Page 93 of Enspelled

My eyes snap open.

And I stare.

“Aunt Mel?” I whisper, knowing this has to be a dream. This can’t be real.

Dressed in a black hoodie and jeans, sitting cross-legged in front of me, she smiles. “Hi, Briar.”

“You’re alive. How can you be alive?” I stumble over my words in a rush to get them out as my eyes rake over every inch of her. It’s her. The long sleek brown hair, large brown eyes, and the smile. It’s definitely her.

I throw myself at her. “It’s really true,” I whisper. “You’re alive.” I’m squeezing her too tight, but I can’t make myself stop. And the tears filling my eyes and sliding down my cheeks are just as impossible to stop too.

“I thought I was alone.” My voice breaks at the end, and I have to swallow hard to silence my sob.

Her arms come up and around me. She doesn’t speak. Just holds me.

A long while later, she pulls away despite my attempt to cling to her. But she doesn’t go far. She remains on her knees in front of me with her hands framing my face.

“How can you be alive?” I whisper. “There was an explosion, and—”

“Shh.” She presses her finger against my lips, and I stop talking. With a gentle touch, she brushes the last of my tears away from my face.

“Aunt Mel?” I ask.

She smiles again, but this isn’t the one I’m used to seeing in the tearoom. This one seems cold and strange. “I never thought I’d become this attached to you.”

I blink at her in confusion. “What do you mean? You’re my aunt. Why wouldn’t you become attached to me?”

Leaning back, she draws her sleeve up her arm, and I glimpse the prosthetic hand.

“Aunt Mel? Since when did you start wearing that? You always said it hurt when it rubbed on your stump. What’s going on?”

“I needed two hands,” she says, her focus on the watch on her wrist.

“What for?”

No sooner have the words left my lips than the forest roars. I barely manage to silence a scream as I jerk my head first one way, and then the other. “What was that?”

“That,” Aunt Mel says, rolling her sleeve back down, “was the sound of an explosion ripping through every single member of the green witch coven of Madden Grove.”

Her voice is so gentle and her smile so wide that at first, I think I must have heard her wrong. “What?”

“You once asked how I can smile all the time. Do you remember, Briar?”

I recall our last conversation in my bedroom before she left for the coven meeting. “Yes, I remember.”

“I could smile,” she says, pushing herself to her feet and holding her hand out for mine. I take it and let her pull me up. “Because I knew that soon they would all be dead.”

This has to be some kind of joke. Or I have a concussion. Or something.

“Dead? Who?”

“The green witches,” she says simply.

“You can’t kill all the green witches in town. That’s… that’s crazy. And you’re… you. You wouldn’t—”

“I did,” she cuts in.

And then I watch something I’ve never seen happen before. Her smile dies. Now she just looks tired and old. “I hate them. Every single person in this town, Briar. I hate them all.”

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