Page 113 of The Lone Wolf Café
“So that’s what it’s called,” my mother whispered in awe, her voice soft and contemplative. “All these years… I never had anyone to ask.”
“You’re an empath, too?”
“Yes.”
“But… where does it come from? Do we really have witch blood?”
“You see, Nettie…” My mother bit her lip. “There’s a part of your family history you don’t know about. I imagine it wasn’t spoken of after I disappeared.”
“What was it?”
“Well, your father is a full-blooded werewolf, with your paternal line on Hollenboro tracing back hundreds of years. My father is also fully werewolf, and he currently serves as the Alpha for our pack here on Mount Desert Island. But my mother, your grandmother… she was a witch.”
My grandmother… was a witch?!
So, Rowena’s theories about me having witch ancestry were true. I was three-quarters werewolf, and one-quarter witch. It explained so much: from how both me and my mother were able to break through the witch barrier, to our empath abilities, and even why my father was always so hesitant to talk about my mother’s side of the family.
“We visited her once,” my mother continued. “She was a traveling witch, a baker who sold her goods all over Maine. Butshe had a cottage in Kennebunkport, and we traveled down there when you were four years old.”
I did remember. Brief flashes of memories flooded my mind. Long white sailboats floating in a harbor while squawking seagulls swooped overhead. A little Cape Cod house on the shoreline, painted a bright sky blue, and a front garden bursting with life and color. A homey kitchen, with lace curtains and antique moose figurines, that smelled of sweet dough and ripe blueberries.
That cookbook, sitting on a counter, its pages crisper and its spine less worn.
Oh gods! The cookbook!
My grandmother’s cookbook. I had been using it for years, always keeping it nearby. It was my most treasured possession. And the whole time I’d been using it, learning the recipes by heart… not knowing the cookbook once belonged to a witch. A kitchen witch, who could infuse magical energy into food.
I thought back to Juniper praising my goods for their anti-anxiety effects. Saying she’d be a regular customer from now on.
Maybe I had a trace of that magic in me.
Maybe I really had been selling spelled goods all along.
I just hadn’t realized it.
“But…” The biggest question I had was still unanswered. “Why did you leave us?”
It made my chest ache to say those words aloud. If my mother had survived falling into the ocean, washing up on the shore on another island, why didn’t she ever come back?
There was only one possible conclusion.
My own mother left us.
She abandoned her family. Faked her own death.
Butwhy?
My mother took a moment to collect herself. Her red ears twitched, and her tail shifted nervously behind her back. She wasstill fiddling with her fingers in her lap, and I noticed that they kept shifting into claws. Within a few seconds, they would turn back to human fingernails, and the process would repeat itself once she got anxious again.
“Let’s start at the beginning,” she sighed. “As you know, your father’s family are natives to Hollenboro. I, however, am not.”
“You’re from here, aren’t you?” I pointed at the ground. “The Mount Desert Island pack. They’re your family.”
My mother nodded. Her fingers had shifted into claws again, and I swore I saw streaks of red fur spreading up her wrists. But once I squinted to get a better look, the red fur disappeared.
“Yes,” my mother replied. “I was born in Bar Harbor, and I spent most of my childhood here, with my father’s pack. I did make trips to Kennebunkport to visit my mother, but I always felt more comfortable as a werewolf than as a witch.”
“And the pack accepted you?” I asked. I remembered Rowena mentioning that the Mount Desert Island pack wouldn’t accept her because she was half-witch.
