A Werewolf, A Vampire, and A Fae Walk Into A Bar (Book 1 of The Last Witch Series) novel Chapter 44

My breath catches, knowing she’s about to talk about the day she died. Or, rather, didn’t die.

“I still didn’t really understand my magic, but I knew that I was part of this prophecy, and so were you, and it was too much to bear. I didn’t want you to suffer the way I and your nanny had.”

“So to ease my suffering you faked your own death?” I ask bitterly, on the verge of losing the battle to control my sorrow and anger.

She shakes her head. “I tried to cast a spell, just before you turned twelve. I wanted to protect you. I just… I wanted you to be safe forever.”

“What happened?”

“I almost killed you,” she says, wiping away more tears wetting her cheeks. “I put my baby girl in a coma. Nanny had to pull out some deep, dark magic to bring you back.”

“Wait, when I was eleven? I don’t remember any of this.” Even if I didn’t remember the coma, wouldn’t I have at least remembered all the magic spell stuff leading up to it? Wouldn’t I have any memory of missing school? Wouldn’t AJ remember something this big?

“Tilly took care of your memories,” she says.

“What about school? Friends? AJ?” I ask, shaken to the core that my kind old Nanny messed with my brain.

“It was summertime, and Nanny handled the rest.”

The rest being AJ. Jesus, what kind of family do I belong to?

My mom continues, seemingly oblivious to my own horror at learning all this. “She tried to tell me it was okay, that you would be okay and I should forgive myself, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t look at you after what I’d done. So…” she forms a fist with her hand like she’s trying to hold in all the pain as she speaks. “I decided you would be safer without me. I chose to end my life.”

I exhale, letting out a breath I didn’t know I was holding. “Except you didn’t,” I point out.

“I tried,” my mom says, sounding even more remorseful than before. “I threw myself off a cliff into the ocean.”

I shiver as the memories I keep carefully suppressed come rushing back. Finding her suicide note. Searching the shoreline for her body. Friends with fishing boats patrolling the coastline day and night. Her body was never found. She was presumed dead. After all, how could anyone live through that fall?

“How did you survive?” I ask. “And where have you been all these years?”

She sighs and looks away, her gaze lost in the darkness of the surrounding trees. “I woke up here, in this very forest, staring into my mother’s face.”

That’s actually something I can imagine quite readily, though her circumstances were a bit different. “So what, this is like some weird recreation reunion for you?”

“No. But I wanted you to understand why I did what I did. Why Nanny did what she did.”

My heart skips a beat. “What did Nanny do?”

My mother stands and approaches me, then kneels down and takes one of my hands into hers. “She stole your magic to bring me back from the dead.”

My throat goes dry and a cold sweat covers my skin as I yank my hand from hers. “What do you mean, stole my magic?”

“I didn’t want her to. I never meant for any of this to happen. I didn’t consider what it would do to a mother to lose her child. She snapped, even before she absorbed too much power. The grief turned her into someone else.” My mother rocks back on her heels, her eyes, the same deep blue as my own, locked on mine. “She used dark magic, blood magic, to pull your power from you and then harnessed it to find my body and bring me back. When I woke up in this forest, I was yanked from the afterlife. The use of that much power made her crazy.”

“That’s why she lost her mind? Why she’s in the hospital now?”

My mother nods. “It is. Magic. Power. It isn’t natural. It’s always been a curse, causing more problems than it solves. And those monsters who are living with you, they are born of the oldest magic, and they are using you, and your daughter, to empower their own races.”

“I already know what they want,” I say, impatiently. “I know why they came. But it’s more complicated than that.”

I think back to all the shared moments, the private conversations, the memories I’ve already made with each of them. Complicated definitely describes my current relationship status.