Crystal Cove (Friday Harbor #4)(43)

“She wasn’t sane,” Rosemary said. “She was in the kind of pain that leaves no room for anything else. And even after she recovered, she was never the same. She came to us when you were still an infant, and said she had decided that her only child must never endure such agony. She wanted to bind a geas to you, so that you would be protected from loss forever.”

“Protect me from loss,” Justine said in a hollow voice, “by making certain I’d never have anything to lose.” She wrapped her arms around herself, an instinctive effort to keep from falling to pieces. Emotions flooded into the blankness like watercolors bleeding across wet paper.

“… disagreed with her,” Sage was saying. “But she was your mother. A mother has the right to make decisions for her child.”

“Not that kind of decision,” Justine said fiercely. “Some decisions even a mother doesn’t get to make.” It infuriated her further to read from their expressions that she had scored a point. “Why didn’t you stop her?”

“We assisted her, Justine,” Rosemary said. “The entire coven did. The geas was too powerful a spell to accomplish on her own.”

Justine could hardly breathe. “You all helped her?”

“Marigold was one of the coven. We were bound to help her. It was a collective choice.”

“But … I never got a choice.”

They had betrayed her, all of them.

It seemed as if everything in the universe were a lie. Justine felt like a wounded wild thing, ready to attack, wanting to hurt someone, including herself.

“It was for your safety.” She heard Rosemary’s voice through the pounding blood in her ears.

“Marigold didn’t want me to be safe,” Justine cried. “She wanted me to be in a prison she’d made. I would be alone, and then what choice would I have except to copy her life exactly? I would have to join the coven and follow her plan, and she would oversee everything I did and I would be just like her. She didn’t want a daughter. She wanted a clone.”

“She loved you,” Sage said. “I know that she still does.”

It outraged Justine more than anything else that Sage could look at what had been done to her and call it love. “How do you know that? Because she said so? Don’t you understand the difference between love and control?”

“Justine, please try to understand—”

“I understand,” she said, thrilling with anger so intense it felt like panic. “You’re the ones who don’t understand. You want to believe every mother wants the best for her child. But some don’t.”

“She didn’t mean to hurt you, Justine—”

“She meant to do exactly what she did.”

“She may not have been a perfect mother, but—”

“Don’t try to tell me what kind of mother Marigold was. I’m the only person in the world who knows what it was like to be raised by her. A mother is supposed to want her child to have an education and a stable home. Instead I was dragged around like a cheap suitcase. My mother never stayed anywhere or stuck with anything unless it was ‘fun.’ And whenever parenting wasn’t fun, which was most of the time, I had to fend for myself. Because I was inconvenient.”

It was the truth. But neither of them wanted to hear it, like most people faced with uncomfortable truths. Their relationships with Marigold and Justine, their culpability in the geas, their trust in the coven’s collective wisdom, all of it was suddenly precarious. And Justine knew exactly how they were going to handle it. They would blame her for being rebellious and difficult. It was easier to blame the troublemaker, the unhappy victim, rather than look inward.

“Of course you’re upset,” Sage said. “You need time to adjust to this, but there isn’t time. We must do something now, darling, because in changing your fate, you’ve managed to—”

“I didn’t change my fate,” Justine snapped, “I changed it back.” Energy smoldered beneath her skin, racing from cell to cell.

Rosemary was staring at her oddly, her face drawn. “Justine,” she said carefully, “you can’t ever change things back to exactly what they were before. Your fate has been shaped by every action you’ve ever taken. For every action there is a reaction. And in breaking the geas, you’ve upset the balance between the spiritual realm and the physical world. You’ve created a storm in more ways than one.”

As far as Justine was concerned, the last straw was having to endure a lecture from a woman who had helped to place a lifelong curse on her. “Then you shouldn’t have helped to curse me in the first place!” The energy released in a volatile and undirected snap, flooding the light fixture on the ceiling. A trio of bulbs exploded, glass raining and glittering in the remaining glow from the corner lamp.

“Justine,” Rosemary said sharply, “calm down.”

Flatware rattled and jumped beside the sink. Justine’s mouth was filled with the taste of ashes. The rage and hurt cut through her like blades.

Sage was white with astonished concern. “We only want to help you—”

“I don’t need your kind of help!” A paring knife and a few stray pieces of magnetized flatware shot across a counter and stuck to the side of the stainless-steel refrigerator. Justine was half blind with fury. Nothing was the way she’d thought it was; nothing was real or true. She heard them calling her name, Rosemary’s voice angry, Sage’s pleading.