Dad winced.
Bingo.
“In fact, honey. You’re right. It has everything to do with the curse.” Mom inhaled a shaky breath. “We wanted to hide you from whoever is attacking children.Powerfulchildren. By making you appear weak, we were protecting you.”
“And humiliating me,” I muttered. “Do you know how many classes I spent frustrated? How many insults I listened to?”
Mom pressed her lips together. “I hate to admit this, but that was part of the plan too. When you expressed interest in enrolling at Spellcasters, Dad tightened the bond. We thought if you weren’t good at magic, that you’d—”
My eyes widened. “Give up on my dream!” I shot up from my chair. “Why would you want me to fail? And what about putting me in danger during the trials?”
“Pea, we made sure that if you truly needed your power, you could access it. Now, please, sit down,” Dad pleaded, but I refused.
“You always said I could be whatever I wanted to be, but then you manipulated my power behind my back to ensure that I wasn’t prepared. Why?”
“We didn’t want anyone to come after you,” Dad said. “If you appeared powerless, why would they?”
“Is that why you quit espionage? So you’d draw less attention to the family?” They shot nervous glances at each other. My eyes narrowed, and I sat, intent on getting answers. “What else aren’t you telling me?”
Dad’s jaw worked from side to side, and then he lifted his hand and waved it in the air. Although I couldn’t see his power because he’d made it colorless, I felt it swirl around me like a protective cocoon.
“What don’t you want others to hear?” I asked
My parents leaned closer to me, and after a tense moment, Mom spoke. “We knew the black witch who cast the curse. She acted as my midwife.”
I gasped. “You hired a black witch to deliver me?!”
Mom shook her head. “No. Not really. I’ve gotten used to calling her a black witch because in witching circles that’s expected, but Desdemona was anything but dark. She was an old woman who kept to herself. She used to deliver babies long ago and had stopped about a decade prior. Desdemona delivered your father and acted as the family healer for years, so when he approached her to deliver you, she agreed. Her favor to our family might have been her downfall.” Tears pricked in Mom’s eyes, and she wiped them away. “Desdemona wouldn’t hurt a fly, and certainly not children. She actually came to our house the morning before the curse became public knowledge. We weren’t around.”
“Why would she stop by the house?”
“She’d been feeling off for days, but was a tough cookie and went about her business. In retrospect, we think she felt the vision building,” Dad replied. I narrowed my eyes, and he extrapolated. “As your mother said, Desdemona was our midwife, and I’d known her all my life. I don’t believe she cast a curse that day, but experienced a vision. Her first and only. First visions often take hours, if not days, to come to the surface. Once the vision was closer to being revealed, she probably figured out what was happening, but didn’t understand why. She was quite old to be experiencing visions, after all. So she came to us. When we weren’t there, she went to our office at the PIA to look for us, but the vision spewed out before she was even completely in the building.”
“And then she just died?” I asked, my tone disbelieving.
“Yes, honey,” Mom said softly. “Contrary to what you see in the movies, being a seer takes a great deal of training. If you simply have a vision—or a prophecy, like Desdemona did—it’s detrimental to the body. Too much energy flowing through you wreaks havoc on your cells—just like it would if you cast a powerful curse without preparation. She was old and didn’t survive.”
I pressed my lips together. There was action all around us, people laughing, hugging, and talking. I experienced none of their glee, only confusion.
“So you think it isn’t a curse, but aprophecy? Aren’t those inaccurate and kinda laughed at in our society? A curse sounds more likely. Clearly, a lot of other people think so too, and have raised their kids accordingly.”
“You should know, pea,” Dad whispered, “that when Desdemona came by our house, she also left a note. Well, more of a scribble really. It was difficult to read, which only lends credence to our idea of a vision building—they can scramble the brain.”
My heart rate accelerated. “What did it say?”
Mom and Dad shared a long, pointed look before turning their full attention on me once again.
Dad gulped. “It said something dark was searching for you.”
Even though my frustration at Mom and Dad lingered, I eventually broke bread with them at the Yule Feast. We didn’t talk about the curse, or prophecy, with others around, but that didn’t stop my mind from whirring with questions.
Was there more to the prophecy? How did we know it was reputable? Prophecies were notoriously flimsy, but therehadbeen a few oracles throughout history who’d been spot-on with everything they’d predicted. Because of this, prophecies could never be entirely discounted.
Alex and Eva joined the table after dessert. I introduced them to my parents, and Dad and Eva launched into a rousing discussion of the latest anthropological thriller that had just hit the big screen. Mom and Alex, on the other hand, struck up a dialogue about healing. Both conversations gave me time to continue mulling over what I’d learned.
It was only when Hunter arrived, greeting my parents and swooping up Eva to dance, that I snapped out of it and noticed Mom was watching me carefully.
“We can’t let them have all the fun, now can we?” Alex asked, holding out his hand.
