When the Magic Stops

My mother tried for the first fifteen years of my life to hide me from my father. Not surprisingly, he found us exactly at midnight on my fifteenth birthday. At that moment, my life changed forever, but not in the way that I wanted. A bit of background info: My name is Catrina. I’m now twenty-four years old, and my mother’s spitting image, right down to my natural hair and eye colors. My mother’s name is Agatha. Unlike me, her hair has begun to turn gray, but that’s because she’s in her fifties. My mother is fifty-eight, but sometimes acts as if she’s only thirty-six. She spends all of her time trying to protect me and my older half-brother, Liam, when she’s not running the Silver Mist Coven. My father’s name is Lucian. He’s five hundred and seventy-six years old, and the current reigning vampire king. He has black hair and copper eyes that have seen more death and destruction than anyone should ever have to witness. My father also has two other children, my half-siblings Adrian and Imogen. Imogen wants to be the center of father’s attention at all times. I’m not sure what motivates Adrian, but he certainly hangs around me quite a bit. He has our father’s black hair, but his mother’s blue eyes. I never met Imogen’s mother, but I’m pretty sure that Imogen has her mother’s blonde hair but our father’s eyes. Imagine your average spoiled rotten, blonde princess, add in a touch of bloodlust, and you have my half-sister. She can’t control herself around blood. Adrian, on the other hand, only feeds when he is about to drop from a lack of blood, though I think that’s out of respect for how I was raised. I happen to be the baby of the family. All of my siblings are older. The oldest is Adrian at one hundred and six, then Imogen at eighty-seven. Neither of them looks their actual age, but nor does our father. My father looks about thirty-two, while Imogen and Adrian don’t look any older than twenty-five. Oh, and Liam is twenty-seven. He’s from my mother’s side. My father’s side of my family is also closely connected to dragons, though all records indicate that dragons went extinct about three hundred years ago. I don’t know if I believe that: I think that the dragons went into hiding to protect themselves from being hunted to extinction. Either way, I’ve never seen one. My mother says that I should be preparing to take her place as High Priestess of our coven. The only problem with that? I don’t want any of my powers. I never have. I wish I were just like any human in existence. Unfortunately, I’m half witch, half vampire princess. Of course, there hasn’t been a pure-blooded vampire in existence in about five thousand years. They were all either killed off or forced to take a mate that wasn’t also a vampire, so bloodlines have been diluted. Humans believe that vampires aren’t able to have children, but that’s not true: vampires are just as fertile as the average human, they just tend to live thousands of years longer. They also don’t explode or burst into flames in direct sunlight, they just get sunburned about five times faster than the average human. They are more active at night, though, which is when the “creature of the night” thing comes in. While vampires can turn humans, it legally can only be done with written consent from the human. If the “sire” doesn’t have that, they will be executed, and if they die, any vampire they created with consent dies with them. Vampire law is harsh, but it’s still the law, and relatively strictly enforced. No matter what, I have to learn more control before I can do anything. You would think that after twenty-four years I would have some level of control over my powers, but no. I still regularly have outbursts that I can’t control. Mostly, it’s my vampire powers, since all I really know I can do as a witch is general spellcasting. For vampiric abilities, however, I got the whole enchilada: enhanced speed, strength, and senses, hypnotic powers, shadowstepping, which is basically a form of teleportation, shapeshifting into a wolf, and even the ability to read people’s thoughts and emotions. I don’t want any of it. I just want to be like any other human, but since my mother’s a High Priestess and my father’s the Vampire king, I can’t. I can’t even pretend. I was supposed to be training with my vampiric abilities with my half-siblings, and still lost in thought when I got knocked flat on my ass by my brother Adrian causing an earthquake under my feet with his elementalist abilities. “Catrina, you still with me?” Adrian asked, looking closely at my face. “You looked like you were zoning out on me again.” I shook my head, clearing my thoughts as best I could. “Sorry, Adrian. Just wondering what it would be like to be normal, like any human on the face of this gods-forsaken planet. You know I don’t want any of my powers.” Imogen rolled her eyes. “Why Daddy’s so focused on getting you to accept your title and your powers is beyond me. If it were me, I wouldn’t have even bothered with you. Daddy’s already got me and Adrian, what does he need you for?” I openly admit that her comment had me seeing red. The next thing she knew, she had a skunk stripe from the flame I launched her direction like a flamethrower. I smirked, satisfied that I had managed to shut her up, before turning back to Adrian. “I don’t get why Dad wants this bimbo trying to train me: it’s not like I ever listen to her, considering all she ever does is piss me off. Why can’t you and I just play hooky for training this one time and go shopping like normal kids? I don’t want my powers anyway, so I shouldn’t have to train with them.” Adrian smirked, amused. “Whether you want your powers or not, kiddo, you have them. Maybe once you can control them, you’ll be able to suppress them better, you never know. As for playing hooky for training, maybe we can do that once you’ve got your powers under control. Until then, it’s not gonna happen. It’s not safe for you to be out in public when you still can’t control your outbursts. Anyway, we’re supposed to be training, not chatting. Back in your stance.” I groaned, but listened to my brother. He did have a point, after all. The last time humans saw any kind of supernatural powers, the immediate result was the Salem Witch Trials. It’s not safe for us to show what we are to the humans, even if we want to. If we can’t control our powers, we’re locked away from the public eye and trained until we can. The problem with me, other than the fact that I don’t want my powers, is the fact that we don’t know the full extent of my powers. I can do everything that the vampires can do, and I can do general spellcasting, but no other witch powers have surfaced so far. A couple of hours later, while we were still training, I felt something incredibly strange. My entire body went stiff, similar to a human having a seizure, and suddenly, I wasn’t seeing the training grounds and my half-siblings. I was standing on the grounds of the coven compound, but the only reason I knew that was the intricate design from the gate that was the only thing left standing. Everything else was burning, including the stables. Corpses were piled every few feet, and on top of the nearest pile were my mother and Liam, looking like they’d lost a witches’ duel. Their eyes were blank and staring into nothing, but their mouths held nothing but contempt for the person that had done this to them. All of the other coven warriors were in various other piles, some of which were already burning. Seated on what was supposed to be my mother’s throne as High Priestess, was Nancy, looking very proud of herself and the destruction around her. Nancy is a low-ranking priestess in the coven that everyone knows wants my mother’s position, though she’s done nothing to try to obtain it thus far. As I looked into her gray eyes, something seemed off, disconnected. There was a sliver of gold in one of the woman’s irises. It was almost too small to see it, but my father had taught me to look for even the smallest detail. When the images faded, I was back on the training grounds, flat on my back and unable to see anything through the blood that had flooded my eyes. “What’s wrong with her? I knew she should have stayed with that coven! I’m telling Daddy!” I heard Imogen screech before hearing footsteps running back towards my father’s mansion. I let out a groan of pain: I had a splitting headache now. “Catrina? Are you alright?” Adrian sounded concerned. “You just dropped, and your eyes started bleeding.” I groaned again. “Adrian, my head is killing me right now. Please just stop talking. I’m pretty sure I just had a vision, and I’m not sure what exactly I was meant to see. I need to talk to my mother, but I can’t see right now.”