Chapter 109

“We did volunteer in a way,” Evarius says, “because we didn’t understand what the hell was going on. I was eleven. My sister was nine. I was a witch myself, so I understood bits of it because I always observed whatever my mother did. But most of it, I did not understand. I think that the spell was so personal to her that she might have felt she needed someone she had a personal connection with. As for choosing herself, she would have never done that. What if something went wrong? I didn’t think of it that way at that time, obviously.”

Tasha is disturbed by how a mother could put her own children at such risk and says, “What about your father? Didn’t he intervene or say something?”

“Father had left because of mother’s erratic ways. He used to visit us now and then. But he wasn’t there at the time.”

As Tasha listens to this she realizes something important and says, “You said you were eleven at the time, but you are surely not eleven now. Does that mean her first experiment didn’t work?