Spell Bound by Rachel Hawkins

talk to you. ” I pointed at Torin.
    He grinned at me. “Certainly. Although I’m guessing that your inquiries are the same as your mother’s. Where is James, is he alive, is there any way to reach him…”
    “You were asking him about Dad?”
    Mom threw a dirty look at Torin. “I was. Not that it’s doing much good. I’d forgotten just how annoying you were.”
    Still smiling, Torin rested his chin in his hand and said, “You know, if you’d just release me from this bloody mirror, I could go get James myself. Providing he isn’t burnt to a crisp, of course.”
    I clenched my fists and called him a word I had never, ever said in front of my mom, but she didn’t seem particularly offended. Instead, she muttered, “Agreed,” and with a flick of her wrist, dropped the canvas covering the mirror.
    “He’s useless most of the time,” Mom said, rubbing the back of her neck. The lines of worry around her mouth were even deeper. “Aislinn should’ve gotten rid of him years ago.”
    “I heard that!” Torin cried, his voice muffled by the canvas.
    Mom rolled her eyes. “Do you want to get out of here for a little bit?”
    I hesitated. What I’d wanted to do was talk to Torin, but I knew there was a lot of stuff Mom and I needed to hash out. Besides, it wasn’t like Mirror Boy was going anywhere. “Sure.”
    We ended up going for a walk. It was weird how pretty and nonthreatening the forest around the Brannick compound looked in the daytime. For a long time, we were quiet. It wasn’t until we reached the trunk of a huge tree, arching over a trickle of water too tiny to even be called a creek, that Mom said anything. “This used to be my favorite place to come and think. Back when I was your age.”
    “I bet you had a lot to think about back then.”
    She chuckled, but there was nothing happy about the sound. We sat down on the fallen tree. The tips of Mom’s boots touched the water, but mine were still a few inches above it.
    “Okay, talk,” I said, once we were seated. “I wanna hear the whole story of how you went from Baby Brannick to Grace—Oh, wow.” I turned and looked at Mom. “Mercer is just a made-up name, isn’t it? You’re Grace Brannick.”
    Mom looked a little embarrassed. “The night I ran away, the car that picked me up was a Mercedes. When the driver asked me my name, I…improvised.”
    Names are just words. I know that. But learning that the last name I’d used all my life was fake…
    “So what should I call myself, then?” I asked. “Sophie Atherton? Sophie Brannick?” Both sounded weird and made me feel like I was wearing clothes that didn’t fit.
    Mom smiled and brushed my hair away from my face. “You can call yourself whatever you want.”
    “Okay. Sophie Awesome Sparkle-Princess it is.”
    Mom laughed then, a real laugh, and laced her fingers with mine. We sat there on that tree, my head on her shoulder, and Mom told me her story. It reminded me of when I was little and she’d read to me before bedtime. And her tale wasn’t much different than the fairy tales I used to love, the really dark ones full of scary stuff and heartbreak.
    “Growing up here, life was…Well, you’ve seen what it’s like for Finley and Izzy. It was brutal. I loved my family, but it was just training, and fighting, and hunting, and more training.” Mom sighed and pressed her cheek against the top of my head. “It just didn’t seem like any way to live. So when I was twenty-one, I left. Went out for patrol one night, and just…kept walking.”
    She’d gone to England, hoping to do more research into the Brannick history, to see if there was some other way she could be useful to her family that didn’t involve killing things.
    “Then you met Dad,” I said softly. Once again, I wondered where Dad was. How he was. If he was.
    “Yes” was all she said.
    “Did you know what he was?”
    “No,” Mom answered, her voice thick with tears. “What I told you about meeting your dad, all