Charmed (19 page)

If my life were a book, it would need a whole chapter dedicated to Impromptu Meetings in Kitchens.

Aunt Penny sits across the table from me, Bishop at my side. They’re both waiting for me to explain why we’re gathered here.

“So listen,” I start. “I’m going to be completely honest with you and tell you everything that’s been going on, and in exchange I ask that you please,
please
consider cutting me some slack. I could keep this from you and you might never know about it.”

For a second it looks like my aunt wants to give me a good old-fashioned spanking, but finally she nods. I take a deep breath.

“I’ve been going to Los Demonios.”

“What?” She launches to her feet.

I sit there quietly while she loses her shit.

“How could you be so stupid?” she yells. “I can’t believe it. Right under my nose!”

“Are you finished?” I ask. “Because there’s more.”

She slumps back into her chair, then waves a hand impatiently for me to continue.

“Remember on TV the other morning—there was a teen who was missing and you asked if I knew him?”

Angry blotches have sprouted up on her neck.

“Well, there have been more teens missing.”

“So?” she says, shifting in her chair.

“So they’re inside Los Demonios. Dozens of them. The Chief is collecting them for something—he says to save them from—”

“Wait a minute,” she interrupts. “Did you just say the Chief?”

“Yeah, why?”

“And you talked to him?” she asks, staring at me with a scary intensity.

“Yes…,” I answer cautiously.

She slaps a hand over her mouth. Her eyes triple in size as the reality of what I’m saying sinks in. “Never again,” she says. “That man is dangerous. Stay far, far away from him, okay? Promise me.”

I exchange a glance with Bishop.

“Why?” I ask.

“Because he’s a disgusting man,” she spits, shaking her head. “Worse than the Family. Worse than anyone. Why do you think he’s in that place?”

The hate coming from her is so uncharacteristic I don’t know how to react.

“Is there something you’re not telling me?” I ask.

She pauses a beat too long, and I know that I’ve hit on the truth.

“Aunt Penny, you have to tell me what you know.”

“I don’t have to tell you anything,” she retorts. “I’m the adult here. I’m your guardian, not the other way around. It’s time you started acting like the kid in this relationship.”

“How can I trust you when I know you’re keeping things from me?”

The hypocrisy of my words hits me. But if Aunt Penny recognizes it too, she doesn’t show it. She puts her head in her hands, and I can’t be sure that she’s not crying. I wait for her to look up.

I wait a long time.

When she does, her eyes are filled with remorse. Suddenly, I’m not so sure I want to know what she has to say.

“Gwen and I,” she starts. “We were so different in so many ways, but one thing we had in common was bad taste in men.”

I sit up straighter, my throat going dry at the mention of Mom. “What does my mom have to do with this?”

“No…,” Bishop says. I look across at him, then back at Aunt Penny, my chest constricting with panic.

“What?” I ask, feeling like I’m missing something important.

And then it hits me.

I shake my head.

Aunt Penny’s face is full of apology. “Indie, the Chief is your dad.”

T
he ground sways violently under my feet.

She’s lying. She has to be lying. The Chief is a sorcerer; there’s no way he could be my dad.

But even in my haze, the devil on my shoulder asks, “Why not?” My dad’s been gone since I was three, and Mom never kept any pictures of him. I don’t have a single memory of the man, and I never really cared until now—I had Mom, and she was all I needed. I could never understand why some people would go to such lengths to find a person who’d dumped them like week-old trash.

I think back to the day I met the Chief in Los Demonios. To his calculating eyes and too-large teeth. Besides the
blond hair—his straight, mine fiercely curly—we look nothing alike.

“You’re wrong.” I send Aunt Penny a challenging glare. Bishop rubs my back, but I shrug off his touch. “She’s wrong! You’re wrong!”

But Aunt Penny just gives me this infuriating apologetic smile. All of the fears I’ve had about myself in the past few months, that I’m a bad person, ugly in some deep, fundamental way, come crashing back into my mind. Could it be that I’ve been fighting against my true nature all along, that the black parts of myself are just the real me pushing through?

I get up and walk away from the table, my fingers trembling at my temples. “I would know my dad if I saw him. And that monster is not my dad.” Of course my argument is ridiculous. I don’t give her a chance to say so. “How can you be so sure? You’ve always said you never met my dad.”

Aunt Penny drops her gaze into her lap.

I give a snort of derision. “Oh, so you were lying about that too?”

“It was just easier than answering questions about him,” she says. “Your grandma thought it was better if you didn’t know about him.”

I swallow the panic rising in my throat, hot tears blurring my vision.

“Nothing you’ve said proves he’s my dad.”

Aunt Penny gives a resigned sigh. “Your dad is a sorcerer.
He’s cruel and has no regard for anyone besides himself, and his nickname is the Chief because he killed dozens of humans and carried their heads around on staffs, which got him tossed into Los Demonios. What are the chances there are two people who meet all those descriptions in the world? What more proof do you need?”

I can’t pull in enough oxygen.

“We look nothing alike,” I whisper. But even now, I have to admit there are similarities. The light eyes. The fine bone structure and full lips.

“And what about Rowan?” I ask, remembering the Chief’s speech about his sister.

“Rowan’s there too?” Aunt Penny gasps.

“She’s been to visit him.”

“God,” she says. “That woman is vile—nothing but a troublemaker. Constantly stirring up problems for the Family. It doesn’t surprise me that she’s part of this. You need to stay away from her.”

Acid burns my throat. This can’t be happening to me. This can’t be true. Yet more and more, it seems impossible to deny.

I’m part sorcerer.

A moan escapes me. Bishop pulls me back into my chair, and I bury my face in my hands. I can feel the weight of their stares on me as I cry.

I’m made of evil.

“Indie,” Bishop pleads.

I wish he would just leave. Doesn’t he get it? What it all means?

He pulls my hands from my face. “Indie. It doesn’t matter if he’s your dad. All of that—it’s just biology.”

I take a shuddery breath, but I won’t look at him. I’m so ashamed.

“Who you are isn’t about your DNA,” he continues. “I mean, it is, but it’s not what makes you
you
. You’re nothing like him—you’re
good
.”

I look at him then. I don’t know what I expected to see in his face, but it wasn’t this deep understanding, like he gets just what’s going through my mind, like he can see every dark part of me and he doesn’t think less of me for them.

Like he loves me.

Instantly, I remember crashing upstairs after Aunt Penny told me about her love affair with a sorcerer. I hadn’t said so, but I’d thought it was vile that she’d considered one of them worthy of her. And now here was Bishop, accepting me without batting an eye. I could probably announce I was also one-quarter alien and he’d be cool with it.

Bishop brushes his fingers over mine. I’m so sorry about Cruz in this moment that I almost break down and tell him everything. I don’t deserve him.

“Bishop is right,” Aunt Penny says, interrupting my train of thought. “Me and your mom, we’re your family. Not him.”

My throat constricts at the mention of Mom. I want so
badly for her to be here right now. I need answers. I need to know why she kept all this from me.

“How?” I start. “How could she?” Bishop rubs my back in small circles. This time, I don’t shrug him off.

“Haven’t you always wondered how Gwen could possibly know nothing about witches?” Aunt Penny asks.

“She was a human,” I answer defensively. “She wasn’t supposed to know.”

“But her own mother was a witch. Her sister too. Don’t you think she’d have caught on that something was up?”

“She
did
own an occult shop,” I spit. “She practiced Wicca.”

“She had her memory erased,” my aunt says.

“Wh-what do you mean?”

Aunt Penny takes a big breath, as if about to tell a long story. “Your mom, she was always so trusting. So open-hearted. Ivan would do the meanest things to her and she’d always take him back. When our mother found out Gwen was pregnant with Ivan’s child, she was so worried he’d harm her that she moved us across the country, here. But he found us, and Gwen took him back again, just like she always did.” Aunt Penny shakes her head. “She thought she could change him, that you guys would be this nice, happy family. She couldn’t believe it when the Family found him guilty of murder and threw him in Los Demonios. She cried for
months
after he was gone. We all thought she’d get over it eventually, but she just didn’t get better.
Our mother had to do something. Gwen had you to look after….” She trails off, leaving the implication hanging in the air.

“So she erased her own daughter’s memory?” I ask, incredulous.

“It was the only option,” Aunt Penny answers quickly. “If there had been any other way, she wouldn’t have done it.”

My heart aches suddenly for my mother, for her violation. I can’t believe they did this to her. I press the backs of my hands into my eyes, the promise of another headache throbbing against my skull.

“You make it seem so bad,” Aunt Penny says.

“It
is
bad.”

“She didn’t know the difference. She was cured!”

I feel sick. Overwhelmed. Exhausted.

I put up my hands. “Can I just—can I just have a minute to digest this?”

The room falls quiet, and there’s just the sound of the grandfather clock ticking away.

My thoughts speed in so many different directions I don’t know how to start processing them.

Mom’s memory was erased. I hate that so much that it hurts in a physical way, but there’s nothing I can do about it now.

The Chief is probably my dad. Bishop says it doesn’t matter, and I desperately want that to be true. Maybe I could
shrug it off if I’d discovered my dad was some deadbeat living off welfare in Illinois, but my dad is an evil sorcerer bent on killing people. A murderer. And I can’t help asking myself, can evil be inherited?

Finally, I allow myself to think of the scariest part, the part that sends a cold shiver straight down into my bones: if I’m going to save Paige and the rest of the teens, I’m going to have to go up against my dad. The only parent I have left. Could I kill him if it came to that? The thought makes me sick, but I know one thing for certain.

“I have to go back,” I say.

Bishop speaks first.

“Indie, I know this is shocking, but you can’t seriously be talking about going to Los Demonios again. We can work out a plan that doesn’t put you in mortal danger.”

“Listen,” I start. “I know you guys think I’m just saying all this because I have some vendetta against the Chief—I don’t. I don’t care if he’s my dad. I mean, yes, it’s shocking, but who he is isn’t what’s important right now. It’s what he’s doing. Something is going on in Los Demonios. Something big. And it’s not just Paige who is in trouble. There are dozens of kids in there, and something really bad is going to happen to them if we don’t stop him.” I take a measured breath. “I know it would be easier and safer if I just forgot about what I saw in there and let someone else worry about it, but I can’t do that, okay?”

I look from Bishop to Aunt Penny, waiting for the onslaught of arguments to fly at me from both sides.

“You’re right,” Aunt Penny whispers.

I lean forward, sure that I misheard her.

Aunt Penny covers her face with her hands. “I can’t believe I’m saying this.” She sighs, then drops her hands back into her lap. “Look. I don’t want you to go, but I don’t want you to live the rest of your life full of regrets because I stopped you from doing this. If you listen to everything I have to say and still feel like you need to go back there”—she shrugs—“then I’m not going to stop you.”

“You’re joking, right?” Bishop says.

“No.”

“Hello? Human heads on staffs? Didn’t we just talk about how sick the Chief is? And you want to let her go straight to him?”

“I can’t control her for the rest of her life, Bishop. I think the two times she managed to go to Los Demonios behind my back—behind both of our backs—are evidence of that.”

“And if she kept sneaking away to shoot up heroin you’d say the same thing? Oh well, can’t stop her! That’s some twisted logic you have there.”

“The last time I checked, you weren’t her guardian,” Aunt Penny retorts.

Bishop gets up so fast his chair crashes to the ground. A moment later, the front door bangs shut.

I desperately want to go after him and tell him that
everything is going to be okay, but I can’t make that promise, and I can’t let an opportunity like this one slip away. Aunt Penny could change her mind any minute.

We’re quiet a moment, the weight of our situation sinking in.

“We better get some sleep,” Aunt Penny says. “We’ve got a long day ahead of us.”

“We?” I ask, surprise written all over my face.

“Well, you’re not going alone. I’ll have to cancel drinks and apps with Chels, but I do what I gotta do.”

“You can’t come to Los Demonios,” I say. “You’ve got that AMO tracker thing.”

She shrugs nonchalantly, but she can’t hide the fear in her eyes. I won’t let her come—I won’t let another person I love get killed because of me—but the idea that she would bring on the wrath of the Family to help me makes me smile. In this moment, I feel the invisible wall that’s been between us since Mom died break down, and I’m suddenly looking at the old Aunt Penny again.

“I’m coming.”

Bishop’s voice shatters the intense quiet. I didn’t even hear him come back in. He’s leaning against the doorframe with his arms crossed over his chest and his lips pulled into a thin line. “I’ll go with Indie.”

“That’s a great idea,” Aunt Penny says. “Indie?”

Yes. It’s a great idea. So why am I not as happy as my aunt?

Bishop raises an eyebrow. “What’s wrong, Indie? Is there a reason you don’t want me to come?”

My cheeks flame at his accusatory tone, at the hint of a challenge in his eyes. I think of Cruz. Maybe Bishop suspects more than he’s let on.

I make myself meet his stare. “No. Of course not.”

“Good,” he says. “Then it’s settled. I’m coming with you to Los Demonios. So what’s our plan?”

“Plan?” I sputter.

“Well, we’re not going to just go in guns blazing, are we? We don’t even know what the Chief is up to. Have you talked to the families of the kidnapping victims?”

“Um, no,” I admit.

“That’s our first goal, then. See if they saw or heard anything that will give us a hint what the Chief wanted those kids for. If we’re going into that place, we need to be smart about it.”

I can’t help smiling. A genuine smile. Because for the first time since I learned that Paige was in that awful place, I feel like there’s a chance we might actually get her out.