Exaltation (Insight #11)(25)
Raven nearly choked. “Are you telling me my Aunt Saige is NOT my aunt?”
He held his hands up to calm her down. “Family isn’t always blood, Raven. When I was adapting to the coven, growing up within it, so was Aunt Saige. We considered ourselves brother and sister long before we played the role for the public. You knowing this changes nothing about our family. You still love her the same, and you know nothing could make her change the way she feels about you.”
“What decade?”
He shook his head.
“What does that mean?”
“It means time was not openly recorded where we were.”
“Time was not recorded then!” Raven said as she almost knocked over her food when she leaned forward. She was expecting him to say like nineteen hundred or something.
He moved his head side to side.
“And you had an entire other life somewhere else before then?”
His stare told her he did.
“Do I have siblings? Do you have another family there or one before ours?” She wanted him to say no. She could deal with the weirdness, but that might be too much. Time was not recorded. River was going to have a blast trying to understand that one when Raven told her.
“The coven and Saige were my family. Our family is my first and last.”
“Last, like something is going to happen to you?” Raven asked, not understanding why he seemed so worried.
“Last, like I know I can not improve on perfection.”
Raven playfully narrowed her eyes on him knowing he was trying to charm her the way he always did.
Jamison cleared his throat before he spoke. “Your mother was from the same place I was raised, a different part of it, but she was still from there.”
“Is my mom back in that place you came from?” Raven asked, fearing some dark coven was coming after her. That could be the only reason her father was worried. The man never worried, ever.
“No. She’s gone,” Jamison said, leaving it at that.
“Was it just you who left your old life?”
“Others did later in time. Some are still trying to understand the division they want to make.”
“Your old life is not going to come looking for you or anything? Right? Wait. Why are you telling me this now?”
His eyes, that peaceful fatherly stare, told her to calm down as he spoke. “I believe that on a large scale I’m forgotten by my old life. But that doesn’t mean you won’t be recognized by someone in your lifetime. Your energy is unique.”
“Why now though?” she pressed.
“Raven, we had a conversation close to this when you were twelve and again when you were sixteen.”
“You’ve told me about my mother before?” Raven knew most of what he said, not the mom part but the others, but that didn’t come from him. It came from her obsessive best friends who were always looking for a mystery to unravel.
“Not your mother but about where my first life was.”
“How–how come I don’t remember it?”
He swallowed. “Aunt Saige gave all of you a remedy to help you process your ordeal.”
“All of us?” Raven was racking her brain. Twelve and sixteen. Holy crap! Hurricanes and car crashes.
“Remembering?” he asked.
She shook her head. “I know I got this,” she said, pointing to the blonde streak in her dark auburn hair. “From my first quote, unquote, ‘date’ which was nothing more than a ride home that ended with me in the emergency room.”
He clenched his jaw as the room became colder.
“What happened?” Raven asked. She had always wondered where the boy went, how no one seemed to even notice he was gone.
“Bad people discovered who you were.”
Raven stared for a moment, remembering the emotions she felt when she thought back to those storms and that car wreck. How she couldn’t remember what happened, but only how she felt. She never wanted to feel that way again, so dark and scared. “You call them bad, but apparently they think I am too, if they’re trying to kill me for no reason.”
“That’s not it, Raven, as much as I hate to admit it, you’re more than likely a solution to a long standing issue that does not wish to be resolved.”
“You’re trying to tell me there is some war of dark and light and I’m the golden child or something?” She was only halfway joking. She had heard about epic battles the coven had fought over time. The girls would whisper them when they camped out in some room, and then try and connect the stories to the people they knew, ones they were sure were immortal like Jamison and Emery. Raven never put herself in the story before, would never want that.
“That’s one way to look at it,” Jamison admitted.
Raven’s eyes went wide.
“It only sounds scary now because you’re not ready for this fate, still young, too young. But one day no one will be able to hold you back when you engage your destiny.”
“Promise?” she asked with a ghost of a whisper.
He nodded once. “One of the reasons I brought it up today is because for the first time you spotted a foe before the girls did.”
“Berries?” Raven said with a lifted brow. She smirked. He was no foe; he was a creeper. “He’s evil? Like beyond the average creeper evil?”