“Go on,” Alarick said. “Tell them.”
“Maybe we should be sitting down for this,” I said when we’d finished introductions.
“Yes, of course,” Sagely said, gesturing to the abundance of seating in the big living room. I took a seat on a sofa between Alarick and Donovan, with Adolf on Alarick’s other side.
Sagely and the guy she’d introduced as Quill sat on a love seat. By the time we’d finished arranging ourselves, a slender guy with black hair had appeared beside them, startling me, since I hadn’t heard or seen him come in. “This is my husband, Fox,” Sagely said. “Cayenne says you have something important to tell us?”
“Yeah,” I said, smoothing my hands along my thighs to steady them. “I think I’m your daughter.”
Chapter Eighteen
I waited, my heart hammering in my chest. Suddenly, I wasn’t so sure I should have blurted that out. What if they were mad? What if they thought I was some kind of intruder, trying to steal their magic? They had wards all over these valleys for a reason.
“What makes you think you’re our daughter?” Quill asked, sitting forward and resting his elbows on his knees, his head quirked to one side.
I went through the story quickly, about how I’d disappeared for a day as a baby, then come back different. How I’d grown up just a few miles down the road, and how I’d never fit in because humans could tell I was different, though they didn’t know how. How I’d been recruited to Ravenwood and turned into a wolf. How Mr. Ravenwood had told me I was a changeling, and that I had unexplainable powers, and sometimes “woke up” in strange places where I hadn’t been a moment before.
By the time I finished speaking, I sounded crazier than anyone had ever accused me of being. Hell, I’d started to doubt my own sanity. And that was with leaving out the part about turning into a vampire, too. I wasn’t sure how witches felt about them. At this point, my vampirism felt like a small thing. As long as I had Alarick to feed from, I was fine. And I never planned on being far from him, anyway. It no longer affected my life much, unless you counted my sex life, which had definitely gotten spicier since blood had become involved.
Not something I was about to go into with my alleged parents.
No one spoke when I finished, and I sat there squirming and trying to quell the urge to laugh and say I’d been kidding, that I made it all up.
Finally, Alarick cleared his throat. “Cayenne said there’s a witch here named Amaryllis who might be… Human.”
Sagely exchanged a worried look with her husbands before turning to us. “Yes,” she said. “That’s possible. We do have a daughter who appears not to have magic. But…”
“But she’s your daughter,” I said softly, thinking how hard it would be for my parents to accept that I wasn’t the person they’d always thought I was.
“Well, yeah,” Quill said, shifting and putting an arm around Sagely.
“I’m not trying to take her place,” I said. “I’m going to tell my parents, and I’ll leave their contact information in case you want to tell Amaryllis. She might want to meet her birth parents, too. That’s all I wanted. I’m not planning to come live with you or to give up the family I’ve always known. I just thought… I don’t know. I might get to know you a little, too.”
“We’d like that,” Sagely said, squeezing Fox’s hand and smiling at me.
“So, do you need, like, a DNA test or something?” I asked. “I mean, you must wonder…”
“No,” Sagely said. “You have the same magic as us. We can feel it. And it makes sense, from what you told us. It matches up with the time I took Amaryllis into town, and when we came back, she was… Different. She got very sick the next day, and we thought something must have happened because of the sickness. That it used all her magic to stay alive.”
“So… Not to be rude, but… Who’s my dad?” I asked, looking from the two men on either side of my biological mother to a picture showing her in a wedding dress with them and two more men, all of them wearing matching tuxedos.
“We are,” Quill and Fox said at the same time. The exchanged a look and then laughed.
“Well, all of us,” Fox said.
“Witches have multiple partners,” Sagely said. “When we bond the way we have, it ties us together in a way so that you could have magic or even DNA from any or all of my husbands.”
I forced myself not to show my frustration, not wanting to offend them. My brain was trained to think of one man as my father, but I’d have to be satisfied with their explanation for now.
“Can I meet my sisters?” I asked.
“Of course,” Sagely said, standing from the couch with the two men.
“Are all those kids yours?” I asked, trying to imagine this tiny woman squeezing out even half the kids I’d seen when I came in.
“No,” she said, laughing. “But a lot of them are. Some are friends and neighbors. Believe it or not, I’m a grandma to some of the little munchkins.”
“And yet, you don’t look a day older than the day we met,” Fox said, kissing her cheek.
“You mean when you tried to kill me?” she shot back, grinning.
He smiled back, revealing sharp teeth that would put mine to shame. “You said you’d stop bringing that up in twenty years,” he shot back. “I think that day has come and gone.”
We walked out with them
