Cate Tiernan - The Coven

Selene Belltower had her Book of Shadows. Why?

I straightened up. Rapidly I read passages here and there, reading the entries as my mother changed from being a girlish fourteen-year-old, newly initiated, to a teenager experiencing love, to a woman who'd lived through hell by the age of twenty-two, as she found herself pregnant with an unplanned child. Me.

My gaze blurred with hot tears, and I flipped back to the front of the book, where the entries were light, girlish, full of wonder and the joy of magick.

Of course this book was mine. Of course I would take it with me tonight. There was no doubt about that. But how had Selene Belltower come to have it in her library? And why, knowing what she knew about me, had she never mentioned it or offered it to me? Was it possible that she'd forgotten she had it?

I rubbed the tears out of my eyes and flipped through the pages, watching as my birth mother's spells became more ambitious and far-reaching, her love deeper and more compassionate.

This was my history, my background, my origin. It was all here in these handwritten pages. In this book I would discover everything there was to know about who I was and where I had come from.

I looked at my watch. It was 7:45. Oh, my God. I'd been in here for more than twenty minutes already. And now it was time to go. The others were surely looking for me.

As hard as it was, I started to close the book. How was I going to get it out of the house?

Then the secret study door opened. A shaft of light from the hall dropped into the room, and I looked up to see Cal and Selene standing there, staring at me sitting at Selene's desk, an open book before me.

And I knew I had trespassed unforgivably.