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“No,” she laughed. “However, now that this has happened, and now you can protect yourself, there is only one thing that will solve this in the long run. Cora, I'm afraid you have to eliminate him.”

“When you say eliminate....”

“I mean exactly that.”

Tabitha’s face remained expressionless.

No.

No way.

“You have to,” Tabitha said almost like she sensed her reluctance. “I know that this revelation is difficult to grasp, especially as you’ve just found out you are a witch but it has to be done. It’s not something I condone, I hate violence but I'm afraid it comes down to that. You die or he dies. You have no option... unless you want to die?”

“No,” Cora said in the same instant her mind said maybe. God, she couldn't even make a decision. Would she rather die than kill another human being?

Why did she have to kill anyone? Why was she even thinking this? It wasn’t normal to drink hot chocolate and discuss who needed to be killed.

             
Tabitha stood, her dress today was snow white, the slim green belt wrapped snugly around her waist.

“If you don't want to die then you have to kill Jack,” Tabitha insisted. “This is the only way to ensure peace. To ensure you don't die. You will not die on my watch. I’ve spent too long protecting you.”

Cora was shaking her head in disbelief.

“We must learn from the mistakes of the past, which means neither Device or Chattox can live peacefully within the same village
.
”

“Wait a minute, shouldn't we take away from 1602 that fighting gets you nowhere other than very dead?” Cora argued.

“Yes, inevitably fighting leads to death but what happened between your mother and the Chattox family was about power. I knew the Chattox family, they wouldn’t want to lose. Dominance battles are a very tricky business, no one is ever going to admit defeat.”

“Okay, then should we not show them and this
Jack
that we don't want a power fight?”

Why didn't Tabitha get it? They didn't have to fight, why couldn't they talk instead? She didn't want to show how powerful she was; she wanted her simple boring life back.

Ironic, she knew, considering she’d hated her boring simple life not more than twenty four hours ago.

“Cora, he doesn’t want peace, haven’t you already witnessed his need to dominate you? To intimidate you? Look at what’s occurred since you two have met. You may not want to admit it but I can imagine when you were stood in front of him you wanted to win.” She raised her perfectly shaped brow in an invitation to argue.

She was right, she had wanted to win but she wasn't going to admit that.

“But times have changed and people don't go around burning each other anymore. We can see who wins in a fight and then leave it. We haven't been caught so far.”

“Yes, and for that you are very lucky. We can't just allow you to do this. Let me ask you this. If you lost, would you be satisfied and leave it be?”

“Yes,” she squeaked, her voice struggling to say the word.  Of course she wouldn't leave it. She'd definitely want a rematch.

“What would happen if one day you were walking on this very street and he was there too, would you just walk past each other without a challenge?”

Cora couldn't answer; she couldn’t imagine it, walking past him without his silly remarks making her want to smack him in the face.

Tabitha nodded and continued. “People may believe that witches are real but to see and be part of a witch war is entirely different, they won't stand for it.”

What was she meant to say? It was clear Jack didn't like her and she wasn't exactly rushing to be his best friend. This whole counter arguing thing wasn't going so well.

“Can't I just move again?” she whined.

“You could, but now you know about your true self would you want to be anywhere other than here?”

She didn't have an answer.

“I find it really ironic that you were brought back here,” Tabitha commented breaking the awkward silence.

“Why?”

“Your mother, Laura that is, didn’t tell me that you had moved here. I found out the day you stood in front of my shop. You live in that house close to the woods and your mother’s house would have been where the woods are now.”

“Can’t I have my memories back?”

Tabitha was already shaking her head. “I wish I could but once the spell has been cast it is up to the individual mind whether it repairs itself.”

“So you're saying that I might never remember my life?”

“I'm sorry, this was the only way to keep you from knowing who you are, and asking questions about your appearance.”

“My appearance?”

“Yes, you never change in appearance.”

             
That didn’t make sense, she grew older every year, of course her appearance changed. She shook her head. “Why didn’t you just go with the easy option and just tell me? Why not let me decide how I wanted to live my life. Why did you have to take my memories?”

“It was the only option at the time, things were too dangerous and by the time things settled down you were already settled and your memories were gone. We had to give you time to find your power, we just never imagined it would take this long. I want to assure you that you’ve had a good life.”

“Well, you would know,” she replied smartly. “From today I don't want my memories taken from me. From now on I want to remember everything.”

“Yes. Of course.”

So many questions popped into her head. She sighed rubbing her eyes. “How am I meant to deal with this? How can I?”

“Cora, his family are the reason you don't have one.”

Anger spiked deep in her gut. “I'm just one person, me, on my own. How I am meant to do this?” She couldn't actually believe she was even contemplating it.

“You're not alone, you have an entire coven to help you.”

“I have a what?” she screeched in shock.

Tabitha smiled and then stood aside. Cora’s heart was palpitating. A coven? Hundreds of people?

             
Tabitha motioned for her to stand, which she did. As she stood Tabitha placed her hand on her back and guided her towards the staircase. She felt the gentle pull on her elbow as Tabitha continued to take her down the stairs. She would finally find out where the stairs led to. This made her excited and nervous. Her curiosity about the door would finally get an answer, but she had a funny feeling that after tonight her life would never be the same.

Chapter 9

LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL

As they stood on the last step facing the wall Tabitha whispered something foreign. Before Cora could ask what the word meant the wall moved revealing nothing but more steps into the darkness. She was gently pulled through the door alongside Tabitha.

             
Darkness engulfed her taking away her sense of direction, her sense of anything. Her hearing heightened, her eyes strained trying to see ahead of her. She picked up the faint smell of... mud. Wet mud.  She felt the reassuring warm arm around her waist.  It was the only thing restricting her from running back up the fake stairway. She hated darkness, how did you ever know what was lingering in the shadows?

             
Taking a deep breath she allowed Tabitha, who was now a dark shape next to her, to guide her to wherever they were going. She felt reassured that Tabitha was with her. She couldn't, no she wouldn’t, run around screaming her head off in the dark.

             
They continued walking in silence with only the swoosh of Tabitha’s robe as their companion in the silence. After several turns, Tabitha eventually stopped. The arm left her waist, the air stalled in her lungs as she felt the first stirrings of panic. She caught the sound of a crackle of energy before it snapped and light filled the area.

             
She was stood in a cove which was large and circular in shape. Every wall was lined with book shelves. Tabitha seemed to like dusty books. In the middle of this room, taking pride of place, was a huge oak table surrounded by four tall high backed chairs. A symbol engraved in the middle of the table caught her eye. A memory popped telling her the symbol she was looking at was the Wiccan symbol. She stopped as her fingers brushed against engraved letters.

“Those are the names of the members in your coven, they are engraved in old English. That one is Preston,” Tabitha said as she pointed to her own name. “Then there is Smith, Quinn, and of course, Device.”

So, she had three members in her coven. That wasn't as bad as she'd first thought.  As Cora looked at Tabitha her eye caught the item she was holding in her hand.

Tabitha hesitated before holding it out for her to see.

             
It was a photograph of a woman who was laughing at the camera. She had long brown hair which hung loose just hitting the small curves of her hips. Her jade green eyes danced mischievously. Her heart pounded hard in her chest. There was no denying it, the shape of those green eyes were the same shape as hers, their lips identical.

It was the woman from her dream.

“This is Alizon Device, your mother.”

She heard the words but they sounded distant. A thick black haze started to fill her vision and then everything went fuzzy as she grabbed for something to stop her from falling. For what seemed like the hundredth time in her life, she fainted.

*

Cora fought her way out of the darkness that surrounded her. Taking a deep breath, she opened her eyes and moved into a sitting position whilst holding her head in her hands, she tried to stop the room from taking a dive and pulling her back under. She felt the blood rush to her head which made great work of deafening her. Taking deep breaths, she closed her eyes to centralise herself. The spinning room was making her stomach lurch, the result of which wasn’t going to be pretty.

“Cora, are you okay?”

Cora opened her eyes and looked at a wavy Tabitha. No, she wasn’t okay but what could Tabitha do to make it better?

Shuffling off the table she sat in a chair. Shaking her head, she looked at Tabitha. “I’m sorry.”

“Please, don’t apologise. This is rather big news.”

“Yeah, you could say that. On the one hand everything you've told me makes sense, it all just slips into place and then on the other hand, I just don’t want it to.”

Tabitha noisily scraped a chair back and sat next to her. “Cora, I don’t know how much more you are ready to handle tonight, this has been enough already.” She held her hands on her lap, Cora noted that the picture was still in her hands.

“I want to know everything,” she insisted.

If she didn't hear it tonight she was afraid that her mind would make up an excuse, any excuse, to tell her this entire thing wasn't real. A mechanism for coping she guessed.

Silence followed as Tabitha held her gaze. Sighing, Tabitha held up the photograph for her to see. “This is your mother. I took this picture in 1602, she was nineteen years old…”

Laughter interrupted Tabitha and she was startled to find that it was coming from her.  This was it, the moment where she finally lost the plot. Well, it had to come at some point, didn't it?

“Well,
if
all this is true…” She continued to giggle. “I know off the top of my head that you couldn’t take pictures in 1602, the camera wasn’t even invented!” she smiled, quite pleased with herself that she’d found a flaw.

“You forget young child that I am a witch,” Tabitha’s smile remained in place but she felt the whiplash from her words. “I do not need such technology to take pictures.”

She swallowed the giggle as the reality of Tabitha’s statement hit her. “O-kay, so, if you did take this picture of…” She couldn’t quite bring herself to say it. “Then, how is it that I am still living? If this is... then I would be old... like...” She stumbled on the maths. It wasn't her best subject.

Something Tabitha had said earlier came screaming back, her appearance. Tabitha said they’d moved because of her appearance.

“Cora, you are four hundred and seventeen years old.”

             
She nearly fell off the chair. My God! She wasn’t sure what she’d been waiting for. But she was seventeen, she'd recently had a birthday. She looked seventeen. She sucked in a breath, she
looked
seventeen. That was the problem, wasn’t it?

“Your mother never did tell me who your father was,” Tabitha said, continuing even though Cora was falling to bits over the whole age issue. “The law, our own Wiccan law states that a witch can be with a commoner but she can never tell him what she is. The same goes for you. If you meet and fall in love with a commoner, you cannot let him know who you truly are. Take my advice, relationships always work better with another witch.”