“You’re the same sign as me, you know. Cancer. We’re sensitive. We have to wait for our feelings to lead the way. My birthday is ten days before yours. I always thought that was a good omen.”
“You believe in astrology?” I asked, barely managing to suppress a groan.
“Oh yes, don’t you?”
“The stars are burning spheres of gas millions of light years away. They have no bearing on our love lives or career decisions. If you argue for astrology than you’re arguing for predestiny, which is completely opposed to quantum physics unless you subscribe to retrocausation. And even if the stars in the sky when you were borndidsomehow impact your personality and future, then astrology wouldstillbe wrong, because of precession and the earth’s wobble. I’m not actually a Cancer, I’m a Gemini, which doesn’t matter because it’s complete bullshit.”
She laughed, that tinkling, singsong sound that made my chest ache. “Oh, you are wonderful. You have Robert’s intensity.”
“You mean Daigh?”
She shook her head. “Robert, I think. He was soseriousabout his art. Daigh infused him with talent, but he already had the visual eye. He excelled at figurework because he likedthe preciseness of the classical proportions. The problem was, he wastooscientific. His paintings didn’t breathe, not the way Daigh’s did. Did he keep painting after Daigh left his body?”
“He made some weird pictures of the fae.” I debated telling her about the triptych hanging in the National Gallery that mirrored my own dreams, but decided against it. “And one final painting – a portrait, I think. It’s in some private collection now, but apparently it was terrible. The critics were quite mean.”
Aline shook her head, a tiny laugh escaping from her lips. “He wouldn’t have liked that. He couldn’t handle criticism. Neither of them could. They were alike in so many ways, it was a clever ruse – they fooled me for many months.”
I did have a question. “Did you love Daigh?”
“I don’t know,” she answered. “I suppose I did. When I fell in love, I thought Daigh and Robert were one person. I thought the person I loved was broken, intense, passionate. Even when I discovered the truth I couldn’t separate the two of them in my mind or heart.”
“I get that, in a weird way.” I thought of the guys. They were each a part of me now, a part of the whole. I couldn’t separate my love for them as individuals from my love of the whole. If I lost one of them, it would be like losing them all.
“Enough about me. I want to know everything aboutyou, my daughter. You came out of me and you were whisked off from the ritual to that dodgy orphanage, and by your accent I presume you ended up in the States. Please, indulge your mother. What happened between then and you tossing my painting on a fire?”
I told her about the Crawfords finding me on their mission trip and how they’d arranged an illegal adoption and raised me in a tiny, evangelical town in rural Arizona.
“They were good people?”
“A little too willing to believe creationism is a science, but yeah.” My throat closed. “They were the best people.”
“I love that the same religion that reviled me and my kin was the one that saved my daughter,” she smiled. “That feels like the hands of fate.”
The idea that my aversion to Christianity might have been an inherited trait, and that I had this thing in common with the woman who’d birthed me – even though she believed in astrology – made a shiver run down my spine. My spirit magic prickled against my skin, teased to life by the connections Aline and I were making.
I kept talking, telling her about I’d always felt out of place in Coopersville, that I’d looked to the stars for answers, but not in the way she did. I explained how the Crawfords indulged my fascination with science, how they brought me all the books they didn’t believe in and scrimped and saved to send me to space camp, how they drove me out into the mountains for scientific surveys and helped me fill in my scholarship application for MIT. My throat caught as I talked about Kelly, who despite her popularity always ignored her friends’ attempts to exclude me. She always tried to make me feel like a normal teenager, even though I wasn’t.
And now she hates me. And I hate her.
Tears streamed down Aline’s cheeks as I spoke. I kept stopping to ask if she was okay, but she’d shake her head and beg me to keep going. I talked until my throat closed up and my own tears rolled down my cheeks.
“My heart hurts to see you upset. To me, it’s as if you were still that tiny little babe in my arms. The feeling of your soft skin, that amazing baby smell.” Aline sniffed. “And now you’re all grown up and I missed it all. Is it me? Is me being here upsetting you?”
“No.” I shook my head. “I mean, yes, but it’s fine. My whole world is upside down. My parents who’ve looked after me mywhole life are dead. You’re supposed to be dead but here you are. And Kelly?—”
A shadow moved along the bookshelf behind the door. I whipped my head up. “Who’s there?”
“If that’s you, Rowan sweetie, I could do with another plate of those fabulous scone,” Aline held out the empty plate.
A figure lurched from behind the door, grabbed the plate from Aline, and smashed it on the floor. Aline yelped. Sherds of crockery scattered across the room.
I jumped out of the seat, heart pounding. “Kelly?”
Kelly’s blonde hair hung over her face as she stared at the broken plate, her chest heaving. She stabbed her arm out, pointing a shaking finger at Aline. “That’s your mother.”
Kelly heard everything.She knows about Aline being trapped in the painting and about my powers and who my father was.There was no lying my way out of this now.
I nodded.
