Page 12 of Truly Madly Magically

So I put my arm around my mother and don’t wait for her permission. Or his. I just...protect him.

I zoom Mom and me up to the second floor and the room I stay in whenever I spend the night here. So it’s only me and her.

And the little baby bump between us.

Tanith Good is a force to be reckoned with. She always has been, with a temper, a sharp tongue, and a healthy sense of revenge not always tempered with the greatest control.

Apple, meet tree.

She didn’t mean to curse me. That was aimed at my deserving father. I don’t think it was just that my dad cheated that upended her tenuous grip on control, though I know that hurt her pride as much as anything else. It was that he’d gone and married a human without telling us. He was expecting a child with a human dental hygienist, of all things. And this double life only came out as he was leaving us for the human world, witches be damned.

“I could banish him,” my mother is muttering, pacing the room. I lower myself on the bed because I am beat and I can’t pretend otherwise, the way I would with anyone else. “It’s not the same as a curse. Just a simple spell to imprison him in a cave forever.”

She’s talking about Zander, not Dad, though I can maybe be forgiven for thinking this is a summoned memory from my childhood. “Mom.”

“I’ve had ten years to come up with the perfect plan, Ellowyn. Why not enact it now that he’s done this to you?”

To me. Oh, if only I could lay the blame of this entire pregnancy on him.

“Maybe you’ve forgotten now that getting pregnant isn’t a risk for you,” I say dryly, given that her long-term partner, Mina, is a woman. “Neither one of us did this alone.”

She huffs out a breath, but she also stops her pacing. She looks at me for a long moment, then crosses to take a seat next to me on the bed. Carefully, sweetly, she lays a hand over my stomach.

I don’t know if I want to cry. Or laugh. Or maybe...sing. It’s only that after months of toil and glamours, I feel right. The power of a mother, I think.

And I’m going to be one.

I swallow hard.

Mom makes a crooning sort of sound I don’t think I’ve heard in twenty-five years, but I recognize it immediately. On a cellular level. Everything in me...lets go a little as I relax into the sound and the heat of her hand on my belly.

“What happened tonight?” she asks.

I breathe past the prickling feeling at the backs of my eyes. “We’re not sure. I’ll go out on a limb and guess the Joywood are at the root of it, one way or another.”

She scowls at this. But one thing Tanith Good has never said to her only child, even when I wish she would, is that I shouldn’t be part of this. If the Joywood wants a fight, Tanith thinks we should all be front and center. She believes I have every right to be part of this coven. That I’m capable.

That they should have arranged the whole thing around my talent, in fact, and she’ll fight anyone who says different.

She has.

Tonight what she does is rub a hand over that soft swell, and I know she’s accepted that this is a danger I’ll have to vanquish. With my coven. Without her.

I can feel how proud she is, beneath the fury and the fear. I don’t know how you go from holding a baby’s entire life inside your body to letting them go off and fight battles they can’t possibly win.

My throat feels too tight to ask.

“Why were you hiding this?” She means, from me.

“I had to tell him first. I couldn’t.” My breath threatens to hitch, and I try to tell her that it’s because Zelda died and there’s all this ascension stuff going on, but those words won’t come out of my mouth. Because they are a lie. But it’s my mom, so it’s the truth I speak. “It hurt too much.”

Tanith runs a hand over my hair. She doesn’t ask me why Zander, or how. She doesn’t press for all the details my friends will want. She sits next to me in a comforting silence that reminds me that no matter what, no matter how scared I get or how little I know what the hell I’m doing when it comes to pregnancies and babies...my mom has been there. She’s done this already, and well. She will be here every step of the way.

All I can think is that Zander doesn’t have that anymore.

“It’s not the worst thing that could happen,” my mother points out. Almost carefully, when she’s normally more of a bull in search of a china shop to level. Maybe she senses that I’m a lot more fragile than china tonight. “I suppose you know that if you’re already this far along.”

I pull away a little and squint over at her. “I thought you wanted to curse him?”

---