staying for me,” I said, certain there was something she wasn’t telling me.
“Why are you so anxious to see me leave?” Elsa asked. “We have much work to do. I sense you have a great power, Olivia,” she said. “I feel the energy in you. But you are in danger as long as you fail to use your instincts to see what is happening around you.”
“I’m afraid,” I said. “This gift you keep referring to has made my mother’s life difficult. I don’t want to become like her.”
“Mother, father, sister, brother,” Elsa said shaking her head. “We cannot escape the bonds of our family, their blood is our blood.”
“I don’t have any of those except my mother. I never knew my father and my grandparents are dead.”
Once again, Elsa paused for a moment as if she were acknowledging something important in my statement. “Your gift is passed through the women in your family, so it matters little about the rest. My mother was a shaman in our village, as was her mother before her. These skills pass through one generation to the next. One day, you will have a daughter.”
“Stop,” I said, holding out my hand. “I’m not getting married. I’m not having a child. Look at me. My life is out of control. I am having a conversation in my kitchen with a ghost about how to beat the devil at his own game. How on earth can you talk about a future with marriage and children?”
Elsa looked amused, but not in a good way. “Technically, I am not a ghost and I have never seen anyone beat the devil at his own game,” she said. “You are nowhere near ready to do that. I am asking that you take responsibility for your own life and use the tools you were given. By all the goddesses of the known world, I have never seen anyone reject her bloodline so readily. This wasn’t a choice when I was your age. People in my tribe, in my village, depended on my mother to seek out the spirits to learn about the harvest, to heal the sick and protect our elders.”
“What about you,” I asked, angry at her lecture. “What did they depend on you for?”
Elsa turned her head away from me slightly. For the first time since she’d revealed herself to me, I could see hesitation. It seemed that she too had secrets.
“We are alike in many ways Olivia,” she continued. “I did not reject my skills when I was your age, but I did not manage them well, either. I wanted to do more than help old men bring in good crops for the village. So I began to dabble in things that were beyond my measure.”
Elsa got up from the bar stool and began to pace around the kitchen.
“Eventually, I left my village in search of someone or someplace where I could learn how to gain more power. I was not content to see the future; I wanted to control it. After much searching, I found an old witch who promised to help me gain introduction to a school of magic where I could learn the secrets of casting powerful spells to control things… nature, the weather.”
“So you wanted to be a powerful witch?”
“I wanted power,” Elsa said. “I had no specific occupation in mind.”
“Did you find the school?”
Elsa nodded, but her face was grim. “The scholomance was in the mountains of Romania. It was very remote. I began my journey in the fall. It took more than a day to reach the top of the mountain and find the castle.”
“And…?”
“The witch was true to her word,” Elsa said. “She sent me to the door of a school where all things dark could be learned. I should have been more cautious, but I was eager to begin my lessons. I knocked upon a large wooden door with a raven engraved on the front. After some time, an elderly man dressed as a servant opened the door. He confirmed it was a school, but said they only accepted ten students at a time. At first I thought he was sending me away, but then he said that I had arrived just in time and would be the tenth student. He instructed me to secure my horse in the stables nearby and return to the castle. Excited, I quickly did as I was told. As I walked back toward the school, an angel appeared on the branch of a tree next