I gasped as a sudden realization shot through me—I was a witch now, but I was thinking like a human. What would a witch do? I knew that my resuscitation efforts alone would not bring him back. At best, the CPR would keep oxygen flowing to his brain until a defibrillator could be used. His heart needed to be restarted with a shock of electricity.
The moment this thought came to mind, a pulse of light shot down my arm, bright and blue like a tight ball of lightning. I hadn’t consciously commanded it. My magic had interpreted my confused thoughts and taken over for me. The bolt shot into the man’s body, and for an instant, his eyes flashed open, full of astonishment. His body lifted a few inches off the ground, and as I tried to pull my hands away, it followed me, the electricity between us attracting him like a magnet. Then the link broke at last, and he dropped to the ground, his eyes fluttering shut for the last time. The stench of burning meat rose to my nostrils, and I grew sick. The part of his chest where the energy had entered him had been burned black, and a gaping tunnel had been blasted through the space that once held his heart.
What had I done? I clawed at the sandy soil, scraping away the residue that clung to my palm, my fingers. My breath failed me, coming only in short gasps that couldn’t fill my lungs. Hands reached out from behind me and held my shoulders. A calm, feminine voice spoke to me. “It’s okay, baby. It’s okay. But you have to come with me. We have to get you away from here.” I had never heard that voice before, but I had known it all my life. I began shaking, my skin cold. The light reaching my eyes alternated between impossibly dim and painfully bright. I felt like the world had fallen away beneath me. I had to be hallucinating. I looked away from the damaged corpse I had created. My head turned slowly, knowing that once I laid eyes on her, nothing would ever be the same again. I looked up. A smile. Loving green eyes. A face so very much like my own.
“Mama?” my voice squeaked out of me, forcing its way between the walls of amazement and disbelief.
“Yes, baby. It’s me,” she said, and then seemed to read the next thought pressing on my mind. “It’s me. I’m alive.”
TWO
My mother guided me through the scrub-filled ravine that separated the powder magazine from the parking lot servicing the nearby businesses. A limousine waited there, and a liveried driver who was standing by its side jolted to attention, then opened the car’s door. Together, my mother and he eased me into the air-conditioned cocoon, and then my mother slid in next to me. A dark privacy glass separated us from the driver’s area, and even blacker windows, nearly onyx, protected us from the world outside. The car began moving, but I had no idea where we were going. Frankly, I didn’t care. I held on to my mother’s hands, grasping them so tightly it must have hurt. Her face held my eyes. It seemed so much like a mirror of my own, except that it held a couple decades more of experience, of sadness.
“I know you must have so many questions.” Her words began to make their way through the haze. “And,” she said as her eyes caressed me, “there are so many things I need to say to you. But we don’t have time now.” A pained smile formed on her face. She managed to extricate her right hand from mine, and ran her fingers through my hair. “I didn’t want you to find out like this. I didn’t want to just fall into your world, but I tracked you down at the powder magazine, and I had to get a look at you.” She pulled my head to her bosom, pressing her cool palm against my cheek. “If only I’d arrived a few moments earlier, I could have helped, but I discovered you too late. The old gentleman had already . . . expired. You were so distraught, and I couldn’t bring myself to leave you there.”
“But how could you?” I asked. “I mean, how could you have left me before? Left Maisie?” I pulled back from her, a sharp and stinging anger cutting me to the quick. “How could you let us grow up believing you had died?”