“So?” she asked, “How have you been?”
“Where do I start?” I asked. Aaron took my hand and squeezed it gently.
“I don’t know. It’s just that we haven’t talked in a while… I don’t know what’s going on with you.”
“I know. I’m sorry. It’s been a crazy year.”
“You could have called.”
I pushed the growing guilt into the pit of my stomach and simply nodded, accepting that I had chosen not to involve my mother in my life and now had to face the consequences. What did my lack of wanting to reach out to her say about how I truly felt? What I really wanted to ask her was why she hadn’t called, and why she hadn’t made an effort. But what I instead said was “I’m really sorry, mom.”
She nodded, turned around to face me, and waited by the stove as the kettle boiled. Beside her, pressed against the fridge by a magnet in the shape of the Eiffel Tower, was a Polaroid of Corey in Paris. She must have gone this year. Who took the picture? Her man, probably. I remembered having brought my mom thimbles of where I had gone in Europe. Wondered where she kept them.
“So, Aaron,” she said, “It’s nice to see you after all these years. You’ve really grown up.”
“Thanks,” he said, “And Amber, I mean, she looks so much more like you now.”
“I always thought so. It’s the hair, isn’t it?”
“It’s the eyes, I think. You have the same eyes.”
“I’ve known that ever since she was born.”
“I’m a witch, mom,” I said. A near paralyzing tremor filled my body as the words spilled out of my mouth. I hadn’t intended on being so blunt, but I also hadn’t spoken to my mom in a long time and hadn’t come here for small-talk.
The room plunged into silence save for the ticking of the cuckoo clock. Aaron’s eyes were on me, narrow with concern and alarm. What have you done? His aura said. Good thing he couldn’t read mine. It would have told him I have no idea. It was the only card I wanted to play, though, so I played it. To hell with the niceties.
“A… witch?” she asked.
“Don’t pretend, mom,” I said, “I found your box in the attic. I pieced it all together. I know you are too.”
“I… I don’t know what you mean.” She turned around and stared at the kettle on the stove.
I pushed a trickle of power into my right hand, directed my fingers toward the stove, and snuffed the fire out with my mind. Then, while my mom watched, I caused the water to come to a boil, sending the kettle into a mad, whistling frenzy. The veins in my neck and temple were starting to beat to the sound of my racing heart, and in the back of my mind I could feel the animal within me reaching for the magick and retreating at its touch as if burned.
My mom stared on, almost in shock. Then she shook her head to snap out of something and poured the boiling hot water into the sink.
“Mom,” I said, “I have questions.”
“I’m sure you do,” she said, still looking away. “But I don’t have answers.”
“I know you have answers. And you need to give them to me, mom. My life depends on it.”
She turned, now. Practically whipped around. The blood had drained from her face. “Your life? What do you mean?”
My eyes searched for Aaron’s and found them. He nodded. “Stuff has happened to me,” I said, “The hardest part wasn’t finding out I was a witch, like you. That I could deal with. It was the stuff that came after.”
She considered for a moment. I could see the conflict in her eyes, could smell it on her skin. My mom would either send me away or listen to what I had to say, and in that instant I didn’t know which she would decide. But was the choice to send me away and deny me my answers truly a choice, or only an illusion?
My mom came up to the table and sat down… and then I told her everything.
***
I surprised myself at how easily I had been able to quantify the last year or so of my life. It seemed like my life before becoming a True Witch had been lived decades ago, when in reality I could think back to the day I enrolled in the Raven’s Glen College and remembered that I had been listening to the Cardigans.
By the end of the story, by the time I had caught up with current affairs, my mom was a sack of questions filled to capacity and about ready to burst. But I had the only question that mattered; the question that sat, as far as I was concerned, at the center of everything. It was the sun around which the fragments of my life orbited, forever chasing themselves but never quite catching each other.
And yet, I couldn’t ask it.
“You should…” my mom started to say, “You could have called me… asked for my help.”
“What help could you have given me?” I asked. Her eyes were filling with tears and she was having trouble finding her voice. I could see the hurt, the guilt, and the regret. “Mom?”
“I don’t know, Amber. But I would have done whatever I could.”
“Would you have used magick?”
“That’s not fair.”
“Why?”
“Because… because…”
“Because what, mom? Why won’t you use magick? Why did you stop?”
“I can’t.”
“Not even after everything I’ve told you? About the constant demonic attack, about the powers I can’t control, about my dead friend? You wanted to know so I told you. I need you to give me the same kind of respect.”
“It’s not about respect, Amber.”
“Then what is it about?”
My mom said nothing.
I have to say it, I thought. I have to ask. She won’t come out and volunteer it if I don’t ask. This was the entire reason for my coming here, the meat on the bones. My nerves were shot, I could feel myself about to fall apart, but I had to do it.
“Mom,” I said, hands tingling and trembling. “I need you to tell me who my real father is.”
My mom seemed to diffuse after what I had just asked. She settled into her chair again, ran her fingers through her hair, and tossed it over one shoulder. I could see the hurt in her eyes, the remembered pain in her aura flashing up like sunspots, and the conflict. Even now it was still there, the internal struggle with the truth. I had struggled with asking the question, deciding whether or not to push her. To push myself. But I had done it. The rest was up to her.
“Your real father isn’t the man you know…”
A catch caught in my throat when I watched her aura tell me what she was about to say before she said it, but I waited in silence for her to continue.
“Your real father is dead.”
Tears came quickly and in force, streaming down my cheeks. The news forced me to sit and Aaron sat with me, his hand still on my back. I wiped my face with the back of my hand, stared at the tears, and then stared at my mother. She was crying too, but her tears were different. Her tears were for a man she once knew, a man who had meant a lot to her. Mine were for a man I had never known, a man I would never know, and the lie I had lived.
“Why,” I said, “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Amber, I—”
“I guess… I guess you had to, right? You had to keep him from me because… because then dad would… I mean, does he know?”
She paused, then nodded. “Your father—Charles—he knows about Ethan. He knows the truth.”
“Ethan…” I said, staring into nothing. “Ethan.”
Then it happened. My stomach twisted in a painful way. I lurched over and felt Aaron remove his hand from my back as if I had suddenly become red hot. My breaths were short, my heart so loud I couldn’t hear what Aaron was saying, and my vision was starting to blacken. It was as if I was slipping into a deep, dark ocean and staring at the world as it dimmed around me; dimmed into a single spot of white light leaving me alone in the dark.
But there was something in the darkness with me. The wolf was here, running toward the light at a speed which I could not hope to match, desperate for a sliver of control. And there was something
else, too; something blacker than the darkness around me.
The wolf was their problem; the darkness within me was mine.
Chapter Eighteen
A meteor shower lit the night sky with scratches of white fire, but as Damien watched, the fire turned green and rained down on the earth. He took a step back just as a smoldering rock wreathed in green fire struck the ground at his feet, pulling the earth up in a cloud of dirt and dust. Damien shielded his eyes from the dust. When he removed his hand from his eyes, he saw the sky ablaze with green and thought, for a moment, it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.
Until the sky became a beast of writhing, sickly flame, and it came for him.
Damien turned. “Lily!” he said, screaming into the woods before him, “Lily, where are you?”
“Damien!” she said, but her voice was distant and faint.
He ran to the treeline, pushing as hard as his legs would take him. All around, the sky was falling. Chunks of flaming green rock were crashing through the trees. Branches were snapping and falling too, chucking green embers up as they fell. The world was ending. He knew it in his heart of hearts. This was how it would all happen when she won, when Acheris got that which she wanted.
“Over here!” Lily’s voice was like a cool, wet blanket on his hot skin and he ran for it, hurtling over a fallen, smoldering tree and rolling down the hill on the other side of it. Bumping, knocking, and scraping he went, and his extremities sang with pain that was skin deep but pain nonetheless. A scream peeled out of his throat as the ground beneath him fell away and his stomach floated in that dizzying moment of freefall.
His shoulder hit the dirt first and the explosion of pain which followed sent his mind reeling, but he had at least come to a stop.
“Lily,” he said, barely able to produce a sound from his throat.
“Hurts, doesn’t it?” The voice came from the dark silhouette of a person standing stark against the green glow of the Dark Fire behind the trees. It was a woman, but it wasn’t Lily.
Damien struggled to rise, pushing beyond the pain in his chest, arms, and legs to find a part of him that could still fight, and he found it. His shoulder burned and the rest of his arm was numb—dislocated—but it was the old wound on his chest which caused the biggest distraction. The one that made him feel sick to his stomach.
“This will never happen,” he said. “You won’t get your way.”
“You don’t know that,” said the shadow figure. “Besides, from where I’m standing, things are looking pretty good. Look at you, for example. Inner turmoil, guilt, shame… pain.”
“You don’t know anything about me.”
“I know plenty about you, Damien Colt; I know what you’ve done.”
Damien wiped the blood from his busted lip. “And what’s that?” he asked.
“I know you broke the skull.”
“Bullshit. I didn’t break the reliquary.”
“Oh, I’m sure you did. And I’m also sure you nudged our angry little friend in the direction you wanted it to go just as the ritual failed. It didn’t quite take, though, did it? Aaron was too strong for the demon. He always has been. One can’t really trust demons to be able to overwhelm a werewolf.”
Damien gritted his teeth and remained quiet. Sweat and blood were pouring down his face and soaking his shirt.
“Where is it?” she asked.
“I destroyed it.”
The shadow figure emerged from the darkness and took shape. It didn’t sound like Lily and he knew now the voice he had heard a moment ago had never been Lily’s voice to begin with. But the figure sure as hell had her long hair, her pointed chin, and her tattoos. For a moment Damien’s heart could have soared into the clouds. It called to her, sang to her, longed to see her again. But it was the eyes—those black orbs—that gave her away. There was no mistaking this mirage for what it really was. Acheris.
“I can smell a liar from mile away, Damien,” she said. “Where is it?”
Damien’s mouth curled upward. A trickle of blood spilled out of his busted lip. “If you’re so powerful, why don’t you know? Why can’t you tell me?”
“Because there are some places even my magick can’t go. Some rules even I can’t break. So how about you just tell me and… maybe I’ll do something for you?”
“There’s nothing you can do for me.”
“I said there were some rules I couldn’t break, but there aren’t many of those.”
Damien fell silent.
“I can let you see her again. Lily. You want to see her again, don’t you?”
“You’re a liar,” he said.
“Maybe, but I can see the desperation in you even from here. She was stolen from you. A casualty of a war she wasn’t a part of. It must kill you to know that Lily died for Amber and that Amber has forgotten you. Doesn’t it? You loved her, despite your flaws, and now you’ll never have her. Your sister was taken from you in vain.”
“You took her from me, she didn’t die for Amber.”
“In a way, yes, I did. But I only took her because I was looking for Amber. And because your sister has my mark upon her soul, I can bring her back to you.”
“No one can bring the dead back to life.”
“I can, but only at great cost. And I feel like paying for what I’ve done to you.”
“If you think I’ll turn on my friends, you’re wrong.”
“Oh, but you have once already. Remember? Whatever you’ve done with the demon, wherever it is now, you tried to have it take Aaron. The fact that it failed is only a resolution of events, but the intent was there.”
“I wasn’t thinking straight,” he said, “I didn’t mean—”
“You did, Damien. You’re a dirty little Judas, but I’m offering you a chance to cut loose and start your life over again with your sister. I can do that for you. All you have to do is tell me what you’ve done with the demon and why I can’t sense it.”
“You’re going to have to rip that information from me.”
“That can be arranged too, sweet prince. And trust me; I would much prefer to have you all to myself for a while. I would rip it out of you eventually, but I would make you mine first.”
Acheris—in Lily’s body—removed the buttons of her blouse one by one and let it fall open. And when she shook her head, whipping her hair around in wild slashes, the image of his sister melted into… into Amber. Goddess, it was her! The hair, the freckles, her slightly upturned nose. But her eyes—they shone with Dark Fire, sickly and green and mesmerizing. Damien’s chest burned white hot and he clutched it with his good arm. The skin beneath his fingers was throbbing, thumping, and sizzling, and his rapidly pounding pulse threatened to send him into cardiac arrest.
“You’re lying,” he said, “I will never help you!”
“I think you will, Damien,” she said, “Because people like you have darkness in them that will never go away. And as long as it’s there, I have a way in.”
Damien shook his head and screamed, and then he jerked awake as if he had just risen out of the depths of a nightmare and broken through the surface to take his first gasp of air. He opened his eyes and saw, looming over him, two figures; one was a gorgeous woman with red hair and eyes you could fall into. Jackal. The other was Frank.
Frank cocked an inquisitive eyebrow. “You okay?” he asked.
Damien, still stunned, his body still throbbing with pain—some phantom, some real—nodded. “Yeah, I… did I fall asleep?” he asked.
Jackal nodded. “Did a little sleep-talking, too. Who’s Lily?”
Frank’s eyes were hard, and his lips were a thin line curved down at the corners. “It was probably just a nightmare,” he said. “In the middle of the day.”
“I can’t believe I fell asleep,” Damien said.
“I almost did too. They’ve been in there for an hour. Care to tell us what your dream was about?”
Damien felt small, like a suspect in an interrogation room answering to two co
ps; bad cop, hot cop. And while the vivid, lucid dream he had just endured was slipping, he still remembered the gist of it. Acheris, Lily, the Dark Fire, the demon.
Judas.
“I don’t remember,” he said.
“That’s a shame,” Frank said, “It sounded interesting.”
Jackal’s finger went up and she made a schhhh sound. “Hear that?” she asked.
Damien perked up. Jackal’s eyes were on the house and then Damien’s were too—though he couldn’t hear anything. Neither could Frank. But as they watched, they saw Amber emerge staggering, lurching, and distressed. Aaron came after her. He was trying to restrain her. But Amber slipped out of his grasp, threw herself onto all fours, and when the wolf burst out of her skin in a shower of clothes and blood and fur she let a howl tear into the sky before speeding off and disappearing into one of the nearby fields.
They watched from the van, stunned, as Aaron leapt off the porch and his body transformed into the same huge, humanoid, half-man, half-wolf form Amber had just taken. Driven by powerful arms and legs, Aaron’s hulking grey shape gave chase to the copper one, also disappearing into the field.
“Holy shit,” Jackal said after a beat.
Frank opened the door. “Go,” he said, and Jackal sped into the field after them.
Damien sat down and stared at Frank. “I didn’t expect that to escalate like it did,” he said.
“And I didn’t expect to hear some of the shit that just came out of your mouth.” Frank shut the door.
“We’re not going to help?” Damien asked.
“Yeah, but you and me have gotta talk first.”
Chapter Nineteen
I hadn’t killed my mother. That was the only thing that mattered. I couldn’t remember leaving the house, but the way Aaron told it I had managed to keep enough self-control to make it through the front door before losing control to the wolf and running into the field. Remembering that moment was a struggle, and remembering the preceding conversation was like trying to watch a muted movie playing on a TV wrapped with cellophane.