Chapter 2

"When the moon hits your eye," Felix sang as he waltzed by himself around the kitchen, a plate heaped high with cake in his hands, "like a big pizza-pie, that's amore."

Gloria was silent as she ate her cake, though. So was I, mostly from trying to watch her and read her. She was acting as if everything was perfectly alright, so maybe I was the one that was blowing things out of proportion? I could overthink things, but something as drastic as Gloria actually leaving the property was something that I could justify overthinking. And on such short notice? She had my lessons planned out for the entire year! Practically down to the minute! Unless this had been planned for some time, and she had been keeping the secret from us.

"Are you going to ask me something, Rae, or continue to stare at me like that?" Gloria finally asked as she pushed half of her cake away from her. Felix promptly scooped up the plate and dumped the contents onto his.

I was caught off-guard, but not as much as I should have been. She had always been able to read me so easily. Felix always said that he never had any idea what was going on in my mind, but Gloria had a way of knowing. She said it was a special trick, one she would teach me later this year. I had read about mental magic before, but it was complicated, and everything I read came with a disclaimer that reading about mental magic was not enough an practice was more important. I adore performing spells, absolutely love it, but nothing quite make my hair stand on edge than the idea of not being able to improve skills by only reading about them.

"Felix said something about a trip..." I muttered, poking at my now unappetizing slice of cake with the silver fork.

"Felix pleads the fifth if this turns out bad," Felix cut in before kicking open the back door to go sit on the porch with his cake.

"It's true," Gloria replied with a sigh. "I have business to deal with elsewhere. You know the gardener that I have come by?" Of course I knew the gardener. She had once brought her daughter by that was my age, when we were both very young. I was just beginning to learn magic, and I turned her hair blue by accident. I never saw her again after that. "She's not doing well. I thought after all these years of service, I should go visit her while she's sick."

I could not recall ever seeing Gloria have more than a stiff, brief conversation with the gardener, and empathetic outreaching to those who sometimes came by to deal with household chores hardly seemed like something she would do. Still, maybe she was turning over a new leaf. I remembered reading a book about a mother who "reinvented" herself after her son went off to college. Perhaps Felix turning eighteen had struck something inside her, and she was using that to become kinder to those outside our own little family of three. It would be good for her.

"That's nice of you," I remarked, the cake now beginning to look more appetizing again. "And are you, uh, going alone?"

"I'm surprised you'd even ask." I looked up at her, for a moment everything seeming a bit brighter as an elated feeling filled my chest. "I'm certainly going alone." The feeling ended quite suddenly. "As if I would expose you two to the horrors out in the world."

"But, I've read about-"

"You've read fiction, dear. The real truth is what you read about in your history books. The Lupo Wars, the War of Hearts, the War of the Gifted...Humans tear each other apart, supernaturals tear each other apart...It's cruel out there. And a book can only tell you so much."

It never failed to hit me rather hard when Gloria would remind me that books were not the real world, even if they told the history of the real world. I mumbled something about going to bed, though there was still some orange from the sunset streaming into the room, reflecting off of Gloria's hair of nearly the same color. I felt sick. Not the kind of sick where I wanted to throw up, but the kind where my bones ached, and my head was beginning to hurt, and there was a bad feeling in my gut. Something similar to this happened when I brewed a bad potion and drank it before Gloria checked it. This time was even worse, and with no real cause, it seemed.

With a wave of my hand, the door to my bedroom flew open before me and slammed shut once I was inside. I absently moved one of my hands around, making up the bed in between changing into my most comfortable pair of pajamas. How suddenly it had gone from a day of enjoyable reading to wanting to sleep away this terrible feeling that had taken hold of me. I could not sleep, though. A couple hours later, I heard Gloria walk past, and I swore I heard her hesitate for a moment outside my door. Then I heard Felix run by a couple times, at one point dropping some piece of whatever his latest invention was. Normally thinking about his little obscure projects brought out a smile or a laugh, but instead the sickening feeling I had just deepened.

As the darkness settled in, so did the rest of the house, until there was nothing but silence.