We only insist you keep your distance. We live quiet, peaceful lives here.”
“You have a lovely community. As do the magickals who live across the river.”
“They stay on their side, we on ours.” She kept her hands folded, implacably, on her lap. “The boy wandered over, and should have known better.”
“I have three sons,” Lana said with a smile. “I can’t count the times they should have known better. I have a daughter, too.”
“I know who you are. Know who she is, and what she claims to be.”
“She doesn’t claim, she is. But more directly to you, she saved your granddaughter’s life.”
“I told you I have no desire to hear—”
“But you will hear.” Lana’s voice changed, snapped. She’d tolerate the chill, even what she considered the rude, but she wouldn’t tolerate ignorance. “You’ll hear, then I’ll go. The child you raised—”
“You hear!” Tears as much from anger as grief sparked in dark eyes where lines fanned out in deep grooves. “I raised Lucia. I raised her because her father died in the Doom, and her mother, my own daughter, my only surviving child, changed.”
In turn, Lana folded her hands in her lap. She considered the temper progress when measured against the cold stone wall she’d hit before. “How?”
“Became like you. Cursed, she was. Cursed, and mad with it. The world dying around us, friends and neighbors sick or already buried. My husband dead, my two sons dead. And my only daughter wild, wild and violent where she’d once been kind and loving.”
When Mrs. Aldi looked away, her knuckles white as bone on her lap, Lana said nothing. Better to wait, Lana thought, let it all come out.
“She tried, my loving daughter, tried with fire from her own hands, to burn down the house. Burn it down while the baby she’d wanted so much screamed in her crib. The baby’s room, she started that fire in Lucia’s room, and laughed like a mad thing, wept like a mad thing. Reason couldn’t stop her, pleas couldn’t as I rushed in to grab the baby, as others rushed to put out the fire. She only laughed and wept and threw more flames from her hands. Those flames struck one of the men who’d come to help, and she laughed and laughed as he burned. Laughed and wept as others dragged him out to try to save him.
“And when she turned to me, to the child I held in my arms, I saw what she meant to do. I shot her. I killed my child, one I loved with all my heart, to save her child.
“So don’t speak to me of witchcraft and magicks.”
“I’m sorry for your daughter, for all you lost, and for the terrible choice you had to make.”
“You know nothing of it.”
“You’re wrong,” Lana said quietly. “I’ve seen the madness. I faced it. I understand loss. I suffered it. I’ve known evil, with power and without. All of us who survived had to make terrible choices. The boy your granddaughter loves made a choice, like yours. To try to save the child you saved, he made a choice. It was Raiders, Mrs. Aldi, not magickals who attacked them. Just men, cruel men. Johnny could have gotten away, he could have left her and with his elfin abilities, run or hidden. Instead he fought to save her, and nearly died in the attempt. Would have died, as she would have if my daughter hadn’t come to their aid.”
Mrs. Aldi looked away, but those tightly pressed lips trembled. “He took her away.”
“It seems nearly the other way around, according to Lucy. Johnny wanted to fight against the Dark Uncanny, against the dark that threatens us all. Lucy begged him not to leave her. They left the home they know because you forbade them to love.”
“No good can come of mixing.”
“Oh, I so disagree. My husband isn’t magickal, our oldest son isn’t. We’re a family, Mrs. Aldi, one I love, one I’m proud of. We’re in this world together, and if you push back, push away from that world, your own becomes smaller and smaller. Has the community across the river offered yours any violence?”
“We leave each other alone.”
“Except when you hid a frightened boy, or when they offer healing balms or other aids to people here. You should ask your neighbors,” Lana said when Mrs. Aldi blinked in shock. “Ask yourself if your pride and your bias—and it is bias—is more worth clinging to than the child you saved at such a terrible