That gets everybody’s attention. Even Hazel’s.
Her mouth snaps shut, her lips a thin line as she stares at me.
“What are you trying to say?” she finally asks when the silence becomes too much for us to bear.
“I’m trying to say that you suppressed your magic when you were four years old.”
“Impossible,” Hazel argues, but her expression’s shifted, just a bit.
“Look.” I tap the frame. “Do you remember Mr. Bunny? I do.”
Rose frowns.
“You remember Mr. Bunny?” I repeat. “There’s no way you don’t. You dragged that thing around everywhere.”
Hazel sits up, lips thin, eyes tight. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“You stopped using your magic after we did this spell.” It comes out in a rush, a dam broken and I can’t hold it back anymore. “Because this is the day Mom and Dad left. They were afraid of us. I remember sitting in our room that we shared when we came to visit Grandma. This was before we all had our own separate rooms here. Mom and Dad were fighting. Screaming. Arguing with Grandma.” I lick my lips before continuing. “‘Take it away,’ they said. They didn’t want us anymore. They didn’t want us to be witches. They didn’t want us to have magic. And Grandma said that she could no more do that than she could cut off our hands, because the magic was a part of us.” I’m crying now, my breath coming in large sobbing gasps.
Gunner comes to sit next to my feet, nuzzling my calves. It doesn’t help.
Caleb tries to touch me again, but I shake him off.
I don’t want anyone to touch me right now. I need to say this, and I need to say it by myself.
“They were afraid of us,” I tell the three of them. “I distracted you all as best I could that night before Mom and Dad left so that you didn’t have to hear the same things that I was hearing.”
I look at my youngest sister, the tears mostly subsiding now, the hurt for her, not for me. “Hazel… you did hear it. You snuck out while they were arguing. I remember I had to grab you off the landing. But you heard them. You had magic, Hazel. Look.Lookat the proof right here. You were part of our coven before we even knew what that word meant. Before we even said it. You helped us call the corners, and do whatever spell this is — And I am almost positive that’s how the ward got set. We were the ones that created the ward and the pact with the kraken. Not Grandma. Us. We did this. And we have to fix it again. And it needs all four of us to happen.”
The house settles around us, just enough that I notice it, like it’s been trying to tell us this for years and now it can finally relax.
I’m anything but relaxed.
“Perfect,” Posey says after a long, pregnant pause. “So now we just have to figure out how to do that.”
I sink into the chair, narrowly avoiding knocking over the large framed photograph leaning against it. The photo of the four of us. Proof of all our magic, of Hazel’s locked away, hiding in the secret basement for all these years.
“What about all the bread I cooked?” Rose finally breaks the thoughtful silence, voice plaintive. “I spent so long making that damn bread.”
“I think I understand what happened with the bread that day,” I say slowly.
“What do you mean?” Rose asks.
“Think about it. Grandma and Nonna cooked all of that bread, and gave it out… And for what?”
They all stare at me, waiting for an answer.
“For what?” Rose repeats, sounding annoyed.
“For a distraction,” I tell them. “Think about it. They were boarding up all the windows. They were prepping for the storm. And the four of us? We should have been down there with them. We should have been handing out bread too. And where were we? Where were we?”
I press them, tapping the back of the photograph a little too angrily.
A piece of paper backing falls off the back and drifts to the carpet.
“We were doing this. The bread was a distraction. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t go give it out, because I’m sure people are hungry. And as weird as that bread is, who knows? Maybe it’ll help. Maybe the octopi cleaning up our stores want some bread.” I shrug. “I don’t know. I don’t even know if bread is good for octopi.”
“You’re getting way off track,” Posey says, holding up a hand. You think Grandma baked all that bread with Nonna just to distract everyone from the fact that we were doing that?
