Bound in Black (32 page)

I sucked in a breath. My world stopped. My vision hazed. Mouth agape, I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think beyond the beating of my pulse pounding in my ears.

He cupped her face and planted a lover’s kiss to her lips. She reciprocated.

“No,” I whispered to myself. “It can’t be.”

Jude stood behind her and couldn’t see her face. Damas grinned from his view of both me and the woman kissing Bamal. He’d known all along. She stepped into the circle, and I clutched my chest, praying my heart didn’t stop right here, right now.

“Mom?”

She made no sign of recognizing me. But I knew her. It had been ten years, but I still knew her. She hadn’t changed a day. Clear blue eyes mirroring my own held me in a state of shock and devastation and disbelief.

“How?” I asked her. She still made no response.

From the outer ring, Bamal had crossed his arms in smug triumph, relishing every heartbreaking second of this reunion.

I turned my question on him, since she refused to acknowledge me. “How is this possible? I saw the video of the day she died, the day she jumped from the Mississippi Bridge. No one could survive that fall.”

“Who said she reached the bottom?” he asked in response. “My spawn can fly, pretty Vessel.” He gestured to the left toward another dragon, red-scaled and orange-eyed, stamping along the perimeter of the standing stones.

Jude wanted to come to me, I could see it in his tight stance, his imploring eyes. An invisible barrier kept them outside the circle. The prophecy demanded that the two Vessels duel unimpeded. I was to duel my own mother to the death? No. I couldn’t. I couldn’t do it, which was exactly what Bamal had counted on.

I caught Jude’s gaze and shook my head. “I can’t.”

He nodded once, encouraging me.

She approached the flat stone at the center, red cloak billowing. She stopped on one side and stared upward toward the moon, waiting for something. Transparent clouds slipped across the sky, a sheer blanket sweeping between earth and the stars. The very edge of the moon began to darken. The eclipse had begun.

A shaft of lightning cracked a resounding boom down from the heavens, vibrating the ground. It struck between two of the stones. A slit of black opened, slowly gaping wide from another dimension, a dark abyss I knew too well.

The first to step forward was Acheron, the ghastly black-boned skeletal creature who held a bargain over my head. I inhaled a deep breath, remembering who Acheron would seize to fulfill said bargain if I failed to deliver a demon prince. I’d be damned before I let Jude fall prey to the underworld again.

The air shifted as the banshee cry of Cocytus wailed across the moor. She too slipped from the void. The Flamma of Light and Dark backed away from the circle, making way for Cocytus, who floated around the ring with ratty raiment billowing in the wind. Third came Styx, her transparent silken white gown slicked tight to her voluptuous frame. She floated to the ground with grace and beauty that belied the black-eyed hatred in her gaze. Lethe whispered out of the black maw, a ghostly hag who floated to the other side. I refused to look at her a second more than I had to, making sure she didn’t approach anywhere near Jude. And finally, a fiery beast I’d not yet laid eyes upon shook the earth when he stepped hooved feet from the other dimension. The opening sealed closed with a crackle.

“Phlegethon.” I knew his name, though I hadn’t imagined one of the soul eaters looking more like a demon lord himself.

With two black extended horns and a body like a minotaur, rippling with massive, bulging muscles and fire licking over his red skin, he was the fiercest creature I’d ever beheld. His slitted yellow eyes glowed with the lust for violence. In his gargantuan fist, he held a Thor-sized hammer, molten red and ready to crush the skulls of any beast that drew near.

The pulse of sorrow, woe and hatred rippled from the otherworld beings in one great symphony of despair. They each took a stance, spaced equally apart, around the ring of stones, facing the mass of Flamma. Every time I’d come in contact with a soul collector, I’d lost the ability to hear. Their presence sucked sound from the air as if into a vacuum. This time, it was the same, but also different. I couldn’t hear the murmurings of angels or demons or the stamping of claw-footed dragons dotting the moor. I couldn’t hear anything outside the circle of stones. It was as if they’d shut a soundproof door where I could only hear whatever passed on the inside.
A ring of wordless, mighty breath; amidst the clutch of endless death.
They completed another part of the prophecy, acting as referees to be sure no one interfered within the stones.

Once more, I set my attention on my mother and dared to step closer. Trembling from the second I saw her, I touched my fingers to the medal around my neck, the one she had given me, and prayed for the strength to endure this trial. One of us must die. This was impossible. The world asked too much of me.

“Mom?”

She stopped watching the sky and looked at me. “Why do you call me that?”

Bamal had wiped me from her memory. Another stab to the heart.

“Because…you are my mother.”

A frown puckered her brow, and I nearly collapsed. This same look of concentration on her face when she painted in her studio was seared in my memory.

“I am no one’s mother.” Though her expression was passive, my VS detected a vibration of dark power radiating outward. “I am my lord’s queen.”

I glanced toward Bamal. He could hear nothing, but the scowl on his face told me he didn’t like whatever he saw.

“You may not remember. But once, you were my mother.”

Curious eyes followed me as I stepped closer. I still held my katana, though it was useless. The will I’d had to kill Bamal’s Vessel vanished the second I saw who she was.

“I would watch you in your studio. You painted the most beautiful things. Always bright colors.”

Her gaze left mine to watch the sky once more, apparently deeming me no threat. A rising wind whipped through the ring, lifting her golden hair. The wispy clouds rolled above us, revealing the silvery orb between patches of darkness. The shadow of the earth eclipsing the moon grew greater, dividing the moon in half.

Sun and Moon, eye to eye; immortals await one battle cry. For within each heart of Moon and Sun, lies key to rule over all and one.

I was the Moon. My mother was the Sun. I’d never understood this cryptic aspect of the prophecy, believing it to be something to do with the eclipse. It was us—my mother and me.

“You painted this one painting of the day I was born. You stood in the window, cradling me close in a white blanket with the midnight sky beyond. Dad hung it in the house. Your husband…he loved you. He never loved another.”

Her gaze dropped from the sky again. “Love?”

“Yes.” I opened my VS, letting it slide outside my body, holding the memory that had always made me strongest when casting any spell. The one where my mother—the woman standing before me as a stranger—held me in her arms with such affection and read nighttime stories with such love in her heart that I knew she’d loved me, no matter that I’d lived with the weight of her suicide all my life.

But it hadn’t been suicide. It was a sacrifice.

“I know who you are,” she said, voice steady, gaze hard. “You are the enemy. The one to take from me my lord. I will not allow this to happen.”

“Please remember.” This was much harder than pulling Jude from the abyss of Lethe. She had been under Bamal’s hand for a decade. “My favorite was Dr. Seuss.”

I called my VS, commanding it to obey my will in a way I’d never asked it before. At first, it would not come. The pain of seeing my mother smothered my thoughts. I closed my eyes and found the memory that had been the one to give me the control over my power.

When the familiar heat pulsed through my body, I opened my eyes. The glow of my skin brightened until the light filled the circle and my memory came to life. There, in transparent form in shades of gray and white, stood my childhood bedroom, and my mother sitting on the bed, one arm around my ten-year-old self. Propped on my belly was a book. My memory mother smiled sweetly and crooned the singsong words.
“Today you are you. That is truer than true. There is no one alive that is you-er than you.”
She touched my nose, and I giggled. The visible memory washed away in an ethereal cloud, but the sound of my childish laughter remained.

“This is a trick of the mind,” she said, though her voice shook. “My lord warned me you would do something like this.”

“He is not your lord. At least, he wasn’t always so. You had a family, a husband who loved you more than anything in this world.”

With a wave of my hand, I called the power of Light forward again and revealed a second vision, the one I cherished most. My dad twirled my mother in his arms in the kitchen, singing an Elvis Presley song. He crooned, “But I…can’t…help…falling in love with you.” My mother tossed her head back, golden locks swinging. This time when the memory faded into ether, her lip trembled.

“That isn’t real,” she said with less confidence than before.

A guttural roar raised our attention to the sky. A great black dragon beat its wings, soaring closer. Its silhouette against the half-eclipsed moon raised chills on my skin. It swooped closer till I could see it carried something, someone in its claws. A rush of wind filled the ring when the beast hovered over us and dropped its quarry toward the stone slab.

“No!” I screamed, not wanting her to fall to her death.

My mother thrust out an arm, and a black mist caught Mindy before her body hit the rock. She floated gently onto her feet right inside the ring of stones. Barefoot, wearing jeans and a New Orleans Saints sweatshirt—apparently what she was wearing when Damas had taken her, Mindy walked, zombie-like, to the stone slab, never even glancing my way, and lay down on her back.

“She mustn’t die until the appointed time,” said my mother. “We will wait until the Blood Moon is full.”

I was right. Damas had taken her to use as the prophecy’s sacrifice. I was ready for this, though anger seethed through me just the same. But Mindy didn’t even try to get up and escape. Her head lolled to the side like she was drugged. Swirling black clouded her irises. I’d seen this before—the girls in Gorham’s club House of Hades, the ones who’d been infected with demon essence to control their will. Damas apparently had given Mindy to Bamal to prepare as a willing sacrifice.

“Your tricks and visions will not fool me,” my mother said. “My lord warned me of you.”

“Your lord is a liar.” Fury swelled inside me. “He erased Dad and me from your memory. But I know…I know in your heart, you must remember.”

The shadow of the earth had nearly enveloped the moon above us. Only a sliver of white remained, the red-tinged eclipse swallowing the globe whole.

My mother slipped from under her cloak a black-boned dagger and raised it above Mindy, who passively awaited her fate.

“No!” I dropped my katana and leapt across the stone slab. I grabbed hold of my mother’s wrist, and we tumbled to the ground.

Her blue eyes transformed, darkening to bloody red. She opened her mouth and released a black mist, which snaked into a web of tendrils, wrapped my wrists and pulled me off her. She rolled to her feet, losing her red cloak, dressed in full black tights and shirt beneath.

“
Flamma intus!
” I commanded.

A pulse of white splintered the black web, releasing me from the bonds. I jerked to my feet.

Catlike, my mother circled the slab, the black-boned dagger still in hand. “She must die. You know the prophecy.”

“I won’t let you hurt her.”

“Then you offer yourself as the sacrifice? Blood must pool under darkened sky or all will perish. You will. So will she. And anyone else you love on this earth. All of us will perish and be lost unless the sacrifice is made.”

I glanced over her shoulder, seeing but not hearing the jeers of Flamma from the other side. Demons screamed their taunts, but I could hear nothing. Jude remained solid and still, watching with his broadsword in his fist.

I couldn’t sacrifice myself, because it was no longer just me at risk. There was my unborn child, even now a warm reminder deep within my womb as my VS flooded my veins. I couldn’t kill myself without killing the life within me.

“No,” I said. “I won’t sacrifice myself.”

“Then she must—”

“Do you know why I won’t sacrifice myself?” I cut her off.

“Because you are not brave enough.”

“No, Mom.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Don’t call me that.”

I circled the stone. Mindy still lay there, helpless and oblivious to her fate.

“You are my mother. Your blood courses through my veins. Bamal doesn’t understand that a mother’s love is stronger than any spell of darkness he cast upon you.”

She stopped circling. “Enough. I will do as my lord commands.” My real mother was buried deep in the dark, having been under Bamal’s control so long. She’d been conditioned by fear of her lord and master and forgotten the truth of who she was.

She raised her dagger high and sliced toward Mindy’s chest. I launched myself toward her again. The dagger embedded in my shoulder as we rolled to the ground once more. A vibration resounded outside our protected shell. I rolled my head sideways to see a myriad of fanged demons roaring outside the circle. I couldn’t hear anything.