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I pointed as Max moved to stand next to me. “Is that her name?”
“Mother?” Maxine pushed past me and Case as she took off in a sprint toward the woman on the beach.
Her mother. Great. I looked down at Case and asked, “Should I go out there?”
It was more than obvious Case was not heading out to interrupt the reunion when it rolled right on back to the kitchen area and then bumped into a drawer.
“Guess that answers that.” I moved over to look in the drawer and found tea. “And I guess that indicates what I should work on in the meantime.”
CHAPTER 9
Maxine
“Mother?” I asked with pure disbelief as I approached. She shifted her focus from the ocean to me. Her expression moved from startled to a false happy as she swiped away tears. Tears? “What happened?”
“Nothing you should worry over, Darling. Did your father send you here?” she asked and moved forward to hug me.
“No.” And a better question, “Did he send you here?”
She actually made a slight laugh and said, “No. I needed to go somewhere happy and I always had the happiest of times with you when we were here, creating that garden, taking long hikes through the woods.”
I winced. “Yeah, I’m more of a summer than a fall.”
She nodded and held my hand as she looked out at the waters and said, “You always were. I knew when you were born the Mayhem line would come to an end. He didn’t believe me.”
“I don’t understand.” I gripped her fingers tighter. Her hair had been sugar white for the past few years, but I never realized until this moment it was actually a wig. “What’s happening?”
As I reached to touch, she shook her head and let go of my hand to secure the hair piece with a magical bobby pin she made appear from thin air. “You needn’t worry—”
I was done with this. “Tell me. I am worried. I don’t understand. I’m not a child, Mother. I haven’t been in a very long time thanks to the stellar parenting job you two did. Why did you come here and not the school if you were missing me and did not know we were on break?”
She looked up at the sky and then closed her eyes as if basking in the sunlight for a moment. Was she gathering her strength, her words? She was always a little odd, but this was unsettling.
“I suppose you’re right. It’s time. It’s beyond time you knew.” She looked at me and said, “Your father is separating from me. He has a new lover. He hopes this one will bring him the male heir he cannot produce. You see, he is the end of the Mayhem. In name and deed, and he refuses to believe he cannot pass the curse to yet one more generation.”
“Uh, what?” I blinked. My brain seemed to be trying to process her words and implications. I was going to need some headache relief tea when this was over. That much I knew for sure.
She looked out at the ocean and then back to me. She took a deep breath and said, “I wonder.”
“Wonder?” I asked.
“The Mayhem family stole something very precious once. The absolute pearl of the ocean. And with it, the life force of the goddess charged with creating life and balance on multiple planes of existence. Why do you think the humans can never seem to find the bottom of certain parts of the oceans there? She had just started with their world and everything was stunted. They won’t find real magic for centuries yet to come. All thanks to the Mayhem wizarding family that used forbidden and unknown magic to locate something that was to never be found.”
I listened to her words, but it was her actions that were confusing me more. By the time she completed that horrific little footnote of my family history, she was down to just a bra and her underwear.
“Um.”
“I’m not an ordinary witch. He knew that. Could sense the power within me, but his arrogance has always been his strongest quality, therefore, it was bound to be his greatest weakness.” She unpinned the hair and tossed it aside. The short blonde curls were plastered to her head but began to spring to life without the matronly wig pressing them down.
My mother looked absolutely crazy to me and the little curls popping out at random almost seemed to move on their own as if they were… alive? Her hair was alive?
She took a few steps forward and once she was right at the water’s edge, she turned to me and said, “There’s no going back. If I do this. There’s no going back for me.”
And then she opened her arms and fell backward as if to trust fall into that water as though it would catch her.
I screamed because I didn’t really understand the woman, but I did love her. She did love me. My scream ended as I heard the door in the distance clang. Thurst was likely on his way to see what had me screaming.
Only, there was no need to worry because she landed on top of the liquid as though she had just dropped back onto a bed. As my mother was lifted up by the same water source that almost killed me, Thurst came to a stop at my side. “What is happening?”
