Born Wicked: The Cahill Witch Chronicles, Book One: The Cahill Witch Chronicles, Book One Read Online Free PDF Page B

him anyway, but I can’t see how it was much of a marriage, honestly.
I sit up, hugging my knees to my chest. “You can’t do magic anywhere you like, Tess. You know that. I couldn’t bear it if something happened to you.”
Tess looks very young in her pink pinafore, her hair in two braids that stretch to her waist. Now that she’s twelve, she’s been bothering me to let her put her hair up and her skirts down. I suppose the governess will advise me to allow it. I can’t keep her from growing up. “I know,” she says. “Me either. If something happened to you, I mean.”
I glance up at the portraits above the fireplace. There’s one of Father with his parents when he was a boy, a retriever puppy asleep at his feet. Next to it is a painting of the five of us—Father, Mother, Maura, Tess, and me. Tess was still a baby with pale blond hair sprouting like dandelion fuzz all over her head. Mother is looking down at her lovingly, a Madonna cradling the child in her arms. She had lost a baby between Maura and Tess—the first of five buried in the family cemetery.
“This governess—she’ll be living here, taking meals with us, watching our every step. Even if you think it’s to help someone—Father, or even me or Maura—”
Tess swivels to face me. “Is this about what happened at services last week?”
“No, but that’s a perfect example.” As we were leaving the church last Sunday, someone stepped on Maura’s skirt. Her dress ripped—right across the middle of her admittedly tight bodice—exposing her corset cover for everyone to see. It would have been mortifying if Tess hadn’t thought quickly and cast a renovo spell.
“Maura would have been humiliated,” Tess argues.
“A little public humiliation wouldn’t have killed her. We would have gotten her into the carriage and out of sight, and no one would have remembered it in a few days. If anyone had seen what you did—”
“They would have thought it never ripped in the first place,” Tess insists. “I was very quick. They would have thought it a trick of their eyes.”
“Would they?” I’m not so certain. “The Brothers have been leaping on anything that even hints of magic—and they wouldn’t assume it was you— they’d think it was Maura. You meant to help, I know, but it could have ended very badly.”
Tess fiddles with the lace at her wrist. “I know,” she whispers.
“Brenna Elliott. Gwen Foucart. Betsy Reed. Marguerite Dolamore.”
I reel off the names like the multiplication tables Father taught us. They’re the four girls arrested by the Brothers in the last year. Gwen and Betsy were sentenced to labor on the prison ship off the coast of New London. The conditions there are horrid—backbreaking work and very little food. There are rats, I hear, and disease, and girls don’t often survive it. But Marguerite—no one even knows what happened to her. She disappeared before her trial, taken away in the middle of the night.
“Would you have it be Maura? Or you?” I’m relentless. I have to be.
“No. No, never.” Tess’s rosy cheeks drain of color. “I won’t do it again.”
“And you’ll be more careful at home, too? No more magic at the dinner table?”
“No. Only—I wish we could tell Father the truth. Perhaps he’d stay home more. Look after us better. I’ll never get anywhere with my lessons this way.”
I stare at the gold flowers on the carpet. There’s so much hope in Tess’s voice. She wants a regular father, someone she can depend upon to protect her.
But we’re not regular girls. If Father knew how I’d gone into his mind, compelled him, and destroyed Lord knows what other memories in the process, would he ever forgive me?
I want to believe he would, that he’d come to understand. But he hasn’t given me any reason to think he’d fight for us.
That only means I have to fight twice as hard. I rest my chin on my knees. “We don’t know what he’d do, Tess. We can’t chance it.”
Tess’s pale