by Rin Grey
But she had done all those things. It was hard not to feel the sting of the cut when she would always blame herself for those actions. Gemma was only stating the truth.
It was a struggle not to look away from her daughter’s hurt expression. And impossible to keep the wince from her own face.
Maybe Gemma needed to see that too.
And to hear the truth. “My magic erupted whenever I was feeling a strong emotion, yes,” she admitted. “Anger, fear, pain, all those would trigger it. I didn’t know why, and I had no control over it at all.”
“So you’re saying that you were angry enough at Tasha and I that you… you…” Gemma broke off, unable to finish the sentence.
Elizabeth didn’t blame her for the misconception, but it was one she was happy to set straight without any guilt. “I wasn’t trying to hurt you or Tasha. It wasn’t you I was angry at, I was angry at myself. Angry that I couldn’t do it all, be the sort of mother I wanted to be.”
“We could have been hurt, even if you didn’t mean to,” Gemma insisted.
Elizabeth couldn’t deny the accusation. It had kept her up far too many nights. “Yes, I know. That’s why I couldn’t stay. I didn’t trust myself. I knew I had to leave.”
“So now you’re trying to say you did the right thing by leaving us? You’re trying to justify what you did.” Gemma’s voice rose in a half shout, though she did glance towards the stairs up to Mitch’s room.
Of course she didn’t understand why Elizabeth had left. How could she?
“No,” Elizabeth said. “Nothing will ever justify that. But there was no right choice. It just was. I did the only thing I could do at the time. I’ll never forgive myself for it, but I had no other options.”
Her heart broke again, as it did every time she reviewed her life and tried to figure out how she could have done it better. No matter how much she went over it, she couldn’t come up with any option that didn’t end with her leaving.
The pain from that never went away.
Gemma opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out. She closed it again.
Elizabeth could see it in her eyes. She was a mother too. She had to be wondering what she would do in the same situation, and possibly coming to the same conclusion.
Her expression eased a little of the constriction around Elizabeth’s heart. Soothed just a little of the pain that never went away.
She berated herself for that. She wasn’t saying this to make herself feel better. She shouldn’t be feeling better. Nothing had actually changed.
She might have been able to forgive herself if that had been the only time it had happened. But that pain hadn’t stopped her from doing the same thing all over again, years later. Elizabeth bit her lip, welcoming the pain.
And it wouldn’t stop it happening again. That was why she couldn’t let herself think she had a place here. She didn’t trust herself anymore than they trusted her, and with even better reason.
This wasn’t about fixing her guilt, it was about Gemma. She focused on her daughter, pushing the unpleasant memories away before they could take hold.
She was doing this to make Gemma feel better.
But no matter how much she rebuked herself, the peace remained.
The silence stretched out between them for a few moments, strangely enough, not uncomfortably. Finally, Gemma asked, “Where did you go? What did you do?”
The peace vanished and guilt returned. That was another whole segment of her life that she didn’t want to discuss. Certainly not with Gemma.
“Not much for a few years,” she said evasively. “I lived on the street, getting by somehow. To be honest, most of that time is a blur.”
A blur she was thankful for. A blur she’d created deliberately. Alcohol was good at that.
She shut her mind down to the memory.
“What about your magic? Did it settle down after you left?” Gemma asked curiously.
These questions must be her punishment for what she’d done. Elizabeth accepted them grudgingly. “There were a few incidents, but for the most part, I was able to suppress it to an extent.” Another thing alcohol had helped with. She was relieved that she managed to keep most of the emotion out of her voice. No hint of what she’d done.
“So how did you learn to control it then? Did you just, well, work it out?” Gemma asked.
Elizabeth shook her head. “No. Maybe I would have if I’d tried, I don’t know. I was too busy trying to pretend it didn’t exist. Until he showed up.”
A tingle of excitement and warmth replaced the guilt at the thought of Sean, followed by just enough shame that he’d seen her at her worst for her to mask most of the emotional response.
Another story she really didn’t want to tell. But it was an inescapable part of the explanation.
“He? Who?”
Elizabeth tried to keep her voice matter of fact, and not to remember too clearly. It was the only way to get through this. “He was a mage, and he saw the potential in me, goodness knows how at that point. He taught me to use my magic.” She shrugged, as if there were nothing unusual in her statement.
Gemma’s eyes were sharp. “You cared for him, didn’t you?” she guessed.
Elizabeth tried not to remember how much. She kept her voice as toneless as she could as she said, “Of course. He was so… smooth, so brilliant as a mage, and he was very kind to me.”
There was understanding in Gemma’s eyes. “What happened?” she asked curiously.
Despite her best efforts, memories flashed through Elizabeth’s mind, leaving her almost breathless. She took a steadying breath, then said flatly, “He left and I got on with life.”
“It didn’t occur to you to come back to us then?” Gemma demanded, hurt in her voice. “You had control of your magic then, surely you weren’t a danger to us anymore.”
Elizabeth winced, remembering how hard that had been. She had felt like she should have. She’d even tried.
“Of course it occurred to me,” she said quietly. “I actually came back once, with some thought of bringing you and Tasha back with me. I watched George pick you both up from school. There was a woman with him. You all seemed so happy together.”
“Sara,” Gemma said, her eyes understanding.
Elizabeth swallowed. “Was that her name? Anyway, I had nothing to offer you. The only reason I even considered coming back into your life was for me, because it would make me feel better for what I had done. It wouldn’t have helped you at all. You were better off where you were. George and this woman offered a family life that I could never have given you.”
“Yes you could have. If you’d come home…”
Gemma’s eyes were so full of childish hope that Elizabeth couldn’t bear to listen. It hurt too much.
“I couldn’t, Gemma,” she interrupted.
She felt guilty that even the thought of returning made her recoil in horror. It had been hard enough coming back here now, after all the experiences she’d had, knowing it was temporary. Knowing that even George couldn’t expect anything from her now.
Then…
“I couldn’t come back here. Not after everything that had happened,” Elizabeth said flatly.
“Why not?” Gemma demanded.
Elizabeth searched for words to explain. Words that wouldn’t make her sound selfish and arrogant.
But there were none.
“Because in discovering my magic, I discovered myself. Who I was as a person. Not just a wife and a mother, but something more.”
Learning her magic would always be tied to Sean in her mind. She couldn’t even separate the two.
She didn’t want to.
“You didn’t want to come back.” Gemma’s expression was accusing.
Elizabeth couldn’t deny it. “I’d never been good at anything like that before. I’d been a hopeless mother and wife, even before my magic manifested. I certainly had no other skills to speak of. But magic… I was good at that. Very good. But there was no place for ma
gic in my life here at all.” She took a deep breath, and admitted the truth. “I was afraid that if I came back here, I’d lose that. I was scared of going back to who I was before.”
“Would that have been so terrible? Did you hate your life so much?” Gemma asked in a whisper.
Elizabeth searched for the words, needing her to understand. She wasn’t even sure if she could. Gemma had no magic. She had no inkling of what it felt to have something like that in her life.
But she was going to need to understand. Mitch would face this same quandary at some point in his life.
Elizabeth hoped he managed it better than she had.
“Not because of you or Tasha. Not at all. But my life had been so… ordinary. I was just another person, never doing anything different from anyone else, I was never going to do anything that would change the world, or even my small part of it. No one would remember me after I was gone.”
“How did what you were doing give you a chance to do that? What were you doing?” Gemma’s expression was earnest, she really was trying to understand.
Elizabeth hesitated, then sighed. “I worked for the mages. Freck, half the time I wasn’t even sure what it was I was doing, but we all knew it was for something big. We found other mages who were just discovering their power and we brought them together so that we could teach and learn from each other. So little was known about magic, there were so many discoveries to be made. It was an amazing time. Then when the Dome went up…”
She couldn’t help remembering the excitement of that moment, a thrill going through her almost as strongly as it had then. Standing next to Sean, with all the other mages, being part of the greatest magical accomplishment that had been achieved to date.
She could see some of her excitement reflected in Gemma’s eyes. “Being stuck at home with two kids, you would have missed out on all of it,” Gemma finished for her. There was understanding in her voice, overlaid by hurt.
Elizabeth could have made excuses, but there was no point. There were no excuses. The fact that she’d chosen that life over being here said it all. “I was far too selfish to be a mother. You were better off without me,” she said flatly.
The way Gemma flinched at her words made her stomach clench. She wished she wasn’t so selfish. Wished she’d felt the maternal instinct that Gemma seemed to want her to feel. But all she’d felt was fear. Fear of getting it wrong. Fear of not being good enough.
Fear of failing.
Not that there had been any way to fail more spectacularly than she already had.
It was better for Gemma to understand that now, before she got the idea that Elizabeth was any different now than she had been then.
“How can you possibly know that? How can you know what would have happened if you had been here?” Gemma demanded.
Elizabeth just shook her head. She felt totally wrung out. She had no more explanations left in her.
She couldn’t change who she was, even if she’d wanted to.
“I’m sorry, Gemma. I really am.”
“Tasha would have loved to see you,” Gemma said, her voice breaking. “She would have denied it, she always tried to pretend she wanted nothing to do with you, but really, it would have meant so much to her.”
The crushing guilt returned, leaving her breathless, any sign of it easing completely gone.
She didn’t deserve this chance to make it right with Gemma when her elder daughter, Tasha had missed out. Nothing could go back in time and save her and her family from the fire that had killed them.
For the first time in the conversation, tears threatened. Elizabeth held them back with difficulty, but didn’t dare speak for fear of unleashing the flood that had been building up since she’d received word of Tasha’s death three years ago.
She hadn’t cried then, had done her best to block the knowledge from her mind. Gemma’s words threatened to undo all that.
Gemma just opened her mouth to say something more, and Elizabeth tried to brace herself, when there was a knock at the door.
Elizabeth scolded herself for being relieved at the interruption.
Chapter 5 - Regrets
Elizabeth heard voices as Gemma returned. Gemma’s voice, she recognised, the second she didn’t, although it seemed familiar enough that she felt she should. Somehow though, she suspected she wasn’t going to like it. Especially since they were heading for the room where she was.
Well, it certainly couldn’t be worse than the conversation she’d just been having with Gemma, could it?
Gemma’s voice was muffled by the walls. “Yes, Mitch is fine, he seems to have suffered no ill effects at all. And Elizabeth has been teaching him magic already.”
As Gemma opened the door, a crotchety voice said, “She should have waited and discussed the matter with us.”
Gemma entered the room first, her face displaying the nervous expression of a child who had just been chastised. It seemed very out of place given her age. “She’s in here, Auntie Evelyn,”
Elizabeth winced, not needing to hear Gemma’s overly polite words to tell her who it was. She’d placed the voice the instant the condescending tone had registered.
Evelyn wasn’t Gemma’s aunt at all of course, in fact she was far removed from that spot, but it was the name the children had used when referring to her. Elizabeth had been just old enough to escape it.
A feeble impulse to jump up and say something polite surfaced, but she resisted. She nodded to Gemma, who immediately made herself scarce.
As the old woman crossed the room, Elizabeth told the butterflies in her stomach that she was no longer a nervous twenty-year-old and that Evelyn could do nothing that would bother her anymore.
Fifty years ago though, Elizabeth had barely dared breathe the few times she’d been in Evelyn’s presence. Evelyn had been at her peak then. With all the confidence of knowing the whole family was behind her, she’d been quite a woman.
Now she must be at least ninety. She leaned on her cane as she hobbled to the chair opposite Elizabeth and took a seat without being invited.
What caught Elizabeth’s attention though, was the old woman’s wrist. A faded and wrinkled tattoo encircled her wrist. The pattern was unmistakable. As was the resemblance to the one Sean wore. And Jocelyn.
She hadn’t imagined it.
What was going on?
Then something else hit her almost like a forceful blow, knocking all other thoughts from her mind.
Evelyn had magic.
How was that even possible?
It was faint, a mere shadow of what Elizabeth possessed, but it was unmistakable.
Anger flared in Elizabeth at the realisation that her whole life might have been different. How long had this woman known about magic? How long had she possessed it?
Her earlier conversation with Gemma was at the forefront of her mind.
Had Evelyn known and understood about magic when Elizabeth was still floundering in confusion at the manifestation of her own powers?
Elizabeth wasn’t even sure if she wished they’d discovered her, or not.
That indecision didn’t stop her anger.
“How long have you been a mage?” she asked, almost before the woman had settled into her seat. Her voice shook with barely repressed anger. Her training told her she should pause and take control of it, but right now she didn’t really care about the consequences.
The hurt underlying the anger was too raw, especially after her conversation with Gemma.
Evelyn, apparently, didn’t realise the potential danger that was sitting opposite her. She looked at Elizabeth for a long moment before answering her. “It is my understanding that you are either born a mage or not, so in that respect I suppose, I have always been one. However, if you’re talking about the actual manifestation of my magic, it was somewhere in my late teens. I’m afraid I don’t remember the exact date at this point.”
“Who taught you?” Elizabeth asked tightly.
“My predecessor of course, t
hat is the way of these things,” Evelyn supplied.
It wasn’t just Evelyn. Other Salinga’s had magic as well. And they’d known about it long enough to have a way of things. Elizabeth’s anger spiked, its intensity almost blinding her for a moment.
She had to take a couple of deep breaths before she could trust herself to speak, then said through clenched teeth, “Then explain to me how, among all these mages, no-one managed to pick up on the fact that I was one?”
“Because you weren’t supposed to be. Only those in the direct line have been mages. We couldn’t predict that magic would become more common. It certainly hadn’t by the time you were grown. The fact that you have magic defies all logic.” Evelyn’s tone was patiently reasonable, as though Elizabeth should have understood this without her explanation.
Except that what she was saying made no sense. “Supposed to be one? What does that mean? Do you really expect me to believe that only those in the direct line have magic?” Elizabeth demanded. “Only the first daughters of the first daughters? Magic is genetic, Evelyn, the youngest daughter has just as much chance as having magic as the eldest. Not to mention the sons.”
Evelyn nodded. “That is true, now. It was not true, however, in the days before magic reappeared in this world.”
Elizabeth frowned, fascination burbling up through her anger, tempering it slightly. She’d heard Sean speak like this before, as though magic was not a new phenomenon, but had been here before, though Elizabeth had never heard any mention of it elsewhere.
Yet, considering the ready supply of words to describe magic in their vocabulary, it made a strange kind of sense. And no sense at all. “If there was no magic, how are you a mage then?”
“There was magic, just not very much,” Evelyn corrected. “There were… isolated pockets, if you will. The magic in someone with the gene could be activated by even the tiniest spark of magic at conception.”
“And you just expect me to believe that there was this spark present at the conception of each woman in the direct line?” Elizabeth asked sarcastically. What Evelyn was saying was impossible.