A Short Excerpt from MYSTICISM Prologue:

She has this recurring dream, one she hasn’t told anyone about – ever. Since she was a kid, even factoring in the Lost Years that are her recently-recovered brain-washed memories, the dream had come and gone, leaving Laila to wake in a cold sweat and a feverish desperation to know what was wrong with her.

Because normal kids don’t dream the type of dreams that Laila has rolling around in her subconscious – not that it seems she has any control over her destiny at all, night-time delusions included.

But this dream isn’t like the others.

It starts the same as any other dream, she supposes, with the awareness that hey, this is a dream and an aerial view of whatever grimy spot of New York she’d claimed for her own. A self-image as she loitered on fire escapes or sulked in dark corners.

The dream would ripple, then, right as Laila grasped some form of normalcy and the scene would change, go in slow motion and backward in time until Laila knew that she wasn’t dreaming of herself.

Until the spontaneous – and ritual-induced – recovery of her memories, she’d never been sure just who the woman in her dream was, the woman with the deep bronze skin and face hidden in the deep black cloak, so shadowed that her face wasn’t visible. The only reason Laila had ever been sure of her skin tone was the fact that the woman’s hands were constantly in motion, roving over some spiral of smoke and candles and golden bowl filled with a thick, congealed molasses of what Laila innately recognized to be blood.

Normal seven year olds don’t dream about crap like that.

And they certainly don’t suppose that they are the cloaked woman in the dream, which had been Laila’s mistaken belief for at least twelve years.

She knew better now, of course.

The cloaked woman was her mother.

And she was doing a spell.

The dream is probably part of the reason that Laila had ever accepted the strange things that happened during her childhood – and why she suspected and believed in Glenn’s magical ties with such ease. She’d been dreaming of the darker side of magic for her entire life.

And there was no mistake that the dream was dark.

The woman was trying to call up the spirits of the dead.

It was different, sometimes. Small animals laid before the bowl, twitching and blooming with renewed life; other times, it was larger quarry. Once it was a blond man with cloudy seaglass eyes.

He never came back to life in the dreams. The cloaked woman would always cry over his body, sob in a way that she had never spared for the animals. Her hands would drift to her stomach – her abdomen – her womb.

Laila never understood, not as a child. It was a bizarre dream to have in the first place and she was normally so rattled that she’d even had the dream that she couldn’t – wouldn’t – spare a second thought to notice the subtle cues she should have been picking up on.

That changes as her memories are restored.

Laila understands it now.

The cloaked woman was her mother; the dead man was her father; and she was in utero as her Maman tried again and again to harness the unspeakable power of necromancy, only to succeed on the experiments and fail when it mattered.

It was tragic.

Disturbing.

And now – well. She gets why her magic has a flare for the Dark Side of the Force, why it seems to respond better to violence and revenge than healing. Why it’s so destructive.

Why a raven of all animals is her familiar.

Why she’s been marked fey.

It just sucks that blood magic is what her magic responds to. Laila doesn’t want to be evil.

But it’s not like she could have saved Adie, anyway.