Banishing the Dark (The Arcadia Bell series) (34 page)

“Use your brain, Sélène,” she said in a low voice. “How do you think I am here with you? We are not flesh. We are observing a moment in time constructed of memories.
Your
memories. You opened the door and guided me through.”

Was that true? Was this just a piecemeal reconstruction of a series of memories? The first time I’d experienced this, when I saw Dare talking to my parents back at the cabin in California, was that a dormant memory, something my parents had hidden with magick but not stripped away completely?

“Dare,” my mother mumbled. “I couldn’t be happier that you burned that devil up.”

All my muscles turned to stone.

My mother’s smile widened. “Surprised? Yes, I can read your thoughts. I can see all of you now. Aren’t you listening? You invited me inside. We are
sharing the same body. You, me, and that monstrous child growing in your belly.”

Oh . . . God.

“Three souls cannot inhabit one body,” my mother said. “Let me show you what power looks likes when the person wielding it knows what she is doing.”

The white walls melted like spring snow. Floorboards fell away. Nighttime swirled around us, and the musty scent of my childhood home in Florida was replaced by damp earth and trees and the mineral scent of red ochre chalk.

Trees. Night. A clearing. A rocky hill in the distance.

Panic shot through me as cool night air chilled my skin. I tried to move, but my hands and ankles were strapped to a post. The metal of a sacrificial oracular bowl cooled the bottoms of my bare feet, waiting to catch my blood.

Bound in Balboa Park. Last September. We were back where my parents had tried to sacrifice me and steal my power. The worst night of my life. Only it was just the two of us here now in the dark. No elemental creatures bound in the great circle before me. No Frater Blue. No father.

“
Victoire!
” My mother’s laughter echoed off the rocky hill as she spun in a circle with her arms outstretched, face tilted up to a full moon.

I struggled against my bonds as hysteria blotted out reason. Rope bit into my wrists and made my
fingers tingle. I tried to rock the post and the heavy oracular bowl and only managed to draw my mother’s attention. She halted her swirling dance and stalked toward me.

“This is how you wield power,” she said, getting in my face. “You are in my memories now.”

But it wasn’t a memory—not exactly. Things were missing. I wasn’t naked and covered in a red veil. The ritual circle wasn’t charged.

“Why do I need protection?” my mother answered, reading my thoughts. “Your devil lover isn’t coming to save you this time. After I kill your soul, I will take control of your reptile body and lay waste to him with fire, exactly as you destroyed Dare. Then I will use magick to snuff out the life of your child.”

I snarled and strained to bite her cheek, but she jerked out of my reach, laughing.

This wasn’t actually happening, no matter how real it felt. I had to get control of myself and think. But how could I, when she was listening to my thoughts?

“Not just your thoughts,” she said. “I see
everything.
All your mistakes. All your fears. And all your weaknesses. Your friends and so-called family, the mundane life you’ve cobbled together from the scraps I left you and the misplaced loyalty you’ve given away freely. I see it all, Sélène.”

Unbidden images of Lon and Jupe popped into my head. I tried to shake them away, but it was impossible. My thoughts were tangled, tripping on her
words. But when she sighed and closed her eyes with a look of deep satisfaction settling on her face, I remembered Lon telling me how to keep him out of my thoughts when he was transmutated.

If we were really inside my body, then why was I giving her control?

My mother’s eyes snapped open.

I immediately put up a barrier in my head.

“Go on,” she said, “if that makes you feel better. I don’t need your memories.”

“Are you sure? Because it seems pretty barren out here. Why did you choose not to remember Dad?”

“Alexander is dead. He was weak, and I am strong.”

An oblong shape glinted on the ground between us. She stooped to pick it up and showed it to me: the ceremonial dagger she’d tried to use on me the first time I’d been tied up here. The blade gleamed in the moonlight beneath the white of her smile.

“That’s not how I see it,” I said, ignoring the fear gnashing at the edges of my thoughts.

“See what?”

“You said Dad was weak and you’re strong. But all I see is a middle-aged woman whose life is filled with failure. You failed to create a Moonchild when you had my brother. You failed with your stupid idea to unite all the occult orders. You failed when you tried to take over all the orders by force—double fail, really, because you got caught by savages instead of ruling over the occult world like some kind of pope.”

Defensive anger flared behind her eyes. “I am not in jail.”

“No, but you’re a wanted felon who had to leave the order in disgrace and abandon your home to live like a rat. What else? You failed to sacrifice me and siphon my powers last year. You failed to keep your husband alive in the Æthyr.”

“But I slaughtered the demon who killed him.”

“Who cares? What do you have now? The shoddy clothes on your back? You have no family, no friends, no roof over your head. Where’s your occult army? No one’s here to defend you. No one’s got your back. Everything you’ve tried to accomplish has backfired. Hell, even your stupid publishing career was a flop—you never had a single book hit the bestseller lists.”

“That is—” She tried to finish but ended up huffing.

“But you know what was your biggest failure? Me.” I stretched against my bonds to lean closer and spoke in a low voice. “You had all the power you wanted in the palm of your hand, but you couldn’t control me. Not when I was a child and not now.”

In a blink, my bonds fell free. I was standing where she stood, holding her dagger. She was tied to the post. Her shoulders jerked as she fought to free herself, a string of French curses spewing from her lips. Feral eyes pinned me as she tried to calm herself, chest heaving with labored breath.

I could almost see her mind working; even now, she was cocky enough to think she was still winning.
It was the same conceit that had buoyed her through her killing spree of the occult leaders and that made her keep pushing forward in the Æthyr to find another way to get at the Moonchild powers, even after my father was dead.

The entire world revolved around her. If she hadn’t possessed the magical talent she did, if she wasn’t the lunatic bound before me, it was still easy to picture her using all that selfish determination to accumulate wealth or status or fame. A dirty politician. Head of some shady corporation. Amoral scientist. Enola Duval could have been any of those things. She would have been married to her job, obsessed with success. And even without a bloody trail of bodies, she still would have screwed over her coworkers left and right, stepping on their backs to climb up some other kind of ladder.

And I still would have grown up in a sterile, lonely house with a mother who didn’t give a damn about her daughter.

I glanced down at the dagger in my hand. “I just want you to know something,” I said in a voice that was surprising calm.

“And what would that be?”

“That even though you were an insane monster who treated me like a science experiment, even though you never truly loved me or even thought of me as more than an inconvenient stepping stone, even though you considered selling me like a slave to Ambrose Dare when you suspected I wasn’t your real
Moonchild, even when you abandoned me at seventeen with the FBI on my trail—because of crimes
you
committed—even when you tried to sacrifice me, I still loved you.”

I brushed away angry tears and stared her down, waiting for a reaction. She didn’t even blink. She simply said, “Then perhaps I am not the one who is insane.”

“Maybe not,” I murmured, sliding my fingers to the handle of the dagger. “But I wanted you to know that. And I also wanted you to know that I forgive you for all of it.”

She stared at me as if I were an unsolvable puzzle or a pet ape that had suddenly developed the ability to use sign language. As if she could
almost
summon enough humanity to pity me.

Almost.

The dagger’s handle fit in my grip like it had been made for my hand—just the right length, just the right weight.

And maybe I did have some of her crazy genes bubbling inside me after all, because I felt nothing but dizzying relief when I sank the blade under her ribs.

Silver eyes squinted in front of my face. I shifted down from my transmutated state, and within a blink, the silver turned to green. Lon. No horns, no fiery halo. Just the man.

The dagger was gone; I’d dropped it before I transported back. But any doubts about what I’d just done dissipated when I caught a glimpse of my hands; they were roughly fisting Lon’s shirt, one of them staining the cotton with blood.

“Is she . . . ?”

I pulled back and spotted the fallen body next to us. The relief I’d just been feeling melted into a slow, humming sadness. Not regret, though. It was just my mind getting accustomed to the sudden weight of this burden: I had killed my own mother. Never mind that I didn’t have a choice. Just because
she
felt nothing for me didn’t mean I was an emotionless machine. I was sad that I had to do it, sad that she was truly, irretrievably gone, and sad that I couldn’t save her—not from herself or from me.

But like most things, it would pass. And I’d grieved for her too many times already.

What mattered now were the ones I’d saved by doing this, and they surrounded me.

“Cady?” Jupe said, eyes big and wary. “Are you in there?”

“Yes, I’m here.” I grabbed him and fell against Lon’s chest, embracing both of them. Happy tears streamed down my cheeks as Lon kissed the top of my head over and over, nearly squeezing the breath out of me. Even Foxglove tried to get in on the action, standing on hind legs to paw at Jupe.

“Get down, you dumb dog,” Jupe said cheerfully. “You just ruined a happy moment, congratulations.”

“Are you okay?” Lon asked, eyes glassy with emotion—which, knowing now exactly how strong that emotion could be, was probably barely contained.

“I’m fine.” My hand slid to my stomach, as if I could tell something. “Everything feels okay. Priya?” I asked, pushing away to search for him.

“He couldn’t hold on,” Jupe explained. “He said he’d find a healer in the Æthyr. And he’s pretty torn up about what happened, thinks he failed you and all that junk. So you should probably be nice to him next time you summon him. He’s got some self-worth issues.”

“Thank God you don’t have that problem,” Lon mumbled, and I wanted to hug them both all over again. But the crunch of gravel behind Jupe made me remember we weren’t alone.

I peered around his mass of curls and spotted the girl. She was pretty, now that I could see her better. And she held herself as if she was slightly uncomfortable but would die before she admitted it. I liked her immediately.

“Hi,” I said.

She held up a tentative hand. “Hi.”

“Thanks for the heads-up earlier.”

“No problem.”

A slow grin lifted Jupe’s cheeks, and his eyes went a little squinky. “
This
is Leticia Vega.”

“Nice to meet you, Leticia.” I gripped Lon’s hand like he might dry up and blow away. “I’d apologize that you caught us on a bad night, but this is pretty much the everyday circus sideshow for this family.” Dead body. Pig’s blood summoning circle behind us in the shed. A great first impression.

“Her sister gets naked in front of the entire lodge every week, and her grandmother’s a racist,” Jupe volunteered happily. “She’s used to weirdness.”

“Well, then,” I said, giving her a sympathetic smile to ease her through Jupe’s gift of oversharing. “I think we’ll get along just fine.”

August, three and a half years later

I lounged on a wide wicker chaise in the backyard. It had been dark for an hour or so, and a pretty good fire still crackled in the round stack-stone fire pit Lon had built this spring. It felt fabulous on my chilly feet.

Behind me, a few hundred yards below our cliff, the dark Pacific crashed on the beach. In front of me, beyond the fire, Mr. and Mrs. Holiday hauled away the last of the plastic cups and paper plates to the garbage before they drove back to their cabin. And beside me, a lingering party guest shared my lounge chair.

“I swear, it’s a good ten degrees colder out here than in the city at night.” To prove her point, Kar Yee shivered dramatically and hugged her sweater tighter.

“You say that every time you come out here.”

“It doesn’t stop being true. It’s summer, for the love of God.”

“I don’t mind when there’s a fire. Where’s Hajo tonight?”

“Working some police case in the foothills. A missing girl.”

“Another one? Damn, he’s really helping them out a lot lately. Not half bad for a former junkie.” I wanted to add
and the biggest jerk I know
, but the last time I joked about someone “pulling a Hajo,” Kar Yee and I had a huge fight and didn’t speak for almost a week.