Total pages in book: 107
Estimated words: 100859 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 504(@200wpm)___ 403(@250wpm)___ 336(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 100859 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 504(@200wpm)___ 403(@250wpm)___ 336(@300wpm)
“Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?” I ask as we step away from the buildings to where the grass meets the thicket of sweet-smelling blackberries and bramble at the base of the trees.
“Me?” she asks. “I’m the one with all the questions for you.”
We walk alongside the woods. “I already answered some. Now it’s my turn to ask you.”
“Fine,” she says with a sigh. “Ask away. I’ll have to warn you, I’m quite boring.”
“You’re anything but boring, Kat,” I tell her. “You seduce me.”
Her brows raise. “I seduce you?” A hint of color appears on her cheeks.
“Yes. You make me want to know everything there is about you.”
She opens her mouth, a peek of her pink tongue coming out to lick her lips, and I feel my cock stiffen in my trousers. Most unwelcome at the moment.
“That’s only because you weren’t able to see anything in my mind,” she says after a moment, her demeanor going from flushed to cool. “You like the challenge. You don’t like being told no.”
She’s not wrong about that, I think.
“I’d like to start by learning more about your family,” I go on as we walk side by side.
“Oh, that figures,” she says, sounding defeated. “It’s never really about me, is it?”
I reach out and grab her gloved hand, pulling her to a stop. “Trust me. It is about you,” I say, staring intently into her eyes.
She relents, and I let go of her hand. “Alright.”
We continue walking. “Tell me, Kat,” I say, keeping my voice down, “how often did you see your aunts while growing up?”
“My aunts? Hardly ever. Aunt Leona and Ana were around when I was a baby, but I think it’s around that time that my mother and them must have had a falling-out.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Just the way my father would talk about them. I was always listening—I was always so nosy.”
“Still are, I imagine,” I interject with a smile.
“That’s true,” she concedes with a nod. “My father would say that she was better off without them. Sometimes he made it sound like she chose him over them.”
“They didn’t approve of your father?”
“I don’t know how they couldn’t have. Everyone loved him. He was the nicest man in town.”
“I don’t think the Sisters care much for whether someone is nice or not. They seem to care whether they have power.”
“My father was a witch too,” she adds to my surprise. “But I never really saw any magic with him. Or with my mother. In fact, when I was really young, one night when my mother had gone on her monthly trips to the school—”
“Your mother went on monthly trips to the school?” I interrupt. “To here?”
“Yes. The days before and after the full moon. She still does. She’ll probably be back in October for the next full moon.”
“What does she do here?”
“I have no idea,” she says.
“You never asked?”
“I was told not to speak about it by my father,” she says. “I assume it’s some full moon ritual she has to do with her sisters, but my father made me promise to keep my own magic and all talks of magic hidden.”
I frown. “Why would he tell you that?”
She shrugs. “He said it was too dangerous for the world to find out what I am. Said I was never to practice my magic in front of anyone, and that included him and my mother. So I didn’t…for the most part.” She trails off with a wistful look in her eyes, and the energy coming off her deepens in grief. “I had a friend. I showed him sometimes.”
Him. How curious this feeling of jealousy that she used to show her magic to a male friend. I shake it out of my head.
“Well, I suppose your father wasn’t wrong in that. I grew up with a father who was a pastor for the church in our small Kansas town. I didn’t even know I was predisposed to magic until the old native man, John, who ran the general store, pointed it out to me one day. After that, he used to visit me in dreams, and it was there I was able to practice and understand. He warned me that my family would never understand and I’d risk being killed over it or locked up in a mental institution, which is more or less the same thing. But to have parents who are also witches…feels like a shame to have to bury it.”
She watches me for a moment, taking in the information with hunger in her eyes. “I just did what I was told. My father was so adamant about it. And because neither of them ever mentioned their magic or used it in the house, it was easy to pretend we were normal.”
“Except when your mother left the house on those full moons.”