Christine
Even in a hoodie, sweatpants, and a pair of long boots, I couldn’t stop my teeth from chattering. We’d checked the house for ghosts, but we didn’t find any. And I wasn’t surprised. This chill felt different from Anna or any spirit I’d ever encountered.
Death was closer, close enough that I could feel it, and my powers were trying to warn me of that. I hadn’t seen anything else or heard any more names. It was just uncomfortably cold. I held myself together by believing what my mom had said: It would pass, I would warm up, and our plan for the coven was going to work.
I watched Nate and his dad out of a window in my old studio as Sophia instructed me on the perfect place to drop her charmed stones. They looked like little ordinary pieces of gravel, but she’d chanted over them for most of the day and had made them anything but ordinary. The stones carried enough power to freeze an enemy in place if our bigger spells failed.
Today, Sophia and I worked alone. The world needed my mom, and my fiancé hadn’t left his dad’s side all day.
As I watched the two dogs wrestle in the backyard through the window, my heart surged with both fear and joy. Zain knew the risks of being at our home with our shields dropping lower and lower as the hours passed, but he still insisted on playing with his son in the backyard like a fight couldn’t break out at any moment.
Sophia tapped my hand, silently asking for more stones, and I dropped a few of them into her palm.
“You’re a wonderful helper,” she said. “No one else has the patience for such tedious work.”
“It’s important, not tedious, and sitting still makes me colder. ”
“It will pass,” she said. “I haven’t said this enough, but I’m so proud of you, dear. The girl I met a few months ago wouldn’t have been standing here with me, doing magic … the devil’s work.” I chuckled, and she placed two stones on the floor in front of the window. Nate and Zain were rolling around in the grass. “I thought you were going to throw holy water at me when I did the spell on your knee. You were shaking.”
“I was broken.” Once the words were out of my mouth, they sounded like a lie. After meeting the Coven of the Night Star, I wasn’t so sure that Sophia and Nate had fixed me after all. I was different, for sure, but different didn’t have to mean broken.
We continued to place the charmed stones around the windows and doorways in our home, and as we moved closer to Emma’s old room, sadness filled the air. It floated into my chest as my dad’s voice floated into my ears. In that room, all alone with his guitar, he sang about a love that he couldn’t live without. It was the same heartbreaking song that I’d heard him sing in the club in Chicago and the same song that he used to sing to Mom when they were younger.
I can’t live without you. I won’t live without you. Your love is all I need. But if I lose…
His voice cracked, and the strumming suddenly stopped. Sophia and I stopped, too. I felt tears on my cheek that weren’t mine, and a heavy feeling in my chest that I couldn’t ignore.
“Sophia…”
“Go,” she said. “I can handle this on my own.”
I knocked on the door, and he didn’t answer. I heard him sniffing in there, so I barged in and ran to the bed. He was leaning over his guitar with his face in his hands.
It was too easy to forget my dad in all of this, with baby Sophie on my mind and the millions of people who stood to lose their lives if we didn’t stop the coven. It was easy not to see him and everything that he could lose. But he was on my list. And his child. And his girlfriend.
I refused to cry with him. I’d cried enough. I just threw my arms around him and tried to make him feel better. He mumbled, “I’m fine.”
But his thoughts were on something completely different. He was thinking of singing that song to my mom on her sixteenth birthday as they drifted on a lake. Then he thought of all the times that he’d sung that song alone over the years, on her birthday and their anniversary, and how he’d never been able to stop singing it or feeling what he felt for her.
Life was being truly cruel to my father. He’d finally gotten her back, gotten the family he’d never had, only for our futures to not have each other in them.
“You really love her,” I said, forcing my words through the lump in my throat.
He moved his guitar and pulled me into his lap like I was small enough to fit there.
“I love you more,” he said. I laid my head on his chest, still refusing to cry. “You are who I can’t live without.” He tried to sing, but not a word of it came out, so we just sat on his bed until the tearful moment passed.
I had to remind myself that we hadn’t lost yet.
That was exactly what I’d told my dad to get him out of his room. I showed him all of the work Sophia had done to protect the house. All our enemies had to do was attack us at home again, before killing any humans or exposing magical kind, and this whole nightmare would be over.
It took a few minutes, but we started singing happier, more hopeful songs together.
As we prepared our home to be a battlefield, we went to my bedroom to triple check the magic there. While they poked around, I checked my phone. I had a missed text from Emma, and she’d typed in all caps to scream at me.
I’M STARTING TO THINK THAT YOU SENT ME OUT FOR THIS STUPID LIST OF INGREDIENTS ON PURPOSE!
It had taken her long enough to figure that out. I didn’t want her and baby Sophie anywhere near the house right now, so Sophia had given her a list of impossible things to find to keep her occupied.
I replied: No. We seriously need all of those things. Keep trying.
Since a half-charged phone was good enough for me, I slipped it into my pocket and followed my dad and Sophia out of the room. The magic was in place. We were as ready as we would ever be for them.
As I lingered on the stairs, Sophia’s phone rang. She answered in a way that could’ve only meant that she was talking to my mom.
“What?” She paused to listen, then she looked over her shoulder to me. I stopped breathing. Her expression was a cross between sadness and terror. “I’ll be right there. Just … relax. She’s … we’re fine.”
Sophia vanished without explaining or even attempting to keep me from panicking over that. So I panicked, and Dad switched roles and became the person trying to keep us in line.
His phone rang, and he answered in a hurry. “Hey, Ken. Let me call you right back.” But he didn’t hang up. He listened to Ken, and the same sadness and terror that had been in Sophia’s eyes reached his. “Man, I’m … I don’t know what to say. It’s not that I’ve been lying. It’s just that the whole thing is really complicated.”
Because I was about to explode, I pulled Dad’s phone away from his ear and put it on speaker.
“Gav, it’s like I don’t even know you,” his friend said. “You’ve always been a little secretive, but I never would’ve guessed this. Man … wow. We’re all stunned. Is this why you’ve been missing practice? Is this why you’ve broken up with every chick we’ve ever set you up with? Is this … are you living with her, too? Is it not just the kid? I thought your kid’s mother was on drugs!”
I dropped the phone, and Dad rushed Ken off to attend to my breakdown. As he told me to breathe and not to panic, I turned on the television. I knew to go to CNN. I felt it. I felt my world crumbling before I made it to the channel.
A news anchor’s voice cut in, but none of her words made sense. We’d caught her in the middle of a sentence.
I looked at the screen slowly. The BREAKING NEWS banner reminded me of the night I’d disappeared from St. Catalina. Back then, I’d watched the world panic over a witch sighting as the video of Sophia’s white light played on repeat. They’d showed my yearbook picture and had called me The Missing Girl.
Today, they were showing a picture of me walking to class at Trenton. My outfit was impeccable and had Emma Arnaud written all over it. That day, I’d worn a purple chiffon skirt with a flowing train, and a white and blue floral top. That day, the media had called me chic, but today, they were calling me Lydia Shaw’s daughter.
****
It could’ve been Remi, or the body-snatching coven, or anyone else who knew about me. I guessed it didn’t matter. Our secret was out, and our problem had gone from nine hunters, to an ancient coven, and now to millions of people around the world.
It was uncontainable. Unfixable. Nothing would ever be the same.
My dad’s face flashed on the screen. They used the one they’d shown on the news after he’d forced us to go out in public at Trenton. Now, they’d tied all of our stories together.
Dad commented on how pretty I looked in my picture to distract from the horror of this. They zoomed in on my face and put it side by side with Mom’s. The anchor’s voice seemed far away now. She said something about me having Mom’s cheeks.
I couldn’t take my eyes off of the words flashing on the bottom of the screen. More evidence that we have been lied to about the creatures? Did a witch capture Lydia Shaw’s daughter?
They alternated those questions for a minute while some guy claiming to be an expert on the magical extinction denied the possibility of my DNA having anything to do with it being a lie. He was stuttering and not being believable at all.
“Not only could this potentially explain the witch sighting,” the anchor said, “this could also answer a lot of lingering questions about Christine’s behavior. Is she trying to get her mother’s attention? And what’s the story behind the orphanage? We still have yet to hear from Lydia Shaw, but we will supply you with more information as this story develops.”
They cut to a car commercial advertising zero percent down for qualified buyers, and I leaned over and tucked my head between my knees. My dad rubbed my back, and I thought about what the world had to be thinking of me. For some reason, I thought about Sienna and Whitney first. They would be more shocked than anyone, because people like us weren’t supposed to have parents.
Then I thought about the magical families all over the world who had been following a treaty that clearly outlawed copies, only to find out that the person they bowed to had one. They would be angry, but more than that, they would be afraid of me, because people like me were supposed to be dangerous. Then I thought about the hunters who would be watching. They would be intrigued, because people like me were supposed to be perfect for breeding.
“Hold on to what you taught me about our family,” Dad said. “It is an unbreakable thing, and it doesn’t matter what it looks like. All that matters is how we feel.”
I wasn’t aware that I’d taught him anything, but I nodded. One day, if I … by some miracle … didn’t cause an apocalypse by existing, I would listen to his advice. Just not today.
I expected my mom to show up and try to make everything okay with hugs and kisses, but instead, my phone rang.
My voice sounded too casual when I answered. “Hi.”
“I won’t tell you not to panic,” she said. “But please believe me when I say that I’ve prepared for this moment, and we will be fine.”
“You know that you can’t fix this by erasing the world’s memory, right?” I said.
Surprisingly, Mom chuckled. Tears that I hadn’t felt until then flowed down my neck. “No, I can’t, but people believe what they see, so all we need to do is show them something else. Everyone knows that the media can report false stories, and we’ll correct them. We can get out of this, honey.”
The confidence in her tone made me sit up a little straighter. “Tell me your plan.”
“First of all, kiss your father for me and tell him that I’m sorry.” I kissed Dad and put my phone on speaker. “Did you kiss him?”
“She did,” Dad said.
“Okay. Let’s not panic, guys. We’re okay. Tyler is working on a story to send to the news, and the Magical Council had an idea to squash these rumors with their kind and end the tension that’s been brewing. Today, I’m going to address these allegations and sign the new treaty in a public ceremony.”
Magical beings were expecting her to be somewhere … in public.
“It’s a setup,” I said, completely sure of it. “The coven will know where you are.”
“I know. I’m sure they caused this, but that’s the beauty of it. The ceremony will be at the Magical Council’s headquarters. The symbols of the Coven of the Night Star are all over this place.”
I died a little. Apparently, I’d left a huge part out of my explanation, and she was counting on protection that wasn’t going to be there.
“Mom, you have to cancel it. The symbols there are purely ornamental. I asked Sister Margret. You can’t do the ceremony.”
She swore softly, and my heart jumped.
“Alright. I’ll figure it out. I … um … have to go. I’ll call you back.”
Old habits died hard. She was trying to protect me from something again. But this felt too important to allow her to do that to me. “You’re canceling it and coming home, right?”
“Christine, you wouldn’t understand…”
“Don’t do that to me. Not again. Please.”
She groaned, and a door slammed in her background. After a long minute of silence, she said, “I can’t cancel it. It’s happening in an hour. Word is spreading quickly, and people are expecting me to be here to end the tension and deny having a copy. If I stay here, I guess they could attack me in the open. If I go, it will make me seem like I don’t care about the treaty.”
We were damned either way, trapped in the coven’s plan, with nowhere to move.