Page 18 of Elora and the Crow

“You were a baby,” Elora said, her anger at a woman she’d never met crackling through her. “You were sweet and innocent, and she knew what kind of life you would have there.”

“She did,” Jonah said.

“Your father didn’t stop her?” Elora said.

“He tried, but my mother threatened to kill him,” Jonah said.

“Oh my God,” she said.

“Yeah,” Jonah said. “She would have done it too. My father… he wasn’t a weak man, but he was only human, and compared to my mother, he had no chance of surviving anything she might do to him. They weren’t in any type of relationship. It was just a casual thing that resulted in my mother getting pregnant. She wanted to have an abortion, but my father convinced her not to. He said there was a chance I could be human, and if I were, the Academy would leave me alone. But I was a shapeshifter like my mother. My dad raised me until I was four, and then my mother took me to the Academy.”

He stared blankly at the wall. “My father never told me this, but Caleb said one night he got really drunk and told Caleb what happened with my mother. I guess he tried to take me and disappear. He knew my mother had decided I’d be better off if she gave me to the Academy, so my father ran. Only she found us, beat the shit out of him, threatened to kill him, and then took me and walked out of my father’s life for good. My father eventually fell in love with a human. They got married, and Caleb was born a few years later.”

“Where is your mother now?” Elora asked.

Jonah studied her. “You have that ‘I’m going to hex someone’ look on your face, little witch.”

“That is not a face I make,” Elora said. “Besides, I’m not a dark witch. I would never do a spell with the intention of harming someone. But I would love for your mother - and I use that term loosely - to meet Sarina.”

“Sending your sister to murder my mother is a waste of time,” Jonah said.

“Why?”

“Because she’s already dead. She died about six months after I got out of the Academy,” Jonah said.

“Even though she was a shitty mother, I’m sorry,” Elora said.

Jonah braced his hands on the windowsill behind him, his lean body tense. The cold sunlight made his dark hair gleam, and Elora reminded herself it was not at all the right time to wander over there and run her fingers through it, even if it did look silky soft.

“How did she die?” she asked.

“Job went bad,” he said.

“How did your father die?”

“A few years after I got out, he died of a brain hemorrhage.”

“I’m so sorry,” she said.

“Thank you. He would write me letters and send care packages while I was at the Academy, but it wasn’t until I got out that we had an actual relationship. He was a good man who tried his best to be a father, even after what my mother said and did.”

“I’m glad you had a little time with him,” Elora said.

“Me too,” he said.

She studied him quietly, and he raised one thick eyebrow at her. “What?”

“Your life has been impossibly hard and sad.”

He just shrugged. “Plenty of people have it worse.”

“Did you know Sarina before you were trapped as a crow?” Elora asked.

“I knew of her,” Jonah said. “She has a reputation in our world.”

“What kind of reputation?” Elora was close with her half-sister, but Sarina had always refused to divulge any information about her jobs, and it didn’t matter how much Elora whined and wheedled. Sarina never gave more than the basics.

Jonah grinned at her. “I might have been a crow, but I am well aware that Sarina wants you to know precisely zero about what she does for a living.”

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