Chapter 23 #2
Harold stares at me like I’ve grown a second head, clearly dumbfounded by my apparent lack of proper fear in the face of whatever ritual they’re planning.
Little does he know that beneath the sarcasm and bravado, I’m absolutely terrified.
Humor and righteous anger are the only weapons I have right now, and I’m going to use them for all they’re worth.
Lenora doesn’t even blink as she steps into my line of sight and locks eyes with me. Her expression is cold, calculated, completely devoid of any emotion that might pass for human warmth or familial affection.
“Shut her up,” she says flatly.
Harold inches closer with obvious reluctance, reaching toward my face with shaking hands. The moment his fingers come within biting range, I snap at them like a rabid animal, my teeth clicking together just short of his skin.
He yelps and jerks back so fast he nearly trips over one of the ground-level lanterns, windmilling his arms to keep his balance. “She tried to bite me!”
I work up a mouthful of saliva mixed with blood from where I bit my own tongue and spit it onto the stone beside my head, glaring up at him with all the venom I can muster. “I was aiming to take the whole finger off, actually. Don’t take it personally.”
I refuse to just lie here passively and let them do whatever they’re planning to me. I’ll fight them every step of the way. The next time Harold gets within range, I’m going straight for his throat.
“Enough.” Lenora steps fully into view then, and the sight of her standing over me with several torn, yellowed pages clutched in her manicured hand makes something hot and violent flare to life behind my ribs.
The rage is so pure, so consuming, that for a moment I can barely see through it.
“You have your mother’s unfortunate talent for dramatics and inappropriate humor in serious situations.
No wonder everyone in town is already so taken with you.
You’re performing the same tricks she used to charm people.
I didn’t anticipate that level of social manipulation from you.
Another miscalculation on my part, it seems.”
My eyes immediately lock onto the pages in her hand like a heat-seeking missile.
They’re aged, creased from being folded and unfolded countless times over the years.
I know with absolute certainty that these are the missing pages we’ve been searching high and low for, the crucial information that was torn from one of the grimoires in the shop.
Of course she has them. Of course she’s been keeping them safe all this time.
Lenora follows my gaze and smiles, a small, ugly expression that transforms her elegant features into something cruel and satisfied.
“Oh, were you looking for these?” she asks mockingly, lifting the pages slightly so they catch the lantern light.
“I had every reason to believe that you and that meddlesome Ezra Lawson would go digging through family records eventually, once you started asking the right questions. I certainly wasn’t about to leave them somewhere they could actually be found.
I tore them out of one of the grimoires myself decades ago, when they were in my mother’s care, and I’ve kept them hidden all these years. ”
I stare at her with such concentrated hatred that if looks could kill, she would be nothing but a smoking puddle of slime at my feet.
Every ugly possibility I’d considered, every worst-case scenario that had kept me awake at night, is standing right in front of me breathing and smiling and holding the proof of her crimes in her hands.
“It really was you all along,” I say, and my voice comes out lower now, stripped clean of sarcasm and bravado, containing nothing but the awful truth. “My own blood. My own family.”
Lenora tilts her head to one side like she’s considering an interesting academic question. “Of course it was me. Who else could it have been?”
There it is, the metaphorical gauntlet thrown down at my feet with casual indifference. Gone is the political smile and carefully chosen public words. There’s no hesitation in those simple words, no attempt at denial or deflection. Just the truth laid bare.
“My mother was absolutely elated when you were born,” she continues, beginning to pace slowly around the edge of the stone altar like we’re having a perfectly normal family conversation and not whatever fresh hell this is supposed to be.
“So was my sister. They looked at you like the future of our entire bloodline had arrived wrapped in a pink blanket, like all their prayers had finally been answered. All that hope, all that breathless certainty about what you would become. They just knew that you would inherit everything that should have been mine by right of birth and magical strength.”
She laughs once, though there’s no humor in it, just bitterness and old resentment that’s had decades to ferment into something poisonous.
“You see, the magic strength needs to hold this town together skipped over both me and your mother when we were born,” she explains, still pacing.
“Two daughters, two disappointments, two failures who couldn’t access all the power that ran in our bloodline.
Then you came along and suddenly the entire world was ready to rearrange itself around a squalling infant who hadn’t even learned to hold her own head up yet. ”
My jaw tightens so hard it aches, every muscle in my face clenches with the effort of keeping my mouth shut.
I want nothing more than to tell my dear aunt to go fuck herself with a rusty garden tool, but I’ve never been one to back down from a fight, and I need to hear this confession in its entirety.
“So, you decided to hurt a defenseless child,” I say flatly, letting all my disgust and disbelief color the words.
Lenora scoffs dismissively. “I didn’t hurt you, Keisha. I simply took something you would never have cause to miss. You were barely three months old, an infant with no awareness of what was being done to you or why.”
I want to scream, to rage, to somehow make her understand the magnitude of what she stole from me. Instead, I pull harder against the leather restraints, feeling them cut deeper into my wrists while the cold stone beneath my back seems to leach all the warmth from my body.
“I found the suppression spell buried deep in our ancestors’ collected works,” she continues, lifting the torn pages again with something approaching reverence.
“It was crude, incomplete, apparently even our predecessors understood that this type of magic would be far too dangerous in the wrong hands. By all rights, it shouldn’t have worked as thoroughly as it did.
But when my mother tested you afterward, desperately hoping to find some trace of the power everyone expected you to manifest, there was nothing.
Not a flicker, not a spark. Nothing that mattered, anyway. ”
I’m breathing so hard now that the leather restraints feel like they’re cutting off circulation to my entire body. The clearing suddenly feels too small, too close, pressing in around me. The claustrophobic sensation mixes with pure rage until I can barely think straight.
Nothing that mattered. The words echo in my head like a death knell, carrying with them the weight of every moment growing up when I was told to accept my limitations, to make peace with my deficiency, to learn how to live beside something I was born too close to ever truly escape from.
I think of my parents, who loved me, but never quite knew how to look at me without seeing what was missing.
The careful language, the pity in their eyes, and the constant, quiet adjustments made on my behalf.
All those years of feeling broken, incomplete, fundamentally wrong, and it all comes back to the woman standing over me right now.
“You let me live my entire life believing something was fundamentally wrong with me,” I say, and I can hear the heartbreak threading through the anger in my voice.
Lenora’s expression doesn’t change by so much as a flicker. “I let you live, period. Which is more consideration than you deserved, frankly.”
That single sentence nearly blacks out my vision with its casual cruelty. The implication that she considered killing me, that letting me exist in a magically neutered state was somehow an act of mercy on her part. It’s so beyond comprehension that for a moment I can’t even form words to respond.
Harold shifts uncomfortably somewhere behind her, clearly growing more agitated by the minute. For once in his miserable life, I’m actually grateful for his inability to keep his mouth shut.
“This has gone far enough, Lenora,” he says, his voice high and strained with barely contained panic. “The town already believes there’s magical instability affecting the wards. If something goes wrong out here tonight, if people come looking—”
“Something already went catastrophically wrong thirty-five years ago,” she cuts him off with vicious precision. “Tonight, I’m simply fixing my previous mistake. Permanently.”
Then, without any further warning or ceremony, she steps forward and presses her palm firmly against my forehead.
Pain detonates through my skull like a lightning strike, sharp and invasive and completely overwhelming.
I can feel her power, cold, alien, wrong, reaching inside my mind and body like skeletal fingers, searching through my very essence, tugging at the fundamental building blocks of who and what I am.
My entire body arches off the stone altar as far as the restraints will allow, every muscle straining against the bonds.
I grit my teeth so hard my jaw trembles with the effort of not screaming. “Stop,” I manage to bite out through the agony, but Lenora only presses down harder and begins to chant in a language I don’t recognize.