Authors: Sydney Bristow
“And you memorized everything in the book?” asked Nolan as fear and doubt crossed his expression.
“Yep. It was
sooo
easy.”
“That’s impossible,” he said.
Celestina cracked a grin. “The book had a spell to remember stuff.” She tapped her left temple. “Every sentence of every page is all up here.”
I put a hand on my niece’s shoulder without the least bit of discomfort and pulled her into an embrace, unable to shake the gratitude settling inside me. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
She shrugged as if to say, “You’d die.”
“You scared the hell out of us,” Brandon told me. He leaned back and allowed his shoulders slump before directing his attention to Celestina with complete admiration, all the while remaining silent.
Rather than allow Brandon to question her, which I sensed would soon happen, whereupon she would probably fumble for an explanation, I released my niece and turned to Nolan. “It wasn’t me out there.” It took tons of patience and understanding to banish the desire to chastise my bandmates for not recognizing my sister’s attempt to impersonate me. “Alexis pretended to be me.”
Anger flashed through Nolan’s eyes.
“We’ve gotta do something about her,” Kendall said a second too late before remembering Celestina sat beside her. “Your mother can’t keep doing this to us. You know that, right?”
Celestina looked down.
“Hey,” I said, catching my niece’s attention. “Stop it. Don’t act as if you’re not worthy of having an opinion. You’re important to me. You’re a strong young woman. Start acting like it!”
My niece’s head snapped up and she looked at me with resolve. “I know Mom wants more power, and I know
she
knows it’s Zephora in Granny’s body, but…I saw you fighting her. You heard the prophecy.” Her lips trembled. “Please, Aunt Serena. Don’t fight Mom. You need to promise me.”
My heart sank at her request, not because I wanted to hurt Alexis, but because I suspected my sister would attack me, and I’d need to defend myself.
“Please,” Celestina said, wincing with an ache in her voice. “Please, just, please promise you won’t fight her.”
“Celestina, I—”
She reached out and clutched my biceps as a frantic expression took hold of her. “Please!”
“If she tries to hurt me, I can’t just—”
She shook me with the confidence, not of an uncertain teenager, but someone much older and wiser. “I need to trust you. Let me trust you, Aunt Serena.”
I stared into that innocent face, the person who had revived me once and saved me from turning into a werewolf. I had no doubt that Alexis would try to hurt me again, but my niece had rescued me twice. How could I deny her this request? With every bit of intuition in my body telling me not to address her question, I said, “Okay, Celestina. I promise.”
We’d left the bar before the paramedics arrived. At my suggestion, Kendall and Brandon had taken Nolan’s vehicle, while he now sat in the passenger seat of my car. In the rearview mirror, I glanced at Celestina’s injured hand. We’d cleaned and disinfected it before wrapping it up in white gauze. I still couldn’t get over Celestina’s selflessness in healing my wound. She gave cutting her hand no thought, as though assisting injured people on a daily basis was a normality rather than an infrequent incident. Many friends and family might do that for one another, but they would certainly give it at least a moment’s thought. Celestina acted without hesitation, almost as though…she’d foreseen the need to do so.
“Did you foresee healing me a little while ago?” I asked her.
“Yep,” she said as though visions assailed her on an hourly basis.
“When did it happen?”
“This morning.”
“So you knew I’d need help today?”
“Nope. I never know when it’ll happen.” Sensing that I’d continue to question her, Celestina said, “I might get a vision and it might not happen for a month, or who knows, maybe even three years. That only happened once. It’s the furthest out my visions ever went.”
“What was the vision?” I asked.
“You killing Mom,” she answered calmly.
My breath caught in my throat. Celestina had seen visions that most often came true, so why wasn’t she freaking out?
“It’s been with me for three years,” Celestina admitted.
I locked my muscles in place at the notion that she might have read my mind.
“Relax, Aunt Serena. I’m not reading your mind.”
I worked on regaining my composure because she hadn’t said, ‘I
can’t
read your mind.’ It was a subtle difference, but if she had replied that way, I would have felt much more at ease. Since she hadn’t, I couldn’t understand how she’d nailed not just one unasked question but two in a row. It seemed highly unlikely, perhaps even impossible. Then again, I hadn’t felt a pluck in my mind, an indication that occurred whenever Alexis and Darius had tried to intercept my thoughts. Therefore, I gave her the benefit of the doubt.
Celestina sighed as though no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t neglect the vision that had presented itself. “I saw you three years before we even met. I didn’t know anything about you, not your name or your identity, nothing.”
“You must’ve hated me,” I said.
“I wanted to kill you.”
Upon hearing such a significant remark, but watching her look out the window with a stoic expression, I almost stomped on the accelerator in fright. Then again, she’d spent the past three years knowing what
might
occur. It gave her plenty of time to face that potential future. She had obviously changed her mind, considering that she’d saved my life and freed me from living out the rest of my days as a werewolf, if I hadn’t outright died.
She looked out the window, a morose look on her face. “Don’t worry, Aunt Serena, I don’t want to kill you.”
That statement should have allayed my fears, but I concentrated on what she’d left out…whether or not she
would
kill me. After all, she’d made me promise not to hurt Alexis. By extracting the oath, Celestina hoped to rest easy with the pledge that I wouldn’t fight my sister, but her gloomy expression told me that, despite my promise, she still believed her ominous prophecy would ring true.
In that moment, I realized how much internal strength it took for Celestina to disregard the prophecy that I’d kill her mother. Yes, she’d had three years to accept it, but now that I’d finally come into her life, she must be incredibly torn over wanting to trust me, but knowing I might kill the one person who meant more to her than any other. To forsake that prophecy and accept me into her life must have taken a tremendous amount of belief in me. No matter what, I needed to retain her trust. She deserved it.
Nolan’s gaze swung toward mine with a worried expression, revealing that he, too, felt her prophecy might happen. “What changed?” he asked Celestina. “You wanted to kill her, but–”
“Hating someone for even a few days makes you so tired. I didn’t know who you were at the time, but after a few months, I didn’t want to feel that way anymore, so I stopped thinking about it. When we first met, I was
sooo
scared.” Now she met my stare in the rearview mirror. “I thought you might try to kill me too.”
My mouth opened at the thought. “I’d never—”
“But how could I know that?” she asked. “I was ten when I first had that vision. In my nightmares, you were friends with Captain Hook and Cruella de Vil.”
“Really?” I asked, hoping to make light of the situation, since it had taken on such a serious tone. “Did we exchange Christmas gifts?”
“I don’t know about the captain, but I dreamed you and Cruella stole all the dogs from a pet store.”
“Hmm.” I pretended to mull it over. “I can understand someone stealing food if they’re poor and starving, but stealing helpless puppies?
Now
I can see why you wanted to kill me.”
Celestina almost smiled. “Since I got that vision, some others that I thought were supposed to happen, never did.”
“Like what?” Nolan asked.
She looked frantically from side-to-side as though trying to negate a thought from clutching her mind. “I don’t want to say.” She shivered and her eyes looked as though they’d seen terrors no one could possibly imagine. “But I’d say they’re right about ninety-five percent of the time.”
That fact made Nolan draw back as though someone had taken a swing at his face. “How often do you get these visions? Daily? Weekly?”
“It all depends on magical activity. Before this week, it hardly happened at all. Maybe once a week. But when Aunt Serena got her abilities, it happened every day. Then when she killed her granny…and then my granny, well, now I get them two or three times a day.” She looked at me, awaiting the next question.
I couldn’t meet her gaze. If it weren’t for me, Celestina wouldn’t have had these narcoleptic fits so often. By killing Grams and Lorraine, I’d allowed more monsters and demons into this dimension, which ramped up the regularity with which those visions tormented my niece, due to more supernatural activity. Not only that, but slaying my mother and grandmother probably didn’t instill much trust in Celestina that I wouldn’t kill Alexis. If anything, she probably considered my murdering her mother as near certain, but her kind soul probably persuaded her to believe in me, despite the mounting evidence against me.
As guilt pelted my heart, I tried to look at the situation from a different angle. For the first time, I had an ulterior motive to banish monsters from this world. “Wait a minute.” I glanced at my niece. “You get visions of good entities, too, right? Like me and Nolan.”
“Everyone.”
“Do the visions hurt?”
“A witch from the past wrote in
The Book of Souls
that she fell asleep before each vision because otherwise, if she tried not to fall asleep, her brain couldn’t handle the pressure, and she had a seizure or something.”
“A natural defense mechanism,” Nolan said. “That makes sense.”
Luckily, the images didn’t cause physical, emotional, or mental damage (from what I could tell), but based on the way she cringed each time Celestina spoke about these visions, I knew she’d prefer not to deal with them. “That’s the worst of it?” I asked my niece. “There’s no other side-effects?”
“I don’t think so, but who knows what’ll happen when more creatures come out.”
I didn’t like her ominous tone. It sounded like she knew more than she let on, but preferred not to discuss the matter.
“One thing doesn’t make any sense,” Celestina said. “Why would Mom want the werewolves to kill you?”
“So I can’t stop Zephora.”
“But Mom wouldn’t do that. She wouldn’t kill anyone.”
“She killed me before. You keep forgetting that. Are you blocking it out on purpose? You remember reviving me, don’t you?”
“Okay,” she said, pushing her open hands at me to stop talking. “I just mean that, she wouldn’t do it again.”
“Do you know what a lie of omission is?” I asked her.
“It’s when someone doesn’t tell someone the truth.”
I couldn’t have phrased it any better. “If your mother allowed the werewolves to attack me, isn’t it the same as wanting them to kill me? Because really, what chance did I have against four werewolves? I barely got away, so in my mind, it’s like lying. Your mother had a chance to do the right thing, but she didn’t.”
“She might want to learn magic from Zephora, but she wouldn’t—”
“But she did, Celestina!” I said with an edge in my voice. “She had a choice. We all have free will. To say she makes bad decisions is the understatement of the year!”
Her eyebrows slid together. Her eyes, usually so cheerful and placid, became cold, distant.
The sight of my niece’s anger sent a shiver through me. The pressure wasn’t self-inflicted, but spread outward from her body. It made sense, considering that her mother had the ability to manipulate energy into freezing elements. Then again, other than allowing Zephora to achieve her goals, my worst fear consisted of my niece taking Zephora’s place because no matter how powerful Zephora might be, Celestina was young and immature. I didn’t want to consider the power she would wield a couple years from now…if she continued to respect her mother’s wishes and followed her example.
“My mother,” said Celestina, a glint of menace in her eyes, “would not hurt you again.”
I met her gaze with a harsh one of my own. “I sure hope you’re right. I will keep my promise and not attack her, but if she does starts something, I’m not going to just stand there and let her kill me a second time. Understood?”
My niece’s jaw clenched and glared at me for a long moment, but then she relaxed and the heated emotion in her expression softened. Nonetheless, she didn’t answer my question.
It told me that, no matter the circumstances, Celestina expected me to keep my promise, without requesting the same of her mother. That was unfair, to say the least, but if my sister assaulted me, I wouldn’t let her get away with it, no matter how Celestina might take it. In that event, I could only hope my niece followed reason and responded in kind.
“You’re certain there’s no mention of how other witches defeated Zephora in
The Book of Souls
?” I asked her.
“I’m sure,” she confirmed.
“Otherwise, how will we be able to—”
“I get to ask the book three questions,” Celestina said. “Remember?”
“Yeah.” Didn’t she comprehend how odd it sounded to ask a question of a book? How would it answer? Based on her placid expression, she appeared completely at ease, as though consulting a book and expecting a verbal response made perfect sense.
“It’ll tell us how to stop her,” she said.
I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the innocence of youth staring back at me. Her charming smile told me that she also believed that fairy tales like
Cinderella
,
Sleeping Beauty
, and
Beauty and the Beast
were based on true events. Once again, I marveled at how someone so powerful could be so naive. It was a mighty combination, and one that could end in tragedy, if not nurtured with great love and care.
Alexis couldn’t supply that type of upbringing, and if Celestina had any chance of following in her footsteps, I needed to broach the subject now. “There’s something I need to tell you.”
When she met my gaze in the mirror with such a hopeful expression, I thought about reconsidering. Why did she find it so hard to distrust her mother? Surely, she knew from watching television that the typical mother didn’t walk around the house before noon, swigging from a bottle of vodka. I could point out countless flaws, but the main reason I had second thoughts was because…if anyone attempted to tell me that Grams was not the prototypical parent, well, I never would have believed them. And since Alexis was my niece’s
true
parent, I had to assume the ties binding them together was even stronger than the one tying me to Grams.
“Okay,” Celestina prompted, waiting for me to explain myself.
Maybe I found it difficult to burst her bubble because Celestina looked so sweet and innocent. Perhaps even because she was my only living relative…who didn’t want to kill me. “You know, we didn’t perform tonight, right? Well, it was because your mom pretended to be me.” I paused to see if she planned to comment. Despite a perplexed expression, she didn’t say a word, so I added, “She insulted the fans, insulted the band, and left.”
“Huh?” Celestina asked with quirked eyebrows, far from convinced. “She wouldn’t do that.”
Nolan let loose with a grunt. “She called our music a pile of ‘steaming shit.’ Then she walked off stage.”
I almost chastised him for swearing in front of her, but it would have been hypocritical, given the circumstances. “Think about it. She set four werewolves on me, left me for dead, and tried to ruin my career. When you add in what she did with Brandon, I can only—” Having let that slip, I stopped talking before admitting anything further and caught Nolan revealing a worried expression.