2 Chapter 1

Calla woke up to the sound of a horn honking outside. Short bursts of noise and, after a moment, a long string that did not let up. Annoyed, she threw back the covers and slammed up her window.

"Xander if Gram doesn't kill you I will!" she shouted out the window.

The honk cut off and Xander poked his head out of the window of his truck. "Why would you guys kill me? I'm practically family. Besides, we're gonna be late if you don't hurry up."

Calla looked at the clock. It was 5:28AM. School started at 8 and it only took about an hour to get there. "I won't be late; I'll be perfectly on time. You're the one with football practice," she informed him. Moving away from the window to start getting ready, she plaited her stereotypical-black-witch-hair into two braids. It was the only way she could really contain it unless she wanted to be super-cliche and plait her hair in one braid down her back like Gram. Or go witch-of-the-woods and just leave it loose, free to catch and tangle on anything within arms length. All in all, two braids kept Calla's hair out of the way while still allowing for some sense of normalcy.

Slipping on her clothes, she heard Xander call out, "Well, you'll definitely be late if you have to walk!" Unfortunately that was true so she grabbed her things and moved to her door.

Something unfamiliar sat at the edge of her vision. She turned and saw a dead rose, brown in color, laying inside an empty pot. She'd forgotten about it; too tired to really deal with it last night, she'd simply placed it in an empty pot to deal with it today, forgetting it was a Monday and Xander would be picking her up early. She carefully placed it in her bag and darted out the door.

Hopping in Xander's truck, Calla pulled out a toothbrush and a travel-size tube of toothpaste from her bag. She bared her teeth and squirted some toothpaste on them before shoving the toothbrush in her mouth.

"Have I ever mentioned how weird it is that you do that?" he asked.

She grabbed a bottle of water from the pack in the floorboard. "Ery time," Calla mumbled, scrubbing the taste of sleep from her mouth. "Puht at leasht I prush 'em."

"And gross. Wait why don't you do that at sch--oh, yeah, the bathrooms are disgusting.  Nevermind."

Calla opened the water bottle and tossed some water out the open window before using the rest to wash her mouth out, spitting it back into the bottle. "Bingo." She slipped the toothbrush into the water bottle, closed it, and stuffed it in her bag. She'd wash it out during lunch.

Xander made a face as he watched her do all of this. "You should get up earlier so I don't have to watch that."

"You only have to watch that every Monday and Friday before morning practice," she countered. Calla woke up with plenty of time every other day.

They passed Gram walking down the side of the street on her way back home with her basket of freshly picked forest stuff swinging on her arm. Calla waved as they passed by, smiling and waving as cheerfully as Gram did. She watched her shrink in the passenger side mirror, her dark grey braid whipping in the wind, leaves and twigs clinging desperately to her. Gram always refused to ride in cars. Said they'd be the death of her.

Xander and Calla engaged in idle small talk the rest of the way to school, just like always, and he dropped her off a block before they got there, just like always. He drove on ahead and she walked the rest of the way. His new-age-hippie-mom was friends with Gram and Gram always had some remedy or salve for whatever ailed or inconvenienced. Well, almost whatever. Sometimes she made Xander's mom just go to an actual doctor, like when Xander needed his tonsils removed. Something about, "I am not gonna perform surgery on ya dang kid. My medicine is not a cure-all; it's for minor things. Now take that poor kid to a (heckin') doctor!" Calla and her older sisters laughed about it for weeks after.

Xander may be Calla's friend and his mom may make him pick up Calla every day to bring her to school with him--she was only a few minutes out of his way--but Xander and Calla had agreed to pretend they didn't know each other at school. Xander was a super-popular football player and Calla was the super-unpopular witch girl that no one wanted to be associated with. Sometimes it bothered her; sometimes it was fun accidentally scaring people when she unknowingly snuck up on them. It was always fun having magic, though.

Calla didn't have a car and this was why Xander had to drive her to school everyday. Only her older sisters had cars and they didn't live with Calla and Gram. She had tried to refuse the ride but it was hard to explain to Xander's mom it wasn't a bother for her to walk to school, especially since she couldn't just say she would probably end up riding a broom back and forth. People sent taunts and insults towards her and Gram but not for a moment did they ever think the two of them were actually witches. If they did, Calla doubted anyone would dare raise a hand against them.

Calla walked to the school's greenhouse to check on the plants. She was in the gardening club, which was so small it barely qualified as a club, but they had the small greenhouse and managed to keep a small variety of plants alive, though most of them were technically weeds. This was where she came on Monday and Friday mornings and when she ended up at school before 7 in the morning. Normally she'd just check on the plants and take a quick nap but today she had something interesting that she hadn't been able to properly appreciate last night.

She opened her bag and carefully removed the little pot with the dead rose curled up inside and placed it on the ground. She crouched down, sitting on her heels and proceeded to use the school's potting soil to fill up the pot and tuck the dead rose in the dirt, stem first, the shriveled remains of the rose-head curving over. Little bits of dead leaves and dried petals broke off and drifted onto the dirt below. She wet the dirt and after encouraging the husk to stand up as much as possible, Calla pulled back and examined her work.

Satisfied, she huffed and cracked her knuckles. Completely unnecessary, but people in movies seemed to do it a lot when they were about to do something cool and she needed every bit of help she could get. She briefly glanced around to see if anyone was lurking about (there was no one, of course, since the gardening club had no official meeting times) then closed her eyes and tried to reach out to the small flower with her mind.

Roses were not Calla's specialty. In fact, very few things in this greenhouse fell into Calla's specialty. Gram's specialty was water, particularly rain. Water seemed to flit around her grandmother in an endless dance every time it rained. Calla was a bit jealous of this but she was also quite proud of her own specialty: poisons. Poisonous plants were her favorite as they allowed her to really see the effects of her specialty. But roses were still plants so she figured it'd be basically the same thing to encourage this one to return to life and take root once more.

She could barely feel the rose in front of her, it had been dead for so long. She felt the remnants of something else running through it, as if it had been kept alive purely with magic at some point, which was strange but she guessed it kind of made since. After all, the rose had been in some glass case-thing for who knows how long in a garden kept and guarded by actual witches. She again wondered if this was such a good idea. As the rose accepted her magic and began to fill with life she decided it was way too late for second guessing it all now.

Her breath seized in her throat as she felt the remnants of the magic still lingering in the rose flow into her, strengthening her own magic, inviting her to dig her hands into the soil beneath her and pull power from the earth as well. She instinctively knew she would need it. The world swirled around her, light seemed to pour from her veins. She felt hot tears slip down her cheeks as a light seared her eyes. She knew it came from within her skull, not from anything around her. Calla had never felt so powerful, so at one with magic and the earth, as she did in this moment. A perfect circulating flow, pure magic pulled from the soil into her body and pushed out to the brightening rose, cleansing the remnants of old magic and death, pushing it into the soil beneath to be purified and renewed.

The light in her eyes faded, leaving behind the green sparks of her magic dancing across her vision and, as she soon realized, all around her. Not only was the rose itself revived, large vines creeping over the remnants of the now broken pot, but every plant in the greenhouse seemed more lively. A light forest-like scent drifted around her and, as she looked around at the overgrown plants, she noticed the clock hanging on one pole. It read 8:12.