Wicked Like a Wildfire (Hibiscus Daughter #1)(5)

“Quiet,” Mama snapped. An electric eel of fear raced down my spine, leaving a hot flush in its wake. Lina dropped my hand in shock. Mama never spoke to us so sharply. Even when she was at her wits’ end, her low, throaty voice only dipped lower, softening like a velvet warning.

Her gaze flicking between us, she knelt so we were face-level with her, gray eyes meeting gray. “You know we have no family,” she said. “I’ve told you that much. The three of us, all alone in the world.”

“And ?i?a Jovan,” Malina added. Only we got to call him “?i?a,” Old Man Jovan. From us, it was both affectionate and respectful, the next best thing to calling him our grandfather. “That’s why you named the café after him. Because he’s like our deda.”

“Yes, as good as a grandfather—maybe even better—though he isn’t blood. But before I had you, I had a twin sister of my own, and a mother, too. They would have been your blood, your aunt and your baba. If they had lived.”

Lina’s breathing went shallow beside me. I could see Mama’s turmoil, but my sister could feel and hear its buzz. That’s what our mother sounded like, Lina told me later. Like she’d swallowed a beehive, a high-pitched panic of wings and stingers.

“What happened to them?” Lina asked, and from the pained way she said it I knew she felt it already, and that it was terrible.

Mama was still young enough then that we could sometimes read her face, and I could see the splitting inside her, the battle between tell and don’t.

“Ana and I were eighteen,” she said, her voice colorless and thin like onionskin. “Ana fell in love that year, even though your grandmother forbade it. Love makes us even brighter than we are, until the gleam grows into a roman candle, impossible to contain. Everyone can see us shine with it, then, and it’s the nature of the human beast to fear what it doesn’t understand.”

I struggled to make the pieces clasp together. “But didn’t our grandmother love our grandfather?”

“She never loved him,” Mama said. Her face had smoothed out flat, until she looked just like she sounded. “That’s why she thought it was safe to accept when he asked her to marry. And why she thought it would be safe to stay with him, once Ana and I were born. We lived in a mountain village many hours from here; Tata raised goats to make cheese, and Mama brewed medicines. And perfumes too, the prettiest you ever smelled, so fine they made you feel things.”

“The way your treats make people think of places?” I asked. That was our mother’s gleam: the sights of the world translated into flavor. “Was that Grandmother’s gleam?”

“It was,” she said. “Ana’s was bigger, and much more wild. When she danced, it was like watching legends come to life, paintings that breathed and pulsed to the heartbeat of her steps. And when she fell in love . . .”

Mama’s eyes grew distant with the memory, soft and diffuse like the fog that sometimes gathered above the slate waters of the bay. “She danced and danced. Love stoked her flame, and she showered the sparks of her gleam all over everything, until they spread to your grandmother and me. That’s what it’s like, when the women in our family eat the moon. We’re bound to one another, braided together. And when we catch fire, we burn as one.”

“And then what, Mama?” Malina said. Her hand had crept back into mine.

Mama’s gaze sharpened back into focus. “Then, we all grew stronger. Your grandmother stopped blending her perfumes, but even still, the house was full of the most wonderful scents; they simply rolled off her, like sea spray from the water. I stopped baking, but your grandfather said he tasted sweet and savory things even when he’d eaten nothing for hours, tastes that made him think of places he had never been. As if ghosts were feeding him morsels. He muttered constantly about vila women and witches, and wore an evil-eye bracelet to fend off curses.”

She worked her jaw back and forth, then drew her full lower lip, softer even than Malina’s, through her strong white teeth. “And one day he walked in on Ana dancing. I was outside in the barn, but I saw him drag both of them out of the house, Ana by the hair, Mama by the arm. Mama had tried to come between them, to lull him with one of her quieting scents, but it only made him more furious. How long had we all been bewitching him, he wanted to know. Were Ana and I even his daughters, or children of demons?”

I barely understood what she meant, but bile welled in my throat all the same.

“Mama saw me cowering in the doorway, and screamed at me to run. And I did—but not until I saw him drag them to the precipice, the cliff’s edge Ana and I had always been forbidden to go near. And he threw them over”—Lina and I both flinched hard—“like they were nothing. I stayed, frozen, until I couldn’t hear them screaming anymore. I’ve never taken you up to the mountains, but they’re terribly tall. It was a very long way down before the sound stopped carrying. Once I finally moved, I ran far and hard until I reached this little city. And here our ?i?a Jovan found me, and took me in.”

Malina pressed against my side, both of us trembling. The questions had blackened and curled up inside me, and all I wanted was for Mama to stop.

She fixed us in her feather-lashed gaze and put a light hand on each of our cheeks. Her fingers were so cold I could feel their chill leach beneath my skin. “Do you understand me? Ana fell in love, and then she was seen. If a father could kill his own child because she gleamed, what do you think a stranger would do to you? That’s why you never let anyone see you. And that’s why we take care to never, ever fall in love.”