29. She's different.

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Ivy.

My fists clench around the warm mug crammed with steaming hot black tea, but the heat radiating to my palms and burning them is nothing compared to the heat I feel in my chest.

Anger.

Turns out the sleepover at Leah's house was both bitter and sweet. It was pleasant that I made out with Leah, and I would do it again if she liked.

But it was bitter because Vera dropped the biggest bomb on me. She said my mother killed my grandmother. I couldn't sleep, so I asked Leah to drive me back home at 3 a.m.

She did not ask many questions, luckily.

From three, I haven't gotten any sleep, it's now 8 a.m and my mother will be home soon.

The door creaks open, and I perk up. Even when my head is spinning, my eyes land upon my mother, who just walked in. I am settled on our small dining table and I know this is the first place she will come. She always brings groceries with her after work.

"Honey." She places a brown paper bag on the dining table. "You alright?"

"Why?" I ask, not surprised a bit that my voice comes out rough and low.

"What?" she asks, busying herself with arranging the groceries.

"Why did you kill nana?" I go straight to the point. I honestly have no time to beat around the bush, I need answers.

My mother seems to be caught totally off guard because she cranes her neck to look at me. Her dark eyebrows furrow with confusion. I can't wait for her to get over this.

"What?!"

"Why did you kill your mother?" I repeat, calmly even when every nerve in me is begging me to push her to the wall and strangle her wrist, perhaps to make her feel just as much pain as I feel.

"What, who said that? Where's this coming from?" she asks, confused and surprised.

Oh, it came from somewhere, alright.

"Did you think you'd get away with it?" I ask, I don't care about her questions, I care about mine.

"Baby-"

"Mother, I know Granny did not die because she was mentally ill or whatever, so the sooner you start explaining why you did it, the better it's going to be for both of us," I say and force a grin. If only she can read how my body is seething right now.

"I don't understand." She sits across me and reaches out to touch my hand, but I pull away. Not the motherly card, not right now. "Fine."

I lift my chin, I need to hear this, and I want to look in her eyes when she explains.

"I guess you're one of them now. That is the only way you could have found out about this. Baby, your grandmother was not a good person."

"She was nice to me," I defend my dead grandmother. Despite her spooky stories at night, she was a good woman. Warm and welcoming, her smile, though old and wrinkly, was the brightest of smiles—after my mother's of course.

"You know I will not talk to you like a kid, you're probably exposed to magic now, and I have no idea how or who told you that, but I wish they informed you that Sierra Myers had turned me into her experiment," she spits out, and my globes grow wider. What does she mean? I stare at her until she gets the hint to continue.

"My mother was a witch, she got it from her mother. When she discovered, I was only thirteen, and guess what? She practiced her magic on her daughter. She'd do spells, some painful, some funny, like when she accidentally turned me into a bunny." She lets out a small chuckle, one can tell it is clogged with hurt. Why did grandmother do that?

"It was fun and games at first, then I turned fifteen, she became a bitch, she'd do dark spells so all boys who came close to me would see all the bad things about me and run. According to her, I needed to inherit her magic and I wouldn't be able to concentrate if I had boys around like a normal teenager."

Sierra was petty.

"I learned her magic, although not as good as she wanted me to be. I was the stubborn student who couldn't learn everything right, unlike my brother, who she favored like nothing else. He had no magic, but she loved him like a germ, she said he was not as dark as I was. You know after everything, I forgave my beast of a mother, I thought the magic was driving her insane, and so I took her to a mental hospital when my brother died."

That explains the reports.

"Fast forward to twenty, I met your father. He was the most beautiful person I had ever seen, and he was a witch too from bitchy parents. We had a lot in common, we just connected immediately." She smiles, I can imagine just how nostalgic she must be feeling right now.

"Then?"

"In the mental hospitals they give people drugs, and to perform a spell one needs the right mind and focus, sure you know that. My mother, I don't know how, managed to break out, then she came for me. She did not want to kill me, she wanted to hurt me, so she killed your father."

What? My grandmother killed my father?

"But I didn't know that, I only found Joshua dead and my mother's nurses said she never left the hospital, so her alibi checked out. I had no choice, but to need a mother in my time of sorrow, and so I got her removed. She never uttered a word about Josh. Later, I discovered I was pregnant with you, and she helped me raise you. She was the best grandmother and I never held anything against her. At some point, I left you with her to go to college, got my degree, and came back for you-"

"Okay, can you get to the part where you murdered her?" I speak through gritted teeth, it's horrible enough that my grandmother killed my father, we have to get this over with.

"The day my brother died, my mother lost it, you weren't here that time, I left you in the city. She was furious you know, while others mourned she blamed me for losing her son. I was the dark one, the evil in the house, and she would, certainly, cleanse me. Her idea of cleansing me was killing me." She chuckles, but the tears that rush down her cheeks betray her, she is hurting. "I needed to survive Ivy, so I did it first. I did my spell first, and the-"

She breaks down into sobs, throwing her hands to her mouth.

I don't know whether to get mad at her, her mother, Vera, or the world. This is twisted. She was just trying to protect herself.

"There's a prophecy, and a woman in the mirror who looks just like me," I inform her with no emotion at all.

"Oh, you've met her."

"You know her?"

"Yes, Vera, Sierra's best friend. I thought she died with her. They believed in being together forever, so Vera asked Sierra to trap her in a mirror, that way they'd never be separated." She wipes out a tear.

"Oh."

"What's the prophecy?"

"The vampires want me dead, I have some dark energy inside me bla bla," I fill her in and her face immediately freezes, her eyebrows furrow and her brown eyes stare at mine with horror I have never seen before.

"We need to go, we can't stay here. I really can't let them hurt yo-"

"No, I will stay. If they're coming for me, I am prepared Mom," I assure her, clasping her chin in my palms.

"No, you don't understand, vampires are beasts, they can rip you apart…it-"

"Don't worry about me, I have Leah to protect me."

She looks at me as though I have grown a second head.

"She is a vampire, isn't she?"

I swallow. "Yes, but she's not like them. She's different."

"Is she?"

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