?”
“So I want to place an order.”
I put a hand on her arm and she winced as if it stung and pulled out of my grip. Then she turned and faced me. Her hotness was of the variety that was slightly scary, like she might turn into a dragon and fire-breathe all over you, but in a sexy way. We were past the baseball field, past the soccer field, and a few steps into the scrubby no-man’s-land between school and a shitty lowlying part of town filled with cheap clapboard houses. It reminded me of the places that Win’s lived his entire life. Dead lawns. Peeling paint. Windows installed crooked. There’s always a broken trike by the back door and a tangled garden hose in the driveway.
“I want to have a little party tomorrow night,” I said. “Me and my best friend and his girlfriend.”
“Sounds like a ton of fun.”
“I want to make this a special party.” I pulled out the money, and the hekamist’s daughter’s eyes showed their whites. “I bet your mom could help me make this extremely special.”
She chewed on the side of her bottom lip, rubbing her sore arm with the opposite hand. “Did you have something specific in mind?”
I told her all about my idea, and she nodded absently, eyes on the cash.
“So you’ll let her know?”
Her eyes snapped back to mine and narrowed. “You’re Markos Waters, right? Waters Hardware? The one with all the brothers?”
“That’s me.”
“Noticed the family resemblance.”
That would be our black hair, blue eyes, and roman noses. Stand all four of us together and we look like time-lapse photography. “Thank you.”
She smiled and tilted her head. “It wasn’t a compliment.”
I smiled at her, because the conversation had gotten off track, and she might turn into a dragon any second. I enjoyed good banter as much as the next guy, but I got the sense she maybe wasn’t flirting and instead actually didn’t like me, which was weird. I was pretty great. Everyone knew that. “You can be kind of a bitch, you know.”
“Hang on, I’ve got to go write that one in my tear-stained diary.”
“What were you doing at practice, anyway, if not soliciting some business?”
“None of your business,” she said, and took the money out of my hand. “But I’m a hekamist myself. I’ll do the spell for you.”