Star Daughter(34)

Like you forced me.

She brushed the scabbed-over cuticle on her thumb. Nope, she would never forget how it felt to be manipulated like that, right into being her constellation’s champion.

Her mother’s smile faded. “You came, and that is what counts.”

Sheetal jiggled her leg harder. “I’m not going to be in that competition,” she blurted. “Whatever it is.”

There went her plan. All the clever things she would do, all the persuasive words she’d say when this moment came, had slipped out the back door of her brain, leaving her numb.

Her mother sighed. “Oh, dikri. If only it were that simple.” Even her sorrow was captivating, a sculptor’s finest expression of tragedy.

Sheetal didn’t belong here. “It is that simple.”

Charumati studied her. “You are so beautiful. Just like your father.”

Sheetal’s hands flickered with pewter fire. On Earth, she was cute enough, even pretty. Here, though, among these people who had no idea what it was like to wake up with a monster zit or to have to cut off an inch of split ends at a time, she felt less than plain.

Unbidden, her imagination called up Dev, the hint of mischief in his eyes when he grinned. He’d thought she was beautiful. She felt sick, remembering the shivery feel of his lips on hers. Remembering how she’d trusted him.

It didn’t matter, though. Only Dad did.

Her mother leaned forward. “I watched you every night,” she said, tears like dewdrops on her long lashes. “I listened to your music and waited for the day you would come to me. I never forgot you.”

There they were, the words Sheetal had ached to hear. But she wasn’t sure she cared.

“It is a fair thing to wonder why I left, as I know you must. Our house struggles: the court hierarchy is unstable, as is our position in it, and your nani and nana needed me by their side.” Affection sweetened Charumati’s bell-like voice. “We have always kept a place for you. Do you know how long your nani and nana have waited to meet their grandchild? How long I have waited to show you my childhood home and everything that will be yours?”

Nani and Nana. The grandparents Sheetal had never met, in the family home she’d never visited.

From the moment she’d seen the letter, this had been a quest, a business transaction, even: make it to Svargalok, find her mother, get the drop of blood, and go home. Now the floodgates in her heart opened wide.

All the holidays she’d missed, all the hugs, all the stories and sleepovers. A whole chunk of her childhood, just ripped away.

It was too much. She began to shake, her exhausted body giving out.

“I’m not going to be in your competition,” she said more slowly, fighting to stay upright on her cushion.

Dad. The name cut through her stupor like a beam from a lighthouse, and she clung to it. Dad needed her, not her grandparents.

Definitely not her mom.

Sheetal took a deep breath to steel herself. “I need your help. That’s why I came here.”

Her mother tucked a lock of Sheetal’s hair behind her ear. When she spoke, her voice was soft. “Whatever help I may give is yours, my daughter.”

Sheetal worked to keep her own voice calm. “It’s Dad. His heart. He’s dying.”

Charumati frowned, delicate eyebrows coming down over a luminescent gaze, and clasped Sheetal’s fiery hands in her cool ones. “So soon? He should have many years yet, by mortal time.”

The inferno was rising now, roaring from inside Sheetal. She was so tired. So very, very tired.

Say it, she told herself. “I burned him.” That’s all you have to do. Three words.

But with her mother watching expectantly, Sheetal couldn’t do it. The shame sat sour on her tongue, and she couldn’t—she wouldn’t—spit it out.

“He needs your blood,” she said instead. Somehow, her mother’s hands still on hers, she doused the flame at her core—and with it, the last of the energy that had sustained her these past two days and through the trip into the heavens. Her vision blurring, she slid down to the marble floor.

An instant later, Charumati knelt at her side. Minal ran over, followed by Charumati’s ladies-in-waiting. “Let us remove her to the guest chambers,” Sheetal heard her mother say. “She must rest.”

“And get her some water,” Minal added. “She’s probably dehydrated.” Other voices murmured agreement, and one asked about the competition.

“That can wait,” Charumati said. “Hand me that glass.”

Sheetal’s eyes had slipped shut, and her lips felt like weights. Still, she took a few sips from the cup her mother held to her mouth before muttering, “You have to help him, Mom.”

Message delivered, she leaned back against her mother’s familiar warmth, inhaling the fragrance of jasmine and night breezes, and passed out.

When Sheetal opened her eyes, she lay in a bed of cloud framed by black crystal posts draped in a cumulus canopy. The richly decorated room around her bore the thinnest of diamond ceilings, through which the sun—Lord Surya—shone down, washing everything with the first dawning rivulets of pink and gold.

She’d been twisting and tossing her way through dreams. Dreams of Dev feeding her cookies and Dad’s physics lectures and the days when Charumati still lived among them that turned into dreams of Sheetal’s flame leaping higher than the house and burning them all alive.