Free Homecoming by Amber Benson Page B

too.

Eleanora

    E leanora was relieved when she saw the turnoff for Curran looming ahead of her, the rectangular street sign faded and half hanging from its cylindrical post. The sun was high above her in the sky, which meant there was still plenty of time to sit Lyse down and explain everything—God help her—before they went into the sacred grove to begin the induction ceremony.
    Eleanora was finally going to come clean to her grandniece. She’d spent years skirting around the fact that she was a clairvoyant and the master of a coven, but that time was over. She’d stayed quiet, hiding her abilities—she could see and talk to ghosts, or Dream Walkers, as she called them—because she didn’t think Lyse was ready for the information, nor did she want to burden her grandniece. Now she felt both excited and terrified to share her secrets—and she wished she possessed a crystal ball, so she could see exactly how Lyse would react to the news.
    She hoped her grandniece would be open to joining them, but there was just no way to tell. From Hessika’s portent, Eleanora assumed that Lyse’s love of plants meant she would join Arrabelle in the herbalist’s trade. Eleanora seriously doubted Lyse even knew her talent
was
a talent—because most herbalists just thought they had a green thumb. They had no idea magic might be involved.
    She realized it was asking a lot of Lyse to give up her plant nursery in Georgia, but she hoped her grandniece could build something similar in Echo Park. Still, becoming a member of the coven required sacrifice, and Eleanora had never regretted the choices she’d made—and therefore she didn’t feel guilty about asking Lyse to do the same. To give oneself over to the greater good was a sacrifice well worth making. It had given Eleanora’s miserable life purpose, had brought her blood sisters and given her the greatest gift of all: Lyse.
    She was selfish about her memories, about the sheer joy and love she’d experienced because Lyse had belonged to her. She’d never expected to fall in love—didn’t think it was possible even—but it’d happened all the same. The gaunt, dark-haired child she’d found standing on her porch one wet afternoon had, with a single gaze, stolen her heart.
    Eleanora remembered the haunted look in Lyse’s blue eyes as the girl had stared up at her. This was a child who’d endured misery and had accepted that her life would only contain more of the same. Eleanora had vowed then and there to place this child’s needs above her own. She was going to love Lyse with the fierceness of everything she possessed.
    Back then she’d seen it as an easy thing, this loving, but somehow, when she wasn’t paying attention, it had transformed into something else. It was only now, as death approached and the future remained uncertain, that she realized Lyse would be the greatest gift she left the world.
    She felt her breath get away from her. She was winded, the uphill climb harder than she’d expected. She stopped on the sidewalk in front of her neighbor—and blood sister—Daniela’s house, leaning against the short wooden fence to catch her breath. She peered past the hedges, curious to see if Daniela was home, but all the lights were off inside, and Daniela’s two black cats, Verity and Veracity, were lounging on the wooden front porch—one in a wicker chaise longue, the other sprawled across the porch’s top step, belly exposed to the sky.
    With its weather-blistered siding and warped wraparound porch, Daniela’s house was no longer a showplace, but once upon a time—before Hessika’s tenure on Curran, even—the Zeke Title House had been magnificent. A converted artist’s bungalow, it’d seen its heyday in the 1920s when Title, an art dealer and rare-book seller, played host to stylish salons with the crème de la crème of Los