“You were not meant to carry a child by this creature,” Ocean said slowly in a voice that was not her own. It had an echo of an ancient soul, one that had seen this many times. “You share the same dark blood. Your body could never withstand creation amidst the raging war that would take place in your womb. Your life is spared now so that you may fulfill your purpose.”
Skylar’s face contorted into a new, shocked expression. She didn’t have time to ask what Ocean’s words meant. She gave out one last bloodcurdling cry, and then the room went dark.
Skylar woke up to the light of the morning sun streaming through the French doors of the parlor. She was slow to move. Her body felt like a sack of beaten potatoes. She was in different clothes then she remembered wearing over to Ocean’s. Maybe it was all a dream. The lines between worlds kept blurring at alarming speeds. She felt her belly with both hands. Her baby was gone, she knew that much.
She walked down to Ocean’s deck, where a breakfast spread for a dozen people was laid out.
“I hope you’re hungry!” Ronnie said, motioning to the platters of eggs Benedict; stacks of pancakes, blueberry and plain; home-fried potatoes; a mountain of sausage, ham, and bacon; and a charred fish with its head still attached.
“She cooks when she’s nervous,” Ocean said.
“Why are you nervous?” Skylar asked, staring at all the food.
“Ocean told me everything,” Ronnie said. “I’m sorry you lost the baby, Skylar.”
Skylar’s hand automatically went to her stomach. “It’s a relief, actually,” she said. “I’m not equipped to take care of a baby right now.” She turned her nose up at all the food.
“You should eat something,” Ronnie said, stroking Rhia’s hair nervously.
Skylar grabbed a piece of toast to be polite.
“Do you remember any of what I said when I was otherworldly last night?” Ocean asked with a mouthful of eggs.
“It’s all pretty fuzzy,” Skylar said, nibbling toast.
Ocean finished her eggs and pushed her plate away. She stared at Skylar intently, like she was a specimen to be examined. Ronnie left Rhia’s side and sat next to Skylar. She took her hand, and Skylar stopped eating midbite.
“Okay, ladies, out with it,” she said.
“Magda said your body could never hold that baby,” Ocean said. “Your blood is too similar to Joshua’s.”
Ronnie squeezed Skylar’s hand in support. Skylar sat quietly for a moment, then dropped Ronnie’s hand and stood up. “No. That’s not right. I know my parents; they couldn’t be more boring.” She stared out at the backyard through the wall of glass. “Joshua comes from another country . . . where did you say?”
“Bulgaria,” Ocean said. “But you have to remember his internal makeup has been seriously manipulated since he was a toddler.”
Skylar turned to face Ocean. “So, I’m all of a sudden a mutant too? That makes no sense.” She pointed a finger at the older woman. “You’re lying. You had your hand on my stomach! I couldn’t break free. You conjured some dark magic and made it happen.” Skylar grabbed her purse and the Book of Akasha and headed for the front door.
“Don’t leave,” Ocean said. “There is much more to discuss.”
The front door flew closed with a slam and locked itself. Skylar tried the handle, but it wouldn’t budge. She whipped around to face Ocean, her eyes wide with fear.
“It is dark magic! You are keeping me here against my will!” she shrieked.
“I am no witch!” Ocean yelled, and the room squeezed in on them slightly.
Ronnie and Rhia stood by in silence.
Ocean calmed herself and spoke more softly. “You are upset. I understand, but you have to listen to me!” she pleaded.
Skylar ran for the back stairs and burst outside. Ocean, Ronnie, and Rhia came out on the front steps and watched her as she leapt into her car and sped away.
Skylar walked into the executive office wing of the equine facility ten minutes late for the briefing Milicent had scheduled for noon. She joined the group quietly, hoping to go unnoticed, but the glass corridors made it difficult to hide. She looked around at many new faces.
“Glad you could join us, Ms. Southmartin,” Milicent said with her back to Skylar.
“She is a witch,” Kyle whispered.
“Not a witch, Mr. Andrews,” Milicent said, turning to face him. “Just someone in tune with all that goes on in my facility. There will be no more abuses of any kind. Understood? You are all easily replaceable.”
Kyle froze where he stood and said nothing. Milicent walked the group forward down the hall.
Suki looked at Skylar with wide eyes. “You look like complete shit. What happened to you?” she whispered.
“Not now,” Skylar muttered.
They came to an opening that resembled an enclosed hotel courtyard. The classrooms sat one story above the interior ring, and the hall doubled as a viewing bridge. The cement and brick walls of the ground level were cold and lifeless.
Milicent ushered everyone to the viewing bridge. Skylar was the last on the bridge, which positioned her immediately next to Milicent. She pretended to be extremely focused on the courtyard below. She knew Milicent was boring holes in the side of her head with her stare, but Skylar didn’t want to look her way. Milicent stepped within inches of her. She could feel her icy cold breath on her neck. When she couldn’t avoid it any longer, she turned to face her boss.
“I know why you were late,” Milicent said in a low voice, her tone positively terrifying.
Skylar’s heart pounded. She knows. She swallowed the lump in her throat. “I won’t let it happen again, ma’am,” she said shakily.
“See to it that you don’t,” Milicent bit out. She walked to the front of the viewing bridge. “Let’s proceed,” she said to the group, returning to her role as tour guide.
“Spill it,” Suki said later that day over lattes at the Daily Grind, a new coffeehouse in town that had opened up over Christmas break.
“Suki.” Skylar took a deep breath. “You missed quite a lot over Christmas.” She sighed and looked at Kyle, hesitant to unleash her story in front of him, but she was tired of all the intrigue; she just wanted the feedback from normal people. If he thought she was insane, so be it. So, for the next forty-five minutes, she recounted all that had happened with Joshua, Ocean, and even mentioned Magda. She respected Ronnie’s fierce privacy and left her and Rhia out of it.
“Milicent is knee-deep in this, I know it, but honestly at this point I just want to finish my thesis and get the hell out of here,” Skylar finished, throwing up her hands.
Kyle was the first to speak. “Cool,” he said, as if he heard this kind of thing every day. “I mean, it’s a little out there, but I’ve seen stranger shit than this. I grew up in L.A.”
Suki seemed more concerned than anything else. “Sky, I’m glad things . . . worked out about the baby. It is not the best way to bring life into the world. But if what you say is true, Milicent is seriously dangerous. This all sounds way over your head.”
“Oh, it is, believe me,” Skylar said. “But I don’t have a choice. Going back to any normal life at this point seems highly unlikely. My best hope is to hang on tight and hope I come out okay on the other side. Whatever that side looks like.” She looked at Kyle, who was sitting abnormally close to Suki, and started waving her finger between them. “What is this, what’s going on here? I should be asking what I missed over break.”
“We hung out a little, watched the fireworks over the harbor New Year’s Eve,” Kyle said with a shrug. “No demons or flying witch ladies or anything.”
Skylar looked at Suki. “No wonder you’ve been MIA.”
Suki shrugged it off. “I haven’t brought him home yet,” Suki said, failing to appear cool about it. Kyle squeezed her hand and left the table to use the bathroom.
“You look happy,” Skylar said. “What about the, uh, other thing?”
Suki looked puzzled for a moment—the
n embarrassed. “Oh, no. We haven’t . . .” She stumbled over her words. “We’re nowhere near . . . ugh, I don’t know how to even prepare for that.”
“Aside from shaving your legs, there’s not a lot of prep work to do.”
“He doesn’t know the details of my situation, anyway.”
“You should tell him soon,” Skylar said, watching as Kyle walked back to the table.
“You know, Sky,” he said, dropping back into his seat, “I was thinking in the bathroom . . . you could use your reader app to see what Milicent has up her sleeve! Then you could be a step ahead of her at every turn. Then, just when she’s on the brink of ripping you apart out of frustration, you can ask Magda to open a portal to some alternate universe, push Milicent through, and rid this world of her altogether. That would help get your life back on track.” He toasted the idea with his latte.
“You got all that in the two minutes you were in the head?” Skylar asked.
Kyle shrugged. “This is eerily similar to an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, minus the app part—they didn’t have smart-phones in the late nineties. But hey, it all turned out all right for Buffy!”
Skylar laughed. She knew it would be imperative to keep her sense of humor in the days to come.
The equine facility met its deadline and was open in time to welcome students for the beginning of the spring semester. By two weeks in, Skylar was already completely disheartened. In her opinion, the “Quine,” as the new kids liked to call it, had changed the landscape of the program into an unattractive beast. Dozens of new faces streamed through the doors, claiming to suddenly be called to the vocation of equine studies. She was glad the new facility was bringing awareness about horses to a broader audience, but she questioned their motives. Most seemed to be looking to get close to Milicent, who was already a living legend on campus. No one questioned or seemed to care that their potential future First Lady wasn’t on the campaign trail with her husband. She had proclaimed herself a professor and started teaching a handful of classes, and every single one was at capacity. Skylar was beyond angry when she was shut out of her Beast of Business class.
When she found Ronnie waiting for her at the entrance of the new, arena-sized parking lot one morning, it only added fuel to her anger.
“I’m glad to see you’re sticking with it,” Ronnie said, smiling.
“I don’t have a choice until I graduate. What are you doing here?” Skylar asked, barely slowing her pace.
“It’s been too long,” Ronnie said, falling into stride beside her. “I wanted to check on you.”
“I’m all right,” Skylar said. “I’m getting my life back to normal, putting all of that . . . stuff . . . behind me.” She continued to look straight ahead, refusing to look at Ronnie.
“Not likely, Skylar,” Ronnie said. “You can’t put any of that behind you. You need to see Ocean.”
“No thanks, I’m all done with Ocean.”
Ronnie grabbed her arm. “Ocean saved your life, do you get that?” she snapped. “You couldn’t have walked into any ER and had a miscarriage. What happened to you needed her kind of help.”
“She was no help!” Skylar broke away.
“Hey! It’s time to lose that young, know-it-all attitude, miss. Because you know what? You don’t know it all—in fact, you don’t know shit! There are things going on here that you couldn’t conjure in your wildest dreams! And like it or not, you need us. This is who you are. So I suggest you take a breath, put your big girl panties on, and learn how to deal with it.”
Skylar stopped walking and looked up at the clouds drifting by. Her book, Joshua, Magda—they were all incredible, yet she had seen them with her own eyes. This news about her blood was no different.
“I need time, Ronnie,” she said and walked toward the barn.
That night, Skylar flailed around wildly in bed. Sometime after three she sat up in a full sweat. She got up and went to the kitchen for some water. A light shone from under the library door. Skylar held her breath and listened for movement. After her heartbeat calmed slightly, she opened the door.
A young Cassie was cuddling five-year-old Skylar in the beanbag chair, telling her a story.
“Skylar wasn’t perfect—alas, no one is. But she had a power with the strength of the sun hidden deep within her heart. And it was time for that power to awaken. She accepted her calling with grace and courage, and she was rewarded with freedom and the freedom of all.”
Young Cassie and five-year-old Skylar looked up at adult Skylar in the doorway.
“You were never the alternate plan, my darling,” Cassie said. “You were the only one.”
The next day, a humbled Skylar sat next to Ocean and across from Ronnie on Ocean’s deck.
“I’m sorry, Ocean,” Skylar said. “If you are still willing, I would love your help.”
“Well, now it’s a bit anticlimactic, really,” Ocean said. “I don’t have all the answers to this one, and I usually have all the answers.” She gave Skylar a jovial nudge with her elbow. “We know now that you couldn’t carry the baby because your blood was clashing with Joshua’s. We know his attributes are man-made. But yours are not.” She cocked her head to the side. “You’ve never exhibited demon-like traits, right?”
“My mother might argue a case against that statement,” Skylar said with a wry smile.
“That means it’s recessive,” Ocean said, ignoring the joke. “Scientists have their theories and their Punnett squares about genetics. But where I come from, recessive means paternal lineage. If you exhibited similar traits, it would have been a pure maternal line.”
“Joel is not demon material,” Skylar said.
“I should have been more specific,” Ocean said. “I meant the paternal line of your mother.”
“I never knew my biological grandfather,” Skylar said. “My mother was adopted, sort of.” Ronnie and Ocean looked puzzled. “Long story.” Skylar stood up and started pacing the room. “You’re talking about actual fire-and-brimstone demons? A fallen angels kind of thing?”
“Uh-huh,” Ocean said. “When you’ve been on the planet as long as I have, you come across all sorts of characters. Look how popular vampires were a few years back.”
“I feel I’m going to have to sharpen my sense of humor if I’m going to continue hanging out with you ladies,” Skylar said, managing a smile.
“That’s the spirit!” Ocean said.
“Ocean, can you take credit for any . . . big events in history?” Skylar wondered out loud.
Ocean laughed. “When possible, I have tried to help mankind move things in the right direction. Not that it’s helped much. I may have given an idea to a philosopher or two. But if I was going to give you a list, I’d have to take responsibility for some of the assholes as well.”
“Like who?”
“Not important,” Ocean said. “I changed my tactics in more recent decades and tried to teach some of what I know in a more formal environment.” She looked at Ronnie.
“She was my counselor at Silverwood,” Ronnie said, breaking her long silence.
Skylar’s head shot up. “So you taught Milicent, too.”
“Yes,” Ocean confessed. “I could see the confused girl behind the walls she had up. She was looking for a landing pad and I took to her immediately.”
“Milicent had a morbid fascination with the dead,” Ronnie said. “But we knew it stemmed from Diana’s accident, and that made it easier to understand.”
“Once she grasped the fundamentals of my teachings, she was eager to delve deeper,” Ocean said. “She spent two years asking me questions about immortality, resurrection, and conjuring spirits of the dead. I knew what she was after, of course.”
“She wanted to bring back her sister?” Skylar looked at Ocean incredulously. “That’s absurd!”
Ocean and Ronnie sat silently.
“It’s . . . not absurd?”
“There are ways to manipulate the human body,” Ocean said. “You’ve
seen her handiwork in Joshua. Milicent is not only fascinated with manipulating the human mind; in her discoveries, she delved into creation itself. That’s where her true obsessions lie.”
“Why would you ever teach someone in that state of mind about manipulating the universe?” Skylar asked, shocked at Ocean’s recklessness.
“She had a great light in her,” Ocean said with a sigh. “It was well hidden by her darkness, but I knew it was there, and I thought if I spent enough energy cultivating the good, she would choose the light. And she did, for a while. But then she struggled with sorting out her sexuality.” She glanced at Ronnie. “And after a series of botched attempts at happiness, she latched onto Devlin. When they couldn’t conceive a baby, all the ideas she’d learned so long ago crept back into her brain. She has taken the last twenty years and gotten further than I ever thought she could. But she is missing a piece. And you hold that piece, Skylar.”
“She sicced Joshua on me,” Skylar whispered. “I knew she was behind this. She was seething yesterday. I just didn’t know why.”
“You hold a piece of something she needs,” Ocean said. “If she was upset with you yesterday, she must have gotten wind that her plan didn’t work.”
“But who am I to her?” Skylar asked.
Ronnie looked to Ocean for an answer, looking just as curious as Skylar felt.
“Do you have any information about your biological grandfather?” Ocean asked.
“No. My mother never wanted to answer any questions about her parents. I’m beginning to see why.” Skylar sat back down and rubbed the pain searing through her temples.
“You need to pay close attention to Milicent whenever you’re around her,” Ronnie said. “It’s our in to whatever she’s concocting. It’s got to be huge to go through the effort of constructing that building. Oh, and there’s one other thing—”
“Skylar, we need to analyze your blood and the fetal tissue,” Ocean said.
“I don’t have the fetal tissue,” Skylar said with a look of disgust.
“I do,” Ocean said.
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