Read Online The Blue Woods by Nicole Maggi - Free Book Online Page A

beneath me, and continued up the street. Follow me. Hope you’re up for some exercise.
    Are you kidding? I feel like I could run all night.
    The wine bar was shut up and dark now, the kissing couple long since gone as we raced up Willow Heights’ quiet Main Street. Okay, no more dodging. Tell me how you know about the Benandanti.
    I’m not dodging, Cal answered. He jumped over a bench on the sidewalk next to a bus stop. I’m just excited. This is the best night of my life.
    What? Why?
    My mother’s a psychic, Cal began. Not one of those crackpots you see on TV. A real, honest-to-God psychic. When I was born, she had a vision that I would be a Benandante.
    I soared higher, away from him for a moment, my gaze fixed on the stars. And she told you about it? She didn’t hide it from you?
    No, Cal said. She’s been preparing me for this for as long as I can remember. I’ve studied everything I could find on the Benandanti. We even took a trip to Friuli a few years ago.
    I pinched my mind closed to him. What if Lidia hadn’t hidden the Benandanti from me? What if she’d agreed with my dad, that I had a great destiny to fulfill? Would I have been bowled over with excitement the day Heath had Called me? I opened up again. What about your dad? What does he think about all this?
    He died when I was a baby.
    Oh, Cal. I dropped, skimming down over rooftops. I’m so sorry. The ache of my own dad’s loss uncoiled inside me.
    Thanks . . . but I never knew him. My mom really makes up for me not having a dad.
    Still, that’s really hard . . . being a single mom. I knew the stress, the loneliness that sometimes Lidia couldn’t hide.
    We do okay. My dad ran a tech company that went public right before he died, so he left her a lot of money. We moved here because we knew it was close to one of the sites.
    The great willow tree that marked the boundary between Willow Heights and Twin Willows loomed into view, its sweeping branches crystalline with tiny icicles. I veered around it, the blood pulsing in my head. There wasn’t a day, an hour, a minute when I didn’t miss my dad. Would it be better to have never known my dad, so I couldn’t miss him? So I didn’t have that constant pain in my heart where he should be? I soared right through the tree’s branches, breaking icicles off in the wake of my beating wings. No. Cal should be pitied for never knowing his father. I was a better person for having known mine. But the other things—the mother who’d been honest with him from day one, the easy money they had to live on without having to struggle. A hot-white bolt of an emotion I didn’t like shot through me. Stop it, I told myself. After all, I was the Guide. I had to rise above.
    You know, you get a choice, I said. You can refuse the Call. So if you have any major life plans . . .
    Well, I did get early admission to Yale, with a soccer scholarship, Cal said. But I’m going to defer.
    What? Are you nuts? If I’d gotten into an Ivy League school when Heath had come to me, I would’ve told him to take his Call and shove it.
    Who cares about Yale? Cal exclaimed, his enthusiasm bounding around my head like a toddler on sugar overload. What the Benandanti do is infinitely more important than studying literature written by dead white men.
    Twin Willows’ shabby Main Street blurred beneath me. We passed Joe’s, Mr. Salter’s hardware store, and the high school, all quiet and dark. When he put it like that, the Benandanti’s work was more important than anything school could teach, but it still would’ve been nice to have had the choice. A voice niggled inside me, reminding me that I’d had a choice. I wanted to argue with it, but I couldn’t. I had made my choice, and I had to stand by it. And deep down I knew that if I could go back and do it all over again, I’d make the same choice.
    So I guess I don’t need to give you