Chapter 4
4
“ELLOWYN SAbrINA GOOD!” my mother shouts before appearing at the entrance to the living room. She’s in her cheerful sunflower pajamas. Half her silvery-blond hair is up in a band, the other half hanging at her shoulders.
She might have called out my full, hated name, but she’s not looking at me. She’s glaring daggers. I mean actual, real daggers, though they hover there in front of her eyes instead of shooting toward their target.
That being Zander, as ever. She points at him, with a finger that seems just as sharp as the blades floating in midair.
“You’re lucky I gave up curses,” she throws at him, and there are even more edges in her words.
I’m not a saint. I enjoy it. Even if I shouldn’t, because of all the things Zander has done wrong—and there are so many—the thing she’s mad about tonight isn’t one of them.
There’s something in his expression that pricks at me now though. I might not understand it entirely, but I see grief there. A terrible kind of Sure, throw some daggers at me grief . With a little too much of It’d be better than all this.
And as much as I hate to admit it, much as I’d love to rip it out, shred it into a million pieces and send it to the depths of the underworld, I have a heart. I can try not to have any empathy for this man, but it’s not going to work. At least not right now.
So I put my arm around my mother and don’t wait for her permission. Or his. I just...protect him.
I zoom Mom and me up to the second floor and the room I stay in whenever I spend the night here. So it’s only me and her.
And the little baby bump between us.
Tanith Good is a force to be reckoned with. She always has been, with a temper, a sharp tongue, and a healthy sense of revenge not always tempered with the greatest control.
Apple, meet tree.
She didn’t mean to curse me. That was aimed at my deserving father. I don’t think it was just that my dad cheated that upended her tenuous grip on control, though I know that hurt her pride as much as anything else. It was that he’d gone and married a human without telling us. He was expecting a child with a human dental hygienist, of all things. And this double life only came out as he was leaving us for the human world, witches be damned.
“I could banish him,” my mother is muttering, pacing the room. I lower myself on the bed because I am beat and I can’t pretend otherwise, the way I would with anyone else. “It’s not the same as a curse. Just a simple spell to imprison him in a cave forever.”
She’s talking about Zander, not Dad, though I can maybe be forgiven for thinking this is a summoned memory from my childhood. “Mom.”
“I’ve had ten years to come up with the perfect plan, Ellowyn. Why not enact it now that he’s done this to you?”
To me. Oh, if only I could lay the blame of this entire pregnancy on him.
“Maybe you’ve forgotten now that getting pregnant isn’t a risk for you,” I say dryly, given that her long-term partner, Mina, is a woman. “Neither one of us did this alone.”
She huffs out a breath, but she also stops her pacing. She looks at me for a long moment, then crosses to take a seat next to me on the bed. Carefully, sweetly, she lays a hand over my stomach.
I don’t know if I want to cry. Or laugh. Or maybe...sing. It’s only that after months of toil and glamours, I feel right . The power of a mother, I think.
And I’m going to be one.
I swallow hard.
Mom makes a crooning sort of sound I don’t think I’ve heard in twenty-five years, but I recognize it immediately. On a cellular level. Everything in me...lets go a little as I relax into the sound and the heat of her hand on my belly.
“What happened tonight?” she asks.
I breathe past the prickling feeling at the backs of my eyes. “We’re not sure. I’ll go out on a limb and guess the Joywood are at the root of it, one way or another.”
She scowls at this. But one thing Tanith Good has never said to her only child, even when I wish she would, is that I shouldn’t be part of this. If the Joywood wants a fight, Tanith thinks we should all be front and center. She believes I have every right to be part of this coven. That I’m capable.
That they should have arranged the whole thing around my talent, in fact, and she’ll fight anyone who says different.
She has.
Tonight what she does is rub a hand over that soft swell, and I know she’s accepted that this is a danger I’ll have to vanquish. With my coven. Without her.
I can feel how proud she is, beneath the fury and the fear. I don’t know how you go from holding a baby’s entire life inside your body to letting them go off and fight battles they can’t possibly win.
My throat feels too tight to ask.
“Why were you hiding this?” She means, from me .
“I had to tell him first. I couldn’t.” My breath threatens to hitch, and I try to tell her that it’s because Zelda died and there’s all this ascension stuff going on, but those words won’t come out of my mouth. Because they are a lie. But it’s my mom, so it’s the truth I speak. “It hurt too much.”
Tanith runs a hand over my hair. She doesn’t ask me why Zander, or how. She doesn’t press for all the details my friends will want. She sits next to me in a comforting silence that reminds me that no matter what, no matter how scared I get or how little I know what the hell I’m doing when it comes to pregnancies and babies...my mom has been there. She’s done this already, and well. She will be here every step of the way.
All I can think is that Zander doesn’t have that anymore.
“It’s not the worst thing that could happen,” my mother points out. Almost carefully, when she’s normally more of a bull in search of a china shop to level. Maybe she senses that I’m a lot more fragile than china tonight. “I suppose you know that if you’re already this far along.”
I pull away a little and squint over at her. “I thought you wanted to curse him?”
“Oh.” She waves that away. “I want to hurt anyone who hurts my baby. I always will. But if I step back...”
She takes my face in her hands now. Her eyes are violet—one of those things I always wished she’d passed on to me but didn’t. Because those are witch eyes.
My eyes are a deeply unremarkable blue.
“Zander is a Guardian,” Mom is saying, intently. “It’s in his blood to...guard, protect, and so forth. I’m not saying he’s perfect,” she hurries to say when I glare at her. “No one is. I’m not saying he’s all good or all Guardians are, because we know Festus Proctor is a useless, pompous fool.”
Festus Proctor is the Joywood’s Guardian, and he is all that and more.
“Mom,” I begin.
She’s not done. “I know you two have hurt each other over the years, Ellowyn, but he isn’t a total dick, and this isn’t a midlife crisis. There are worse fathers out there.”
She doesn’t say like yours . She doesn’t need to. Bill Wallace is always our personal touchstone for useless men.
But I’m not ready to think of Zander as a father .
“I’m more concerned about the fact some shadow creature took a chunk out of you,” my mother is saying now, that daggery glint back in her eyes.
“It took a bigger chunk out of Zander.”
“Yeah, but you’re my chunk. He could stand a few less chunks.” She wrinkles her nose at that. “I shouldn’t say that. Zelda was a good friend.”
It’s Zelda, and my mother, and this whole shitty evening that has me pulling away and pushing off the bed. To stand up even though I’m exhausted. Because it’s all too much . “I should quit the coven.”
I don’t even get into the ascension situation. Because, spoiler alert: I think we’re going to lose.
“Why?” my mother asks from her seat on the bed, but like she’s merely curious. Not like she’s taking me seriously. A lot like when I made proclamations in junior high, now that I think about it.
“I’ve got other stuff to worry about now.” I try not to relive that angry claw mark across my stomach. I don’t say the other part. The part my mother will argue with.
Which is this, and it’s inescapable now that we’re the Riverwood : I don’t belong. I never did. I can’t let my friends down, but if I back out because of pregnancy—which is part of my concern or I wouldn’t have been able to say it to my mother—they can’t argue with that, can they?
Pathetic , Ruth whispers in my head from where she flies or perches somewhere outside.
I’m thinking of making an owl stew , I tell her, because I can. And because I won’t.
“I can’t go around fighting off dark shadows,” I tell my mother. “I’ve got more to lose now.”
“And more to protect.” My mother stands and takes me by the shoulders. She looks at me, in that way I think is looking into me.
“A pregnant witch isn’t fragile, Ellowyn,” she tells me. Fiercely. “The life inside of her might be, but she isn’t. She is powerful. Fearsome. Not fear ful .”
I don’t tell my mother what I’m thinking. She never responds well to it.
I’m not a witch. I’m only half. Bits and pieces but never the whole.
“Even powerful witches need sleep. I’ll stay with you tonight and—”
I would love nothing more than to let my mother baby me, but how can I? I had four months to wallow. Now the secret is out. It’s time to suck it up.
“Go on home to Mina,” I tell her. “I’ve got to deal with ascension meetings and all that tomorrow. I don’t need a babysitter. I’ve got Emerson.”
She laughs and squeezes me tight. “Let them take care of you. Or I will force my way into this house, turn them all into summer sausages, and do it myself.”
“Not summer sausages,” I say, making myself smile. “They’re so greasy.”
She hugs me again. “I hated being pregnant,” she whispers, but like hating it is a fond memory. “But I loved, and love, every minute of being your mother. Even the hard parts. You will too.” She strokes my hair and holds me against her like I’m two instead of twenty-eight, and I wish I was. “Underneath all those walls, you have everything you need to be a good one.”
Only then I realize how badly I needed to hear that.
“Go home, Mom.” I say it with a smile, with all the love in my heart.
She smiles, and Tanith Good doesn’t leave anything to chance. Not these days. She leans over to kiss my cheek, whispering words of encouragement that are also a spell. “Yes, my darling child, I will go home and you will stay. And you will be well.”