Untamable Matriarch: The Witheridge Witches

Chapter 1

T.W. Pregnancy loss. Also, death and drug use. 

Margareth

I wish I had known my mother. Perhaps, she'd be able to help me. She'd know what to do. Mothers know how to deal with things such as this. But my mother is dead. She burnt alive in a fire that my father was rumored to have set before he fled never to be seen again. A much more brutal end than the one of my stillborn child that lay sleeping in my arms. I can only pray that she felt no pain and that our holy mother in heaven will guard her until I am called to join them. I hope that time is soon as my child came early.

Too early. So early that we hadn't chosen a name. Her hair shows an essence of mine mixed with her father's. A beautiful shade of auburn. Slightly darker than my strands except while mine is mostly straight hers is curly. I wonder what color her eyes are? Maybe grey like mine? I suppose I'll never know. For they'll remain 'ever shut.

It's a tender thing stroking the cheek of a dead loved one. I've done it for a dying soldier as he passed on and then after washed his body for burial with the help of my adoptive parents. Neither prepared me for this. I can feel a shift in her body heat as I finish pushing out the afterbirth. It's a subtle thing - the heat leaving her colder and colder.

I'm frozen.

Have mere minutes or hours passed? Everything hurts, and I can't bear to move. Because I know that once I do this nightmare will become so much worse. Real.

A door creaks, and a familiar voice echos throughout our one-roomed home.

"Mon amour." Roul coaxes.

I flinch. I've never heard him speak so gently- for he is not a gentle man. I feel his large body sit beside me.

We compliment each other well for I am not a gentle woman. In the small French town I live in I'm known to be rigid. Unfeeling even. However, my husband knows better.

Our elderly striped cat I'd inherited from my mother must have slipped inside with him as it jumped on the bed and froze upon what it saw.

I winced as I struggled to sit up and hand our daughter over to my husband tightly wrapped in a blanket.

"J'airuinéle lit. Il nous faudra changer lesdrapsetensuite la pai-"

I don't get to finish the sentence because the room began to rattle once then twice paired with something else that brought me out of the dream.

No. A memory.

A door slams. And that's when the fogginess starts to lift. Roul's face starts to blur as does the entire scene around me. I reach toward him but it's too late.

I wake up from my slumber in a shitty run-down motel just outside of Washington D.C. in Maryland far away from my ancestral homeland and many centuries later where things are now much more complicated than my simple life with Roul. My first husband. He died a few months later on his way to the Crusades, and shortly after that, my new life began.

Because they found me. My coven.

And since then I no longer pray to be reunited with my child or my loved ones in heaven. That's no longer in the cards for me. No. I'm damned and even worse than that I'm cursed.

I start to rub my eyes but stop to avoid smearing my heavy eye makeup. I can't believe I fell asleep, especially on a mission. I must be losing my touch. Despite my error, I'm lying quite gracefully on top of the comforter of a musty full-sized bed on my side looking out the window at an abandoned gas station. It's quiet besides the buzzing of the air conditioning unit and the distant sound of water pelting the walls from the shower going. He isn't here yet, but one look at the clock tells me he will be here any second.