“Grandma!” I giggled. I needed to get as much info from her as I could before she had to leave, but it felt good to be able to joke with her again.
“I’m teasing.” She laughed and hugged me again, tighter. “I’ve missed these moments. You have no idea how much.”
“Well, if you weren’t so busy being a cougar.” I snorted.
“I wish.” Grandma sighed heavily. “But I don’t stay in one place long enough to date.”
“Why did you fake your death?” I asked when she’d loosened her grasp and I could breathe again. “And why are you hiding?”
“I can’t even begin to cover everything. But I’ll try.” She sat on the bed, taking me with her and slinging an arm around my shoulder. “I’d made my choice. I was naïve and believed anything they told me. As the years passed, I rose in the ranks. The more I discovered about our leader and his operation, the more I realized I had to disappear. With my knowledge of their organization, the only way out was in a body bag.”
“Which side did you choose? Fawn texted me earlier to set up a time to meet Boris’s people at Headquarters, but I haven’t answered. I need to answer her soon.”
She rose and wandered about my room. “You know about the rival groups, Jane’s people and Boris’s?”
“Hayden filled me in a bit,” I said.
“Is he your boyfriend?”
I snorted. “Very definitely not.”
She glanced at me over her shoulder, a smile playing at her lips. “But you want him to be.”
My gaze fell to the floor. “He’s not boyfriend material. But I don’t want to talk about him. I need to know which side you chose.” And if trusting Chait was a huge mistake.
“Boris.”
My instinct had steered me well. “I had a feeling choosing them would be wrong.”
“That depends on how you look at it.” Grandma turned and leaned against the dresser in front of me. “Boris is extremely powerful and skilled at manipulation, which makes him dangerous. But Jane’s side has some undesirables too — usually spying for Boris. Even if they aren’t on Boris’s side, sometimes people have their own agenda. If Jane were the greatest leader in history, she’s still only as good as those backing her up.”
“You make both sides seem scary. If you had it to do all over again, who would you choose?”
“I’d hold off as long as I could. I don’t know… maybe I’d run. But I wouldn’t choose Boris.” Grandma roamed the room.
“So you’re working with Jane now?” I asked.
She stopped to lift a framed photo of her and me in happier times. “Yes. But as much as I’d love to say that you can rely on all her followers, I can’t.”
“Which means I can’t trust either side.” My shoulders slumped.
“While Boris is in control of that faction, none of us are safe. Take your meeting with his people but do it in a public place, somewhere you feel comfortable.” She slowly returned the photo to its spot, her gaze fixed to it as is if reluctant to let the memory go.
“I will.” I nodded. “What happened to Zoe?”
Grandma pursed her lips a moment then returned to my side and sat. “Since I wasn’t there, I can only tell you what I heard.”
“She didn’t choose Boris’s side.” I held my breath and paused a beat before my next words. “You think… you think he killed her?”
“We’re not so easy to take out, but not impossible. Because of the perpetual war between factions, we generally don’t go out alone, opting to stay in groups of three or four. Zoe—”
“Chait was over at Hayden’s the other night, by himself.”
“I guarantee he wasn’t alone. Just because you didn’t see anyone…”
What Grandma said made sense. Very likely, Chait hadn’t told us everything. The thought filled me with angst. Should I continue to trust him? “Go on. Tell me what else you know about Zoe.”
“She still lived with your parents, which left her unprotected. Ideally, you don’t choose until you’re over eighteen when you can leave your parents. You go straight to your people where there’s safety in numbers. Zoe knew that and kept her loyalties to herself. But they watched and figured it out.” Grandma searched my face, resting a hand on my cheek. “You have to do better than Zoe did. You can’t show any favoritism. Make both sides think they’re ahead of the game. You only have a month before you turn eighteen. They’ll wait, so long as they believe you might choose them.”
I laid my hand over hers. “I’ll be careful.”
“Good.” She smiled and dropped her hand, but kept mine in it.
“If we’re hard to kill, how could they take out Zoe, especially without her sensing them? I suppose someone could setup on the rooftop with a sniper rifle, right?”
“A bullet wouldn’t kill us.”
“Really?”
“Multiple shots might do it but one or two? No. We don’t heal instantly but we heal quickly, which is why we live so long. Our bodies are continually regenerating.”
My phone beeped, alerting me that a text came in and my eyes shot to my purse still on the floor by the door. I would check that later, after Grandma left. I returned my attention to her. “You could go to the roof with a machine gun.”
“Now you’re getting it.”
“But Zoe didn’t die from a bullet. And we sense others around, so it’s tough to take us by surprise. In order for them to kill her, Zoe had to have been alone and outnumbered.”
“Exactly.”
I had so many questions for my grandmother but one thing kept sticking in my head. I couldn’t shake it. “Why are there so many witches in our family if it’s not hereditary?”
“It’s not passed on through genetics. That’s been proven.”
“But there’s you, Zoe and me. How’s it possible?”
“I don’t know. But…” She looked away. “Tessa, it’s not only the three of us.”
“What? Who else?”
“Your mother.”
“Mom? No way. She looks at least ten years older than you.”
“It’s because she can’t embrace her magic. She won’t allow it to nurture her. But if you concentrate, really focus on her, you’ll feel it.”
The very concept made it difficult for me to think. Mom? Impossible.
“She has the potential,” Grandma went on. “Something about her, and I’m not sure what, maybe the death of her daughter, prevents her from tapping into the power.”
“The same way she has trouble connecting to me and Bree?”
She shrugged. “Maybe. Something is definitely off. I had no idea Vivienne would be anything but normal, so I sent her to live with my parents.”
“Because you didn’t want her growing up in the middle of a war.”
“Yes,” Grandma answered. “Perhaps if I’d been there, I could’ve helped Vivienne with her powers.”
“Mom lived with your adopted parents?” I asked.
“That’s right.”
“Do you know anything about your biological parents?” I wondered if they were witches, too.
“No.” Grandma shook her head.
“Did you try to find them?”
“Yes. Nothing so far. I don’t have many chances to research. I haven’t given up though.”
“So you have no clue why we’re different?”
“Until I know more about our family history, I have no way of knowing,” she said.
“Okay. Recap. Everyone in our family is a witch. Even Bree?”
“Most likely, yes.”
“That means…” Different scenarios swirled in my head, nearly suffocating me. “I have to protect her. But by being around her, I also put her in danger.”
“You could leave Bree with your mother until she’s of age.”
“No way. Mom’s incapable of loving us. I can’t subject Bree to that life. She even told me that when I turn eighteen, I can take Bree with me when I move out.” I pivoted on the bed, bringing my knee up and fixing a stare at my grandmother. “You see why I can’t leave her here? I can’t bear to watch her go through what I did the last few years.”
“Sweetheart.” She covered my hand with her own. “I’m so sorry. I wish I could’ve been there for you.”