Free Returned by Keeley Smith

popped telling her the symbol she was looking at was the Wiccan symbol. She stopped as her fingers brushed against engraved letters.
    “Those are the names of the members in your coven, they are engraved in old English. That one is Preston,” Tabitha said as she pointed to her own name. “Then there is Smith, Quinn, and of course, Device.”
    So, she had three members in her coven. That wasn't as bad as she'd first thought.  As Cora looked at Tabitha her eye caught the item she was holding in her hand.
    Tabitha hesitated before holding it out for her to see.
                  It was a photograph of a woman who was laughing at the camera. She had long brown hair which hung loose just hitting the small curves of her hips. Her jade green eyes danced mischievously. Her heart pounded hard in her chest. There was no denying it, the shape of those green eyes were the same shape as hers, their lips identical.
    It was the woman from her dream.
    “This is Alizon Device, your mother.”
    She heard the words but they sounded distant. A thick black haze started to fill her vision and then everything went fuzzy as she grabbed for something to stop her from falling. For what seemed like the hundredth time in her life, she fainted.
    *
    Cora fought her way out of the darkness that surrounded her. Taking a deep breath, she opened her eyes and moved into a sitting position whilst holding her head in her hands, she tried to stop the room from taking a dive and pulling her back under. She felt the blood rush to her head which made great work of deafening her. Taking deep breaths, she closed her eyes to centralise herself. The spinning room was making her stomach lurch, the result of which wasn’t going to be pretty.
    “Cora, are you okay?”
    Cora opened her eyes and looked at a wavy Tabitha. No, she wasn’t okay but what could Tabitha do to make it better?
    Shuffling off the table she sat in a chair. Shaking her head, she looked at Tabitha. “I’m sorry.”
    “Please, don’t apologise. This is rather big news.”
    “Yeah, you could say that. On the one hand everything you've told me makes sense, it all just slips into place and then on the other hand, I just don’t want it to.”
    Tabitha noisily scraped a chair back and sat next to her. “Cora, I don’t know how much more you are ready to handle tonight, this has been enough already.” She held her hands on her lap, Cora noted that the picture was still in her hands.
    “I want to know everything,” she insisted.
    If she didn't hear it tonight she was afraid that her mind would make up an excuse, any excuse, to tell her this entire thing wasn't real. A mechanism for coping she guessed.
    Silence followed as Tabitha held her gaze. Sighing, Tabitha held up the photograph for her to see. “This is your mother. I took this picture in 1602, she was nineteen years old…”
    Laughter interrupted Tabitha and she was startled to find that it was coming from her.  This was it, the moment where she finally lost the plot. Well, it had to come at some point, didn't it?
    “Well, if all this is true…” She continued to giggle. “I know off the top of my head that you couldn’t take pictures in 1602, the camera wasn’t even invented!” she smiled, quite pleased with herself that she’d found a flaw.
    “You forget young child that I am a witch,” Tabitha’s smile remained in place but she felt the whiplash from her words. “I do not need such technology to take pictures.”
    She swallowed the giggle as the reality of Tabitha’s statement hit her. “O-kay, so, if you did take this picture of…” She couldn’t quite bring herself to say it. “Then, how is it that I am still living? If this is... then I would be old... like...” She stumbled on the maths. It wasn't her best subject.
    Something Tabitha had said earlier came screaming back, her appearance. Tabitha said they’d moved because of her appearance.
    “Cora, you are four hundred and seventeen years