A bone-white sickle paired with a bundle of flax. A fraying thread tied in a knot. The curve of a full moon.
And then there’s Abra, her pale skin sparkling in the warped moonlight coming through the window.
I’ve no idea how long I’ve been unconscious.
“So this is it?” I ask, leveling Abra with my gaze.
She’s as atrociously lovely as ever, her snow-white hair slicked firmly to her scalp. Her opal-beaded gown reflects the dazzling moonlight coming through the stained glass windows, shooting speckles of greens and yellows and pinks and blues across the walls and floors.
“Whatever do you mean?” she asks.
“You spend years grooming me, forcing me to become your son, then you throw me away?”
She pins me with that icy stare of hers as I stand, a flurry of bone-white runes separating us. I’d lunge for her, rip her delicate throat out, but it’s clear by the way the runes have already begun to blur that the spell has already started. It’s why she picked this room of all places to conduct it. My crossing the runes could do nothing, or it could send the entire spell rippling off-balance, leaving Zora in the crossfires of a ricocheting blast of magic gone out of control.
So I stay planted and instead simply imagine what I’d do to the Queen of Mystral if my sister wasn’t lying asleep behind me.
If only she could wake, make a run for it and hide, then I’d end this.
It wouldn’t matter to me if I went up in the smoke of a spell gone wrong.
Blaise left. Gunter is gone. Zora’s safety is the only thing tying me to this side of the sun anyway.
“You act as if I was successful. As if any of my attempts to bring you into my family were successful. Like what I’m doing now is akin to slaughtering my own child.”
I scoff. “I would have never expected you to be the type to understand that not all children are tied to their parents through flesh and blood.”
“No,” Abra says, her voice as cold as steel. “They are tied by the heart. And that is the one thing you never offered me access to. The one thing you kept from me all these years. So forgive me if I do not feel as though I’m sacrificing one of my children for the other.”
I watch the runes, and even as I trace their familiar patterns with my gaze, my vision starts to blur as the spell sets in.
It will lock me up, at best. Erase me at worst. It depends on how well the queen conducts the spell. Normally, I would be less than confident in her abilities to perform a ritual that didn’t come directly from that head of hers. It seems like it’s taking her longer with me than it took with Blaise, but this one is different.
Because I know the shadow that lurks within the depths of her irises, the same parasite that watched through Blaise’s eyes the last time I cast this spell.
The parasite has attached itself to a new host. It’s how the queen knows to perform this ritual. How she’ll succeed in handing my body over to her awful son.
“I thought your purpose in obtaining the parasite was to protect the Rip,” I venture. In the end it won’t matter. In the end, I’ll be gone, but apparently that does nothing to assuage my burning curiosity.
The queen traces a pattern on the ground with her foot, like she’s trying to memorize the runes in case the parasite refuses to share them with her in the future. “It is my purpose. But there is no reason I can’t have my son while I fulfill it.”
“Oh, no?” I cock my brow. “Because I was under the impression you had this grand idea you were protecting this realm from the Others that lurk in the Nether. Yet you seek to release a different sort of monster upon the humans. What did you offer the parasite in exchange for unleashing Farin?”
The queen purses her thin lips, but she doesn’t answer my question. “He was not always a monster. It was his father’s doing, but the harm can be undone.”
I can almost laugh. “He despises you, you know,” I say, because the rage is all I have left.
Her eyes narrow. “It would matter not if he did, even if it were true.”
I huff, tracing the ground with my foot. When I glance back up at her, she sneers. “Males cannot understand. They are devoid of the natural attachment that mothers feel toward their children. We cannot resent them for it, but we know it in our very being all the same. It’s why you resent our Blaise for leaving you. It’s why you can’t fathom her choice to find her child over the choice to stay with you. It took her less than a moment to choose between you and the ability to obtain the location of her child.”
My heart stops, and the rage in the queen’s face falters as she realizes what she’s revealed. Her mouth moves as if to grope for the words, to take them back, but she cannot take the words from my ears, from my heart.
It’s the Fates’ last gift to me before I am erased.
Blaise left for her child.
I know it was my plan for her to leave, that because I love her, I wanted her to leave me behind.
But still.
A faint smile curves my lips, and I’m too flooded by warmth, by my love and respect and adoration for the woman I love, to even revel in the fact that my joy irritates the queen.
“Thank you,” I tell her, and I mean it.
She swallows, and I know her well enough by now that this would be easier for her if she despised me utterly. That my genuine smile tugs at her heart.
The queen’s heart might be made of ice, but that’s the thing about ice.
It has a tendency of wanting to melt.
When she speaks, her voice is hoarse. “He is my son,” she explains.
I ignore her and instead settle into an image, the place I want my mind to occupy before I’m wiped away by a flurry of magic and evil.
So I close my eyes and think of Blaise, I think of the joy in her heart when she finally stumbles across Theo or Rose.
I think of her combing Rose’s hair into a braid for Rose’s wedding.
