“What was the vision?” I asked.
“You killing Mom,” she answered calmly.
My breath caught in my throat. Celestina had seen visions that most often came true, so why wasn’t she freaking out?
“It’s been with me for three years,” Celestina admitted.
I locked my muscles in place at the notion that she might have read my mind.
“Relax, Aunt Serena. I’m not reading your mind.”
I worked on regaining my composure because she hadn’t said, ‘I can’t read your mind.’ It was a subtle difference, but if she had replied that way, I would have felt much more at ease. Since she hadn’t, I couldn’t understand how she’d nailed not just one unasked question but two in a row. It seemed highly unlikely, perhaps even impossible. Then again, I hadn’t felt a pluck in my mind, an indication that occurred whenever Alexis and Darius had tried to intercept my thoughts. Therefore, I gave her the benefit of the doubt.
Celestina sighed as though no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t neglect the vision that had presented itself. “I saw you three years before we even met. I didn’t know anything about you, not your name or your identity, nothing.”
“You must’ve hated me,” I said.
“I wanted to kill you.”
Upon hearing such a significant remark, but watching her look out the window with a stoic expression, I almost stomped on the accelerator in fright. Then again, she’d spent the past three years knowing what might occur. It gave her plenty of time to face that potential future. She had obviously changed her mind, considering that she’d saved my life and freed me from living out the rest of my days as a werewolf, if I hadn’t outright died.
She looked out the window, a morose look on her face. “Don’t worry, Aunt Serena, I don’t want to kill you.”
That statement should have allayed my fears, but I concentrated on what she’d left out…whether or not she would kill me. After all, she’d made me promise not to hurt Alexis. By extracting the oath, Celestina hoped to rest easy with the pledge that I wouldn’t fight my sister, but her gloomy expression told me that, despite my promise, she still believed her ominous prophecy would ring true.
In that moment, I realized how much internal strength it took for Celestina to disregard the prophecy that I’d kill her mother. Yes, she’d had three years to accept it, but now that I’d finally come into her life, she must be incredibly torn over wanting to trust me, but knowing I might kill the one person who meant more to her than any other. To forsake that prophecy and accept me into her life must have taken a tremendous amount of belief in me. No matter what, I needed to retain her trust. She deserved it.
Nolan’s gaze swung toward mine with a worried expression, revealing that he, too, felt her prophecy might happen. “What changed?” he asked Celestina. “You wanted to kill her, but–”
“Hating someone for even a few days makes you so tired. I didn’t know who you were at the time, but after a few months, I didn’t want to feel that way anymore, so I stopped thinking about it. When we first met, I was sooo scared.” Now she met my stare in the rearview mirror. “I thought you might try to kill me too.”
My mouth opened at the thought. “I’d never—”
“But how could I know that?” she asked. “I was ten when I first had that vision. In my nightmares, you were friends with Captain Hook and Cruella de Vil.”
“Really?” I asked, hoping to make light of the situation, since it had taken on such a serious tone. “Did we exchange Christmas gifts?”
“I don’t know about the captain, but I dreamed you and Cruella stole all the dogs from a pet store.”
“Hmm.” I pretended to mull it over. “I can understand someone stealing food if they’re poor and starving, but stealing helpless puppies? Now I can see why you wanted to kill me.”
Celestina almost smiled. “Since I got that vision, some others that I thought were supposed to happen, never did.”
“Like what?” Nolan asked.
She looked frantically from side-to-side as though trying to negate a thought from clutching her mind. “I don’t want to say.” She shivered and her eyes looked as though they’d seen terrors no one could possibly imagine. “But I’d say they’re right about ninety-five percent of the time.”
That fact made Nolan draw back as though someone had taken a swing at his face. “How often do you get these visions? Daily? Weekly?”
“It all depends on magical activity. Before this week, it hardly happened at all. Maybe once a week. But when Aunt Serena got her abilities, it happened every day. Then when she killed her granny…and then my granny, well, now I get them two or three times a day.” She looked at me, awaiting the next question.
I couldn’t meet her gaze. If it weren’t for me, Celestina wouldn’t have had these narcoleptic fits so often. By killing Grams and Lorraine, I’d allowed more monsters and demons into this dimension, which ramped up the regularity with which those visions tormented my niece, due to more supernatural activity. Not only that, but slaying my mother and grandmother probably didn’t instill much trust in Celestina that I wouldn’t kill Alexis. If anything, she probably considered my murdering her mother as near certain, but her kind soul probably persuaded her to believe in me, despite the mounting evidence against me.
As guilt pelted my heart, I tried to look at the situation from a different angle. For the first time, I had an ulterior motive to banish monsters from this world. “Wait a minute.” I glanced at my niece. “You get visions of good entities, too, right? Like me and Nolan.”
“Everyone.”
“Do the visions hurt?”
“A witch from the past wrote in The Book of Souls that she fell asleep before each vision because otherwise, if she tried not to fall asleep, her brain couldn’t handle the pressure, and she had a seizure or something.”
“A natural defense mechanism,” Nolan said. “That makes sense.”
Luckily, the images didn’t cause physical, emotional, or mental damage (from what I could tell), but based on the way she cringed each time Celestina spoke about these visions, I knew she’d prefer not to deal with them. “That’s the worst of it?” I asked my niece. “There’s no other side-effects?”
“I don’t think so, but who knows what’ll happen when more creatures come out.”
I didn’t like her ominous tone. It sounded like she knew more than she let on, but preferred not to discuss the matter.
“One thing doesn’t make any sense,” Celestina said. “Why would Mom want the werewolves to kill you?”
“So I can’t stop Zephora.”
“But Mom wouldn’t do that. She wouldn’t kill anyone.”
“She killed me before. You keep forgetting that. Are you blocking it out on purpose? You remember reviving me, don’t you?”
“Okay,” she said, pushing her open hands at me to stop talking. “I just mean that, she wouldn’t do it again.”
“Do you know what a lie of omission is?” I asked her.
“It’s when someone doesn’t tell someone the truth.”
I couldn’t have phrased it any better. “If your mother allowed the werewolves to attack me, isn’t it the same as wanting them to kill me? Because really, what chance did I have against four werewolves? I barely got away, so in my mind, it’s like lying. Your mother had a chance to do the right thing, but she didn’t.”
“She might want to learn magic from Zephora, but she wouldn’t—”
“But she did, Celestina!” I said with an edge in my voice. “She had a choice. We all have free will. To say she makes bad decisions is the understatement of the year!”
Her eyebrows slid together. Her eyes, usually so cheerful and placid, became cold, distant.
The sight of my niece’s anger sent a shiver through me. The pressure wasn’t self-inflicted, but spread outward from her body. It made sense, considering that her mother had the ability to manipulate energy into freezing elements. Then again, other than allowing Zephora to a
chieve her goals, my worst fear consisted of my niece taking Zephora’s place because no matter how powerful Zephora might be, Celestina was young and immature. I didn’t want to consider the power she would wield a couple years from now…if she continued to respect her mother’s wishes and followed her example.
“My mother,” said Celestina, a glint of menace in her eyes, “would not hurt you again.”
I met her gaze with a harsh one of my own. “I sure hope you’re right. I will keep my promise and not attack her, but if she does starts something, I’m not going to just stand there and let her kill me a second time. Understood?”
My niece’s jaw clenched and glared at me for a long moment, but then she relaxed and the heated emotion in her expression softened. Nonetheless, she didn’t answer my question.
It told me that, no matter the circumstances, Celestina expected me to keep my promise, without requesting the same of her mother. That was unfair, to say the least, but if my sister assaulted me, I wouldn’t let her get away with it, no matter how Celestina might take it. In that event, I could only hope my niece followed reason and responded in kind.
“You’re certain there’s no mention of how other witches defeated Zephora in The Book of Souls?” I asked her.
“I’m sure,” she confirmed.
“Otherwise, how will we be able to—”
“I get to ask the book three questions,” Celestina said. “Remember?”
“Yeah.” Didn’t she comprehend how odd it sounded to ask a question of a book? How would it answer? Based on her placid expression, she appeared completely at ease, as though consulting a book and expecting a verbal response made perfect sense.
“It’ll tell us how to stop her,” she said.
I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the innocence of youth staring back at me. Her charming smile told me that she also believed that fairy tales like Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Beauty and the Beast were based on true events. Once again, I marveled at how someone so powerful could be so naive. It was a mighty combination, and one that could end in tragedy, if not nurtured with great love and care.
Alexis couldn’t supply that type of upbringing, and if Celestina had any chance of following in her footsteps, I needed to broach the subject now. “There’s something I need to tell you.”
When she met my gaze in the mirror with such a hopeful expression, I thought about reconsidering. Why did she find it so hard to distrust her mother? Surely, she knew from watching television that the typical mother didn’t walk around the house before noon, swigging from a bottle of vodka. I could point out countless flaws, but the main reason I had second thoughts was because…if anyone attempted to tell me that Grams was not the prototypical parent, well, I never would have believed them. And since Alexis was my niece’s true parent, I had to assume the ties binding them together was even stronger than the one tying me to Grams.
“Okay,” Celestina prompted, waiting for me to explain myself.
Maybe I found it difficult to burst her bubble because Celestina looked so sweet and innocent. Perhaps even because she was my only living relative…who didn’t want to kill me. “You know, we didn’t perform tonight, right? Well, it was because your mom pretended to be me.” I paused to see if she planned to comment. Despite a perplexed expression, she didn’t say a word, so I added, “She insulted the fans, insulted the band, and left.”
“Huh?” Celestina asked with quirked eyebrows, far from convinced. “She wouldn’t do that.”
Nolan let loose with a grunt. “She called our music a pile of ‘steaming shit.’ Then she walked off stage.”
I almost chastised him for swearing in front of her, but it would have been hypocritical, given the circumstances. “Think about it. She set four werewolves on me, left me for dead, and tried to ruin my career. When you add in what she did with Brandon, I can only—” Having let that slip, I stopped talking before admitting anything further and caught Nolan revealing a worried expression.
Celestina, however, didn’t infer anything from the unsaid, only what I’d spoken aloud. She looked on either side of her, trying to make sense of what I’d just told her. “You’ve gotta be confused, Aunt Serena, because Mom wouldn’t—”
“I look in the mirror every day just like you,” I said. “I know what my identical twin looks like.” I turned to Nolan for some backup.
“She did everything your aunt said. Sorry, Celestina, but your mother…is a mean girl!”
I appreciated the pop culture reference, the attempt to lessen the blow might incur, and the sentiment behind it, even if it kind of didn’t fit in the context of the conversation. Still, I gave him points for trying. “She’s threatened,” I said. “She wants to make things difficult for me.”
“Mom doesn’t fight fair,” Celestina admitted and accepted the response without difficulty. “She told me…sometimes you have to do what it takes to win.”
My heart sank upon hearing my niece accept Alexis’s words without consternation. If that’s what her mother taught her while growing up, how could I convince Celestina to do otherwise as just a distant relative? What place did I have trying to refute her mother’s advice? A moment later, however, fury erupted inside me.
“She tried to kill me,” I said. “Again! Did I try to hurt her or steal from her or—”
“I get it, Aunt Serena. I do. But Mom, she’s—”
“A nutjob,” I said, for the first time verbally acknowledging the truth. Before now, I’d made excuses: her lack of a loving and rational upbringing, the sexual abuse she’d endured, that she’d raised a child…as a child. Those truths would mess up any person, but unfortunately, Alexis wasn’t the first person to experience those atrocities. Granted, I didn’t know anyone who’d suffered all of those horrible indignities, but with over seven billion people on the planet, Alexis couldn’t have been the only one…and even then, how many of those victims turned into murderers?
Celestina’s eyes once more turned vicious. “Mom is not a psycho!”
“You’re right,” I said, trying to control my temper. “Killing me once was a mistake. It could have happened to anyone. She even learned from her mistakes, right? She didn’t try it again. She just let four werewolves try to tear my arms and legs from my body.” I nodded with false modesty. “Much more humane.”
Celestina’s face trembled with anger. “I said, Mom wouldn’t do that.”
“Oh, so it was a shape shifter, pretending to be my sister, who was in turn, pretending to be me?” I found it difficult to keep my blood pressure from rising. “Sounds far-fetched, don’t you think?”
Pouting, Celestina crossed her arms across her chest and looked out the window, trying to contain her frustration. “Well, you keep hitting her in the face. What do you expect her to do?”
Finally! She had acknowledged the truth. This exchange felt like a dentist trying to remove a molar that refused to budge. Having spewed so much truth, only to have so much emotional turmoil sent my way, I decided to stay quiet for a while. Knowing Celestina, she would use the silence to make excuses for Alexis’s behavior.
“Did you ever think,” she said, “that maybe she’s jealous? You had a granny who loved you and…and…”
Catching her reflection in the mirror, I recognized the self-loathing that teenagers were so good at emoting, but I noticed something I hadn’t expected to see: Celestina hadn’t spoken about her mother…she’d spoken about herself. She acknowledged that Delphine and Alexis weren’t fit to be parents.
The tension in my shoulders subsided. I glanced at Nolan in search of a strategy to continue this conversation with Celestina, but with his eyes closed and his head lying against his right shoulder, he did a poor job at faking to have fallen asleep. But I understood why he did so. He wanted no part of this conversation, since he had nothing to contribute. Still, it would have been nice to have some moral support, but it brought up a topic I had little to no information about: his past. As much as I cared about him, I knew practicall
y nothing about Nolan Hart.
“I had Grams and what?” I asked my niece, following up on her inability to finish her sentence.
“She loved you.” Celestina lowered her gaze, and she tensed her muscles so severely that her breath escaped her mouth in a hiss reminiscent of the steam that exited a teakettle.
“Your mother—”
“I know she loves me, but it’s not the same. Sometimes she looks at me like I’m a mistake, like I should’ve never been born.” She yawned. “I can see it in her eyes. She loves me, but she hates me too!”
I couldn’t refute that claim because Celestina had summed up what felt like the truth.
“Have you ever felt like a mistake?”
“Are you kidding me?” I almost shouted back at her. “My mother gave me up after taking one look at me. Believe me, Delphine was a horrible woman. I was lucky she gave me away.” For the first time, I recognized that I was no longer angry that she abandoned me as an infant. I’d always loved having Grams in my life, but maybe I appreciated her more now that she’d passed on. “You might not have been intended,” I admitted, since I knew that my niece wanted honesty, “but you are more than your mother could have ever hoped for in a daughter.”
A subtle smile appeared and disappeared on her face quicker than it took me to blink twice. She fought to keep her eyelids open, a battle she increasingly lost.
“But I don’t think she ever wanted to have children.” Celestina took in a heap of air, yawned, smacked her lips a couple times, and dug her back into the contours of the seat behind her to relax.
How could she feel tired after such an argument? And what could I say to that?
“I think,” she said, interrupted by another yawn as she let her eyelids close for good this time, “you’d be a better mother.”
I looked at her through the rearview, but soft, even breaths left her mouth as she slept. Nevertheless, the sentiment behind her comment sent tears rushing into my eyes. I’d often questioned whether I’d wanted kids, and although I always answered in the affirmative, I currently wanted to write music and perform across the world more than I wanted to have a child. But the moment Celestina said it, if I’d been given the option, I would have accepted her as my child without a second thought. If given the chance, even if my career as a musician was in full swing, I would have happily taken her away from Zephora and Alexis.
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