by Jenn Bennett
I peered into shadows down the street, searching for movement. “He sent us to Merrimoth’s to find the leak.”
“What?”
“Dare. He said he wanted us to find out why Merrimoth’s knack was amped up, but he already knew why—had to. Maybe he realized someone had stolen his elixir when he started hearing rumors about Merrimoth’s knack getting wilder. But when he heard about the crazy crimes in Morella, he knew he had a bigger problem. That would explain why he was so angry when we failed to get any information out of Merrimoth.”
“Then he heard your bar had been hit and knew you’d go after the robbers.”
“I first saw the black car outside Diablo Market. And I saw someone at the car rally when I was chasing down Noel in the parking lot.”
Lon stared out over the steering wheel. “He was already following Hajo before we went to the trailer park. Probably trailed you to Hajo’s apartment.”
“We led Dare to Telly.” Sure, Telly was an asshole, and I had every reason to hate him, but he was just a kid. A dark, nauseating feeling bubbled up inside me.
“If it wasn’t us, it would’ve been someone else,” Lon said. “Dare is petty. He’s big on retribution. Killing Telly was sending a message to Evan.”
Dare. That arrogant asshole had done nothing but make my life miserable.
He was the one responsible for all this. For Merrimoth. For Tambuku being robbed. For Kar Yee being hurt. For Telly’s path of destruction. At that moment, I even blamed him for Jupe getting drunk, and for pushing my hand to do what I did to Yvonne.
“Cady,” Lon said.
“Don’t defend him,” I snapped. “What about us? If he finds out Evan gave a vial to Yvonne, will he send a message to you by putting a bullet in her head?”
“No, he . . . I don’t know,” he admitted. “Dare isn’t the man I used to know. I don’t know how far he’d go to protect his secrets, and I don’t know how far he’d go to punish people who wronged him.”
“He’s already got a hate-on for me. Maybe he’ll just take me out like Telly.”
Lon grabbed my arm. “Like hell. I’ll kill him myself before that happens.”
“Not if I get him first.”
He might be rich, he might surround himself with bodyguards, but what was all that to someone like me?
“Cady,” Lon warned. “I can hear what you’re feeling, but you can’t act on that.”
“Why not? Who else can stop him? The police?”
“We can’t just ram down his door and kill him. That makes us no better than he is. And we have other things to think about.”
“Like?”
“Like Jupe. Telly was only a couple of years older.”
“Dare wouldn’t—”
“You want to bet on that? How do we know what he won’t do? Even if he won’t pull the trigger, what’s to stop him from arranging some kind of accident when Jupe’s at school? You think a man who doesn’t give a shit about killing one teenager is going to hesitate to kill another one?”
“But he was your father’s best friend. You’re family to him.”
“You willing to bet Jupe’s life on that? Mr. and Mrs. Holiday? The Giovannis?”
I stared at him across the darkened car for several moments before shaking my head.
“I’m responsible for too many people, Cady, and that includes you. I’m not taking a chance until I’ve had time to think it all through.”
I couldn’t argue. He was right. But as we drove home in silence, another part of me wondered if us being cautious just meant Dare had won. Again.
• • •
When we got home, I played phone tag with Kar Yee, leaving her a message that I had news about Telly. She left me one in return that she’d stop by Lon’s house tomorrow afternoon on her way back from visiting our friend upstate.
We checked in on Jupe—he was snoring off his night with Yvonne—sent the Holidays back to their own house, and crashed. I fell asleep angry, still thinking of Dare, but ended up dreaming about someone worse.
I was lying on my back in a field of cheery wildflowers, red and yellow and purple. A soft breeze rustled through the green grass and stems swaying around my limbs. Lon’s hand clasped mine. He lay at my side, eyes closed, wind fluttering his honey hair.
The bright blue sky began to darken around the edges, cerulean shot through with dreary gray. Something approached—something that I couldn’t immediately see, sneaking through the field. Fear blanketed me as I watched tall stalks of grass bending. The flowers around us drooped and withered. The green grass turned to straw.
Something was coming.
I shook Lon, trying to wake him, but he remained asleep.
Two legs appeared in the dead grass. My gaze followed them. My mother’s long face peered down at me, a smirk curling her lips.
The sky behind her continued to darken, but it wasn’t night. I said, “Why are you here? The moon’s not out, and I’m not doing magick. You can’t see me.”
“The moon is not visible here,” she corrected, her white toga shifting in the breeze. “But it’s night on your plane.”
“But I’m not doing magick.”
“This makes no difference to me. Not anymore. As long as the moon is visible, I can track your Heka here.”
“Where is this?”
“Between the planes.”
“Liar,” I said. “This is a dream.”
She squinted. “Me, a liar? Look at yourself. You are the one with the tail and the forked tongue like the serpent in the garden. The great deceiver, filled with venom.”
Forked tongue. I remembered biting my lip at the racetrack. It still wasn’t fully healed.
My tail slithered down the side of my thigh. Black and white stripes rotated as it grew until it was longer than my legs. My mother watched it carefully, taking a step back to stay out of its reach.
“What am I? What did you put inside me?” I whispered.
“Why, Sélène—don’t you like your serpentine form? It is the real you, after all. And every night you will shed your human skin and become your true self, my little one.”
I shook my head. “I’m not yours.”
“You’ll always be mine. I called forth beings you can’t imagine and trapped their magick to create you inside my womb. I birthed your body.”
“A pact with what? What am I? What did you create?”
Instead of answering me directly, she talked around my question. “After all my hard work, how do you repay me? Cause me nothing but misery.”
She murmured words that sounded like a spell, crouched at my feet, and cruelly clamped my tail to the ground. Pain spiked through it, all the way into my spine. I tried to move away, but I was paralyzed. She’d done something to me with magick.
Terror overtook me. I strained to look at Lon. He was still sleeping.
My mother growled at my feet, still holding my tail to the ground. “You sold your own parents to a demon,” she said, anger darkening her eyes. “Once she took us into the Æthyr, Nivella killed your father. Sliced him into shreds like he was meat.” She leaned over me. “Do you not care? The man who raised you is dead.”
“No, I don’t care,” I said coldly. “I’m glad he’s dead. I wish you were.”
She growled in my face. “It is your fault. Your father’s blood is on your hands. And you may not care, but I do. He was my lover. My soul mate. My reason for living.”
“Why are you still alive, then?”
“I live for you, now, darling. Only you.” She crawled over me and whispered into my ear. “And I want what’s mine. I created you, spent the last twenty-five years of my life waiting for you. And you may think you’ve gotten away, but it’s only a matter of time before I will have you under my control again. And to prove it, I will take from you what you took from me. An eye for an eye . . . a heart for a heart.”
She pushed off the ground and stood, releasing my tail. I felt something cold in my hand and looked down. I was holding a kni
fe. One that looked remarkably like the ceremonial dagger she’d used when she was slicing my breast, trying to sacrifice me to steal my moon powers.
“Your human form betrayed your father. Betrayed me,” she said. “But your true form inside cannot, because it is bound to me by ancient rules. We are connected, you and I. And that connection will only get stronger. It’s just a matter of time.”
Her eyes closed. She raised her hands to the sky. Foreign Æthyric words tumbled out of her mouth. Another spell.
I scrambled to move away, but it wasn’t soon enough. Heka hit me like a punch in the gut. My too-slow limbs felt like they were caught in syrup. Then her spoken chant ended and she spoke to me. “I command you to offer me a sacrifice. In payment for your father’s death, you will now kill who you love.”
I sat up in the dead grass, not by will, but by force. She was controlling me. I was a puppet, and the strings she pulled made me move toward Lon. I called his name, tried to warn him, but he still didn’t wake. Holding the dagger, I raised my arms high and aimed for his chest.
This couldn’t be happening. It was just a dream.
Wake up, wake up, wake up! I told myself.
And I did. The field fizzled away. My mother disappeared.
I was in Lon’s dark bedroom. Moonlight spilled across the sheets, illuminating the kitchen knife I held in my hands as I straddled Lon’s sleeping form.
Shock and horror held me frozen for several moments. This wasn’t a dream.
This was real.
Lon grunted when I jumped off him. Then he rolled to his side and fell back into sleep, utterly unaware of what I was doing.
I was in full Moonchild mode. Everything had a silvery tinge. I started to sever the connection, push it away, when I caught a glimpse of myself in the long dressing mirror standing next to the bed.
I gasped. Took a shaky step forward to get a better look.
It was me, naked. Me, but not me. My skin was covered in tiny, iridescent reptilian scales. Mostly black, I thought—it was hard to tell with the silver vision. A reticulated pattern began around my face, neck, and shoulders, where the black was interspersed with white and gray, and—I turned to peer over my shoulder—this eventually became black and white stripes on my back . . . and tail.
The tail seamlessly jutted out from my lower back and was a couple of inches in diameter. Black and white rings, all the way to the tip. It was now wrapped around my ankle, clinging to my leg, making me look like a dog with its tail tucked.
But that wasn’t the startling part. Nor was the silver eyes or the massive dancing silver halo. None of that shocked me. Lon had told me about those things.
He didn’t tell me about the horns.
Not spiraling. Not even two. A series of ridges began on my forehead, just above my eyes. They made a wide V shape there, increasing in size and length until they became black spines. A few inches above my hairline, the spines changed to black horns, gently curving backward like crests on a dragon. Three black, glossy horns flaring in neat little rows on each side of my head. The ones at the crown of my head were the longest—maybe two feet tall.
My hair stood out from my head, licking around the horns as my halo whorled like an angry storm cloud.
Terrified of my own reflection, I pushed the moon power away as fast as I could. The weight changed on my head as the horns retracted. Scales disappeared, as well as the tail.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
I stood by the bed, a slow tremor wracking my body as I looked down at Lon. I could’ve killed him. Stabbed him while he slept. My fingers uncurled around the handle of the blade I’d forgotten I’d been holding. Not my mother’s ceremonial dagger, but a knife from Lon’s kitchen—one of his fancy, expensive knives. How the hell . . . had I sleepwalked? Did my mother orchestrate all this?
Her voice rang in my head, clear and strong, as if we’d actually spoken. And maybe we had. She said it was a place between the planes. I stared at the knife. My hand was shaking so badly, I nearly dropped it.
This was so bad. I’d never felt so out of control.
Chest heaving, pulse jittery, I backed away from the bed and headed to the bedroom door. I felt like an intruder in my own home. Lon’s home. Jupe’s home. Dear God, he was sleeping two doors away. What if he’d seen me . . . looking like that?
Worse: what if he wasn’t safe either?
Stifling a sob, I grabbed my robe off the back of the door and covered myself, quietly fleeing downstairs in the darkness. I headed straight for the kitchen, where Lon kept a small light over the sink constantly switched on like a nightlight. The magnetic strip that held his knives was attached to the wall nearby. Sure enough, a narrow space on the strip was blank, exactly the space where this one belonged. He kept them arranged in a specific order, which is why he’d known I’d taken the paring knife that night I called up Priya on Kar Yee’s roof.
I pressed the blade to the strip until it clicked. Nausea gripped my stomach. I barely had time to hunch over the sink before the vomiting began—once, twice. A third time. Weak and sick, I washed it down the drain and thrust my head under the tap to drink straight from the faucet. Rinsed my mouth out. Drank more. I didn’t understand why’d I’d be experiencing post-magick nausea. I hadn’t done any magick. Besides, the moon power didn’t make me sick like Heka-fueled magick did. Maybe it was my mother’s magick.
I waited until the nausea subsided, thinking of my reflection in the mirror.
My true serpentine form. That’s what my mother called it.
I ran through a shortlist of deities or mythological beings associated with snakes, but none of them were directly associated with magick. And whatever I had pinging around under my skin was definitely a magick-wielder.
A reptilian, serpent magick-wielder.
Padding to the bottom of the stairs, I paused, listening. No movement upstairs. Lon’s jacket hung on a peg in the foyer. I put it on and quietly slipped out the sliding glass doors to the back patio.
The dark Pacific crashed against rocks in the distance. The tree line blocked the moon. I was glad for that, all things considered. Damp grass sent cold shivers up my legs as I wiped saliva over my guardian’s sigil. “Priya. Come.”
His black line appeared in the middle of my palm as he swooped down from a crack in the sky. “Mistress,” he said, folding up his wings behind his back as he landed in the grass a few feet away. He stalked forward and stopped in front of me, black halo swirling above his crazy shocked hair. “What is wrong?”
“My mother visited me in a dream tonight. She’s got some sort of control over me in the Æthyr. She’s trying to make me do bad things. I’m scared, Priya. Have you found out anything more?”
“Where is your lover? The Kerub.”
“Lon is inside,” I said nodding toward the house as I crossed my arms over my chest to fend off the biting wind blowing off the ocean.
“He does not like me.”
“That’s not true,” I said. “He’s just protective of me, that’s all. He doesn’t hate you. He’s thankful you’re helping me in the Æthyr.”
“He is right to feel protective, for you are in danger.”
“Tell me.”
“This is what I know. Your mother is claiming that she has dominion over you through an unbreakable bond. The magick that she used to conceive you is very old. It is similar to the spell used to draw demons into human bodies.”
“To create Earthbounds?”
He nodded. “She is bragging that she still has control over you. She has claimed that her control is strengthening.”
“It definitely is.”
“I think I know why. The spell she used to conceive you is degenerative. Your human body weakens as it ages while the other part of you strengthens. The stronger it becomes, the more control she has over you, because the bond between you will solidify. Your willpower will crumble.”
“She can control me in my sleep.”
“Because you are unaware and weak. The Moon
child part of you uses lunar power to open up a connection between the planes. You can call up the power when you are awake. But she can use a spell to open that same connection when you are weak.”
“When I am asleep.”
“Asleep, weary. Inebriated. Impassioned. Any time you are not in full control of your own willpower.” He held out his palm, showing me the black thread that connected us. “Her connection to you is like ours, but only temporary. The more you grow into the Moonchild, the stronger the bond becomes. And more permanent.”
I curled my hands inside the too long sleeves of Lon’s coat and paced. “But only when it’s night, right?”
“That would be logical since it is a lunar power, and, as you told me, it does not work in the day.”
My throat was dry. “Okay, so I just sleep in the day, when she can’t hack into me. I stay vigilant at night. Don’t use the moon power at all.”
“Even if you do not sleep at night, you will still need to worry.” Priya stepped in front of me and leveled his gaze with mine. “Your loved ones and friends are not safe. She can see into your thoughts and feelings when she is connected to you.”
I blinked at him. He was talking from experience, wasn’t he? He could see into my thoughts and feelings now?
His voice softened. “She can feel who you care about, especially if thoughts of them are fresh in your mind. She will search for your weaknesses, and she will have you destroy them.”
“I can’t run again,” I said miserably. “I can’t do that. I have a family now. I need them. They need me.”
“You should not risk their lives for a moment of comfort. You must erase them from your mind. Get as far away from them as you can.”
“And do what? Wait until this thing inside me is completely under her command?” I was shouting at him. It wasn’t his fault. “What am I?”
“They call you Mother of Ahriman.”
“Mother of demons,” I said. “Is that what I am? A demon? I saw myself, Priya. I was covered in scales. I have a serpent’s tail, and horns. What am I?”
“I do not know. ‘Mother of Ahriman’ is only a story in the Æthyr. A legend. A woman that commands fear and respect. But I do not know exactly who she is, or what manner of being.”