I decided to add this second bit in Nerissa's POV, because I wanted to show she's not all evil, just mostly unhinged (and a little bit evil) x Please read and review :)

She was surprised that she was taken in by Caleb's act, but she supposes she really shouldn't be. He is her flesh and blood after all and what is she, if not the consummate actor?

It is how she'd lived her life for so long now that until recently she'd forgotten who she really was, instead being the Mage or one of her many other guises. Those guises had become more of her than Nerissa had even anticipated.

Nerissa had watched her son grow up from the shadows, just out of view, making sure that Julian was raising him right.

He was doing a good job - Caleb was strong-willed, dedicated, hard-working and loyal. All traits she admired, even if it would be difficult to get him to side with her. But once he was...

It would be difficult for anyone to take him away again, even if that had been her own fault for walking away.

She hated that she'd had to leave him, but she couldn't exactly stay with them as Nerissa, as a wanted and hunted criminal. So she'd left, to continue her disguise as the Mage and watch from afar. She had always watched over him, even before he'd even been old enough to meet the Mage.

But Caleb also rushed into things, acting before he thought, a trait that he'd gotten from both his parents and she wished he'd gotten from neither.

But he had. And he'd charged in here, to the cave that had once been her prison, without any sort of plan in place, getting himself caught by his own mother with complete ease.

His relationship with the vain Earth Guardian was troubling, but now that he was here she could have set that to rights.

Only the Guardians had come to rescue him.

A sharp pang had shot through her, as she remembered her own time as a Guardian and Cassidy who had long since been lost. These girls didn't deserve the honour of being Guardians, young, foolish girls who had only defeated Phobos through her assistance and the help of a powerful and untrained Queen.

The red-head, the fiery one, had her heart. Her heart was in someone else's hands, dangling just out of reach.

But, with Caleb's help, she'd had it in reach at last. They would hardly fight against Caleb, not properly, especially not the blonde Earth Guardian.

But Caleb had chosen to betray get, to side with the Guardians and attempt to take her new heart by force.

He was acting before thinking again.

Like mother, like son.