The Sea Witch (The Era of Villains Book 1) (2 page)

“
Where
have you been?” said Moira. “I was expecting you an hour
ago. I could have used your help with my last client. Surely you
don’t like scrubbing floors so much that you stick around
after hours doing it for free.”

“
Perhaps
if you like it that much you could scrub our floors, too,”
said Hazel, Serena’s younger sister, appearing from the
corridor leading to her bedchamber. Her laugh was shrill and had all
the charm of a seagull’s call. When she realized Moira was not
laughing along with her, she pouted. “What did you need her
help for anyway? I helped you like I always do.”

“
What
you do can hardly be called helping,” said Moira. “Your
magical ability is so limited and so faulty you can hardly call
yourself a witch.”

The hurt
on Hazel’s face and the way she shrank back from their mother,
slightly raising her arms as if to protect herself, made Serena both
furious and disgusted. Furious at the pain her mother caused her
sister; disgusted at the way Hazel went belly up and took it every
time. Hazel looked about as frail as her mental state. She was stick
thin. The only curve she had was the slight size discrepancy of the
width of her tail meeting her waifish torso. Her hair was the same
color as Serena’s, but it looked a shade lighter because it
was unhealthy and dull. Serena figured it was the stress of being
under Moira’s fins all the time. Her hazel eyes (for which she
got her name) and dark green tail were the only colorful things
about her. Even her shell top was a bleak black.

“
I
didn’t work for free,” said Serena, challenging her
mother with her eyes, hoping to draw Moira’s poisonous gaze
away from Hazel. “It’s called overtime. And yes, I do
like scrubbing floors, at least more than I like being in this
horrible place where merpeople slink in and out in secret. This
place wreaks of greed and vanity and merpeople’s deepest
darkest fears, and I don’t think I can stand it much longer.”

“
So
you’re going to live off a maid’s salary?” said
Hazel with another shrill, derisive laugh. Her eyes darted to Moira
in excited anticipation of the explosion—directed at
Serena—that was sure to come soon. But Moira’s face was
neutral and unreadable. Hazel pushed on. “Honestly, Serena,
you’re twenty years old and you’re still a maid.”

“
You
have a gift, given to you from birth,” said Moira. Her voice
was level and seemingly calm, but Serena detected the cold edge
underneath that boded ill for both sisters, despite what Hazel
thought. “A gift of power, a gift that offers you a lucrative
career, and you turn your back on it and on your own family for
what? A job fit for filthy bottom feeders!” A violet flame was
dancing in Moira’s irises, a sign that her anger was making
her magic build up inside her. “I will not have a daughter of
mine scrubbing the dishes and licking the fins of those moronic,
pompous, spineless shrimps who call themselves royalty! You have
potential, Serena! You are strong-willed and intelligent, unlike
your sniveling sister. You showed great power as a child. I know
you’ll make a talented witch, also unlike your worthless
sister, who can’t even skin an eel or mix together a simple
sleeping potion. I’ve had enough of this maid nonsense! You’re
going to…”

Hazel had
fled the room, her chest heaving with sobs, her tears invisible as
they mixed with the salt water around her. Serena clenched her hands
into fists, staring at the corridor after Hazel.

“
You’ve
had enough?” Serena said, her own anger matching that of her
mother. She clenched her fists harder, feeling the power inside her
threatening to burst free and refusing to let it. “No, Mother,
I’ve had enough! I’ve had enough of you ripping Hazel to
pieces. Maybe if you would actually teach her instead of yelling at
her all the time, she’d get better at controlling her magic.
Just because you can’t bully me into doing what you want,
doesn’t mean you can just take it all out on her. She worships
you! Don’t you see that?” Serena rolled her eyes and
scoffed. “Of course you do. You love it. You love to watch her
grovel at your fins begging to be loved. Well I’ve had enough
of it, and I won’t allow it anymore.”

“
Allow
it?” said Moira, her voice like a violently crashing wave. Her
hair stood on end around her head in writhing snake-like tendrils.
The tattoos covering her body started vibrating, making Serena avert
her eyes. “You won’t allow it? Ha! You think you can
command me?”

Moira
floated off her seat. Her eyes had dancing flames where the irises
once were. She lashed a hand out at Serena in a diagonal motion, her
index finger pointed out, her long nail like a little dagger.
Moira’s hand did not make contact, but Serena gasped in pain
as a small gash appeared across her cheekbone. Her blood leaked out
into the water and floated in front of her eyes.

“
You
know what I can do, girl!” said Moira. “You do not
command me. I am power itself. As long as you refuse to use your own
power, you will kneel at my tail like the helpless little maid you
are. Get out of my face. I don’t want to see you again until
you decide to take up your birthright and be the sea witch I know
you truly are.”

Powerless
against her mother’s magical fury, realizing she was beaten,
Serena retreated, but she kept her head high and her features hard.
She swam down the corridor after Hazel, pumping her tail hard in her
anger, hoping her furiously flicking fins would translate her
feelings to her mother better than words.

The
hallway glowed with strange green light from the little orbs
floating on the cave ceiling. Hazel preferred the green lights over
the other colors and thus lined the corridor to her bedchamber with
them as a way of staking her claim. Her bedchamber glowed green as
well, the light dancing off her tail, the color of seaweed, making
her iridescent scales even more dazzling. In this light, here in her
safe haven, she was beautiful.

She was
sprawled out on her bed that was shaped like a giant jellyfish and
woven out of hundreds of jellyfish whose stingers Moira had removed
for potion ingredients. Even though jellyfish were brainless, and
thus unable to communicate with mermaids, Serena still felt uneasy
every time she sat on the bed. In bobbed underneath her weight and
felt much too alive. Hazel had her back to Serena, her head buried
in her arms as she sobbed.

“
Don’t
let the old hag get to you that way, Hazel,” said Serena.

Hazel
inhaled in surprise, and her head shot up from the bed. She gulped
down another sob and her face pulled down into an angry look of
reproach.

“
Go
away,” she said. “I don’t want to…”
Her eyes opened wide, and the angry set of her brow and jaw softened
as her eyes rested on Serena’s cut cheek. “Did she do
that to you?”

“
Yeah,
she gave me the ‘I am power itself’ speech and threw a
tantrum,” said Serena, shrugging her shoulders and smiling
easily at Hazel. “What’s that? The third time this
week?”

Hazel
laughed weakly and said, “At least.”

“
You
need to make her an ‘I am serenity itself’ potion. Maybe
a little sea slug slime in her morning anti-aging potion; that’ll
slow her down, don’t you think?”

Hazel’s
mouth turned down, and she looked as though she might start crying
again.

“
You
know I’m no good at potions. Don’t make fun of me.”

“
Who
says you’re no good? Mother? She just likes to beat you down
so you don’t stand up to her— so you think you have to
depend on her so she can keep you around to do her errands.”

“
No,
I’m really no good. Whenever I try to make a potion by myself
it’s a disaster. She’s right; I can’t even make a
sleeping potion, and it only has two ingredients. It’s just
every time I try, the instructions get all jumbled up in my head and
I forget things, or I don’t prepare the ingredients properly.
When I try to say incantations I get all tongue tied.”

“
Where’s
Mother when you’re doing those things?”

“
Watching
me, so she can tell me what I did wrong afterwards so I can learn.”

“
She
doesn’t stick around to teach you, Hazel. She hangs around to
intimidate you. You mess up your potions and your incantations
because you’re so afraid of displeasing her that you lose your
nerve. You have to learn to ignore her.”

“
I
try! I just…oh, what do you care anyways? You think magic is
stupid and wrong,” said Hazel, hanging her hand and fidgeting
with her nails.

“
No
I don’t. The king does good magic with the Trident. He helps
people with his magic. I think the way Mother uses her magic is
wrong. She only uses it for her own gain, and she loves to play
games with people’s minds and trick them into terrible deals.
What did she make that last man give her? I saw him leaving, and he
looked terrified. What did she give him?”

“
She
helped him,” said Hazel, her voice defiant. “She gave
him a potion to cure his dying brother.”

“
And
what did he have to give her?”

“
It
doesn’t matter.”

“
Yes
it does, Hazel. I want you to say it. What did her give her in
return?”

“
The…the
heart of a pirate.” She averted her eyes from Serena’s
and said in a high, desperate voice, “Sinner’s hearts
are very special ingredients that can make lots of good potions to
help people. Besides, pirates are thieves and murderers anyways.”

“
Hazel,
do you hear yourself? You know it’s wrong. You can’t
keep letting her shove that nonsense down your throat. She’s
influencing your mind without even needing to use her magic.”

“
Let
me fix your cut,” said Hazel, swimming over to the recessed
holes that held her things on the far side of her room. “It
looks like it hurts.”

Serena
sighed. Hazel had shut down. She wouldn’t hear any ill words
spoken against their mother. She so desperately wanted to control
her magic like Moira, to be confident and powerful like her, and so
desperately needed to be loved by her that she couldn’t see
Moira’s considerable dark side.

Hazel
pulled a small clam shell full of a clear balm from her wall and
brought it to Serena. As she rubbed the balm into Serena’s
cut, sending a warm, pleasant feeling radiating across her cheek,
Hazel said, “Our magic is much better than the Trident’s
magic, you know. It comes from within us, not from an object. If you
think the Trident’s magic helps people, I don’t see why
you won’t learn to control your own magic and use it how you
think it should be used.” Pressing her finger onto Serena’s
cut hard enough to make her wince, she added bitterly, “Mother
seems to think you could be a whole lot better at it than me.”

Sea
witches were born with the ability to work magic. Potions and
incantations were useless to regular merpeople; they only worked for
those who had magical power in their blood. From infancy, Serena had
shown great magical ability. Before her fins developed enough to
swim, things she wanted—toys, food, even her mother—would
come zooming into her little hands as if she’d pulled them to
her with an invisible rope. When she cried, the ground beneath her
would shake or objects around her would explode. As she grew, she
learned to keep her magic bottled inside herself, but she refused to
learn how to properly use it. Children often tease and bully those
they don’t understand, and being the daughter of a sea witch
with a dark reputation was bad enough in school without adding her
own magical ability to the mix. She didn’t want her mother’s
reputation.

“
Who
cares what Mother says,” said Serena. “How can I
possibly be better than you when I don’t even do magic? She
just says things like that to hurt you and to try and convince me
that I should get into the witch business.”

According
to Moira, Hazel hadn’t shown as many signs of power as Serena.
Objects she wanted would fall short of her crib. When she cried she
just tipped things over. Serena wasn’t sure she believed
it—perhaps it was just another of Moira’s manipulations
to convince Hazel she was second rate—but Hazel took it to
heart. Hazel just shook her head in rehearsed disbelief at Serena’s
words of encouragement.

“
And
I would like to use my magic to help people,” said Serena,
“but you know as well as I do that it will take a lot of
training to learn how to properly use my power, and I refuse to be
taught by Mother. I won’t do magic until I have a teacher I
trust.”

Serena
looked hard at Hazel, hinting with her eyes and a small smile. Hazel
looked back with the same level of intensity, and for a fleeting
moment, Serena thought Hazel would offer to be her teacher. Then
Hazel’s eyes narrowed in a bitter look that Serena was
familiar with and that always made her sad. She knew how needlessly
jealous Hazel was of her—how it drove them apart when they
should be banded together.

“
I
guess you’ll just have to go on being a maid then,” said
Hazel, a snarl in her voice.

Serena
sighed, and Hazel turned away from her. They sat that way, Serena
studying Hazel’s dull hair under the green glow of the orbs
while Hazel studied her bedroom wall, for a long time. Serena longed
to reach out and touch her sister, comfort her, but knew
instinctively that she needed to wait and let Hazel come back to
her.