The Rose Witch - Chandelle LaVaun Page 0,12

dimensions?” I squealed. “I don’t remember that from the stories.”

Granny shrugged and chuckled. “Bit frightful for a four year old.”

I turned to my mother. “Mum.”

“Right, so, with the veil weakened, it allowed spirits to come back, both the harmless from Heaven, and the evil from Hell. The dimensional wall still prevented Greater Demons and the Fae Court from entering our realm, but now weaker demons and fair folk could get here. As you can imagine, this world was a horrible, dangerous place all of a sudden, and the humans were no match. They were being decimated.”

Pressure weighed down on my shoulders, pushing me toward the ground. I didn’t fight it. I let myself drop down to sit on the wooden step. My head was already spinning.

“The Creator realized Earth needed protection, but knew it was too big of a job to handle. So, The Creator birthed the Goddess and tasked her with the job of controlling the supernatural elements. Except, she couldn’t directly interfere. This is when she created her own species, a species that looked and sounded human, would live amongst them, and would be there to protect them.” She looked over at me with raised eyebrows, like she was waiting for me to fill in the blank.

“Witches?”

She nodded. “Witches. She took her own blood, which possessed magical qualities, then mixed it with the blood of humans and that of angels to create arcana – witches.”

I shook my head, trying to wrap my mind around that.

“Chloe,” Granny said softly. “Do you remember the stories about the original twenty? About the witches who were too strong, too powerful? The ones who were forced to mate with humans to dilute their magic?”

I opened my mouth to say no when I realized I did remember that. “Weren’t there like a hundred of them at first but only twenty of those survived?”

“Exactly!” Granny grinned and popped a biscuit in her mouth. She chewed then smiled. “And the Lancasters were one of those twenty.”

The world spun. I reached down and gripped the step. “The Lancasters come from them? From the creation of our entire species?”

They both nodded.

I groaned and scrubbed my face. The stories were all trying to come back, but I hadn’t heard them in over a decade. The details were fuzzy. “Okay…right…was there something about an angel named…bollocks, I can’t remember. Jophiel?”

Mum gasped and clapped her hands. “You do remember! Yes!” She jumped to her feet and scurried over to the far wall where the paintings hung, her long blonde hair that matched mine swinging as she moved.

“Mum? Where are you going?”

She stopped in front of a painting and pointed to the angel who’d spoken to me. “This is Jophiel.”

I gasped and sat up straight. “What? Who is the bloke?”

“The first Lancaster.”

My eyes widened. “The first?”

She nodded and smiled up at the painting fondly. Then she glanced back to me. “You see this moving right now?”

“Yes, though not much.” Her hair and dress rustled in a breeze. Grass swayed. The man lifted his rose. Then another memory hit me. “WAIT. Wasn’t there a story about the first child of an angel?”

Mother nodded again, looking back to the painting. “The angels decided back then that Earth needed a single piece of Heaven to protect them. To harness the goodness of Heaven, the holiness, and spread it. Jophiel, the only female angel who has ever come to Earth, chose the first Lancaster to have a child with. He was so honored that she chose him that he presented her with a single red rose that he spent hours searching for.”

That’s what this painting is?

“Yes, exactly,” mum answered the question I hadn’t meant to ask out loud. “Together, they had a daughter. She went on to have many sons to pass Heaven’s light down to.”

“What about the other twenty originals? Did they have children with angels too?”

She shook her head. “No. See, an angel may only have one single child with a human. Sure, that child can have many children of their own and that bloodline may carry for thousands of years just as the Lancasters have…but it must only stem from one. So, the angels are picky. Careful. They only father children when it is absolutely necessary.”

“None of the others have then?”

“Only a few. Uriel, Gabriel, Michael, and Raziel – I believe they’re the only ones. And they all chose descendants from an original twenty.” She cleared her throat and stared up at the painting. “Now, the original twenty have some tremendously powerful families,