Page 169 of The Blairville Legacies

Hello?!

Her fingers encircled the milky white stone that had taken on my body temperature.

“Nothing,” was all she said before she stepped back again and began to march thoughtfully around the room. Back and forth.

Thankfully, no one was wearing the black robe anymore, and we were in a very different place as well. It was a kind of drawing room with burgundy wallpaper. The ceilings were dark wood and decorated with those recurring floral ornaments. The tiny bulbs of the chandelier shone in a warm glow above us. The arched windows told me that we were no longer underground.

Grace came out of nowhere with a glass bottle full of green stuff. She knelt beside my mother and took my hand.

I hesitated at first, but it was still Grace. The outgoing girl from campus with the brown corkscrew curls and all the crystals.One of them…

She gave me a pitying look before just dumping the stuff on my hand.

I groaned and twisted my face in pain.

“Press it together, and your pain will lessen.”

Then she stood up and disappeared back through the doorway.

“How is it possible that her powers cannot be activated?” came a voice from the hallway just before a woman with shoulder-length blonde hair and ice-blue eyes entered the room, dressed in a dark blue business dress. She looked very pretty, and somehow, she also looked familiar, but I had certainly never seen her before.

It was immediately obvious that she must be Vivienna’s mother, because they were the spitting image of each other.

When our eyes met, she paused for a moment and unease spread through me.

Her thoughtful look gave way to suspicion, then she looked back at Amara.

“Could you please give me an explanation of what happened there last night?”

Last night?What time was it, exactly?

“I don’t know, Amanda.” Amara ran a hand through her hair. “What are you even doing here at this hour?”

The woman addressed propped both hands at her sides.

“I’m worried about our Circle,” she snorted in disdain.

“That’s news to me,” Margot laughed, earning a stern look from Vivienna’s mother. I was pretty sure it had to be her mother.

“She’s possibly an ungifted one. Extremely rare, but yet it has happened many times in history.”

Anungifted one?Amara could have just saidordinary mortalorhuman. But in the end, it came out the same, and that was that I didn’t have any freaky gifts.

I cleared my throat audibly.

“Listen, whatever you all are and can do here. I don’t. And no matter what my mother has to do with this, I’m just a normal person and I don’t want anything to do withanyof this.”

“Impossible,” the woman in blue hissed without giving me another look. “Ungifted Quatura don’t cause reactions like that, Amara.”

Amara looked at my mother.

“Where’s the father?”

“Doesn’t matter anymore,” Mum said quickly, but swallowed, because I knew it had very much mattered in her life.

To my surprise, Amara just nodded knowingly, as if that answer was enough for her. Suddenly the suspicion sprouted in me that perhaps he had also been one of them. But would I really be ungifted then, as this cult – or rather their cult leader – claimed?

“Whether she is ungifted or not, the Councils are unsettled by what took place yesterday, and the Councils demand an answer.”

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