Page 4 of The Vampire and the Case of the Cursed Canine

For the first time in my life, I didn’t want tea at all.

Chapter 3

After a brew, Connor took John to Kamluck. I felt my lover’s absence like the loss of a limb.

I was alone with my mother now and her judgement was heavy in the air. The silence drew out, and the longer it went on the tenser it felt. We sat at my kitchen table politely sipping our tea. Try as I might, I couldn’t think of a single thing to say to her.

When she finally spoke, I was relieved that one of us had broken the uncomfortable silence. ‘Love, I have something to discuss with you.’ She stirred some sugar into her cup and my eyebrows rose: she believed that having sugar in tea was uncouth. She only did it when she was stressed, which was rare because she was a lady who lunched; she had chefs, cleaners and drivers so what did she have to be stressed about – except for how successful her charity luncheons were?

Something to discuss with me? My stomach clenched. Here it was: she was about to tell me how disappointed she was about my small house, chaotic job and apparently overly large dog.

I felt Fluffy’s weight against my legs, comforting and protective. He’d sensed something was off and was putting himself between us. Shadow had retreated to my bedroom, away from Arabella who was sitting primly on Mum’s lap.

I raised my eyebrows in invitation. Go on then, hit me – tell me how wrong my life is. I squared my shoulders; I wasn’t going to bite my tongue in response, not this time.

‘It’s like this, darling.’ She looked down at her tea and took a sip almost as if she were gathering her courage. She took a deep breath. ‘I’ve wanted to talk to you about this since you became a vampire, but I didn’t find the time before you left.’ She frowned at me, ‘Of course you didn’t clue us into your plans to leave, so that’s hardly my fault.’

I clenched my teeth and didn’t point out that I had asked for their help to leave and they’d said no. ‘Mum, get to the point. What are you talking about?’ How did me becoming a vampire change anything besides my diet and my vulnerability to the sun?

‘Well, Elizabeth, it’s like this. Supernats aren’t supposed to reveal themselves to the pedestrian world.’

I blinked. Something in the way she’d phrased it made my stomach clench. Suddenly I was sure that she wasn’t lecturing me because I’d once blurted out to her that I was a vampire. Pedestrian world: she’d phrased it like she wasn’t pedestrian.

‘Mum…’

She raised a hand to stop me. ‘Listen. This is difficult enough as it is.’

I closed my mouth and clenched my jaw, my slow heart hammering as I waited.

She drew herself up stiffly into her normal imperious posture. ‘You see, Elizabeth … I’m a witch, darling.’

I stared at her. All this time she’d been a supernat? My mouth hung open and for once I had nothing to say.

Mum trilled an awkward laugh. ‘An elemental fire witch.’ As if to prove it, she summoned a small flame to her fingertip. ‘I always have been. Unlike you, I manifested my powers at a proper age – I was three when I summoned my first flame by accident.’

Gods: even while she was telling me something so important, she couldn’t help getting in a dig. My mum might be a witch but she was definitely a total bitch.

‘Nope.’ The word flew from my lips and I shook my head like I had when I was a child, hair flying, eyes wide in disbelief.

I’d seen and accepted plenty of things since I’d arrived in Portlock: dead banshee spirits – fine; red-eyed werewolves – I got it; smoky murderous beasts – sure. But my mother a witch? Nope. No. All the no’s, because if she was, that could mean my nana was one, too. The thought of her keeping that from me was crippling. Mum always let me down – that was her modus operandi – but Nana?

My mother nodded primly. ‘Deny it all you like, Elizabeth, but I assure you I am a fire witch. See?’ She waved her flaming finger at me.

‘That’s a tiny flame,’ I said inanely. I could throw huge fireballs; maybe I was even more powerful than my mother. Fire came to me easily, and now I realised that I’d inherited that ability from her.

My mum was a fire witch. No matter how many times I repeated it, my brain couldn’t accept it. I was in shock.

‘It is tiny, isn’t it?’ she said smugly. At my less-than-impressed look, she elaborated. ‘Any old idiot can throw a huge fireball but it takes years of study to perfect the control required to produce such a small flame.’

Right: I was any old idiot.

‘That’s why there aren’t that many fire witches,’ she continued sagely. ‘Too many accidentally kill themselves before they learn control.’

Yikes. I added ‘learn control’ to my to-do list.

She doused the flame and took another sip of her sweetened tea. I stared at her as my brain started whirring again. The shock faded and gave way to anger. My mum was a witch, and John had told me a witch had arranged for me to be turned; had an enemy of my mother’s arranged for me to be killed? Was my vampirism nothing more than a ‘fuck you’ to my mum?

I pushed the thought aside for later. I needed to focus on the issue at hand, namely that Mum was a freaking fire witch and she’d never, ever told me about it.

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