Justina glanced at Tracy and said a quick hello to everyone — including me — before sitting at the opposite end of the table.

That was fine with me. I didn’t want her sitting near me anyway.

They must have told her to play nice. Whatever. As long as she pretended to get along, then sit way over there, I could deal with that.

Pity they couldn’t fix all my other problems so easily.

As I was enjoying the flavour of the meat and gravy, Tracy turned to me. “So, as Anna-Marie has told you, you’ll need to be trained to control your magic so that you don’t hurt yourself or anyone else. We can help you with that.” At my puzzled look, she added, “It’s okay. Everyone here is a Descendant, and they all possess the ability to use magic.”

I looked around the table at everyone with fresh eyes.

That conversation between Justina and Kellie suddenly made sense. Kellie had said something about me being a Descendant and at the time I had no idea what she was talking about.

Kellie smiled. “It’s great that you know what you are now. You’ll be able to train with us. It’ll be fun. You’ll see.”

Fun? I wasn’t too sure about that.

“In the meantime,” Tracy said, “try not to let yourself get too emotional.”

Well, that’s gonna be impossible.

“That’s the main trigger that can release your magic. We will teach you how to keep your emotions from bringing out your power and you’ll no longer be a threat.”

“A threat?”

She gave me a pointed look. “Yes. You need to take this seriously, Maddie. You are very powerful. If I didn’t block you, I could have been seriously injured or killed.”

My stomach sank and my dinner sat heavily like I’d swallowed a rock.

“Don’t worry, though. It shouldn’t take long for you to learn control.” She put a hand on my arm. “You can see now why I had to bring you back here, don’t you?”

All I could do was nod.

─── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ───

“Take some slow, deep breaths in through your nose, then out through your mouth.”

Tracy and I were sitting in the middle of the lounge room floor on cushions while she tried to teach me how to relax and meditate. Everyone had gone upstairs after tea, so there would be no distractions.

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I followed her instructions and tried to relax my body, but I’d never done this in front of someone before and I felt silly.

She spoke slowly and evenly. “Relax your shoulders. Relax your facial muscles. Relax your mind.”

Lay back and groove with mine…

I gave myself a mental slap. This was no time for singing.

I focused again, but then my mind wandered. How was I going to learn to control this magic when I didn’t even know how I’d made it happen? How did they expect me to do it on command? It seemed like such an impossible task. I was still finding it hard to believe that this was all real. It was hard enough to deal with seeing ghosts, and now I find out I’m some kind of magical being too? How do I even process that?

And what was I going to say to Mum?

My eyes flew open. “What about Mum? She saw what I did. She’s always told me there’s no such thing as magic. How is she dealing with it?”

Tracy looked me in the eye. “We thought it best to erase that incident from her mind.”

“What? How is that even possible?”

“You’ll find that a lot of things are possible with magic.” She gave a casual wave of her hand. “There are limitations, of course, and we have to stay under the radar. We can’t let anyone know the truth. There would be chaos.”

My mind painted some pretty gruesome pictures of people reacting badly to the knowledge that there were magical beings among us. Riots. Looting. Panic. I shuddered.

“That’s why we made your mum forget. It’s safer that way. All she knows is that I came to get you and you got upset, but then you agreed to return with me. The evidence was erased and your house is back to normal.”

I sat with my jaw hanging open. It was a lot to take in.

How many “incidents” were being covered up all around us every day that we were all oblivious to?

Tracy put a smile back on her face. “Time to get back to our relaxation lesson.”

“Oh. Yeah. Sorry.”

I knew how to do some basic relaxation, but Tracy wanted me to be able to take it a step further and meditate.

She went through the instructions again for relaxing each part of my body. Then she said to imagine a relaxing scene like the waves crashing on a beach. That was easy to do. Keeping that image in my mind was the hard part.

Once the kookaburras outside stopped distracting me with their cackling laughter and I refocused, I could feel myself loosen up and the stress left my body. I was surprised at how much better I felt.

We’d been at it for a while and I was sure Tracy deserved a medal for her patience. I was so thankful that she’d stuck with me. Being able to keep calm and in control would be so helpful. The thought of me hurting someone else was something I had to constantly push to the back of my mind, but it kept creeping back in. Especially since the person I’d already hurt was sitting in front of me.

“That’s it,” she whispered. “Keep going.”

I jumped at the sound of a child’s delighted squeal and my eyes opened automatically. I heard an angry shush sound, followed by Victoria telling Jemma to be quiet.

“Is something wrong?” Tracy asked.

“No. It’s fine. I thought I heard a car outside.”

My face flushed red and I hoped she push it, because I couldn’t tell her the truth.

We’d barely started again when someone giggled and when I opened my eyes this time, Kassie was staring at me with a smirk on her lips. I looked away quickly, wishing I could tell her to go away.

I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate, but I could hear a soft laugh coming from the corner of the room.

I glared at her, hoping she’d get the message, but that just made her laugh harder. I wanted to slap the smile right off her face.

Johnny strode into the room and just as he was ushering her out, a voice behind me made me almost leap off the floor.

“Maddelyn Johnson! What do you think you’re doing?”