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you
and brought you to me. Why is that? Are you so naïve? Have you been
so ill-prepared for your fate?”
    She seemed to expect that Sunday wouldn’t
respond. Bernadette projected authority. Her pedantic tone implied
she was the boss. Child or no, Sunday didn’t want to be spoken to
as an unruly, precocious girl who’d been caught being naughty with
her hand in a cookie jar. She also didn’t want to be treated like a
fool but, then, her choices weren’t many when she was struggling so
hard to keep up her psychic defenses.
    “Do you not know what you are, Incarnate?”
Bernadette continued.
    Sunday had never heard herself referred to by
that name. It was a term that she learned of while in the care of
the sisters, but no one had ever told her she was it. Her eyebrows
pinched and she jerked her head slightly to face Bernadette’s
voice.
    “I see you flinch with recognition.” The
witch laughed with cruelty, pleased with the fact that Sunday had,
in some small way, responded.
    “The Incarnate child,” she continued. “We
have doubted you for so long and yet here you sit in complete
ignorance of what you truly are. Can it be true that the Incarnate
is so entirely unaware of what she is? Do you not want to know the
extent to which you are coveted or why it is so?”
    Behind the blindfold and the single-minded
intent she had against her captor’s will, Sunday’s curiosity
stirred. The Incarnate stuff tested her reasoning. This being, this
natural wonder of humanity, was a myth the nuns passed along
generations of their sisterhood. From the stories she’d been told,
Sunday learned little to substantiate the existence of such a
person. Sure, some people believed in saints and prophets,
messengers of God, but saints and prophets were a whole different
story than gods and goddesses walking in the flesh. There was only
so much Sunday could believe as fact, or even possibility.
    The Incarnate, according to the sisters, was
an avatar for something ancient. It was real, more real than the
earth and the people walking on it. Incarnate magic was something
that, unlike witches’ magic, was born with them and would die with
them. It didn’t come from spells or potions. It wasn’t singularly
‘good’ or ‘evil.’ It was just, natural and neutral in that way. An
Incarnate was a vessel for all of the mundane and all of the
mystical, an avatar for all the things that had spiritual or
natural energy simultaneously. It was the walking, talking soul of
everything.
    Some people thought the Incarnate could be a
god. Other people thought the Incarnate was something of a demon.
However many different ways people chose to define it, everyone
could agree on one thing: the Incarnate was a rare gift to the
world. The thing is, gifts aren’t universally good or bad. Gifts
could be awesome, or gifts could suck.
    Sunday wasn’t sure all the Incarnate stuff
didn’t sound totally crazy. She’d told Maggie only a million times how she thought that, quite possibly, Maggie and her sisters
had drunk the Kool-Aid. Still, Maggie answered, “Consider that this
kind of being could walk amongst us. Consider that this person
could transcend the mundane, physical shell of her body. Don’t you
do that, Sunday? Don’t you experience this?”
    Sunday shrugged then. To be compared to a
mythical being seemed silly. She would sooner believe in vampires
and angels than in an Incarnate.
    “Whatever,” she’d answered to Maggie. “An
Incarnate can’t be everything all at once. It’s just not
possible.”
    Perhaps Maggie and the other nuns were
witches in their own way. She assumed, perhaps wrongfully, that
growing up among them, she was one of them. That she was merely
someone with a gift, an innate ability that had grown into a
practiced skill. Sunday had never assumed that she’d been anything
but what they all were, just a little stronger.
    The air in her dungeon had once again grown
stale. Bernadette came into this room alone, but she wasn’t