Page 19 of A Winding Wave of Magic
Sibyl always said that like it would make a difference. She was still fiery back then, a red-haired flame against the dark woods and gray slate of the kitchen.
She always burned a little too brightly, even when she scowled.
I just kept arguing. “You can’t See that sort of thing. You told me so yourself.”
“I didn’t have to See what you were doing. It was more than obvious that you’d rather watch the surf than do your chores.”
Then it was my turn to scowl. No matter what I did, it was never good enough. Even with things—like laundry—that she never seemed to do it herself. A great injustice to thirteen-year-old me.
The argument continued. I know it word for word even now.
“If you had just let me go surfing this morning like I wanted, we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” I sneered, though I was already refolding the towel.
“And what am I, your chauffeur? Between swim team and school, I spend half my life carting you up and down the 101. Now I have to do it on the weekends too so you can frolic with the sharks? The gods know I’d have never had children if I’d known they would turn me into a bus driver.”
The same argument we had constantly for the last year. Ever since Dad had received his orders to go to Baghdad and made Mom bring me here instead of staying on the base.
Manzanita wasn’t Pendleton. Fifty degrees most of the year instead of seventy-five. The average age of the sleepy town’sthree hundred and sixty full-time residents was sixty. But at least I still had the ocean, and now she was threatening that too.
“Who cares!” I tossed a folded towel onto the sofa. It fell to the ground. “It’s not like you do anything anyway.”
“Cassandra!”
“Well, you don’t. If he were here, Dad would take me surfing. He’d probably go with me.”
“Do you have any idea how spoiled you sound right now? Your father is off fighting a war, and you can’t even deal with folding a couple of towels.”
“That’s because there’s no point. They’re just going to get used and rumpled all over again. We should just hang them up.”
“Cassandra, I swear to the goddess, I’m in no mood for this right now. If you don’t shut that mouth of yours, I’ll?—”
“You’ll what? Practice a little voodoo on me? Make me think I’m a frog? Yeah, I’ve been listening to those threats for years. You don’t have the guts or the talent.”
Silence suddenly yawned across the house. The back of my neck pricked with tension as I looked away, away, away from the fire in my mother’s eyes. When I finally did have the guts to look at her again, she had crossed the room to sit next to me.
She reached out a hand. I flinched as if she had threatened to hit me.
“You wouldn’t,” I whispered.
“Wouldn’t I?” The fingers edged closer.
“I’ll tell Gran.” My voice was unsteady as I watched their progress. “She said seers don’t do that.”
“That’s right. ‘The world’s conscience.’” A joke to Sibyl. She got along with her mother as well as I got along with her.“Well, Penny is not your mother. She is not the one who has to teach her impossible child some respect.”
“This is Gran’s house, not yours,” I said, though my bravado was draining. “You don’t make the rules. She does. You’re just her daughter, same as I am to you. Except you’re a terrible mother. And a terrible seer. You’re nothing, you’re pathetic, you’re?—”
My mother gasped, sharp and pained. Her eyes rolled back into her head, and her thin, stark form began to shake. Her hand latched around my wrist with the jab of a snake bite. And a vision—my first vision—lanced through my mind, as violent as a stake.
The beach was gone. The house disappeared. I was standing on a street where the light was yellow, the air was filled with dust, and people were running, screaming, between buildings as gunfire peppered overhead.
Behind me, a tank roared.
“Whelan!” a man’s voice shouted. “Move!”
The street disappeared. I was back in the house, keeled over the couch while my mother stood, milk white and shaking in the middle of the room.
“What was that?” I demanded. “What just happened?”
