My family was composed of all females, eight sets of twins. Hecate had cursed her line to birth multiples, all female offspring. She’d ensured we would never be alone, but that came at a heavy price. Any female who carried a male child learned quickly the cost of doing so. My mother was the daughter of Hecate, purest of blood, and yet she birthed twin daughters without a care of what happened after we’d detached from her womb. Her sisters Hysteria and Aurora had been the ones to deal with the repercussions of her overactive libido.
Freya had wanted an army of witches, but she didn’t want the responsibility that came with birthing that army herself. Instead, she left us with her sisters, who loved us like their own children, Aurora more so than Hysteria. Hysteria had entered the portal and hasn’t been heard of since. Hecate herself birthed two sets of twins. Freya and Aurora and Hysteria and Kamara. Kamara had been lost centuries ago or left on her own. Nobody knew what happened to her, other than she’d vanished and hadn’t been seen or heard of since.
“We may have to consider the fact that she might have gone with our mother,” Kinvara stated, shrugging when I stared at her, brow raised in a questioning look.
“I have considered it, but Amara isn’t that stupid.” I frowned, knowing it was a viable explanation, but that wouldn’t make Amara safe. “I don’t think she’d be stupid enough to trust our murderous mother.”
“I don’t think our mother would try to murder Amara,” Sabine pointed out. “She’s cold-blooded for sure, but she isn’t a murderer. Maybe she wanted Amara with her to lure men to her bed, but murder? I don’t think she would do something like that to her own child.”
“Seriously?” I snorted. “That bitch tried to murder me frequently. Hell, she tried to abort Amara and me from her womb. If Aurora hadn’t stepped in during every attempt on my life, I would be dead. I was a child.”
Sabine frowned, nodding at the anger and hatred that dripped from my words. “She was crazed after she came back. Something was off, Aria. I don’t know why she did what she did to you, but whatever the reason, know that she wasn’t the same when she returned from the Nine Realms, heavily pregnant with you and Amara.”
“It doesn’t excuse her actions, Sabine. She tried to murder me.”
“Yes, and Aurora saved you. She never tried to murder Amara directly. She only aimed for her when you were both in her womb, so not sure you can assume she’d go for her now. That is what we are saying, and since we left this place, she hasn’t been able to find you. Aurora made certain we were untraceable.”
Our mother, God love her, wasn’t selective about the creatures she took between her thighs. Freya also never kept track of who had fathered us, making it impossible to know what we were until the change began within us; then, we handled it on our own. Aine and Luna had glowing blue eyes, marking them alpha wolves, alerting us to their heritage. Sabine and Callista were nymphs or sirens, but it was hard to tell since there wasn’t much difference between the two species. We’d resorted to calling them hookers because it made them laugh when we did. Kinvara and Valeria were succubi, the result of our mother getting busy with a horde of incubus demons on one of her trips into the Nine Realms. She’d created her own twisted version of Noah’s ark, but with daughters.
Our father’s blood only determined half of what we were; our mothers, the other. Unlike my sisters, who had realized what they were by their sixteenth birthday, I had no idea what I was. Where they depended on nature to cast magic or spells, I wielded it from someplace else. It was exhilarating when I used magic, but there was a call to something darker within me that preened proudly when I did. As if something deadly slumbered within me and had yet to awaken fully.