Page 14 of Monsters' Manor

As much as I still want to refuse, as much as I still want to rail against her for what a hard-ass she’s being right now, I… can’t.

Because that small, childish part of me that still misses my father and still remembers the way his eyes would sparkle when he told me about his magickal world feels like it’s been kicked in the chest.

But can I do this? Can I really face what it would mean to not only accept my magick, but hone it?

I’m speaking before I’ve even fully realized I’ve decided.

“Fine. I’ll do it. I’ll train.”

For one unexpected moment, there’s something like tenderness in Odelia’s eyes. With how absolutely battered I’m feeling from this conversation, I would have expected triumph, maybe some kind of vicious satisfaction for having strong-armed her way into getting what she wanted.

None of that is there, though, and in those few moments of truce, I see my father looking at me through her dark eyes.

“Alright then,” Odelia says, all business again. “Telekinesis. And fire-wielding? You agree to train them both?”

“Yes.” The word is an effort, but I force it out.

“And alchemy? Did James pass that down to you?”

My heart leaps into my throat, and my palms go clammy. “I don’t know.”

Fuck, I hate the hitch in my voice, just as much as I hate the flash of concern that crosses Odelia’s face.

“Rosemary. Forgive me, I didn’t mean to—”

“It’s fine.”

It’s not fine. But what am I supposed to do? Have a damn heart-to-heart with her over a piece of magick I can barely think about, let alone try to access?

Alchemy was my father’s power.

Telekinesis and fire are all my own, passed down from some distant Bramwell ancestor, but alchemy? That was all his.

Before he died, my father’s workshop used to be my favorite place in the world. He’d been so patient with me when I asked about his work, so eager to share that part of his life. Though I’d been too young to test out my own magick and see if I had any talents in transfiguration and transmutation, I always hoped I would.

Alchemy was going to beours.

I’d been so certain of it as a child. Whenever he dropped me off with my mother, back at the house where magick was taboo and she didn’t want to see a single trace of it under her roof, I’d held onto that belief.

I was going to be a great alchemist, just like him. He’d teach me everything he knew, and I’d go live with him full time as soon as I was old enough to choose.

Until one rainy autumn night, when the phone had rang at half-past ten.

I’d still been awake, curled under my covers reading through one of the thick, dusty alchemy tomes my father had given me on my last visit. I barely understood any of it, and my eyes were droopy when I heard the shrill ring of the handset in the kitchen.

When I’d crept to the top of the stairs and heard half the conversation my mother was having with Odelia, I didn’t know what to make of it. I didn’t know anything except that there was a pit opening up in the bottom of my stomach, and when my mother hung up and came around the corner, she’d had a horrible expression on her face. Some combination of guilt and pain, and just the slightest edge of… relief.

A car accident. A bend in the road and a drunk driver in the wrong lane. Instantaneous. Catastrophic.

That had been it. No more magick, no more visits from Odelia or any of my other Bramwell family.

I spent the next fifteen years living with the unspoken understanding my magick was something to hide, something to control. My mother didn’t want to hear about it, didn’t want to entertain it for a moment. The older I got, the more I came to understand that just because she’d gotten pregnant during a short-lived relationship with a man who’s true nature as a witch she didn’t know at the time, it didn’t mean she’d ever come to accept her own daughter had inherited that nature.

And when all of that magick reared its ugly head and caused me to lose my job, my way of supporting myself?

I couldn’t go back.

The idea of it made me sick.

---