Chapter 1 #2
“Human form?” I’m in so much trouble. These people are cracked in the head. I have got to get out of here! “Look, my family doesn’t have much money. If you want ransom money, you took the wrong girl.” I started to move away from him, which on the huge bed was pretty easy.
Bevin came closer. Her bun flopped to the side. “You are a Witch, young one.”
“Bevin!” Doran snapped.
Bevin tilted her head, and her bun flopped to the other side. “Doran, we don’t have time to be delicate. She is not a child like her sister was. She will understand.”
Doran bowed her head and made a face that I thought looked like concern…or was it disgust? I couldn’t decide.
Bevin continued, “You are one of two who were born to a powerful Witch and then hidden. We sent Manus to you at the age of twelve, when we found your location. Manus is a Shapeshifter, and he has spent the last eighteen years as your guardian in the form of a gray cat.” I looked into his eyes again.
The green was the same shade as Clyde’s.
His face held the slightest feline shape.
It took nothing away from his masculinity, but it was there.
“You didn’t come into your powers at puberty as most Witches do,” Bevin explained.
“I suspect it’s your Demon blood, or maybe the human, we’re not sure. ”
“Excuse me? Demons…Witches?” I rubbed my eyes again, grateful that the pain had subsided somewhat.
“You aren’t yet convinced? Manus, please demonstrate.” Bevin stood up straighter, maybe reaching five feet at her full height. The action sent her bun to the far side of her head.
Manus stood and raised his eyebrows in question. “Don’t you think we can demonstrate another way? We don’t have to frighten her to death.”
“If she is the Priestess of the Wild, she must learn not to be frightened every time she encounters something that is unfamiliar.” She and Manus both looked to Doran, who bowed her head slightly in agreement. He shook his head and closed his eyes…
And began to distort!
Memories from the attack at the house rushed over me. Clyde, my beloved cat, under the patio table, hissing as his face contorted…
I shook off the memory as, before me, the man’s form shifted, bones buckling and body shrinking.
Impossible as it was, there on the floor, surrounded by piles of clothes, sat my precious cat.
He was the same cat who had been with me through all the good and bad times of my life, the only creature on earth that loved me unconditionally.
I had talked to that cat when I was happy, sad, or frightened.
Clyde had been the only thing that had remained constant in my life.
He jumped onto the bed and circled close to my legs on the down comforter before reclining and starting to purr.
It was him. There was no way it wasn’t. I’d have known him anywhere.
A sickening feeling came over me. “You’ve seen me pee!” I squeaked. “Slept in my bed.” This was just getting worse and worse. “Oh. My. God! You’ve been in the room when I had…” I glanced briefly at the sophisticated woman, Doran. “When I had company!”
“Manus!” Bevin scolded.
“I was to protect her! How could I do that if I wasn’t near?” His protest came out slightly slurred and hissing in his cat form.
He made his way into my lap and stretched his neck, nuzzling my own with his head, the way he had comforted me for years.
“I didn’t mean to intrude on your privacy.
I only wanted to protect you and act as any cat would.
It was natural for me to be so close to you.
It still is.” Softly, he spoke into my ear, “What we are telling you is true. I wish we could have done it a better way, but circumstances have changed. You are a Witch.”
I pushed him back to the bed, trying not to think of anything else horrifying that he might have witnessed. Everything! He’d been there for everything.
“Your true given name is Keena,” Doran said softly as she sat on the end of the bed.
She was trying to be non-threatening, but it wasn’t working.
Supremacy rolled off the woman like an expensive perfume.
My stomach burned in response to her closeness.
“Haven’t you always felt like you were different, someone not quite like the others?
Stronger than the other children, longing for something in relationships with humans that wasn’t there? ”
She paused, watching my face. I looked away from the three of them, gazed across the room to watch the flame on one of the fat, dripping candles.
I thought back over all the times in my life when I’d felt as she’d described.
She was right. I didn’t fit in anywhere, even in my own home.
I loved my parents, but it was true. I was never really at ease with them.
But it was still hard to believe they weren’t my real parents. This couldn’t be real.
I had been a good athlete in school, but too embarrassed to surpass everyone so easily. Everything else about academic life had bored me. Everyone else seemed to be in on something I wasn’t. Or had it been the other way around all along? I blinked a couple of times, my brain feeling overloaded.
Doran’s strong voice brought me out of my thoughts. “You have longed for your own people, Keena. Without magic, you’ve not been complete. You couldn’t be.” Her pleasant face looked sympathetic. “We feared it would never come to you, until last month when Manus started to feel your magic.”
“Magic? I don’t have any magic.” I was confused and getting angry, but at least I no longer felt threatened.
I looked at Clyde-Manus, curled against my hip.
“Could you change back? I’m a little freaked by you right now.
” He shrugged his kitty shoulders, something I’d never seen him do as a cat, and moved to the edge of the bed and changed back.
I preferred him in his cat form actually.
It was comforting, but I really wanted to see the change again to reinforce my sanity.
And he did it, changed with a smooth stretching of bones and flesh before nonchalantly picking up his clothes and redressing.
“Either this is the result of really good drugs or…”
I couldn’t think of another or.
Bevin cackled a little and finished for me.
“Or the things that go bump in the night are real. Believe me, dear. They are. We’re real.
You’re real. You will find out you have true magic.
Witches use far more of their brains than humans do, you know.
Everything about you will grow stronger soon.
” She smiled, which made her dark eyes twinkle in the candlelight.
“Have you had a burning in your lower abdomen?”
I know my eyes were bulging in disbelief. “Yes. How did you know that?” My stomach had been burning off and on for weeks. I’d chalked it up to work, but… “I thought it was stress.”
Bevin came closer and put her hand over my lower abdomen.
The burning turned to a surge of warmth.
“That is your power, child. It comes from your womb. You will learn to channel it…use it. It will grow stronger, as will your sense of being and your confidence. Once you are brought into your full powers, you will be a great Witch.”
Her lovely voice seemed to echo through my head.
Witch. I couldn’t get the image of the Wicked Witch of the West out of my head.
Yet these women were graceful and beautiful, and I could feel something in the air around them.
I let my hand cover the charm around my neck.
It seemed charged with the same force I felt in my abdomen.
“Did you say something about a twin? What about my mother? Is she a Witch?” The questions were coming faster than I could get them out. “I look just like her. How would she not have known this? Did she know? Why did those things attack me?”
Bevin turned a sideways smile to Doran before turning back to me.
“You were given to…your human mother when her biological child died at birth, we think. She knew no different. Your real mother—your Witch mother—spelled you to take on the human characteristics of your adoptive mother.” She looked out into space with an expression resembling awe.
“Quite an impressive spell, actually. No one has been able to replicate it since. It was more like Fairy glamour than a spell.”