She smiled softly, closing her eyes against the sensation of one of his hands playing in her hair. Ladybug knew she would go to bed that night with a crown of braids, the tangible signature of his affection. With another hand, he threaded their fingers together, and her eyes opened once more.
“Sometimes she did. She would read tarot cards or look into her scrying ball, whichever the client preferred. But it was more than just a carnival trick. Willow saw things in her dreams and in fires, in the reflection of glass. She saw that all on her own, even before Holt came to her.”
“So, because she was a talented soothsayer, she was given this familiar?” he questioned before stuffing his mouth with popcorn, black eyes moving like falling dominoes.
She shook her head, biting her lip. “No. Not quite. That was the way it might have happened, maybe. That was perhaps the future that would have been in-store otherwise. She might have been assigned a familiar through more traditional methods . . . but that wasn’t what happened. Holt sawher.”
Another handful of popcorn, slower this time. Ladybug noticed the hand that was absently braiding the edge of her shawl had stilled, fingers barely twitching. The hand in her hair had slowed as well.Always in awe of a good movie. I guess this counts.
“He saw her in the fire,” she went on. “Like I said, first you must understand about familiars. They don’t have power on their own. Well . . . they do, in a way, they’re connected to the root of magic, but they do not have the power to wield it without a witch. For a witch, a familiar is a conduit. Like a-a battery, or like a fiber optic line. They help a witch connect to her source of power; they assist her in harnessing her magic. But they don’t have power of their own, not truly.” She swallowed hard. “Hedoes.”
Ladybug held up a hand when Anzan’s mouth dropped open, just as easily taken in by the twists and turns of her clumsy narrative as he was with spy blockbusters.
“Don’t ask me how. I don’t know how, not really. None of us did. Willow used to say he was made of magic,” she laughed wistfully, almost able to hear Willow’s soft voice saying the words. “Authricia said it was because he was born twice of the fire. But however it came to be, he has a power of his own, and it is deeper than any witch I’ve ever known.” Another breath to steady herself, followed by a fortifying handful of popcorn. “He has the skill of pyromancy, and he saw my aunt in the fire. He came to her of his own accord and bound himself to her. This all happened before I was born, so there’s the beginning of your story, if I’m going to be graded later.”
Anzan nodded appreciatively. “You are doing yourself and your kin a credit, my Ladybug. The second showing is much better than the first.” She gasped in mock outrage again as he smiled wryly. “I get the feeling that this feline was not necessarily a welcome addition to your family’s household?”
She gave a small shrug, chewing for a moment. It was hard to say. “I didn’t know Holt as a young child. He went to the Collegium with Willow, before I was born, and they lived together out of town after she graduated. My mother came back to Cambric Creek to have me, and then we moved away once she found work.”
“Was your mother a seer as well?”
Ladybug smiled, her insides twisting with the bittersweet sadness that always came when she spoke of her mother.
“No. She was an herbalist, like me. We lived here in this house after I was born, and she finished her full accreditation with the coven. She got a job working in the lab of a burn unit at a big hospital system when I was just a few years old. I-I followed in her footsteps, I suppose.”
The tears were impossible to hold in then. She thought of her mother often of late. She had been just a girl when she had died, and while there was no doubt in her mind that both aunts watched over her still, she often wondered if her mother did as well. So much had changed that year, if her mother’s spirit had gone on any sort of extended holiday, she might scarcely recognize the woman who stood each day in their family work kitchen.You would be a stranger to her. She probably wouldn’t even recognize you today.
“Willow came to live with us for a while,” she went on, gratefully accepting the tissue he produced with one hand, while two others enfolded her own. “She came to get treatment at the hospital where my mother worked.”
Those years she remembered well. The cancer center had a wide glass atrium, and she would sit with her aunt on the second floor, facing an artificial lake, watching the ducks as Willow received that first round of chemotherapy. When her aunt’s hair began to fall out, Ladybug had been in charge of collecting the icy blonde locks from the sheet on the floor while her mother shaved Willow’s head in their small kitchen. The billows of hair had been woven into a small doll; one Ladybug still had.
“Holt wasn’t with her, though,” she went on, momentarily lost in her memories. “She wasn’t well enough to practice, and our apartment was small . . . I’m not really sure where he went. I never asked. After my mother died, when I came to live here permanently, he came and went. Authricia . . . well, it’s not that she didn’t like him. She held him in very high regard, but she didn’t trust him, not entirely.”
She could almost hear her great-aunt’s contralto voice ringing through the room.Walk wary of magic that is beyond understanding, little one. For it owes allegiance to no one.
“But even when he wasn’t here, they were very close, Holt and my aunt.Veryclose.”
“Were they lovers?”
She smiled wryly at the question, shrugging again.
“I don’t know. I was only a child, after all. Possibly? Probably? That wouldn’t have been uncommon, from what I know. The relationship between a familiar and their witch is intimate, dependent on trust. If they were lovers, they certainly wouldn’t have been the first pairing to share that relationship. They were . . . codependent. Enmeshed. Close in a way that was detrimental. Familiars are meant to help their witches leverage their ability and find clarity, but Authricia said all Holt did was cloud Willow. She was meant to use her ability as a seer for good, to help people and businesses, to help build a prosperous community.”
“She did not use her skill for such things?” Anzan pushed her hair over her shoulder, blotting her cheeks with another tissue, like an overprotective mother hen.
Ladybug took her time answering. After all, how could she be expected to have a full understanding of the way things were then? She had been an awkward, grief-stricken child with no friends. She already felt as if the whole world spoke in a hidden, second language she didn’t understand, and Holt and Willow communicated in a way comprehensible to only themselves.
“It’s not that she didn’t. She focused on raising me,” Ladybug said finally. “Once she was named my legal guardian. She took my mother’s death very hard. They were twins, after all. Authricia wanted her to work for the city, to use her gift in the planning office. Our family has always been close friends with the Hemmings, so that wouldn’t have been hard to arrange. Holt wanted her to stay focused on whatever nonsense he had her convinced of. They would speak of some vague future that had been set in motion, but it didn’t make sense to anyone but them. I don’t even think Willow understood it half the time. They argued over it. Over me,” she chuckled sheepishly, pausing to blow her nose.
“Little bug, I already dislike this feline. If you give me another reason to do so, I cannot promise that I will heed your warning of his alleged menace.”
“There’s no need for you to ambush him in the bushes,” she laughed. “She told him I was her only priority.”
She remembered that day as well, as Holt and her aunt argued in the garden.
“She is more important than any of that! Don’t you understand, beloved? Raising her with goodness, to understand what is right . . . that’s more important than anything.”
She’d been standing at the kitchen’s open doorway listening, only just home from school, still gripping her lunchbox, not understanding why Willow and Holt were having a row, only that she was the cause. Ladybug remembered shrinking, her excitement over the announcement that her class would be visiting the arboretum withering as she listened to Willow calling after him, the black cat streaking away through the bushes a moment later. He’d left that afternoon and hadn’t returned for more than a week.
