Secrets and Lies (Cassie Scot) (32 page)

The light of the fire flickered in and out of focus. I could no longer hear the music, though I could sense it just out of reach, like the ghost of a song.

Shame washed over me. Shame for the things I had done. Shame for the things I had kept hidden, even from my own children. Even from the precious child who needed to know the most. The first from my womb. The one most like me.

Most like her? I didn’t understand. I looked quite a bit like her, but so did Elena, and Elena would be a gifted sorcerer one day. If Elena and I hadn’t been born twelve years apart, we might have been twins. No one who looked could tell that the pictures of me at the age of nine were not pictures of Elena.

Or of my mother. Not that I’d ever seen pictures of her as a child. Was that strange?

Mom?

The most like me. The cave continued to fade.

Mom?

Shame. Guilt. Fear. A secret kept too long becomes a lie. And when it is told, it is just as devastating.

Mom?

She’ll never forgive me. She hates me. I can feel it. I can feel her hatred, her resentment, her hurt. Oh, God, the hurt! How could I have made her feel this way? Didn’t I tell her I loved her? Didn’t she know? Yes, she knew. She knew that, at least. Relief.

The cave grew brighter.

But she didn’t know that I blamed myself for her lack of magic, never her. She didn’t know that I was beating myself up when I tried again and again to help her find some shred of magic within herself. She didn’t know I was afraid she would be just like me. Temporary relief.

The cave grew dimmer.

She’ll never forgive.

Mom, please!
I wanted to know. I hadn’t wanted to know before, but I suddenly needed to know.

Forgive me?

Show me.

I love you.
I felt it. I felt angry toward her, but I knew that my own hatred was more a symptom of love mixed with anger. Two powerful emotions combine to make the coin flip, and that is hatred. It is difficult to feel so strongly for someone you do not care about.

Who is Sheridan?
I asked.

She was relenting. She would show me what she meant. Again, the cave flickered and dimmed, but this time we weren’t fading to the blackness of my own quiet space. Instead, I found myself inside the kitchen of a modest home, staring at two teenage girls who looked just like my mother would have at that age – just like I had a few years ago.

They were twins down to the dusting of freckles on their noses. They had auburn hair, blue eyes, tiny noses, and small, indistinct breasts that would suddenly blossom when they were sixteen or seventeen.

I was looking at my mother and her twin sister, Sherry – Jason’s mom.

Sheridan.

Confused, I looked from girl to girl. When realization suddenly hit I gasped. I was Mom. We were one and the same and we were looking out at two identical mirrors of ourself. These were Mom’s sisters. She wasn’t a twin, as she had always told us. She was a triplet. Or had been, at one time.

Sherry and Sheridan.
If I weren’t inside my mother’s head, I wouldn’t have known which was which, but to Mom it was obvious. Sheridan’s pattern of freckles was much different from Sherry’s. Why, Sheridan had three more freckles than Sherry did, and they were slightly more concentrated on the bridge of her nose.

I was excited. I had barely been able to contain myself all day at school, bursting to tell my sisters all about the new high school guidance counselor, Mr. Hart. He’d asked me to see him during second period to talk to me about my academic future. He had been so interested in my nearly perfect test scores, and even more fascinated when I’d told him about my eidetic memory.

“It’s a gift,” he’d told me. “You should treasure a gift.”

But the conversation hadn’t stopped there. I had missed my entire second period English class and half of my third period P.E. class (which I didn’t mind in the least). Mr. Hart had wanted to know everything about me. He’d seemed so genuinely interested, especially when I told him that I could sometimes...do things.

“What sort of things?” he’d asked.

“What did you tell him?” Sherry asked as I relayed my story. She seemed half worried, half fascinated by my obvious excitement. Sheridan didn’t say much at all. She was the quiet one, except when she sang.

I’d told him about the time I’d been very angry with Jack Schneider and he tripped and fell. And about the time I’d been desperate not to see Ernie Bloom at school and we’d ended up having a snow day – in May. About the time Mom had said we’d have to put the cat to sleep and I loved that cat and begged her not to, when suddenly, the cat started eating again. The vet said his kidney was healed. On and on I’d talked, about strange things that happened, sometimes at random, but most often when all three of us focused our mind on the same thing – like with the cat. We always worked better together.

“You told him all that?” Sherry asked. I could almost feel her fear. That was another thing we could do, though I hadn’t told Mr. Hart about it.

“But wait until you hear!” I insisted. After all that, he’d shown me what
he
could do. With one hand –
one hand
– he’d lifted me and the chair upon which I’d sat. I’d screamed, but before the secretary ran in to find out what was wrong, he set me down and began offering reassurances. Then he’d showed me other things he could do with his strength.

Shock and excitement were written all over Sherry’s face. But Sheridan – oh, Sheridan! Why didn’t I listen to you?
“He wants to teach us to use magic. To really use it!” I told them.

“What’s the catch?” Sheridan asked.

There’s always a catch.

I refused to believe there was a catch. Mr. Hart had been so sincere. “He wants us to stay after school tomorrow to talk to him. He wants to test us.”

Sherry and Sheridan asked questions at the same time, tripping over one another, but the scene began to fade. The memory was faded. I could only remember my enthusiasm and my excitement. Mom and Dad knew nothing of magic, but we’d known for a long time we could do things. We’d always kept it secret, a little afraid of what others would do to us, a little afraid of what we might do to them.

But he had come to me. He had pretty much known already, hadn’t he?

He’d suspected, but I’d told him a great deal. It was my fault. I’d let him in and through me, he got to my sisters.

Oh, did he test us. He learned our strengths and our weaknesses. He learned about Sherry’s gift with plants. Anything would grow for her, even in infertile soil. Our house was always full of plants.

He learned about Sheridan’s songs. Her achingly beautiful songs that could lift or destroy our spirits. Songbird, he’d called her.

We were strong, he said. So strong because there were three. There was power in three, he said.

Lots of power. We were so strong and so naïve. Of course, he just wanted to teach us. He liked us. He said he’d always wanted daughters just like us.

Fools. Sheridan never trusted him, but she’d never been the leader. I was the leader. The others leaned on me.

Suddenly, everything went black. I was back in my quiet place, but I wasn’t alone. Mom was there. It seemed she had been scarcely aware of my presence but with a jolt, she’d noticed me behind her eyes, watching her past, and she was afraid.

Afraid of what?

Of him. Of Mr. Hart. In my mind I saw him again – a middle-aged man not yet past his prime, with a full head of luscious, brown hair. What color had his eyes been before? They were red now. He looked eight feel tall and so powerfully built. So overpowering. Overwhelming.

The power was seductive. It called to me. I wanted to know, to learn. What good was power if I didn’t know what to do with it?

What good was knowledge if I had no power? That last was my own thought, I realized, and Mom realized it too.

What happened next?
I wanted to know.

The basement. I couldn’t stand to return to the basement. Anywhere but there. Let’s think about something else. Let’s just stay here, in this dark, quiet place.

Powerless place.

Like my quiet place, when I had my first real lesson.

What do you mean, Mom? I need to understand.
I wanted to understand.

My parents died while I was in the basement. He didn’t tell us. I found out later. I’d always wondered why they never looked for us.

Were you a prisoner?

I still am. But now, the prison is of my own making.

Silence. I felt drained, emotionally and spiritually. Mom didn’t want to tell me the rest. She was holding back.

You do love Evan,
Mom told me.
I told Edward you did. He didn’t want to hear it.

I tried to blank my thoughts, to keep her out of my head. This trip was about her, not about me.
Get out of my head.

Well, you’re looking in mine. And love feels so much better than...than...

The basement.

Mr. Hart told us we couldn’t learn magic at school. We’d have to come to his house on a Saturday and he would show us everything. He gave us the address and we went, bright and early, so we would be there when the sun rose. Sunrise is a powerful time of day. So is sunset, but he wanted us there at sunrise.

So it would look like we’d run away. But I didn’t know that at the time.

The basement had no windows and only a single door led to it – a door hidden in a paneled wall. No one would see that door, unless they knew what they were looking for. I only saw it twice, once on my way down and once on my way up.

The way down was easier. I was excited. The door was part of this new intrigue. This game.

There were three beds in the basement. I saw them first. I think they were the first clue I had that something wasn’t quite right. Three beds. Three twin beds side-by-side, They were in a room to the right of the stairs. To the left of the stairs were some storage shelves, an air conditioner, heater, washer, dryer...the sorts of things you would expect to see in a basement.

But off to the right was a room. With three beds and a little bathroom connected by yet another door.

Shouldn’t there have been an altar or something? Candles? Spell books? There were no books at all and no furniture, save for those beds. The walls were brown, wood paneled like a bar or some nightmare of a bachelor pad.

No pictures. No windows. A small closet behind yet another door.

Slam. Click.

I remembered it just like that. My whole body tightened with fear beyond expressing. No! No!

Denial.

He had locked us in.

Shock.

Let us out! Let us out!

Bargaining.

Acceptance never came.

The door was made of steel, as it turned out. Steel. Why hadn’t I noticed on the way in?

Sheridan was crying. Sobbing. Sherry held her. I sat alone on one of the beds, staring at them, at Sherry’s accusatory stare. She hated me. I had done this. Me. My fault.

We would be in that room together for two years.

Two years?
That was me. I couldn’t understand. I couldn’t even fathom. What had this man done to my mother in there for two years? Perverted thoughts danced before my mind but I instantly knew they were wrong. That wasn’t it. He wasn’t after our bodies.

He was after our souls – the part that spilled into the blood and became the magic.

He brought us good food for a while. He slid it through a little flap in the door. But he didn’t speak much and there was nothing to do. We ate and talked. Sheridan would sing to us. I would recite novels from memory.

Boredom. Afraid, alone, imprisoned, and bored. Time is endless.

The food gets a little worse after a while. How long? We had no clock, no window, no way of knowing. We slept when we were tired or bored, but that was often, so sleeping was no measure of time. We tried counting meals but after a while, there weren’t three in a day. There might only be one. Or none.

He was angry. We knew that, but he didn’t answer questions for a long, long time.

Oh and we tried to escape! We pooled our magic, but we didn’t know how to focus it and Mr. Hart had built a magic-proof cage for us, though we didn’t know it at the time.

Time and time and time. That’s all we had. More time.

Then one day, he came into the room.

My heart was in my throat.

He never came in, but that day he did. We were all lying in bed. We’d pushed the beds together so we could cling to one another. We didn’t wear clothes anymore. We had no replacements for the ones we had brought and there’s only so long you can wear the same thing. We washed our clothes in the bathtub for a while, but they still became rags.

We hadn’t eaten in a long time. Our ribs were clearly visible through our skin.

He hadn’t brought a tray of food.

“Which one of you is always singing?”

Don’t tell him. Don’t tell him.