by Alina Banks
“When we made the choice to come back, we talked a lot about how what she did back then affected everything. Part of the reason she wanted to come back was to try to fix the damage she’d caused when she was too young to truly understand the repercussions of her actions. However, I know that after her father died, she did everything she could to learn what she needed to know before they took on the demon. It wasn’t enough. It was never going to be enough, but she did do her best, and that’s how they managed to come through the attack. She wasn’t strong enough to fight it the way her mom wanted to, but she had the strength to send the demon back to where it came from, which was, considering how badly things had gone, the best-case scenario.”
“How much did she tell you about what happened?”
“At first, it was barely anything. She didn’t want to talk about it, and I respected her decision. If I were in her place, I can’t imagine I would have wanted to talk about it either, because she had just lost her mom after already losing both her dad and her sister. Later on, it became a little easier for her to bring the subject up. To talk about what it had been like to be dealing with the demon. When they went up there, I’m certain they thought they were just going to be dealing with the minions, but it turned out they’d already managed to open the door. The demon had already emerged, and that changed everything” Dad shook his head. “It was a mixture of many things. If they had more time, things might have worked out differently, but they didn’t. They were almost entirely unprepared to fight the demon, or at least that was what your mom said. I don’t have any reason not to believe her when she says that, but knowing your grandmother, I honestly can’t see that being the case, because she was the kind of person who tried to prepare for every possible eventuality. It was more likely that your mom wasn’t prepared. She didn’t want to believe how close the minions had gotten to opening the door.
“I don’t know. I wasn’t there, so the only real option I have is to pass on the story your mom told me, so you have a better understanding of what happened. I’m not certain she wanted you to know the whole truth, because she doesn’t want the weight of what’s to come on your shoulders, but that’s mostly due to the fact she doesn’t understand you’ve already got that weight there. You already feel it, because of who you are. She doesn’t understand the choices you’ve already made, but I see them. I see them when you spend hours out in the sanctuary, learning what it means to be what you are. Your mom never did that. She’d do what she had to before coming to spend time with me, but she never dedicated herself to being a witch. She didn’t want to be a Conway witch, and, honestly, I still don’t think she does. She’d prefer to be anyone else, but she is who she is, and there’s nothing that can be done to change that. There’s nothing to be done to change who you are either.
“Not that I think you’d want to change anything. I think you’re the one who was needed back then. As much as I love your mother, she wasn’t the right person to be leading the coven, and she knows that better than anyone. Only, in the end, she had to take it on for a short period of time, because her mom died. After that…we talked a lot in the days after the battle with the demon. She didn’t want to give me too many details. Just enough for me to understand how hard it had all been, which…in a lot of ways, I think it was so hard for her due to the choices she made.” Dad shrugged. “Had she made different choices, things would have been very different, but she didn’t, because she was too focused on what she believed she wanted.”
“Lilah…” I spoke with a voice that wasn’t mine, and I sounded frustrated. “I understand…”
“Mom, if you understood, you wouldn’t be forcing me to do this.” When the young woman in front of me turned, I saw Mom as she was when she was a teenager, and knew I was in my grandmother’s body. It was weird, but not entirely unexpected after the conversation with Dad. “I get it. The minions are trying to open the door for the demon. We could solve this all easily if we were to just kill the minions.”
“No.” The certainty in my voice wasn’t something I’d been expecting. I thought Grandmother would have agreed with that being the simplest option. Yet I was wrong, and that had me smiling. “You know as well as I do that those minions are manipulated by the demon. They don’t know until it’s too late, what it means to have been claimed by the demon, and by that point, there’s no way for them to free themselves from the deal. They have to see it through to the end, in the hope they’ll get what it was the demon offered them.”
“They’re idiots. They made the choice to work with the demon, and that should be enough of a reason to kill them. I don’t see why you can’t accept that.” I’d never known before how callous Mom could be. “They’re the reason Dad’s dead, and I want them to pay.”
“Do you really think that getting revenge is going to make you feel any better?” I shook my head. “It’s not going to change anything. Your dad will still be dead, and nothing we can do will bring him back.”
“So what if it won’t bring him back? They killed him to hurt you, but it seems like you aren’t grieving Dad at all, because if you were, you wouldn’t be doing this. You would have already killed them.”
For a long time, I stood there silently and looked at Mom. At my daughter. I was both myself and my grandmother, which was the strangest thing, especially since I could feel what she was thinking. About how Mom didn’t understand what it was like to know I was the reason for the death of the man I loved, the man who’d been by my side longer than she knew, and how much it hurt that he wasn’t around any longer. How angry I’d been, and how much I had wanted to kill the minions. How much I had wanted to make them pay for what they’d done. Then, slowly, I’d been able to let go of that anger, because it wasn’t going to help. I needed to focus on the same thing I had before - working out how to bring an end to the demon for good. How to stop this from being the future my grandchild would have to be a part of. Only, as it turned out, that hadn’t worked. Maybe because there was no one like Alice around. Maybe she was the missing piece in the puzzle.
“I can understand why you might think that, but I can assure you that’s not the case. I’m simply better at dealing with my emotions than you are, Delilah, and that is something you need to learn to do, for when you become the leader of the coven.”
Mom shook her head and laughed. “I’m not going to become the leader of the coven. Becca can, for all I care, because this is not my future.” She took a couple of steps closer to me, to Grandmother, and I could see the anger in her eyes, because she’d been born something she didn’t want to be. “When this is over, I’m leaving Clermont. I’m getting away from you, the coven, and this damned town. I’m not who you wanted me to be, and I’m never going to be. I’m me. More than anything, I’m the person I should always have been, and you need to understand that. You need to understand why I can’t be the person you want me to be. I need my life back.”
“You can have a life.” I remembered all the arguments I’d had with Mom about how little I wanted to take the coven over, but in the end it I didn’t have a choice.
Sighing, I looked at Delilah, at Mom, seeing all the same emotions I felt back then, but she didn’t know how hard I’d fought to be free of Clermont. How long I’d fought. “These kinds of decisions shouldn’t be made at a time like this. Your emotions are getting the better of you, and I can understand, after everything we’ve been through, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to feel the same way in the future.” I reached out to touch her shoulder, and she pulled away from me. “Just give it a little time. Let the pain fade, and when it does, we can talk about this again. We can work out how you can get what you want while also taking on the responsibility…”
“Why can’t you understand? I’m not going to change my mind. I want to live a normal life, far away from Clermont. Far away from everything it means to be a Conway, and a witch, and dealing with this demon. This isn’t what I asked for, Mom, and I just…I can’t do this. I can’t be here and live happily,
because this place is a reminder of everything I don’t want to be, and this isn’t a new thing. You should know that. I didn’t want to be a witch the day you told me I was born with powers. I spent three weeks crying, and you somehow think that’s going to change after all of this.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
When I stepped into the sanctuary to take a few minutes to myself before I had to head to school, Mom was already there. She was sitting on the floor, even though I’d dragged a more comfortable chair inside. I looked at her. She looked back at me, and I was reminded of the dream I’d had. Of the choices she’d made, back before the battle, before following through with them after the coven had mostly been destroyed, because she wasn’t willing to take on the job of putting it all back together. She wanted to get away from Clermont more than she wanted anything else.
“Learning the truth when I did…” She shook her head. “I know this is going to sound like an excuse, and I guess, in a way, it is. I was young, about ten, when Mom told me I was a witch. I think she thought that it would be something I’d be excited about. My sister would have been thrilled. She was the one who spent all her time with her nose in a book, talking about traveling to magical lands, because she wanted something more. Something different. I didn’t. I wanted to be normal, even then. I’m not even sure I knew what normal was, but as time passed, and Mom tried to get me to give up more of my free time to learn magic, I pushed harder against her. I didn’t want the magic. I had never wanted it, and that wasn’t going to change purely because she wanted me to embrace it. She wanted me to be someone I wasn’t. That’s why I started looking into how I could give my magic to my sister, because she was the one who spent all her time in the sanctuary, doing what she could to learn more about us. Even if she couldn’t cast the spells, she wanted to know how to, just in case.”
“She was killed for her power.”
“Everyone who died during that time was. I blamed Mom for Dad’s death, but it wasn’t her fault. It was a case of him having power because of his family, and the minions wanted to use it to open the door for the demon. That was their job. That was the only thing they wanted to do.” Mom looked at me. “I’m a different person now. I’m a different person than who I was last week, because I could never have imagined taking on the responsibility of trying to protect Clermont, with Becca, of all people.” She sighed. “For so long, I was jealous of Becca and Alice. Both of them were willing to walk a path I didn’t want to be on, and the more time I spent around them, the harder it became for me to be around them. They knew more about me than I really wanted them to. They knew I was going to leave Clermont as soon as I could, but Becca tried to talk me out of it after so many members of the coven were killed by the demon. She didn’t want to be there alone, trying to hold things together. She knew they were going to end up following me, leaving Clermont to live mostly normal lives elsewhere, without understanding how this would always remain a part of us, and that would mean we’d always be hunted.”
“You talked about that before.”
“The demon has minions out in the world, Ana. For the first few years, we were safe. I think we’d done so much damage to him that he wasn’t able to connect with them. However, when he regained that strength, he did what he had to do in order to kill all the witches who were left, which is why we had to keep moving. I wasn’t going to let him hurt you, because you were my only daughter, and as you grew up, I could see what you were, which…I didn’t want this for you, but I should never have kept the truth from you. This should always have been your decision to make.”
James was waiting for me at the gates. We shared a look. “We need to get this done, Ana.”
“How’s Sabrina?”
“They still can’t stop the bleeding. She’s holding up fairly well, but I can tell she’s scared, and I can’t tell her anything more than I already have. Neither of my parents are pleased with the fact that I transformed in front of you, even though I told them I didn’t have any other option.”
“You did tell them that I’m a witch, right?”
“Of course. It made things a little better, but they don’t think I should have put myself in danger, and they aren’t wrong about that. It’s just, I feel like we’re the only people who are taking this seriously, while everyone else…” Slowly, he looked around. “They’re not doing enough. Not even Miss Cane is doing enough, and she’s the one I thought we could rely on. What are we supposed to do next? Just wait until those minions kill enough people to open the way for the demon? I don’t want that, and I know you don’t want that.”
“No, I don’t.” I thought about the dream I had. About how my grandmother wasn’t willing to kill the minions, and instead, seemed to want to rehabilitate them. Maybe Miss Cane was the same, but I didn’t think we could leave it any longer. “Going out there without being prepared is going to get us killed, and that’s not what I want either.”
“Of course, I don’t want either of us to get hurt, but it’s not like we have any other choice. There was another murder last week while the two of us were off sick, and that means the door’s going to be a little more open than it was before.”
Slowly, I nodded. “Honestly, I think that means there are two people who had their power used for opened the door, while Wayde…I don’t think his death would have been much use. Not here. I think the cabin where we were before is where the victims are taken, because that’s where the door needs to be opened. Or that’s where it’s being opened this time.”
“That was the choice of the current minion.”
“Probably.” I thought a little more about my dream. “From what I know, I believe the door was opened on the outskirts of town, not in the woods. Maybe, this time, the place was chosen in order to stop the witches from being able to stop the demon from coming through, because of how hard it would be to create a good circle with all those trees in the way.” I shrugged. “Since there are so few of us here, I haven’t got much of a clue what it would be like to be in a coven, and I have no idea how they would have fought the demon before.”
“We don’t want to take on the demon. I think defeating the minion is going to be hard enough.”
“From what Mom said, it seems like the minion is protected in certain ways, although being one of them…it’s something that changes people. Something that transforms them into their darkest selves.” I shook my head. “That’s probably why we were fighting that creature rather than a human being.”
“At least we’d know who we’re dealing with. Whoever it is doesn’t care about who they hurt. They just want to open the door for the demon.”
“There’s a reason for that. The demon offers the minion whatever they want, and that’s what gets them into this mess in the first place. It wants to manipulate them, to slowly transform them into something else.”
“Is it really slow? The creature in the woods seemed to be pretty comfortable in its skin.”
“I suppose it depends on who they were before they changed. Someone closer to the darkness would likely transform faster than someone who was further away.” I shrugged. “I’m just guessing with some of this, but my source said it took time for him to transform. Maybe this is someone who has worked with the demon in the past, but wasn’t truly a minion.”
Alex was waiting for me when I stepped out of my classroom. For a moment, I looked at him. He looked back at me. “You took a couple of days off last week.”
I nodded. “After what happened to Sabrina, Mom thought it was for the best.” I’d already been asked more questions about what had really happened than I could ever answer, but I stuck with the same story every time. I had to. “She wanted to make sure I was okay.” I shrugged. “Now she’s certain I am, so I’m allowed back.”
“What did happen, Ana?” I opened my mouth to tell him the same story I’d told everyone else, but he cut me off. “Don’t lie to me. I’ve already heard all the lies.” He raked a hand through his hair. “There’s something going on. Everyone k
nows it, but no one is willing to talk about it. I know I’m in danger.”
“How do you know that?”
“Dante finally talked about what happened to Wayde.” Alex’s eyes met with mine. “I thought it was weird that Wayde was on his own when it happened, but he wasn’t. Dante was there. From the sounds of things, it was Dante they were after, and he talked about there being this creature trying to grab him, but Wayde got in the way. Honestly, I don’t know how that happened. I wouldn’t have put it past Dante to have pushed Wayde into that position so he could get away. Dante blames himself for everything that happened. I’d be doing the same thing, because it was partly his fault.”
I studied Alex. Part of me wanted to tell him everything, but then I’d have to tell him about James. “None of this is Dante’s fault. How much do you know about Clermont? About the superstitions relating to it?”
“Probably the same as everyone else. The hospital is said to be built in a place of power, which is why so many people come here. Some are said to be protecting it, but I don’t know how much I believe that, because surely that’s something more of us would know about if it was the case.”
“Then you don’t know what really happened?”
“You mean before, when there were all those deaths?” He shrugged. “I know whatever it was I was told, but that doesn’t mean I was told the truth. What you’ve said makes me think I wasn’t.”
I could see Alice between the bookcases, and I gave her a smile, but she didn’t step out to talk to me. Her eyes met mine for a moment, and I knew I needed to visit alone soon. She was the one I could talk to about trying to connect with the spirit world, in the hope I’d be able to bring an end to the demon, rather than putting the burden on my own daughter’s shoulders in the future. Or my granddaughter’s.
