Chapter Sixteen – Carina
Sixteen
CARINA
From the minute I asked Ryder to bring me home, I suspected, if Mom was unable to help Alaric, this would be how the conversation’s outcome.
So, while masking my anxiety and the fears creeping up that threaten to tie me in a little bow and lock me away from all this, my voice rings firmly, my stance leaving no room for questions.
Fact is, once Twilight Grove sent Arthur and Violet Hartman to murder Emily and John Sinclair and kidnap Harlow, this has all been in play. Harlow was round one of their messed-up games, and apparently, I’m round two. The longer I avoid them, the more people will die or be harmed.
If infiltrating Twilight Grove under the guise of being their captive is how this has to happen, so be it. It means letting the wolves use me, to ensure Alaric gets healed. It means being a victim for Twilight Grove, and walking within their lines, learning everything I can.
No one speaks in response to my tangent, but Ryder’s eyes drill into the back of my head. They’re as pointed as how Mom glares at my face. But with him, it feels like he’s trying to send me another message.
Since no one speaks, I do, continuing to hammer in my points. “In a week, when they show up, I’ll play the captive. Once with the coven, I can learn the truth.”
“I don’t like this,” Mom grates in a wavering tone suggests I’m winning my argument. “Exchanging yourself for a shifter—”
She isn’t getting it.
“Not only for him,” I interrupt. “For all of us. Hecate protects all on Earth, which includes the shifters. We need to figure out what we’re up against, and none of us will be able to walk up to them, so this makes me the perfect candidate.
For the coven, I will be doing this, and you can’t stop me. ”
Arguments play across her expression, and like a real battle, there’s waves. The immediate mom rage demands she locks me up before that transforms into calculations, figuring out how to fight me on this, while finally ending with a concession: A sigh and lowered shoulders.
“This is dangerous, Carina. We don’t know what they want with you, so you could die.”
“More reason to go. What makes me so special, since I’m not like Harlow; I’m not one of the four? Besides, I doubt killing me helps them.”
The room is silent. Mom mentally fighting me. Me mentally defending. And the shifters trying to track what’s happening.
Her shoulders slump, and the weight of a million lifetimes grace her downturned expression. “I can’t change your mind, can I?”
“No.”
“Why Carina?” Ryder’s deep rumble nearly has me jumping from my skin. “She said this coven is targeting descendants from the four original bloodlines.”
As he talks, I look at him. It may be crazy, but I swear his eyes flash through his question. It’s quick and subtle, and maybe a trick of the light.
When Mom doesn’t respond, my spine prickles with something. Fear? Worry? She’s staring at me, her expression pinched with a mixture of dismay and horror, like learning a favourite show is off the air. Or that the BeaverTails restaurant ran out of the ingredients for my favourite flavour.
It’s an expression saying she doesn’t want to have this conversation. Her hands are loose at her side, clenching every so often as the final remnants of our argument fall.
“What is it?”
The weight of the conversation drops Mom into the chair behind her. Her head falls into her hands, hair covering her face, and a whisper emerges from between the strands. “Please don’t hate me.”
She waves her hand into the air and conjures an image—a moving one. A mini movie suspended right there on a makeshift projection enchantment.
Behind me, one of this shifters mumbles something about it being “cool,” but being caught up in the scene that’s beginning, I tune the three of them out.
The feed is from the viewer’s point-of-view. A hand stretches into view and twists a doorknob. The familiar dark wood with the small circular window two-thirds of the way up is one I’ve opened and shut countless times over the years.
Which would make the hand in the scene…Mom’s?
She tugs open the door to find a woman slumped on the doorframe, dark hair plastered to her forehead in a combination of blood and rain. She grips a crying newborn baby in her arms, keeping the baby’s face protected in her chest.
The vision lowers to the ground, hands stretching out to reach for the woman.
“Goddess, what has happened to you?” She casts a spell over the drying blood to examine the true extent of the injuries.
That’s Mom’s voice.
The dying witch blocks the spell. “D-don’t. I’m…already dead. Keep her safe. Carina…her name.”
“What’s your name? What happened?”
“Carina. Love her…as your own. Please. Tell her I…”
Her eyes slide shut, and Mom reaches for her. “Tell her what? What is your name?”
“Cov…Silver Seas.”
“Coven of the Silver Seas. That’s where you’re from?”
The witch blinks her response. “Protect her…love her.” Her breath shudders, her eyes opening to gaze at her baby. “I…love…”
The witch fades away, and Mom slowly tucks the child in deeper. “Rest now, sister. Your daughter will be cared for. Go forth to Hecate and Blessed Be.”
The vision changes slightly as Mom walks away from the baby, who’s no longer crying and is wrapped in more blankets, resting between couch cushions that were dragged to the floor. She returns a bit later with the deceased witch and rests the woman on the ground beside her—beside me.
Carina, that witch said. “Carina…her name.”
Mother and daughter lay beside one another for the final time while the woman who I came to know as Mom whispers prayers to Hecate.
The vision transforms again, this time to a rainy afternoon with the coven all standing within the burial ground. “I”—seeing through Mom’s eyes—stare down at the fresh grave. Closest to my right is a young version of Harlow’s mother.
In her arms: a sleeping child with light brown hair.
“What are you going to do with her?” Emily asks, nodding to the bundled child.
“I’m going to keep her, exactly as she asked me to. I’m also going to figure out how she came to us.”
“Have you reached out to the Coven of the Silver Seas?”
“Yes. There wasn’t a response.”
Emily grimaces. “Why don’t John and I take a couple others and go to Vancouver to check things out?”
“That would be good, thank you. Carina has a family out there, and while her mother clearly was running from something, we need answers about what we’re up against.”
The vision changes, this time as Emily and John Sinclair cross our front yard.
The couple shares a look before John murmurs, “There’s no one there. Where the coven resides is empty; not even a trace of magick. It’s like they were never there to begin with.”
Covens can go years without communicating with one another, and it’s so rarely in person.
We’re too spread through the world and generally prefer one another’s company to outsiders—even of the same species.
Only in passing have I’d heard of the Coven of the Silver Seas.
Nothing about them being missing, and only of their existence as one of the four original covens.
Mom lifts her head as the vision drops—right alongside everything else in my life that I’ve come to know and trust.
I’m not from here.
“Now do you get why you can’t go?”
Weakened by reality, I fall backwards and land on the couch.
My gaze is lost in limbo, staring at the place where the vision last hung while replaying it in my head.
Witnessing it felt like an outsider’s viewing; I was watching and taking it all in, but reliving it puts it into place—into perspective.
I was the baby held by a dying mother—my real mother, whom I never knew about. A baby with another family.
“It’s why you have water magick.”
I’m the only one in the coven that has it.
Considering Highridge was created by the Sinclair family and soon joined by air witches, it’s where most of our power comes from.
Over the centuries more Earth element witches have joined, and fire has died out.
But there’s never been a water witch—only me.
Being that children don’t always adopt their parents’ powers, though it’s more common they do, I never really thought twice about Mom having air magick while I don’t. But now, it makes sense.
Why she and I look so vastly different. She always claimed I took after my bio-father or suggested it was DNA skipping generations.
“I’m from another coven.”
Mom’s shoulders bow in and she nods. She’s nervous. Scared, even. She fears this will destroy our relationship—and the family she’s given me. Herself, Jasper, his parents, and once, the Sinclairs, when they were alive and considered honorary family.
But it won’t.
My birth mother saved me. She gave me a life by keeping me alive, getting me to Banff, and away from whatever she ran from. I owe her everything.
And I don’t even know her name.
But my mother is Mom, and what her memories revealed changes little. My birth mother didn’t give me up, so there’s no hard feelings for either of them. This much I already know, despite only learning the truth now.
I also owe Mom everything. She took in a baby who was orphaned by a complete stranger. She raised me as her own, gave me a life, and made me into Carina Hargrove. While Mom’s fear is understandable, it’s misplaced. The truth doesn’t change my feelings. Yet, it does change everything about my life.
I’m from a whole other coven. One that went missing—or into hiding. I may have siblings, grandparents, cousins, aunts, and uncles. Other water witches who could relate to me. A coven who would have been home. And…a father.
“The man you claimed was my father… That was a lie?” Mom always said a warlock impregnated her and disappeared. She never knew where he was from or even what his name was.
“Yes,” she whispers. “I don’t know who your father is, or what your mother’s name was.”
“My mother’s name is Morgan.”
Mom releases a choking sob into her hands. I slide off the couch and lower to my knees beside her to take her hands in my own, pulling them off her tear-streaked face until she’s forced to look at me.
“I’m not upset, just surprised.”
“I tried.” Another tear slips down her cheek.
“So hard. When you were twelve and coming into your powers, your signature was also developing. With it becoming familiar, I travelled to Vancouver; that business trip I went on that summer wasn’t for the shop.
Instead, I went to the area they were last known to be, hoping their traces would match with yours.
There was nothing to be found. I tried again, two years ago, but still nothing. ”
“Even if you found them, I wouldn’t have gone back. This is my home.”
“You deserve the truth, and I’m sorry you may never have it. Your mother was scared, Carina. You saw the memories; she saved you from something. Now, Sloane’s asking for you specifically…”
Realization unbalances me until I fall back onto my ass, her hands sliding from mine. “You think I’m descended from the original water witch.”
“The BC coven is one of the original four covens, so it’s plausible.”
Suddenly, my plan gets a lot more dangerous—feels a lot more of what Mom’s been telling me.
If she’s correct about my parentage, then I’m about to hand myself over to the people intent on making me into a Dark witch.
It’ll change me, more than what the truth revealed today. It’ll be a permanent mark on my soul.
More importantly, it’ll change the tide of the war. With me and Harlow Dark, it’d be two out of the four needed.
Going to Twilight Grove doesn’t feel like a sacrifice any longer.
It’s a death march.
Weight presses onto my chest. My breaths come out short and my vision blurs as the ground shakes beneath me. Mom disappears, as do the three shifters who are observing this not-so-wholesome family moment. Hands on the floor, I push to my feet.
“I, uh…I need air.”
I streak from the room and past the three of them, whom I’d forgotten were even present.
One of whom looks as though he was just kicked in the balls.