Chapter 14

The Heart of Amon

Mommy didn't know he was still awake, but he had picked up on how nervous and excited she'd been all day, and wanted to know why.

He snuck out onto the balcony and climbed over the partition between his room and Mommy's room. Mommy didn't like it when he did that, but he was a really good climber.

He peeked through the small crack open at the corner of the curtain.

Mommy's room was lit with candles. She had a piece of paper on the floor, and she was checking the paper and drawing pictures on her floor with sand. She didn't like it when he made messes like that, so why did she get to do it?

It took her a long time to finish making the pictures. She was being really careful. He didn't know what the pictures were. Some of them looked like letters, but they weren't letters that he knew. She was drawing them in a design of concentric circles.

When she finished, she stood in the center of the circles. He heard her chanting.

"I am a descendent of Witches. I have the Witch nature within me. Draw it forth, Runes of Hecate!"

The circles and symbols on the floor began to glow with an eerie cold light.

She lifted her hands as if in a trance. The candles lifted into the air, levitating. Her fingers turned, and the floating lights turned in the air, casting dancing shadows on the wall. The light glittered in her raven black hair. Her eyes were sparkling, and her face was transformed by rapture into someone unrecognizable.

"Mommy?" he whispered, too quietly for there to be any chance of her hearing. He backed away, climbed back over the partition and went back into his own room. He hid under the covers.

She found herself in a house, in a bedroom, the cluttered, constricted bedroom of a teenage boy.

She turned around at the sound of a door opening and saw a teenage Nagira standing there.

"What are you doing in my room?" he asked, sounding curious and not at all upset.

"Nothing," the younger boy answered quickly.

"It's okay if you want to come in here," Nagira said. "It's just that there's stuff in here I don't want to get messed up. And some stuff I don't want my mom finding out about, so be careful about getting into things."

"Sorry."

"No need to be sorry. I know how hard it is for you to be here, moving in with people you don't even know. I want us to be friends. My mom wants us to be friends."

The boy looked down at his feet. "Your mom hates me," he mumbled.

"She doesn't hate you. She doesn't really hate hate you, anyway. You just remind her of someone she doesn't like. But so do I. She got used to me. She'll get used to you too."

"I don't get it. Who do I remind her of? And why did she take me in anyway if she doesn't like me?"

Nagira sighed in that dismissive way only teenagers who were sure they knew better than everyone else were capable of. "My mom thinks we shouldn't tell you. She thinks you're too young to know."

"Too young? I'm ten and a half!"

"I know. And I don't think anyone's really too young to know the truth about life. But my mom doesn't think you should know, so don't tell her I told you this."

"Okay. I won't."

"You promise?"

"I promise."

"When my mom kicked my dad out, my dad met your mom, and then your mom had you."

"What?"

"It's my dad. That's who you remind my mom of."

"Wait, are you saying… Are you saying I'm your brother?"

"Yeah. We've got the same dad."

The boy's mouth gaped open, and he stared at the older boy, the only person who'd been kind to him since moving here. "My mom never talked about my dad at all. She never told me I had a brother."

"My mother told me about you years ago. When I asked if I could meet you someday, she just said maybe."

The younger boy stared at the wall, then he shook his head like he was trying to get himself out if a daydream. "Why did your mom kick your dad out?"

"Because he changed. My mom said he wasn't the man she'd fallen in love with anymore."

"What did he do?"

"It wasn't anything he did, it was just what he was," Nagira replied.

"What was that?" When the older boy didn't answer right away, he plaintively added, "I thought you said no one's too young to know the truth about life."

"He was a Witch," Nagira answered. "Our dad is a Witch."

And all of a sudden the young boy understood why Mommy left, why she coldly left him in the house of strangers and disappeared. He suddenly knew who it was his mother talked to on the phone late at night, why sometimes she left him with a babysitter all day to go on secret trips.

She'd chosen the love of a man over her own son. She'd abandoned her duty as a mother for a man.

No, not a man: a Witch.

It was a cold morning, the dead of a snowy winter. He had been asleep in the car, but woke up when a cold gust of air blew into the car from an open door.

His mother closed the door slowly, trying not to wake him. She went to an old payphone at the side of the road and made a call.

The boy peeked out the window. He could hear some words of the conversation.

"I have no one else to turn to. They've been following me, watching me. I don't know what else to do... Please. I will give you all the money I have, all my savings... No, nothing... But he's a Seed. What do you think they'll do to him when they come for me? ... For your son's sake..." She closed her eyes as relief washed over her face. "Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you." She wrote something down. "Thank you." Then she hung up the phone.

Her son was pretending to be asleep when she climbed back in the car

Robin was in a dark forest. The trees were bare of leaves, perhaps dead. Their branches made tangled cobwebs against the starry sky.

"There must be more," she said. "Some moment, some instance that shows your mother's true feelings. Maybe something you don't consciously remember, or something too painful to remember." She looked around and there was no response. "Show me... Show me the last time your mother saw you."

Another snowy day. Mommy drove him up to a strange house.

"This is it," she said, her voice oddly emotionless.

A woman stepped out the front door. She had a hard face and hair pulled up in a careful, severe bun. She folded her arms and waited on her front step.

Mommy looked at the woman for a moment, looking almost scared.

"That's Ms. Nagira," she explained. "She's going to take care of you."

Mommy took a large suitcase out of the car and left it on the sidewalk. Ms. Nagira didn't approach or speak, only watched.

"There's another boy here for you to play with," Mommy continued. "He's a few years older than you. Try to be nice to him. Do what you're told and don't get in trouble."

"How long do I have to stay here, Mommy?"

She didn't look at him. This whole time she had not looked directly at him. "A while, sweetheart."

"When will you come visit?"

"I'm afraid I won't be able to."

He started to cry. "Why? Please don't go! Let me come with you." He wrapped his arms around her waist.

She tried to pull away. "I can't."

"Please!"

She averted her face and tried to pry him away from her. "I can't take you. You'll understand when you're older."

"No! Mommy! Don't go."

"I can't let anything happen to you. I can't..." She turned away from him, and an invisible force stronger than her physical body pried the boy's hands and arms back, lifted him off his feet, and placed him on the sidewalk next to the suitcase, pinning him there as Mommy got into the car and drove away, her shoulders shaking from the effort of using her power.

When the force released him, Mommy was already too far away to run after. He slid to the ground sobbing.

Ms. Nagira came down and carried the suitcase into the house. "Come in from the cold whenever you're ready," she said. "This is your home now."

"Amon, you don't understand," Robin said. "She wasn't shaking from using her power; she was crying."