She’d been sick for months, almost a year now. But the time had finally come, I could see it. The spark of her magic was beginning to fade, like a candle flickering with no wax left to burn. It grew smaller and darker by the second.
I think she knew it too.
Horror filled me as I realized all the things we hadn’t talked about, all the things that still needed to be said. I didn’t know if apologies were in order. I didn’t know if we should exchange pledges of love. But something felt unsaid and I didn’t want her to leave without me at least saying it.
But what, I didn’t know. Maybe if I tried to talk, maybe if I pushed myself to speak, the words might come to my mouth before they popped into my brain.
“Mother, I...”
She squeezed my hand, hard, stalling my words. What was she trying to say?
I forced my mind back to the last thing she’d said. I couldn’t focus on that. Instead, I reflected on what she’d just told me. “What do you mean, nothing?”
We had a house, a beautiful house. Servants. Our health. A vast yard where we could run and play and practice our magic.
She wasn’t making any sense. If she meant we had no family, no friends, no one outside of our little world we could trust, then yes, we had nothing. But that had never bothered us before. We had each other. And even though our mother was particularly hard on me, she was our friend, our family, and, yes, our whole world.
“Everything around us, Ava... the house, the lands, it’s all magic.” She paused, coughing. “A conjure. It’s not real.”
An eerie coldness crept up my spine. She was delirious. She had to be. The disease had taken hold of her mind and was saying things that made no sense.
“What do you mean, not real?” I asked. Part of me didn’t want to even entertain her words. But since she was so adamant about saying them, I would humor her even if I did not understand how one person could produce such magic, such a façade, for two decades.
“I mean, there’s a reason I’ve never been able to leave this house,” she continued. “Not since I built it. These lands. My very presence is what keeps the house erect. The servants visible. It is all an elaborate... spell.”
My breath caught in my throat. “It’s... what?”
No. It couldn’t be true. The home I’d been born into. Loved. Lived in my whole life. It couldn’t all be a fabricated spell. Because if that was true, we’d have more things to worry about than our grief very soon.
Mother wheezed again, louder this time, and I reached for a glass of water and handed it to her. “Hold on, Mother. Just hold on a minute more.”
Suddenly, my blood burned with anger. How dare she wait until her deathbed to tell us this? How dare she not prepare us for what was to come? How dare she be so entirely selfish? How dare she lie to us? We were fools, all of us, for believing this place, this happiness, could belong to us.
For a flash of a second, I hated her.
A female servant, whom I now didn’t even know if she was real or not, shuffled into the room.
I turned to her. “Gemma, you need to find my sisters, now.” I cleared my voice, trying to remain calm despite what my mother had just confessed to me. “Bring them here. Quickly.”
Something flickered in my peripheral. I blinked. The elaborate wallpaper faded. The rich carpet beneath my feet shrunk away. The whole house shook, as though the very foundations of which the house was built were disappearing.
Fear raced through me, my heart pounding hard and every sense coming alive. What was I going to do? I always tried to prepare myself for every possible outcome. This was what my mother had instilled in my brain at a young age. Figure out the best way forward.
There was a solution to everything. And yet, I could not think of one. I could not think of how I was going to save my sisters from the devastation that was about to occur. They should at least be given a heads up. The rug shouldn’t be ripped out from under them. It wasn’t their fault our mother had lied to us for so long.
Gemma rushed off and I focused all my attention on my mother. She had lied to me my whole life. It was like she was a puzzle. I thought I had all the pieces together, but I had forced them into spots that didn’t fit.
My mother detested lying. Honesty, even brutal honesty, was better than a lie. Now, though, I realized she was the biggest hypocrite I knew.
I let out a breath.
There was no time for thoughts of regret and anger now. I had to save my sisters. I swallowed. My throat was too dry. My skin tickled, crawling with premonition.
We were all in a lot of trouble.
“Just hold on, Mother.” It was strange, me telling her what to do rather than the opposite, the way it normally was. It would never be that way again. “Until Bella and Courtney come.”
I hoped hearing their names would move her, would make her hold on longer.