Wicked Like a Wildfire (Hibiscus Daughter #1)(4)
Especially when hers still gleamed so brightly while mine guttered by the day.
“I thought you had a violin lesson with Natalija this afternoon.”
“I can cancel that, if you want. I already saw her earlier this week.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said curtly, stepping back into my flip-flops. “I only have a few pieces left from the last batch, anyway. Not enough to show.”
She sighed behind me. “Riss—”
“I’ll see you later.”
I could feel her eyes heavy on my back as I left.
TWO
OUTSIDE, THE MORNING WAS FRAGRANT WITH THE SPICE of the oleander drifting from the back garden. Our bicycles leaned together against the chain-link fence. Above them, a warm rainbow of bougainvillea clung to the links, fading like twilight from fuchsia to orange, yellow, and peach before nestling into the green of stems and leaves.
I paused for a moment as the flowers burst into their usual spectacle. Each separate blossom multiplied, over and over, until the tangle burgeoned into sparkling symmetry, a fractal sphere like a honeycomb. I saw these flowers every morning, fiercely grateful that their dazzle never dimmed. That was my gift, my variant of the gleam. I didn’t just see flowers; I saw them to the nth degree. Each bloomed into a little galaxy that I could cup inside my palm, the sticky stars of its pollen caught between my fingers. Petal nested within petal, each level of the pattern cradling tiny versions of itself, stamen and pistil and vein and leaf swirling in concentric patterns like a nautilus shell.
It hadn’t always been just flowers. When I was younger, the whole world had bloomed for me. Sunlight through summer leaves had spiraled into a blaze of gold and green, an infinite pillar of fireflies swarming into the sky. Pebbles and stones beneath my bare toes would whirlpool into cream and slate and gray. Even the crosshatch of tanned skin on the back of my own hand would fractal for me, layering like dragon scales.
Back when Mama still let us practice the gleam together—eating the moon, she always called it, like something out of a fairy tale, like the three of us were strong enough to swallow the sky—I’d even been able to share what I saw with both of them. Even the memory of that happiness was painfully fierce, a bubble of vast joy that strained my lungs. In the summer dark of the garden, the sigh of leaves and crickets stirring the silence around us, Mama would let me bloom balls of tinsel or twine, handfuls of beach glass and jars filled with seashells, bowls clicking with tigereye marbles. When I made each explode into fractal fireworks between us, Mama would slip one of the moon-shaped truffles she made for those nights into my mouth—dark chocolate, sea salt, and a sweet curl of jasmine, the taste of the summer night dissolving on my tongue. Then Lina’s song would settle over us, her triad of voices clear and lilting as a flute, the precise pitch of wonder.
We had been so beautiful together, reflecting one another like a family of mirrors.
The word for “witch,” ve?tica, meant “deft one,” and that was what we’d been: deft in beauty, versed in its tastes and sounds and textures as it wove like a ribbon through our fingers. It was an heirloom we carried in our blood, a legacy of magic passed down from womb to womb. All the women in our family had it.
Some had even died for it.
Lina and I had been seven when Mrs. Petrovi? next door saw one of my fractals bloom. Maybe our light laughter had woken her, quiet as we always tried to be, or maybe she’d caught a thread of Lina’s song in her sleep and it had drawn her to the window. The next morning, Mama had trotted us next door and talked her down easily, with a basket of warm trifles from the café and her own cool and perfect poise. Lina and I had been playing with firecrackers, she lied smoothly, because we were young and silly and overly bold, too used to running free during the long hours she was gone. Yes, the colors were very unusual; she thought maybe that kind was called a snapdragon, wasn’t that charming? No, of course, sweet names were no excuse for such a fire hazard, and her without a man to tame that unruly garden in the back. We should still have known better, and now we knew never to do it again.
It wasn’t until she brought us back home that her hands began to shake. She had us kneel with her on her massive sleigh bed, its swooping wooden headboard polished to a honey gleam; ?i?a Jovan had made it for her from reclaimed wood. She’d let us sleep in it with her on the nights we ate the moon together, and it had always felt to me like the safest place in our little house.
But now, the devastation that swept over her face when she turned to us made my stomach drop, Lina’s clammy fingers curling into mine like a reflex.
“That was the last time,” Mama said, running her tongue over her teeth. The movement pursed her lush mouth and bared the strong, Slavic bones of her face: a squared jaw and cheekbones that cleaved air, a bold but dainty falcon’s nose. The large, thick-lashed gray eyes she shared with me and Malina sparkled oddly, and I suddenly realized what it was—she was trying not to cry. “No more eating the moon for us, not ever. I should have never—I’ve let you both practice for too long. A little longer, and I won’t be able to hold on to you. There’ll be no tamping you down.”
“But why?” I demanded. “Who cares if she saw me? She looks like a shrunken head.”
Malina smothered a snicker next to me. “Smells like one, too,” she whispered.