She sighed. “And yet still, how could I have made a different choice? When your mother first approached the coven, I wasn’t interested in adding another witch. Especially not one with two young children. Evie was a baby, and you looked like you’d be a pain in my neck.” She narrowed her eyes at me. “I was right.”
I ignored that. “What made you decide to let her join?”
“She was powerful.”
I angled my head and let the silence lie between us. Gemma scowled. “And she begged for my help. She said if I didn’t help her hide your sister, you were all dead.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t even try that shit with me. A desperate woman comes to you with two kids, says she’s in serious trouble, and you don’t even ask what that trouble is?”
“I assumed she was fleeing an abusive partner. She had cuts and scrapes on her, and she owned nothing. Gail was the one to convince me that it was our duty— both as women and witches— to take her in.”
“What did you do to Evie?”
“Your mother insisted that she could be tracked. She said that if she was found, she would be taken, likely killed. I believed she was being overdramatic. But when I examined the child, I knew there was something different about her.”
“Different how?”
“She held many ‘threads’ of magic. It was as if your mother had laid with men from several different factions— fae, werewolf, demon— and they had all fathered the same baby. Impossible, of course. But I understood why your mother was so afraid. She was friends with a light fae woman who had urged her to seek out the most powerful coven she could find and ask for assistance. If the baby’s father had found her, I had no doubt that he would take such an unusual child.”
“So you agreed to help.”
“Yes. We needed a way to cloak the baby if she was being tracked— and I certainly believed your mother about that. A child so unusual would be valuable to every faction. There was only one way we could think to hide her. Our house had been fed magic by hundreds of witches since the portals opened. We created a spell— one that had never been attempted before. It would tie Evie to the house in an almost… symbiotic relationship. She would be shielded— both by every witch who lived in the house, and the house itself.
“I hadn’t expected the side effect. Evie is powerful enough that we no longer needed to renew the wards except to adjust them once every few years. If she’d been there, it’s likely the house would have been able to fight the fire.”
That creeped me out. “You say that like it was sentient.”
“It didn’t have true awareness, but it had been so heavily spelled for so long, it should never have burned.”
“She can never know,” I said. Gemma gave me a sharp nod. With this, at least, we were in agreement. If Evie knew that the house likely wouldn’t have burned if she’d been home, that all those witches would probably be alive if she hadn’t gone on her date… my chest ached at the thought.
“If the house is now magically dead, is it going to have an impact on Evie? On her health? Or her power?”
Gemma shook her head. “Not her health. I’m unsure about her power. She was so young when the spell was placed. And it will no longer hide her from those who were hunting her.”
I leveled her with a hard stare. “The spell you created ensured that Evie would want to stay home most of the time.”
Gemma was silent. I ground my teeth. “I’m right, aren’t I?”
“She needed to be within range of the house for the majority of her life in order for the spell to hold.”
“When were you going to tell her? Were you going to just let her grow old in that house, never knowing that she was under a compulsion to spend most of her life there?”
She sighed, suddenly looking so old and tired that a frisson of alarm went through me.
“We saved her life, girl.”
“And I’m thankful for that. But now she’s an adult, with no idea why she suddenly feels like a weight is suddenly off her shoulders– which is obviously confusing as fuck since so many members of her family are dead. She’s completely unprepared for whoever is hunting her.”
“She will learn. You will teach her. And now, she will have you, and all of the demons behind you to keep her safe. I have done my job.”
“Did you know there was a suppression spell on my power?”
She shook her head. “Your mother had taken care of that before she arrived. We never would have sheltered a half-demon child.”
