It was Aileen.
“Mum?” I whispered, my hands falling to my side.
She smiled as our magic faded from the air, her eyes crinkling at the corners.
“Skye,” she said. “I come back to you now at the turnin’ of the tide.”
I frowned. “Wait. Isn’t that a line from Lord of the Rings?”
“Yes, but it’s a good one. Very fittin’, don’t you think?”
I was flabbergasted, and my mouth flapped uselessly. “What… How… When…”
“Can I come inside? It’s rather chilly out here.”
I stood aside as she came in, the reality of her being alive not hitting me as hard as it should have. Not yet, anyway. I was sure I would be visiting the toilet bowl again soon.
The moment the door closed, Aileen pulled me into a tight hug, squashing the air out of my lungs. “My daughter,” she murmured. “Why do you smell like midge cream?”
I didn’t know what to say, so I blurted the first thing that came to mind. “Aileen… Carman’s here. She’s in Ireland.”
She pulled away, staring at me with unguarded concern. “How?”
“Aileen…” My bottom lip trembled, and suddenly, I was two years old again with a scraped knee. “I stuffed everything up.”
“I seriously doubt that. You’re my daughter.” She glanced over my shoulder and frowned. “Why is there a dead tree in my living room?”
I’d totally forgotten about the Christmas tree that had turned brown a week ago. “I think you’ll find the cottage is legally mine.”
“Hmm. You’re right…” Aileen wrapped her arm around my waist and led me into the lounge room.
“Are you hungry? You must be.” Wriggling out of her grasp, I legged it into the kitchen.
Leaning against the counter, I drew in a breath, my lungs burning. Aileen was alive. Aileen was alive and in the next room. My mother. I’d hated her for leaving for so long but had then come to understand her and the Crescent Calling—maybe I even loved her a little—and now she’d come back to life. She better not be a zombie because I was fresh out of brains.
Reaching for the last packet of chocolate biscuits, I went back into the lounge room and set them on the coffee table.
“Oohh, Chocolate Kimberleys,” Aileen exclaimed, opening the packet.
“How are you here?” I asked. “I mean… I’ve seen a lot of weird shit but resurrection? This is a new bag of crazy.”
“I never made it to the ancestors,” she replied, nibbling on a chocolate biscuit. “I was in between, and it took me a while to find my way back. I didn’t expect it, to be honest. When I told Boone to protect you, I thought I was a goner.” She humphed. “Luckily, I didn’t arrive because they’re the most difficult bunch of spirits I’ve ever dealt with. I wasn’t ready for an eternity with them. It would drive me around the bend and back.”
I screwed my face up, wondering why that sounded so familiar. “I think I was there.”
Aileen almost dropped her biscuit. “What? On the other side?”
“In the hawthorn, you mean? That’s where they are, right?”
Aileen nodded.
“Uh… There was a thing with a craglorn and…” I didn’t want to say Boone’s name because then I would have to explain, and I was humiliated enough with all my stabbing in the dark and nonsense dreams.
“And?” she prodded.
I lifted up my T-shirt, stopping an inch away from flashing her.
“Skye!” Her hand flew to her mouth.
“This was another one,” I said lamely. “Today. I put midge cream on it. It seems to be helping.”
“There was another one?”
“Three, if you want to get specific. Wait. Five. Yeah, there were five.”
“Skye Williams,” Aileen exclaimed, getting all motherly.
“Am I grounded?”
“I think we’re past that stage, don’t you? How much did it take?”
“Not much.”
She eyed me for a moment, then seemed satisfied. This day was getting more whacked as it went.
“Ahh, it’s good to be home…” Shoving the last of the biscuit into her mouth, Aileen kicked up her feet and began picking leaves and grit from her hair. “Tell me about the craglorn. Do you feel sick?”
“I barfed big time, but I was able to get it back.”
“What? The vomit? Skye, that’s disgustin’.”
“No! I don’t lick up neon yellow spew, thank you very much. I’m talking about my magic. You know, the Crescent Legacy or whatever fancy-pants name you want to slap on it. I took it back, then zapped its ass. Pow!” I swatted the air with my fist.
“You took it back?” Aileen stopped playing with her hair.
I nodded and poked at the mark on my stomach. “Served it right. I warned it, but it didn’t listen. It was all mmaaggiiccc, blergh!”
Aileen looked thoughtful but didn’t share any of it with me. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to take my magic back. Is that what made me throw up? Better not have because there went my plan for getting stolen Legacies back to their rightful owners. Throwing up was the worst.
My stomach flip-flopped again. This was happening way too fast. Thinking about the Chariot, I wondered if this was what it heralded all along. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d misinterpreted the tarot cards. Aileen was back… Like, really back.
“Are you really here?” I wanted to pinch Aileen to make sure she was solid. I’d seen some crazy things since moving to Derrydun, but this was the craziest by far. “I mean, I’ve had weird dreams about purple typewriters, and there was this thing about elephant toast, and there was this fae that stole the face of my ex-boyfriend, and I poked a wolf’s eye out with a stick… Oh! And there was the swim I took with the sluagh, and the hawthorn tried to warn me about the Nightshade Witches, then there—”
“Skye,” Aileen interrupted. “Calm down. I’m really here.”
“How? I mean, you just said you never made it to the other side, but how?”
She sank back into the armchair and drew in a deep breath before letting it out in one big whoosh.
“I was pulled into the earth,” she began. “But my magic cocooned me.”
“But we went to the clearing,” I argued. “There was nothing there. Nothing at all. The earth wasn’t disturbed or anything. I don’t understand…”
“After survivin’ this long, I’ve stopped askin’ questions myself. Though I gathered it mustn’t have been my time.”
“But you must remember something,” I argued. “That can’t be it!”
“I remember usin’ the last of me strength to cast a cocoon around myself. Then there was darkness. Lots of darkness. I suppose that’s when I died, and you were Called. Somethin’ brought me back and stopped me from crossin’ into the hawthorn with the ancestors, but I can’t really explain what. Perhaps me spell spared me and gave me another chance. It felt like I went for a really long swim through sludge, not knowin’ which way I was supposed to go. Then I swam into the forest, pulled myself out of the ground, and here we are. I’m glad you’ve got biscuits.”
“Well, I’m glad you’re here,” I said sullenly. “I’ve got a lot of mess to clean up. I could do with a hand.”
“I can’t fix this for you, Skye. I’m not a plot device dropped in at the right moment to make all your mistakes go away. I’m not in control of the coven anymore.”
“Why not?”
“Technically, I did die but not really. It messed up the bloodline, and magic can be very literal about these things.”
“So this is some kind of magical time warp where the space-time continuum has folded in on itself?”
Aileen blinked, looking bewildered, then shrugged. “You could say it like that, but the simple version is the mantle passed to you, and once you’ve got it, you can’t hand it back. You’re in charge of the coven now, and whatever comes next, you must lead with your Legacy.”
“So, I’m your boss.”
“Kind of.�
��
“You sort of died, and even though you’re back, you got demoted anyway?”
“I wouldn’t say it like that,” she said with a huff.
“It’s exactly like that.”
“Where’s Boone?” Aileen asked, abruptly changing the subject. She looked around the cottage as if he would poke his head out from behind the couch at any second.
“Uh…”
“Skye?”
I played with the ring on my finger and looked anywhere but at Aileen. The floral curtains had a rather interesting pattern to them even though they were ugly as sin, and I’d been too lazy to change them over.
“Skye?” Aileen prodded again. “Where is Boone?”
“Gone,” I replied with a sigh.
“Gone? Where?”
“Home.” It was as simple as that.
Aileen’s gaze dropped to my finger, and her eyebrows knitted together. “His memory came back.”
It was a statement, not a question, so I didn’t bother replying.
“Where is home, Skye?”
“Carman,” I replied, twisting the ring around my finger. “He’s one of Carman’s sons.”
Aileen let her head fall. “And that ring?”
“I love him,” I whispered, the words tearing open the wound in my heart again. “He asked me to marry him at Christmas and…”
“Oh, Skye…”
“I’ve got a lot to tell you,” I murmured. “So much has happened.”
“Then you better start at the beginnin’.”
“But we don’t have time,” I complained. “Carman is coming, and she could be here at any moment! I’ve been trying to prepare, but…” I felt like bursting into tears. “I told you. I stuffed everything up.”
“We have time,” Aileen said, placing her hand on my knee. “This is important, Skye. Take a deep breath, and tell me about arrivin’ in Derrydun. Did Robert O’Keefe help you?”
Doing as she said, I breathed deeply, then exclaimed, “Let me tell you about that scoundrel, Robert O’Keefe!”
Chapter 15
When the sun rose the next morning, it broke through the clouds for the first time in months.
I scarcely had the brainpower to work out the omen to go with it. I’d had an hour of sleep on the back of an entire night bringing Aileen up to speed on everything that had happened since she’d, well, carked it. The craglorns, the ritual, what I’d done to the Nightshade Witches, the visions the hawthorn had shown me, the athame I’d found buried in the tower house, the swim I’d taken with the sluagh, Boone’s wolf shape and the healing powers of his animal tongue…all of it. Well, except the part where Boone and I’d done it in a ditch. I left that bit out. There were some things you just didn’t tell your mother.
I was currently sitting at the kitchen table in a state of fatigue and shock, a can of energy drink open in front of me. Aileen—all washed and smelling like roses—was sorting through the fridge, clucking her tongue at every over-processed, genetically modified convenient food item I’d stuffed in there. I was having another nonsense dream. If that were the case, then who knew what it would manifest as when I woke up. Arctic, honeysuckle, powder puff, ice cream most likely.
“I’ve been having dreams,” I said.
“Of?”
I shrugged.
“I can’t hear you shruggin’,” Aileen declared, her head still stuffed into the fridge.
“I don’t know,” I said. “That’s the point. I mean, I know I’ve been dreaming something important, but when I try to recall them, it’s all purple monkey, elephant, toaster, lima bean.”
“Lima bean?”
“I made that last one up.”
“Hmm…” she mused, stacking up the dozen frozen meals on top of the frozen pizza. “It could mean a lot of things.”
“Like?”
“You say the hawthorn’s been talkin’ to you?”
I nodded.
She looked at me curiously, then shrugged. “We’ll just have to wait and see.”
“Is that it?” I exclaimed. “We just have to wait and see? What if I have a brain tumor?”
“You don’t have a brain tumor,” she retorted. “I would’ve smelled it.”
“That’s not weird at all!”
The resemblance was uncanny. Aileen even thought the same way I did—in sarcasm and pop culture references. Was sass a genetic trait? I was fast becoming a believer.
“What’s normal in our world, Skye? We talk to magical trees and protect humanity from starvin’ creatures trapped here from another plane of existence. Leprechauns are real, shadow people are real, and golden light shoots from our fingertips!”
My shoulders sank. “Point.”
Our world was crazy and wonderful, but it had a darker side. One that had been with us for a thousand years.
After hoping the hawthorn had been right about Aileen being alive and finding nothing at the site of her death, after all the disappointments—I couldn’t quite fathom the fact she was pulling out all my frozen meals from the freezer and scolding me like I was five years old. Seeing my mother in the kitchen, checking how well I adulted, was really messing with my head. I never had any of this growing up, and I’d come to accept she was gone forever only a few months ago.
I wondered what Dad would think about all this. Did he know about her being a witch? I didn’t think so. It wasn’t like I was accidentally going to set something on fire in the midst of a tantrum. My magic had been bound long before Aileen had answered the Crescent Calling. It wasn’t until Robert O’Keefe had shown up and unbound my Legacy with his golden pen that things had started getting weird.
That was another revelation from last night. Robert O’Keefe, the Danny DeVito lookalike, was a leprechaun. It explained a lot.
“Mum… Aileen… I mean…”
She glanced up from the fridge and frowned. “Call me what you like, Skye. I know I wasn’t there. I don’t blame you. You can call me ‘that bitch-faced scrag’ if you like, and I won’t ground you or anythin’.”
“It’s just…” I didn’t know how to express what I was thinking without hurting her feelings. “I get it now, but when you left, it took me a while to understand you weren’t coming back. I got used to it then. Lots of kids I went to school with had single parents, so I didn’t think I was special or anything. When Robert O’Keefe showed up… It hadn’t been long since Dad passed away and…”
“I regret what happened with your father, I do… I wanted to protect you from all of this. Both of you.” She picked up a frozen chicken meal and scowled at it. “I never told him about this life. He never knew what I could do, and back then… I didn’t want you to be drawn into this awful existence. Once, I imagine it would’ve been wonderful bein’ a witch.”
“Yeah, a thousand years ago,” I drawled.
“Exactly. It’s always been a burden I wanted to spare you from. Look at that mark on your stomach. I never wanted you to face a craglorn let alone have your magic siphoned by one.”
“Yeah, you wanted to spare me until Boone got you killed.” I knew it wasn’t his fault, but I was in a mood, and my mouth was running away with itself. What a bitch.
Aileen shook her head. “No, it wasn’t his fault. It was what it was and nothin’ more. I assume he told you about it?”
I nodded, knowing I was just sulking and making excuses. Sometimes, shit just happened, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. Unless it was me and my quick temper, shit had nothing to do with it.
“He wasn’t going to tell me,” I said. “About his memories being unlocked.”
“Boone’s brother came to Derrydun because Carman wanted to separate you,” Aileen said matter-of-factly. “Together, you were stronger.”
“And I sent him straight back to her,” I muttered. “If I’d just spoken rationally to him, then he’d be here right now.”
“Maybe, maybe not. It’s no use dwellin’ on what-ifs, Skye.”
“That’s easy for you to say!
” I threw my hands into the air in frustration.
“Why would you think that?” she asked. “You’re lucky. Your grandmother, great-aunt, and great-grandmother didn’t come back. I knew of my magic, but I was never any good at it. I was the only child, the last Crescent in a new generation, much like you, and I was hopeless. Magic never came easy to me, not like everyone else. I’d watch them all twirl around the hawthorn, flick their fingers and make the clearin’ bloom. When I tried, I made everythin’ wither and die. Always too much magic, my mother would tell me. You’re not tryin’. I wanted to be anywhere else but here. Guardin’ a tree when I could be backpackin’ across Europe and bein’ promiscuous? That was much more excitin’.”
“So when you came back…”
“I was takin’ a stab in the dark. I knew all the pieces—in that, our stories differ—but controllin’ what I’d spent a lifetime rebellin’ against wasn’t easy.”
I opened my mouth to say ‘you didn’t have Carman breathing down your neck,’ but it was just another excuse. I’d been full of them since she’d turned up last night. Coming back from the dead was a huge thing, and here I was just waiting to dump all my crap on her head. I finally had a mother, but it didn’t mean I had to regress twenty years into adolescence. Besides, she said it herself. I was the head of the coven now. I guess that meant I had to act like I knew what I was doing at least some of the time.
I sighed and rubbed my finger over the condensation on the side of the pizza box.
“The worst was knowin’ I wasn’t there when they needed me most,” she added. “Guilt held me back for a long time.”
What did I say to that? The Nightshade Witches had burned our family alive while she was living in Australia and raising a family. Who knew what would’ve happened if she’d remained. Aileen was right about all the what-ifs. All we had was now.
“We can’t afford to wait anymore,” Aileen said. “Now I’m back, it’s only a matter of time before Carman finds out. We have the element of surprise.”
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