by Nicole Maggi
“You’ll probably be out of school for a while.” Alessia broke into my thoughts. “You can’t go looking like that.”
Jenny leaned across her. “If you’re going to be rattling around here all day long, you’d better not get into my stuff.”
I smirked at her. “Don’t worry, Sands, I wouldn’t dream of borrowing your cherry-flavored Bonne Bell lip gloss.”
“I don’t wear Bonne Bell, thank you very much. I have seen the inside of a Sephora.”
“Coulda fooled me.”
“Oh, my God, you guys!” Alessia threw her hands up. “Look, it sucks, okay, but we all have to deal with it. So can we please just get along?”
Jenny slumped back into the couch and folded her arms. I would’ve done the same if I didn’t know it would cause a riptide of agony. Instead I took a deep, dramatic breath and held my hand out to her. “Truce. I won’t play with your toys.”
Jenny rolled her eyes, but she sat up and took my hand. “Deal.” When we let go, she tilted her head at me. “Those bruises do look really bad. My mom has some like super-hippie homemade ointment that actually works pretty well. Want some?”
“That would be great. Thanks.” When she got up, I turned to Alessia. “But I want to at least go back to my house to get some stuff. You do too, right?”
“Well yeah, but I don’t know if we should risk it.” Alessia chewed her lip. “Pratt—the Raven—showed up there right after we left.”
“I was thinking maybe I could use a masking spell,” I said. “I could probably pull one off long enough for each of us to pack a bag.”
“You need to be healing, like Nerina said. I don’t want you to overexert yourself.”
“Well, I am not borrowing Jenny’s underwear,” I said. I glanced around to make sure no one was listening, but Cora, Heath, and Nerina were deep in conversation and Jeff had left to get Barb. I lowered my voice anyway. “Nerina told me what happened in the basement. About Jonah.”
Alessia looked down at her hands in her lap. “Did she tell you everything?”
I cocked my head. “I don’t know. What’s everything?”
She knotted her fingers together. “We could talk to each other, Bree. Even though we were transformed.”
My heart did a little spin inside my chest. I’d suspected. “Did he say if he heard me? At the Waterfall, during the battle?”
“Yes.” Alessia raised her gaze to my face. “He heard you.”
I breathed in deep, the corners of my mouth turning up. “I knew it. I knew it was possible.”
“He thinks it has to do with connection. Your connection because you’re twins . . . our connection . . .” She looked down at her fingers again.
“Ugh, stop.” I held my hand up. “I don’t need to hear about your, ahem, connection.” I reached out and nudged her shoulder lightly. “But this is huge. It means that we can communicate with him during a battle. Even if he can’t fight against the Malandanti while he’s still one of them, he can still tell us what they’re going to do before they do it. This could be super helpful, Alessia.”
She scrunched her forehead. “What do you mean, he can’t fight against the Malandanti?”
Before I could answer, a glass smashed to the floor. Alessia’s mother stood at the edge of the living room, her arm stretched out, her finger pointing straight at Nerina. Her whole body shook, and her face was contorted with disbelief and white-hot anger. The only other person I’d ever seen in a full Italian rage was Nerina, and Lidia definitely looked like she could give her a run for her money.
She took one trembling step toward Nerina, her lips pale. “You!”
Chapter Four
The Truth at Last
Alessia
I jumped off the couch. “Mom! What’s wrong?”
But Lidia didn’t answer me. She stalked toward Nerina, her face white as moonlight. Nerina stood, her back straight and her expression haughty, but I could see something in her eyes, something like regret. “Lidia,” she said, “after so many years, we meet again.”
She had switched to Italian. She didn’t want the rest of the Clan to hear. But she had to know that I would.
“Is this your fault?” Lidia asked, answering in Italian. “Did you bring my daughter into all this?”
“You had to have known,” Nerina said. “You knew what she would become the moment she was born. It was destined.”
“Destiny is nothing,” Lidia said. “We choose our own destiny.”
Nerina stared at my mother so hard that Lidia flinched. “Like you chose yours?” she said, very softly but with an edge that could kill.
Lidia raised her chin. “Yes. As I chose mine. And I stand by that choice.”
Nerina’s lips twisted. Before she could speak, I stepped between them. “Enough,” I said, also in Italian to make sure they knew I’d understood what had just been said. I didn’t know what the hell was going on, but I was going to find out. I grabbed Lidia’s arm and dragged her out of the living room and into the den.
Barb had gone a little overboard with the manly Daniel Boone theme in the den, which was ironic considering she and Jeff were vegetarians. All four walls were padded with faux leather, including the back of the door. When I closed it, all sound from the living room was shut out. Lidia collapsed onto the plaid couch and buried her face in her hands. I came around and knelt on the braided rug in front of her. “Mom? What was that all about? Do you know Nerina?”
Lidia raised her head. Although her face was streaked with sorrow, her eyes were clear. She cupped my face, her calloused palms warm on my skin. “I’m so sorry, cara. I never wanted this life for you. I never wanted you to be a Benandante.”
I jerked away from her. I’d long suspected that Lidia knew about the Benandanti, but to hear the word tumble from her lips with such ease was still startling. I took a few long breaths. “You knew.”
“Yes,” she whispered. “I knew.” She tried to touch my face again, but I moved back far enough that she couldn’t reach me.
“You’ve known about the Benandanti all this time, haven’t you? How?”
Lidia dropped her hands and turned her head so that I could see only her profile. She stared at the singing bass that hung on the wall that she’d always called tacky but that Jenny and I thought was funny. She was seeing something far beyond that silly little fish—something in her past. “She came to me,” Lidia said. I didn’t need to ask who the she was. “When you were born.”
“Why?”
Lidia swung her gaze back to me. Her dark hair, which she had messily put up into a bun when we’d rushed from the farmhouse, tumbled in front of her eyes. “Because she’d come to me once before. When I was sixteen, like you.”
My breath caught. I couldn’t move.
“Nerina came to me,” Lidia said. “Called me, told me I was destined to be a Benandante. Gave me the choice that all Benandanti get.” She brushed a lock of hair behind her ear and peered deep into my eyes. “I refused.”
Breath crept back into my body as my mind curved itself around the truth. “You’re a Refuser.” It all made sense. “I bet Nerina didn’t like being told no.”
Lidia’s mouth pinched. “No. No, she did not.” Her gaze narrowed and shifted to the door, as though she could see her on the other side of it. “And she had her revenge. Seven years later, when you were a year old, she came back to me. She told me that you would be chosen to fulfill the destiny that I had denied. I fought with her,” Lidia said, her voice raspy and low. “I said I would not allow my child to be put in that kind of danger. And she replied that the Benandanti would come back for you when you were old enough to make the decision for yourself. That night, I told your father that I wanted to move to America.”
I pressed my hands to the sides of my head, trying to wrestle this knowledge in with all the other secrets I’d been keeping. “Did Dad know?” I asked, finally saying aloud the question that had haunted me for months. “Did he know about the Benandanti?”
; Lidia nodded. My chest squeezed tight, and I couldn’t say the thing I feared most. Had he been a Benandante too?
“He knew about them because both of his parents were Benandanti.”
I came off my knees and eased away from her. I had no memory of my paternal grandparents; I had always been told that they died when I was a baby. That was why my dad had returned to Twin Willows with his new wife and child: to run the farm that they had left behind. “Did they . . . die in battle?”
Lidia swallowed hard. Her eyes were shiny with tears threatening to spill over. “Yes. It happened about six months after we came to Twin Willows.”
Six months. So I had met my grandparents. Or rather, they had met me. Try as I might, the only image of them I could conjure in my head was the picture of them, kind-faced and surrounded by goats, that we had on the mantel at home. My brain spun as all the pieces of the puzzle finally began clicking into place. That was why Nerina had built her lair on our farm, why she’d placed the amulet in the basement of the farmhouse. Bree didn’t know how right she’d been when she once called my home Benandanti Central.
“But Dad had to have known that they would find me here, too. The Waterfall in the woods behind our house—that’s the site of magic we’re protecting. He knew about it; he used to take me there. Why did you come back here to Twin Willows if you knew they were here, too?”
Lidia closed her eyes. Now the tears did spill over, staining her cheeks. “Because he didn’t agree with me,” she said, so low that I had to lean in to hear her. “Because he knew that you would be a great Walker. That you would be a hero. He did not believe that you could escape that destiny, no matter where we were.”
God, that word, destiny. I could never escape it, no matter how hard I tried. “So I’ve just been fulfilling some master plan all along?” I pushed myself up to my feet and paced the length of the couch. “You all knew that I was going to be a Benandante someday, didn’t you?”
“Alessia, I never wanted this for you. I had hoped it would never come to this, or if it did, that you would make the same choice I did. That you would refuse.”
I whirled to a stop in front of Lidia. “The coward’s choice?”
She winced. A stab of guilt pierced my gut, but I was too angry to really feel its pain. “How long have you suspected that I was a Benandante?”
“I . . . I don’t know . . . maybe a couple of months . . .”
“A couple of months?” I tore my hands through my hair. “And you didn’t say anything to me?”
“I knew that you would not be allowed to talk—”
“But I could’ve talked to you!” I flung my arm in the direction of the living room. “Jenny’s known her dad was a Benandante since she was twelve. Barb knows. Dad obviously knew about his parents. It seems like I was the only one in the Clan following the rules, and I was the one who most needed to break them.” I couldn’t breathe; the anger and frustration were like bands across my ribs.
“Cara . . .”
“Don’t cara me! I needed you and I was so afraid to say anything, afraid for your safety. And now I find out you knew all along.” I was surprised to taste salted tears in my mouth; I hadn’t realized I’d started crying. “If you had come to me, I would’ve told you everything.”
Lidia looked up at me, her face a bottomless pit of grief. “I didn’t want to believe it was true. It was easier to think it wasn’t . . .”
“Yeah, easier for you.” My legs felt so rubbery, I was in danger of collapsing on the rug. “My whole life, you’ve overprotected me. God, you wouldn’t even let me go to Paris on a school trip. And the one time when it would’ve been really great to have you be overly involved, you stepped back.”
Lidia hunched over and buried her face in her hands. Her shoulders shook with the force of her crying. I stood in the center of the rug, my chest heaving with every emotion that coursed through me. The only other time I’d seen her cry like this was when my dad had died. That time, we had curled up together, comforting each other’s grief. This time, I couldn’t stand the thought of touching her. “Did Dad really die of a heart attack?” I asked. My words landed like barbs, and she flinched. “Or was he killed by the Malandanti?”
She raised her face from her hands, her eyes a swollen red mess. “No. I swear, Alessia. He really did die of a heart attack.”
I breathed in sharp through my nose. “How do I know you’re telling the truth? You’ve been lying to me my whole life.”
“Alessia, everything I have done, I did to protect you. To keep you safe.” She rubbed her face. “And every step of the way, I have been blocked by that woman,” she said, jabbing her finger in the direction of the living room.
“Oh, don’t blame Nerina, Mom! You know it’s not her fault.” I shook my head. “The only person you have to blame is yourself. For refusing the Call in the first place. Because if you hadn’t, I never would have been Called.”
“If I hadn’t, you never would have been born,” Lidia shot back. She stiffened her shoulders. “We choose our own destiny, yes, but there are some things that just can’t be stopped . . .”
“Stop saying ‘destiny’!” I balled my hands into fists and dug my nails deep into my palms. “Destiny doesn’t matter. What matters is that you knew what was going on and you did nothing to help me. What matters is that at the moment I needed my mom the most, you refused to be there.”
“Alessia . . .” Lidia stretched her arms out, reaching for me, but I backed up all the way to the door.
“Don’t, Mom. Just don’t.” I collided with the soft padding on the door and felt for the handle. “Dad would’ve been there for me. The minute he suspected I’d been Called, he would’ve been there.”
“That’s not fair.” Lidia stood up. A flush crept up her neck. “I did what I thought was right.”
I flung open the door so hard it slammed against the wall. My existence in this town, my entire life, had been built on a lie. “The problem is,” I told her, my voice shaking, “that you couldn’t have been more wrong.”
Chapter Five
I’d Give Anything for a Ritz-Carlton Right about Now
Bree
When Alessia came back into the living room, she looked like she’d been punched in the soul. Lidia trailed behind, her hair and face looking like something a cat coughed up. Without looking at anyone, she veered off into the kitchen. Alessia collapsed onto the couch so hard it made my ribs ache. “Jesus,” I said. “What the hell happened to you?”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Alessia muttered, shooting a death-ray glance at Nerina. “What did I miss?”
“Nothing,” Nerina said quickly. Whatever Shakespearean plot twist had happened between Alessia and her mom, I guessed that Nerina had more than a supporting role. “We were just about to break up and get settled in here.”
I stretched my arms overhead, my chest prickling with pain. “Well, I need a cigarette,” I announced. “Alessia, will you help me outside?”
“You are not allowed in my room smelling like smoke,” Jenny said. “I’m not going to die from secondhand smoke because of you.”
I rolled my head to the side to glare at her. “Oh, for Chrissake,” I hissed. “I need to talk to Alessia alone and I was trying not to be obvious. Happy?”
That, at least, put a shadow of a smile on Alessia’s face. I leaned into her as we hobbled to the front door. “This is going to be the most not-fun slumber party in the history of slumber parties,” I muttered. I glanced into the kitchen as we passed. Lidia was at the stove, stirring something in a big pot over a low flame. It smelled like tomato sauce. Really delicious, homemade tomato sauce. Lidia looked up, her eyes big as a doll’s, but Alessia squared her shoulders and pulled open the front door.
Outside, the cold slapped me across the face. Should’ve grabbed my coat on the way out. I propped myself up against the side of the house. “So what the hell was that all about?”
Alessia sighed and dropped to sit on the steps. “Ap
parently my mother has been lying to me my entire life.”
“Join the club,” I said. “I can’t remember a time when I didn’t feel like my parents were keeping something from me.”
“Yeah, well, some of us aren’t used to that.” Alessia looked at the patch of bare trees that filled the space between the house and the street. “My grandparents were Benandanti. They didn’t die in an accident like I thought. They died in battle when I was a baby. Oh, and that wasn’t the reason my parents moved back here from Italy. They moved back here before that because my mom wanted to get me away from Nerina.”
“How did your mom know Nerina? Italy isn’t that small.”
“I guess Friuli is,” Alessia said. She blew out a breath, making a loose strand of hair dance across her face. “Nerina Called my mom when she was my age. My mom’s a Refuser.”
“Really?” I gazed at the sky. “It’s nice to know I’m not the only one.”
“Well, I’m glad you’re happy to hear it.” Alessia shook her head. “She says she’s known for months that I’m a Benandante. But she never said anything. What the hell kind of parenting is that?”
“The crappy kind,” I said. “I can’t believe Nerina didn’t tell you this.”
“Well, it wasn’t her place to tell me,” Alessia said. “And actually, that doesn’t surprise me at all. I mean, Nerina keeps a lot of stuff from us. I think she truly enjoys knowing things the rest of us don’t.”
If Nerina was a nail, Alessia had just hit her on the head. “That’s for damn sure,” I said. I moved to sit next to Alessia, every joint and muscle creaking. “In the car on the way over here, she told me that the Malandanti can’t fight each other. Their auras prevent it. I’d never read that in any of the books—and I went deep into those books. If it had been in there, I would’ve known.”