Beautiful Chaos(117)

I stopped a few feet away. The heat was so intense I couldn’t get any closer. Lena was standing in front of Sarafine, on the other side of the blazing ring. Her hair was singed from the heat, her face black from the smoke.

The cloud of Vexes was moving away from her and toward Abraham. He was watching, but he wasn’t helping Sarafine.

“Lena! Help me!” Sarafine called, dropping to her knees. She looked so much like Izabel the night she was Claimed, lying at her mother’s feet. “I never wanted to hurt you. I never wanted any of this.”

Lena’s blackened face was filled with rage. “No. You wanted me dead.”

Sarafine’s eyes were watering from the smoke, which almost made it look like she was crying. “My life has never been about what I wanted. My choices were made for me. I tried so hard to fight the Darkness, but I wasn’t strong enough.” She coughed, trying to rub the smoke away. With her face streaked and her eyes swollen and red, the gold in them was hard to see. “You have always been the strong one, even as a baby. That’s how you survived.”

I recognized the confusion in Lena’s eyes. Sarafine was a victim of the curse Lena had feared her whole life—the curse that had spared Lena. Was this who her mother could have been? “What do you mean, how I survived?”

Sarafine coughed, black smoke swirling around her. “There was a terrible storm, and the rain put out the fire. You saved yourself.” She sounded relieved, as if she hadn’t left Lena for dead.

Lena stared at her mother. “And today you were going to finish what you started.”

An ember fell onto Sarafine’s dress, and it caught fire again. She slapped at the charred fabric with her bare hand until it went out. She lifted her eyes to meet Lena’s. “Please.” Her voice was so hoarse, it was hard to hear. She reached out her hand toward Lena. “I wasn’t going to hurt you. I just had to make him believe I was.”

She was talking about Abraham, the one who had lured Lena’s mother into the Dark, the one who was standing there watching her burn.

Lena was shaking her head, tears streaming down her face. “How can I trust you?” But even as she said it, the flames began to die down in the space between them.

Lena started to reach out her hand.

Their fingertips were inches apart.

I could see the burns on Sarafine’s arm as she reached for Lena. “I’ve always loved you, Lena. You’re my little girl.”

Lena closed her eyes. It was hard to look at Sarafine, with her hair singed and her skin blistering. It had to be even harder if she was your mother. “I wish I could believe you….”

“Lena, look at me.” Sarafine seemed to be breaking. “I’ll love you until the day after forever.”

I remembered the words from the vision. The last thing Sarafine said to Lena’s father before she left him to die. “I’ll love you until the day after forever.”

Lena remembered, too.

I saw her face twist in agony as she yanked her hand back. “You don’t love me. You aren’t capable of love.”

The fire surged up where it had died down only a minute before, trapping Sarafine. She was being consumed by the flames she once controlled, her powers as unpredictable as any Caster’s.

“No!” Sarafine screamed.

“I’m sorry, Izabel,” Lena whispered.

Sarafine lunged forward, catching the sleeve of her dress on fire. “You little bitch! I wish you had burned to death like your miserable father! I will find you in the next life—”

But screams reached a crescendo as the flames swept over Sarafine’s body in seconds. It was worse than the bloodcurdling shrieking of the Vexes. It was the sound of pain and death and misery.

Her body fell, and the flames moved over it like a swarm of locusts, leaving nothing but the raging fire. At the same moment, Lena dropped to her knees, staring at the place where her mother’s hand had hung in the air a minute before.

Lena!

I closed the distance between us, dragging her away from the fire. She was coughing, trying to catch her breath.

Abraham came closer, the black cloud of demonic spirits above him. I pulled Lena to me as we watched Greenbrier burn for the second time.

He was standing over us, the tip of his cane practically touching the melted toe of my sneaker. “Well, you know what they say. If you want something done right, do it yourself.”

“You didn’t help her.” I don’t know why I said it. I didn’t care that Sarafine was dead. But why hadn’t he?

Abraham laughed. “Saved me the trouble of killing her myself. She wasn’t worth her weight in salt anymore.”

I wondered if Sarafine had realized how expendable she was. How worthless she was in the eyes of the master she served? “But she was one of you.”

“Dark Casters are nothing like me and my kind, boy. They’re like rats. Plenty more where Sarafine came from.” He looked at Lena, his face darkening to match his empty eyes. “Once your little girlfriend’s dead, getting rid of them will be my next order of business.”

Don’t listen to him, L.

But she wasn’t listening to Abraham. She wasn’t listening to anyone. I knew, because I could hear her stumbling over the same words in her mind, again and again.

I let my mother die.

I let my mother die.