too selfish and too lazy to be a decent human being? She’d terrorized me, belittled me, stolen from me, for most of my life. Why was I letting her get away with it again? Why was I just sitting there like a lump?
From the eastern edge of the clearing, something was tickling my brain. I shook my head, wondering if I was imagining it. The nudging turned into all-out poking. Impatient and persistent. Jane. My friends—the supernatural cavalry—were here.
I opened my mind fully, letting Jane see everything that I was seeing—the number of people, their placement, a special admonition not to hurt the boy, and my suspicion that there could be more Kerrigans hiding in the woods. I would apologize for the headache this gave Jane later. The nudging retreated, and I looked up at my mother, looking so smug and sure of herself while she sold out her family.
I felt Jane’s mental nudging again, closer this time. The head poking was more urgent now. What would she want? Would she want me to shut up? To stop provoking my mother? Unlikely. If anything, she would probably want me to cause distraction. She and the others would want the Kerrigans and my mother distracted so they could sneak up on them.
Magic had to work for me this time. Forget the binding. Forget inconsistency and random explosions. I was more powerful than Penny’s binding. I was no longer ambivalent about my own talents. It simply had to work. There was no other option.
I focused on the energy around me, the light and heat coming off the campfire. I drew that into my mind, focusing on the nerves and muscles of my hands. I pictured a spark growing between them, the heat traveling along my fingertips and feeding that spark until I could feel the flame glowing pleasantly against my skin.
“Mom!” I called out while she flirted shamelessly with John in front of his wife and child. I called louder. “Mom!”
She turned her attention to me, exasperated. “What?”
“There’s something I’ve wanted to say to you for a long time,” I told her.
She simpered, as if this was some warm Hallmark moment between mother and daughter. “And what’s that, darling?”
“You were never a proper mother. Despite having the best example in the world, you never managed to learn about loving someone or caring for someone more than you cared for yourself. You’re selfish, cruel, and unable to see anything past your own wants and needs. You were never a mother to me. And you were never the daughter Nana Fee deserved. You want to know why you were never Nana’s heir? It’s because you’re weak. Your soul is weak, your spine is weak, and your magic is weak. You feel so little emotion, so little real energy for anything except for what you think you’re missing out on, that you’re barely human enough to qualify as a witch. I think that’s why the magic seems to have passed you by. It’s a living, breathing thing, Mom, and you can’t be trusted to care for a goldfish.”
“Shut up, you little bitch!” she hissed, her grip tightening around the blade in her hand.
“You forgot about me.” I chuckled, squirming against the tree in an attempt to stand, to no avail. “All those years when I thought you were out there trying to fix your problems so you could come home to us. You’d just conveniently forget about the fact that I existed, until you needed money, of course, or something from Nana Fee. You forgot that I needed you, that I loved you, that I would have forgiven you anything if you’d only asked.”
“Cue the violins,” Melinda Kerrigan huffed. “We’re on a schedule here, John.”
“Really, madam, we don’t have time for this,” John insisted, although I wasn’t sure if he was talking to me or my mother.
“What have I ever done to need your forgiveness?” my mother demanded, ignoring them. The athame glinted in her hand as she gestured wildly, the blade coming closer and closer to my face. “You ruined my life, not the other way around. Always needy. Always noisy. And when I needed you, when I came to see you, all you did was scream and turn to Daddy.”
At the mention of my father, my anger spiked, from a minor blaze to volcanic in the space of a second. Instead of trying to fight it off, I embraced it. I could feel the last of Penny’s restraints fall away and the spark