by Jenn Bennett
Yvonne was panicked. Her cool, aloof exterior had melted away completely. “We went to a different restaurant. It was Evan’s idea, and I hadn’t seen him in—”
Rose slapped Yvonne across the face.
And again.
Yvonne slid down the side of the car and crouched into ball, covering her head with her arms as Rose continued to flail at her.
Christ.
“Come on,” I said against Jupe’s ear, as calm as I could. “Let’s get you inside, okay?”
I half carried, half dragged him across the driveway in a daze. He could walk a few steps, then his legs would turn to noodles and give out. He was trying to say something, but his words were slurred. Everything seemed surreal. Like time had slowed. I could hear Rose screaming at Yvonne behind me.
“I’ve got him,” I told Adella firmly. “I do this at the bar all the time. I can handle this. Go stop your mother from hurting her. If she’s drunk as well, better call her a cab and get her out of here before Lon gets back, or he’ll kill her.”
Getting him up the stairs was the hardest part, but I managed. He seemed to sober up a little and started talking in a small, roughened voice. Mostly just little drunken observations that made no sense, like his shoes were too big, and that was the reason he was having trouble walking. And was he at home? Where were we going?
“Here’s your room,” I said, kicking open his door and dragging him through in the dark. It was cleaner than usual, due to the Giovannis’ visit, so I didn’t have to wade through piles of clothes and teetering stacks of comics. Right before I made it to his bed, he made a horrible noise, tried to push me back, and vomited all over my arm. Twice. Good God, it stunk of wine.
“I’m sorry,” he said brokenly. “So sorry.”
“Hush. It’s not the first time someone’s done that,” I said. “Bartender, remember? I’m a vomit cleaning expert. Sit down on the bed. Can you do that? Mind the nightstand.” I got him down, half sprawled on his pillows. Wrangled his shirt off and used it to mop up vomit around his mouth and off my arm. It took some work to prop him up against the headboard. I turned on the lamp next to his bed. He squeezed his eyes shut and groaned.
“Don’t move,” I said. “I’m going to get something that will make you feel better.”
My medicinals from the bar were locked up in a drawer in Lon’s walk-in closet. I didn’t want to leave them in Tambuku while it was closed, just in case we got robbed again—whether it be Telly on a revenge mission or some other hopped-up Earthbound deciding we looked weak enough to hit. I quickly changed shirts and washed my arm in the bathroom sink, then rummaged through the vials until I found one that I used to sober up bar patrons.
When I got back to his room, he was staring at the ceiling. I went into his bathroom and filled up two disposable cups with water then set those down on his nightstand. In one, I measured two drops of the medicinal. “Here, drink this. It will make you feel better.”
He drank it down, slow at first, then faster. “I’m so thirsty,” he said, as if it was a great revelation.
“I know. Here’s more water.” I gave him the second cup and filled up two more while he drank it, setting them on his nightstand. “You’re going to want to sleep now, but when you wake up, drink more water.” I tugged off his sneakers and pulled the covers over his legs, then perched next to him on the edge of the bed.
“Are you mad at me?” he asked.
“I’m mad at your mother. What happened? I tried to call you, but you didn’t answer.”
He sloppily dug his phone out of the pocket of his jeans. The screen lit up. “Oh, no,” he moaned. “I had it on silent. I usually feel it.”
I took the phone away and placed it on the nightstand. “Why were you drinking? Did you use your knack to make her let you drink?”
“It was that Evan guy. Dad thinks he’s an asshole, but he was okay at first. He said kids in Europe drink wine at dinner, so I tasted Yvonne’s”—he still wouldn’t call her “mom,” I noticed—“and it was pretty good, so she let me be in charge of refilling the glasses from the bottle, and they kept bringing more bottles, and they were expensive, but Evan said he’d pay for dinner.”
“Tasting is one thing, but you can’t drink. You’re a kid,” I said, struggling for the right thing to say. “You’re not supposed to drink.” Christ, I felt like such a hypocrite. I got people drunk for a living. How was I going to explain the difference?
“They stopped talking to me, Cady,” he argued, gesturing loosely. “I mean, she was s’posed to be spending time with me, not him. But he was making her laugh, and she just forgot I was even there. It was like being a kid all over again. Like nothing changed.”
“So you had more wine, and she didn’t notice?” I said, combing my fingers through his curls, pushing them away from his face.
“I didn’t mean to drink so much, but they told me to stay at the table. And I tried to stop her. That’s when I used my knack. But it didn’t work, Cady. Just like when I tried to use it on my dad on the boat, remember?”
Could have been because he was too soused to use it, but I didn’t say this. “You’ve only had your knack a couple of months. It’ll take time to learn to manage. Don’t worry about it. What happened then?”
“When my knack didn’t work, I couldn’t stop them. They left for a long time. And the waiter brought another bottle of wine. I didn’t mean to drink the whole thing, but it went fast.” He groaned again and closed his eyes. “It feels good and bad at the same time.”
“I know. When you drink too much, that’s what happens.”
“Dad is going to be Hulk angry.”
“Yeah, he is,” I agreed.
“I wanted her to be okay.”
I thought of my own mother, and how badly I wanted her to be okay, even after I knew she’d killed people. Even after I knew she was irretrievably lost.
“She said she was sober, but that Evan guy was selling her drugs. I saw him. I went to find them, and he was giving her a tiny bottle of something. Like that.” He pointed to my medicinal.
I stilled.
“What color was the bottle, Jupe? Do you remember?”
“Red. Like a little bottle of red wine.”
Oh my God. Could it be? The bionic elixir? “Did she drink any of it? This is important, Jupe.”
“No, I don’t think so. We started fighting, and she told him she’d come by his place later after she got me home.”
Jesus. My pulse jackhammered against my temples as I tried to sort it all out in my head.
“Dad’s going to . . .” He didn’t finish.
“I’ll deal with your dad. Go on and sleep. You’ll feel better when you wake up.”
“Okay.”
“I’m going to leave the light on, in case you need to go to the bathroom. Don’t want you to trip over Mr. Piggy’s crate and smush him.”
He mumbled something and shut his eyes. After I’d made it halfway to the door, he said, “Cady?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m not giving her any more chances.”
I blew out a long breath, not knowing what to say. He probably wouldn’t remember it anyway. “Go to sleep. I’ll check back in on you later.”
When I closed the door behind me, Rose was striding down the hallway. Pissed off as hell, from the looks of it. “He’ll be okay,” I assured her. “I gave him something that will help him detox. He threw up, so that’s good. Got some of it out of his system.”
“Did he tell you what happened?”
“A little—”
“Yvonne said they left Jupe at the table while they went to talk to someone else in the restaurant, and that’s when he sneaked the wine.”
“Look, I’m not saying she’s a liar, but Jupe said that Evan guy encouraged Yvonne to let him drink. They left him at the table with the wine bottle, and they were gone long enough for him to empty it. And—” I stopped and decided against telling her about the elixir. It just complicated things, and I needed t
o see it for my own eyes first. Jupe was drunk, after all.
She swore under her breath. Her anger was contagious, because now that I was satisfied Jupe would be okay, I was furious. “I don’t know who this Evan guy is, or what they were thinking, but Jupe says Lon hates him. And given the fact that he’s Hellfire, and nobody I’ve met from that bloody club has a decent bone in their body—”
And if he had a whole bottle of elixir on him, did that make him the distributor? Was this the guy Telly originally robbed to get his supply? If he was Hellfire, it would explain how Merrimoth got it, back when this all started. Could also explain its presence at Peter Little’s Richie Rich party.
“I knew she was lying,” Rose said. “She just tried to use her knack on us.”
“Out there?”
“Just now. Anytime she does anything wrong, that’s what she falls back on—the knack. Only it didn’t work on me because of my charmed ring. When she didn’t get what she wanted, she pressed on and shifted herself.”
“Transmutated?”
Rose nodded. “Almost too much for the ring to fight. It was tough, but I did.”
“Where is she now?”
“Sitting in the backseat of her rental. Adella’s got the ring. She’s guarding her. I’ve got her car keys.” She opened her palm to show me. We stared at each other for a long moment. Long enough to hear Jupe snoring through the closed door. Rose eventually said, “You remember what we talked about?”
“Excuse me?”
“You said you could strip away that magick from her. So she can’t shift like that.”
“Whoa,” I said, throwing up both hands. “I said I possibly could.”
“Lon tells me you’re special. Different. He says you can do incredible things that other magicians can’t even dream about doing.”
“But—”
“Do you want me to beg you? Because I will. She could’ve hurt him,” she said, pointing at Jupe’s door. “What if he’d ended up in the hospital getting his stomach pumped? What if she got drunk too and crashed her car?”
That thought made me sick.
“She’s a danger to everyone around her, and she’s going to end up killing someone or herself before it’s all over.”
“I don’t know,” I mumbled, trying to move things around in my head. To make sense of everything. I was overwhelmed. Could I do what she was asking? I knew I couldn’t with a traditional spell. It would have to be the Moonchild power. As much as I didn’t want to admit it after what happened in Hajo’s parking garage, I’d had success using it. In fact, I’d instinctually been able to get the results I’d wanted every time. They weren’t always results I knew were possible: freezing time to help Lon, trapping Noel with smoke at the car rally, squeezing the trust funder to the brink of death, teleporting myself home.
But could I use it to poke around the innermost workings of a human being? Could I “will” Yvonne’s transmutation spell out of her? Or would I melt a few organs in the process?
Even if I could, there was the other sticking point. Priya warned me: I was calling attention to myself in the Æthyr when I used it. Specifically, my mother’s attention.
Rose became frantic. “What do you think Lon’s going to do when he gets back? Huh? You think he’s going to just let her go back to Miami? He’s going to end up in jail, that’s what’s going to happen. You want to lose him to her? Because if she has her way, she’ll take him down however she can.” She leaned in closer, putting her face right in front of mine, intense green eyes on mine. Swirls of her halo cast a glow on the tip of my nose. “God forbid she catches Lon alone. If he doesn’t have something like this ring to protect him, she’ll have him on his knees in seconds. And if you want to know how that story ends, you go ask Adella.”
I didn’t have to. Adella’s story was still fresh in my mind. And it wasn’t like I hadn’t made myself sick worrying about Yvonne’s possible control over Lon.
My hands were shaking with anger. I walked around Rose, heading back down the hall. She trailed me downstairs to the living room as I dialed Lon’s number. “Pick up, pick up,” I muttered. But he didn’t. I tried again and hung up when his voicemail came on a second time. Then I stopped in the middle of the living room and stared at Rose for several beats, fingernail clicking on the screen of my phone.
“Her knack by itself, I can handle,” Rose said. “Even without this ring. But when she shifts, there’s nobody in this world that can stand between her and what she sets her mind to have. And as much as she’s done to hurt this family, I still want her to get better. But without getting rid of that magick inside her, it’s just not going to happen. God help me, but she’s my daughter.”
“Rose—”
“If you won’t do it for me,” she said in a deceptively calm voice, “then do it for Jupiter.”
I glanced upstairs like I could see him. My heart constricted painfully.
Then Rose said, “He’s counting on you. Lord knows he can’t count on her.”
And sometimes you do stupid things for people you love.
Golden light from the entry faded as my low-top sneakers crunched over white gravel. Adella’s poofy curls were silhouetted against the headlights from Yvonne’s rental.
“Everything okay?” Rose called out over my shoulder.
Muffled pounding sounded from the backseat of the car. Shouting followed.
“She’s angry as a bull,” Adella replied.
I could just make out the movement of Yvonne’s halo inside the dark car. When I stepped closer, I saw more. She was blindfolded. I glanced at Adella; the scarf around her hair was gone. I remembered how her knack kicked in when I looked up at her at the seafood restaurant that first night.
“She’s like Medusa,” I said dumbly.
Rose huffed. “Turning people to stone might actually be useful. She’s like Medusa’s evil twin. It came from my late husband’s family tree.”
“Avoiding eye contact only delays the inevitable,” Adella explained. “Unless you’ve got a solid wall between you, she’ll eventually ensnare you. She’s gotten me when I’ve had my back turned. You doing this? Stripping away the transmutation spell?”
“I can’t guarantee anything,” I warned. “Are we straight on that?”
They both nodded. Rose gave me the rental keys.
“And I’ll need the Solomon Seal ring,” I said. “Maybe it’s best you two head inside the house. Keep trying Lon. Check on Jupe.” I thought of the tail and twitched. No jeans to hide it this time; I was wearing mini cargo shorts that barely covered my ass. An ass that was, by the way, currently freezing in the cool night air. “Don’t come out until I tell you it’s safe.”
Adella slipped off the ring and gave a wary look toward the car as she handed it over.
“Go!” I said. “Before she changes your minds.”
I slid the ring on my index finger and waited until I heard the front door shut. Then I approached the car and hit the unlock button on the key ring. The car’s interior lights came on, illuminating Yvonne. Her sister’s blue-and-white striped headscarf had been torn in two. Half of it covered her eyes; the other half bound her wrists together behind her back. It was a shame that the Giovannis felt they had to do this. I almost felt sorry for Yvonne.
Almost.
“Get out,” I shouted.
She didn’t move for several seconds. I swung the door open and stepped back.
“Where are they?” she asked. The bottom edge of her makeshift blindfold was damp with tears. Mascara seeped beneath it, running down her cheeks.
“Inside. It’s just you and me. Please get out. We need to talk.”
“Untie me,” she bit out between clenched teeth. She was angry now. Her halo was dancing. I watched it carefully, worried that she might transmutate any second.
“You don’t need your arms to stand. Out of the car, please.”
She struggled to move her legs around, but finally managed a sloppy exit and teetered on high heels against
the side of the car. “I don’t know what you expect to accomplish by talking to me,” she said, chest heaving. “But this is between me and my family.”
“Wrong. It’s between you and my family.”
“He’ll always be my son.”
“But when are you going to start acting like his mother?”
“It was just wine, for the hundredth time!” She slammed her heel against the car frame in aggravation.
“He’s falling down drunk!”
“I never said he could have more than a glass.”
“You left him alone at the table.”
“Just for a minute!”
“Liar. He told me what happened.” I stepped closer and stuck my hand in her coat pocket.
“What are you doing?” she said, squirming.
“Where is it? Jupe told me you were buying drugs. Is Evan a dealer?” I tried the other pocket. “He promise you something that would amp up your knack?”
She jerked away from me with a grunt. But I managed to get a hand inside her dress pocket. Bingo. The glass vial, filled with red liquid. Exactly the same as the other bottle of bionic juice.
“I didn’t use any!” she protested desperately. “I’m clean, I swear.”
I pocketed the vial. “It’s not something you should be allowed anywhere near. Your knack is already amped up enough as it is.”
“Ethan said it was magic, not a drug. He said I couldn’t get addicted to it. I just wouldn’t have to worry about showing my horns to use my knack.”
I couldn’t think of anything more destructive for someone like her. “What’s the matter with you, for the love of God? You encouraged Jupe to drink and left him alone so you could cut a drug deal?”
“I don’t need to watch Jupe every second. He’s a teenager, not a baby.”
“And he wanted to spend time with you. How often do you see him, Yvonne? Once a year? You didn’t see him last year at all—I know that much. Why? What could be so important to you that you couldn’t come visit? He’s a fucking joy to be around.”
She choked out a laugh. “Don’t tell me what he’s like. I know. I carried him inside me. I raised him.”