Binding the Shadows (Arcadia Bell #3)(75)

Two legs appeared in the dead grass. My gaze followed them. My mother’s long face peered down at me, a smirk curling her lips.

The sky behind her continued to darken, but it wasn’t night. I said, “Why are you here? The moon’s not out, and I’m not doing magick. You can’t see me.”

“The moon is not visible here,” she corrected, her white toga shifting in the breeze. “But it’s night on your plane.”

“But I’m not doing magick.”

“This makes no difference to me. Not anymore. As long as the moon is visible, I can track your Heka here.”

“Where is this?”

“Between the planes.”

“Liar,” I said. “This is a dream.”

She squinted. “Me, a liar? Look at yourself. You are the one with the tail and the forked tongue like the serpent in the garden. The great deceiver, filled with venom.”

Forked tongue. I remembered biting my lip at the racetrack. It still wasn’t fully healed.

My tail slithered down the side of my thigh. Black and white stripes rotated as it grew until it was longer than my legs. My mother watched it carefully, taking a step back to stay out of its reach.

“What am I? What did you put inside me?” I whispered.

“Why, Sélène—don’t you like your serpentine form? It is the real you, after all. And every night you will shed your human skin and become your true self, my little one.”

I shook my head. “I’m not yours.”

“You’ll always be mine. I called forth beings you can’t imagine and trapped their magick to create you inside my womb. I birthed your body.”

“A pact with what? What am I? What did you create?”

Instead of answering me directly, she talked around my question. “After all my hard work, how do you repay me? Cause me nothing but misery.”

She murmured words that sounded like a spell, crouched at my feet, and cruelly clamped my tail to the ground. Pain spiked through it, all the way into my spine. I tried to move away, but I was paralyzed. She’d done something to me with magick.

Terror overtook me. I strained to look at Lon. He was still sleeping.

My mother growled at my feet, still holding my tail to the ground. “You sold your own parents to a demon,” she said, anger darkening her eyes. “Once she took us into the Æthyr, Nivella killed your father. Sliced him into shreds like he was meat.” She leaned over me. “Do you not care? The man who raised you is dead.”

“No, I don’t care,” I said coldly. “I’m glad he’s dead. I wish you were.”

She growled in my face. “It is your fault. Your father’s blood is on your hands. And you may not care, but I do. He was my lover. My soul mate. My reason for living.”

“Why are you still alive, then?”

“I live for you, now, darling. Only you.” She crawled over me and whispered into my ear. “And I want what’s mine. I created you, spent the last twenty-five years of my life waiting for you. And you may think you’ve gotten away, but it’s only a matter of time before I will have you under my control again. And to prove it, I will take from you what you took from me. An eye for an eye . . . a heart for a heart.”

She pushed off the ground and stood, releasing my tail. I felt something cold in my hand and looked down. I was holding a knife. One that looked remarkably like the ceremonial dagger she’d used when she was slicing my breast, trying to sacrifice me to steal my moon powers.

“Your human form betrayed your father. Betrayed me,” she said. “But your true form inside cannot, because it is bound to me by ancient rules. We are connected, you and I. And that connection will only get stronger. It’s just a matter of time.”

Her eyes closed. She raised her hands to the sky. Foreign Æthyric words tumbled out of her mouth. Another spell.

I scrambled to move away, but it wasn’t soon enough. Heka hit me like a punch in the gut. My too-slow limbs felt like they were caught in syrup. Then her spoken chant ended and she spoke to me. “I command you to offer me a sacrifice. In payment for your father’s death, you will now kill who you love.”

I sat up in the dead grass, not by will, but by force. She was controlling me. I was a puppet, and the strings she pulled made me move toward Lon. I called his name, tried to warn him, but he still didn’t wake. Holding the dagger, I raised my arms high and aimed for his chest.

This couldn’t be happening. It was just a dream.

Wake up, wake up, wake up! I told myself.

And I did. The field fizzled away. My mother disappeared.

I was in Lon’s dark bedroom. Moonlight spilled across the sheets, illuminating the kitchen knife I held in my hands as I straddled Lon’s sleeping form.

Shock and horror held me frozen for several moments. This wasn’t a dream.

This was real.

Lon grunted when I jumped off him. Then he rolled to his side and fell back into sleep, utterly unaware of what I was doing.

I was in full Moonchild mode. Everything had a silvery tinge. I started to sever the connection, push it away, when I caught a glimpse of myself in the long dressing mirror standing next to the bed.

I gasped. Took a shaky step forward to get a better look.

It was me, naked. Me, but not me. My skin was covered in tiny, iridescent reptilian scales. Mostly black, I thought—it was hard to tell with the silver vision. A reticulated pattern began around my face, neck, and shoulders, where the black was interspersed with white and gray, and—I turned to peer over my shoulder—this eventually became black and white stripes on my back . . . and tail.