“The locket will be the anchor, but I still need to summon a trace of Solina’s Touchmage energy,” he explains. Regret flashes across his face, creasing his make-up. “Do you have any traumatic memories in which your mother used her powers on you?”
I tap my temple. “It’s an all-you-can-eat trauma buffet up there.”
“Magic, similar to trauma, is stored in the body as an energy imprint. We need to go back to a few of those moments and bring that energy back in order to seal the brew. Can you do that for me? Can you go back?”
I nod, fingers digging into the plush carpet beneath my knees. Angel looks at Jackson.
“I will give you some privacy,” Jackson says. He gets to his feet, places his hand reassuringly on my shoulder for a couple of seconds, then leaves the room.
“That is one fine specimen.” Angel hums in appreciation. “You two ever had a thing?”
“Me and Jackson? No. Gross.”
The Brew Witch laughs. He’s clearly not buying my feigned disgust.
“OK, honey.” He positions himself behind me and starts to massage my tense shoulders. “Now, what I need you to do is visualize a moment your mother controlled you with her touch magic. Close your eyes.”
I do as he says, and immediately Angel starts an incantation. I hear the bubbles in the cauldron intensify and feel his energy envelop me. Behind my closed eyelids, there’s only darkness at first, then slowly I begin to pluck a painful memory from my collection as if it were a floating ember in the darkness.
I plunge in.
I’m thirteen years old. It’s a week after my Witching Day.
All my friends had discovered their abilities that day and were classified into their magical factions – Dreamchasers, Touchmages, Elementals…and then there was me. Saskia, sister of the talented Mikayla who’d been classified into so many magical categories on her special day that she’d lost count of her abilities. Saskia, daughter of the powerful Solina. Saskia, the little girl who had failed spectacularly in front of hundreds of people and hadn’t been able to produce one single spell. Whose only ability was to detect truth from lies, meaning she’d spent the day knowing that everyone who told her that it didn’t matter was lying to her face.
I watch my memory unfold as I wandered into my mother’s expansive chambers to ask her if she could get me photos for my locket.
“I’m busy,” she said.
“You’re always busy. I need you.”
She dipped low so that we were face to face. “Do you think your needs are more important than my MA work?”
My mother waited for the silence that she knew would come.
“Well, then, have the staff see to your needs, and I will continue doing my job.”
“Your job is also being my mom,” I spat. “And you’re bad at it.”
The words that came out of my mouth were ugly, but they were the truth, and that’s when my mother slapped me hard across the face. She could have used a binding spell to hold my tongue, a trick MA moms often used, or relaxed me with her Touchmage magic, but instead she opted for the good old-fashioned backhander with fingers full of diamond-encrusted rings that caught on my mouth.
Tears scald my wet skin and I wipe them away, unable to tell if I’m crying in my memory or in Angel’s living room.
I cried so hard that day I started choking, and my mother clutched me to her chest. Yet at the touch of her embrace, I felt my anger towards her slowly ebb away and I was filled with an uncomfortable calm I hadn’t asked for.
“I forgive you for disappointing me,” she whispered in my ear.
I feel a release as Angel’s incantation comes to a halt and I open my eyes. My body is shaking slightly as I take a few heavy breaths.
“That was good,” he says. “Although, unfortunately, we need to do it again.”
“I don’t…” I start to argue, but he raises his perfectly arched brows.
Fine. I close my eyes again. Refocusing. Plucking another cursed memory from my mind’s fire.
I’m ten this time. Six months have passed since my father died. He’d been bitten by a Werewolf and then shot himself in the head. I never got to attend his funeral.
I remember waking up from a nightmare, having heard the bang of a gunshot followed by a howl so loud I convinced myself there were Wolves outside my bedroom window — that they were coming for me next. I scrambled out of bed and scurried through the halls of our villa towards my mother’s bedroom. My bare feet smacked against the marble, her room so impossibly far. Finally, I reached it and knocked. There’s nothing I wanted more than to crawl into her bed, to have her smooth my hair and tell me I was safe. After a few urgent knocks, she opened the door, tying her silk robe around her waist. She looked down at me, surprise and irritation fluttering across her face like shadows playing tag.
“What?”
“Mama.” I didn’t know how to explain how hollow I was, how much I needed her. “Can I sleep with you tonight?”
She gazed down at me. “Why, Saskia?”
Why? Why? Why?
The question danced around my mind and I couldn’t make sense of it. Why? Because she was my mommy.
“I’m scared of the dark,” I said.
It was a half-truth. I missed my father with such an intensity it physically hurt.
“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” she replied.
The unfamiliar ping of lies had only awakened in me recently, like a flavor I hadn’t yet learned to describe. I heard it again then, leaving me wondering what other terrors lay in wait for me at night.
Someone stirred in the darkness behind her.
“I’m scared, Mama,” I cried, holding out my arms to her.
She looked over her shoulder, then sighed. “Come here.”
I thought she would invite me into her bed, into her embrace, but instead her ringed hand shot out and stopped me.
