The Witches of Echo Park by Benson Amber

Author:Benson, Amber [Benson, Amber]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Fantasy, Contemporary, Paranormal, Fiction
ISBN: 9781101630433
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2015-01-06T08:00:00+00:00

* * *

. . . and because she “loved” me—a word that even now sounds unbelievable to my ears—she did something she thought might save me, unhooking the Devil’s claws from my soul once and for all.

Of course, I didn’t understand any of this until I was long gone from Massachusetts, far away from everything and everyone I’d ever known, my childhood and adolescence a dusty memory locked up tight inside my mind.

My mama had powers, and so did her mother before her—though Mimi did everything she could to excise that part of herself, while my mama was her opposite. My mama reveled in her special abilities: magical powers that, as a nurse, she used to heal the hopelessly sick and to deliver new life safely into the world, when without her help both the mother and infant would’ve been lost.

While Mimi hated what she was and stuffed her powers deep down inside her until they were dead and (mostly) buried, my mama embraced her calling. She left home at seventeen to become a nurse, and when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, she joined the Nurse Corps and was stationed in a military field hospital in Italy until she found herself pregnant with me and was discharged.

My existence, you see, was due to pure happenstance:

A wounded young man from Mama’s small town in Massachusetts came under her care. He was a year younger than she, but they’d known each other tangentially in school, had friends in common, spent time at the same adolescent haunts. Their shared history, and the intimacy of war, brought them together in a way that could’ve never happened back home. My mama was poor and my father, James Davenport, was from one of the wealthiest families the town of Duxbury had ever produced.

I was made one frightening night when screaming bombs lit up the sky like the Fourth of July, and everywhere men went off to battle and died like pigs at slaughter. My parents’ coupling was quick and unplanned—two terrified human beings clinging to one another in order to remind themselves they were still alive—but it was enough to conceive me. Sadly, my father was sent back to fight shortly thereafter and died never knowing of my existence.

How do I know all this? Did my mama tell me these stories?

Yes and no; in her lifetime she did not get the chance to whisper her stories to me, her only daughter. I did not get to sit at her feet and hear them fall from her lips like precious jewels—because one cold winter morning, on her way back from Mass General after a long overnight shift in the maternity ward, Mama’s car skidded on black ice and hit a tree.

For all her magical healing powers, my mama could not heal herself.

Yet I know these things. Know them because of a quirk in my nature, passed down to me through all the Eames women who came before me. I am a blood sister and my gift is clairvoyance.

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