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She took a deep breath and looked up at me. “I don’t know what to do. The witch… she told me…”

She started crying again. “I’m sorry… I don’t usually cry. I’m stronger than this… it’s just…”

“What is worse than her wanting to kill you?”

She shook her head.

“Can you tell me?”

“If I say it… then…”

“It’s already true, but I can’t fix it if I don’t know.” I bit my tongue the second the words were out of my mouth.

No!

Distance!

Keep my distance.

“You can’t fix this.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Merla… she’s my mother.”

I was going to speak, but it was like a word vomit. She just continued to talk.

“She basically implanted me in the Queen, who I thought was my mother, through dark magic. She visited my mother, well, the Queen, as a blackbird and cursed her. She bound the Queen’s life to mine, so when I was born, I killed her to live. I have no father because I was born of magic. I’m a witch with strong powers that I don’t know how to use. Merla wants me dead because she harvested me for my youth until I turned eighteen, which is why she wanted to kill me because now every day I live it is causing her to age. What else?”

She took a deep breath and continued.

“She has thirteen others like me scattered around. Apparently, I was the first. It’s because the huntsmen were hunting her children down and killing them when they learned what she was doing. So she had the idea to conceal her children in other women, so the huntsmen wouldn’t know.”

It felt like a rock had settled in my stomach.

“What else is there? I feel like I’m missing something.”

She puckered out her lips, her tone more direct and angry than the fragile girl she was a minute ago.

“Oh right. I can’t kill her, because that would kill the children she has linked herself too. Oh! And she’s pregnant right now with another one. If I wanted to make her weak enough to kill, I’d have to kill the children. So basically, no matter how you look at it, the children have to die, which is so fucking unfair.”

“So you would die?”

She laughed. “No. I’m no longer a child. Once I turned eighteen, she could no longer harvest me. Harvest me!”

She stood and started pacing around.

“As if I am some fucking grain in the field. I always wondered how she never aged and always looked so young.”

I nodded. “She’s over three hundred years old.”

“What? How?”

I shook my head.

“I don’t know what to do, Gage.” She walked over to me and stood in front of me.

I so badly wanted to reach out and hold her, but now more than ever, I couldn’t. It was like no matter how hard I tried to get away from my past, it kept finding me.