Christine
The Coven of the Night Star had officially run us out of our home in search of safety that may not have existed.
After Mom had sent the bodies to her morgue to be examined, Sophia had packed all of our things to leave. Everyone had apologized for not believing me when we’d made it to Los Angeles.
It was bittersweet.
For one, we’d moved again and we had no idea if this place was any safer than San Juan. They’d found us once, so they could do it again. And secondly, no one had been able to come up with an explanation of how those witches had died other than blaming it on me.
I’d stretched my hands in their direction and they’d screamed bloody murder. I hadn’t felt myself do anything, but according to everyone I loved, I was a murderer now. For some reason, my mother thought that murderers deserved bubble baths, so she’d forced me to take one and was trying to run the world from my bathroom.
As I soaked in my tub in my old house, she became all versions of herself at once. Lydia Shaw barked orders to her agents on the phone every few minutes, the leader of the world’s security cancelled more meetings about human terrorists that she couldn’t attend, and my mom was trying to keep me from having a mental breakdown.
And I was turning into a prune in the tub as I waited for it to hit me.
I was a murderer, and I was numb.
“When I take a life,” Mom said, “I feel drained and …” Her phone rang, and she silenced the call. “And I feel like they’re still with me for a while. Do you feel that way?”
“No.”
There was clearly something wrong with me. I didn’t feel anything at all. “Any nausea?” I shook my head. “Are you holding back tears that you don’t want to let fall? That’s the worst part for me.” I shook my head again. “Then I’ll wait right here until it happens.”
I tried to whisper, but I failed miserably. “I guess I’m an infant again.”
“I would do this whether you were five years old or fifty. I’ve been where you are, and I’m just trying to help. When I made my first kill, I cried for hours.”
“You?” I said. “I wouldn’t imagine murder being hard for you.”
She smiled and sat on the counter. “I’m actually human, if you haven’t noticed. And once, I was a scared twelve-year-old girl who was ordered to kill a witch. Kamon enjoyed it, and I … puked.”
I laughed with her, but I stopped when I realized that I wasn’t puking. Hopefully that didn’t mean that I was more like Kamon than her.
“That day, I called my dad,” she said. “He didn’t agree with killing people, and he asked me to come home, but I didn’t want to quit. So he told me to think about the good I’d done by killing that woman. Is that something that I need to remind you of?”
With my eyes on my toes, and the soapsuds between them, I said, “No. I get it. They were terrible people who wanted to kill us and destroy the world. It had to happen, and if we’re lucky, we’ll get the chance to kill the rest of them soon. Thanks to that smoke, we finally know for sure that it’s the Coven of the Night Star. I can’t be happier about that. Those familiar symbols finally paid off.”
I cranked on the hot water with my foot. My bath was getting colder by the minute. “Familiar?” she asked.
“I’ve always felt like I’ve seen them before.”
“On the rings? Or in the vault?”
“No. Before that. Even when I first saw the rings, it felt like I’d seen the symbols before.”
She narrowed her eyes, and I turned off the hot water. “But you lived in an orphanage for seventeen years, and before that, you were with me. I wouldn’t have shown you those symbols. Are you-” Her phone interrupted us. This time, she answered. “Shaw,” she said, then sighed heavily. “Did Kiana ID them before then? I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
With bubbles up to my neck, I rested my head on the edge of the tub and stared at her. I thought making eye contact would make it harder for her to leave me out of anything.
“The bodies disappeared from the morgue,” she said. “We need to track them down. I have to go, but I’ll be back in half an hour. Tops.”
“I’ll come with you.”
“I’m sorry, sweetie. Not this time. I’m not going to push you any further today. You’ve been so lucky not to have any more seizures, but I don’t want you to hurt yourself. You’d better be in bed when I get back.” She pointed a long finger at me and smiled. “Rest. That is an order.”
Playfully, I said, “Yes, Master,” and she snarled at me. “Yes, Mom.”
“Better.” I closed my eyes for a fraction of a second, and when I opened them, she was gone. With so much going on, it felt like I should’ve told her how much I loved her. Every goodbye could’ve been the last goodbye.
As I stepped out of the tub, I realized I was alone for the first time since becoming a murderer. I waited for it to hit me, but it never came. No nausea. Nothing.
Dressed in sweats and a t-shirt, I got in bed as ordered. I laid my unfeeling body down and stared at the ceiling, thinking about what my mom had said.
I hadn’t thought about where I would’ve seen those symbols before Pop had shown me the rings. My first time away from St. Catalina was when Sophia had rescued me. I’d never gone on field trips because the thought of being anywhere with Sienna Martin used to make my stomach curl. And I’d never gone with the nuns into town or bowling with the boys at the school next door.
If I had seen the symbols before, it had to have been somewhere inside of those gates.
The gates.
Memories rushed into my mind of the concrete wall enclosing St. Catalina, and the field that led to it. And I gasped.
I hadn’t noticed it before, but it looked overwhelmingly similar to the field that my grandfather had shown me. I saw the overgrown grass around black clogs. My black clogs. It was in the courtyard where I’d eaten lunch to escape Sienna and the horrors of the cafeteria. I would sit there and draw to pass the time and numb the pain of loneliness.
From the wooden bench in the shade, the most interesting thing to draw was the high concrete wall that kept the orphans in and the world out. Long before I’d gotten there, someone had painted a colorful mural of children running and playing all around the gate. Nothing would kill time as well as recreating that elaborate painting on the edges of my notebook. I couldn’t remember how many times I’d drawn it and how many pages I’d filled over the years with that mural.
And it all came rushing back into my mind as I lay in bed. The symbols were familiar because I’d seen them every day. The curled star, the moon, the lion. All of them. I’d seen them on the concrete wall inside of the mural at St. Catalina.
My grandfather had tried to show me that. But why? Had he shown me where to find the coven? Did he want me to go home?