Chapter 18
EIGHTEEN
The third time Joan woke up, it was with much more clarity.
For one, she could move her right hand, which had two sets of splints.
Molly was still there, in a new outfit, though one that was still worn and comfortable.
Joan was pretty sure she’d seen Nate in that hoodie before, and there was Nate, in another armchair across the room, with a book of sudoku in his hands.
Joan shifted her head, and Nate’s gaze snapped to her. She remembered his family owned a string of hospitals, stacking the ranks with hidden witches who could use healing magic. Perhaps they were in one of his own buildings.
He dropped his pen on the table. Sudoku done in pen, respect.
“You’re awake!” Nate said.
Joan wasn’t entirely convinced of that fact, but in perhaps the most herculean task ever devised, she unstuck her mouth and spoke. “Don’t look so surprised.”
She sounded like a chain-smoker had had a baby with a revving motorcycle.
Nate scrambled out of his chair. “I have to wake her, she’ll kill me if I don’t,” he said apologetically, reaching over to gently shake Molly’s shoulder. “She’s been here the whole week.”
A week?
That was too long… Wouldn’t Joan have known if a week had passed? All time before her sleep was nothing but blackness.
Molly lurched awake, hand flying up to rest on Nate’s. “Is she dead?” she gasped.
Nate laughed, which seemed a little cruel, because Molly sounded genuine. “See for yourself.”
Molly looked confusedly at Joan, dashed a hand across her face, and when Joan didn’t disappear, she burst into tears.
“You’re not dead!” she wailed, reaching out to clutch Joan’s forearm. “Joan, you’re not dead!”
Her grip hurt, but Joan thought she’d let Molly have this one; she clearly needed it. “I feel dead,” she said.
Nate went looking for a tissue box as Molly continued to open-mouth cry, snot coming out of her nose. Joan, in her saintly kindness, didn’t point out how disgusting it was.
“I’m going to kill you,” Molly sobbed. “Now that you’re alive, I’m going to kill you. The market, Joan? Do you have any idea how dangerous that was?”
The market.
Her memory swung back around like a sledgehammer, careening into her head.
The market. CZ running off. Mik, the magic, Grace.
Their injuries had been bad, real bad, and magic couldn’t cure all ills—it couldn’t do anything the body couldn’t naturally do, like grow new limbs, and the more severe the wound, the more magic was needed to heal it.
Someone would have needed to get help very quickly for them both to survive.
Very quickly and from a highly skilled team of witches who could blend their magic with human medicine.
Joan attempted to sit up and felt every fiber of her being protest the movement. Molly let out a little scream, reaching to push Joan back, and Nate yelped, running back over with the tissue box in hand, but Joan ignored them both.
“Grace Collins,” Joan said, gripping Molly’s wrist with her good hand. “Molly, is Grace Collins okay?”
“LIE BACK DOWN.”
“GRACE COLLINS, MOLLY.”
“Astoria got both of you out!” Molly screamed right back.
“Grace is three rooms down, recovering. Mom and Dad wanted to keep a close eye on her. No one knows exactly what you two did in there, but we couldn’t use healing spells on you for days; magic was corrosive to you both.
You looked like humans with exposure poisoning. It was close, Joan.”
Joan gaped at her sister. “Astoria Wardwell?”
“This reminds me, Nate, can you text our parents and let them know Joan is awake?”
“Sure thing,” Nate said, unlocking Molly’s phone and tapping out a message.
“Mol, focus. What happened with Astoria?” Joan asked.
Molly gave Joan a stern glare. A you’re not making demands here glower, but she continued.
“Astoria said she found you both in the market passed out. Grace was covered in blood, you barely had a pulse, and she brought both of you directly to the Greenwoods. Covertly,” Molly added, like Joan gave a single fuck whether it was covert or not.
She couldn’t ask about Mik—gods, had Mik made it out?
“CZ and the market, what happened?”
“Can you lie back down and focus on not dying,” Molly snapped. “I’m trying to be reasonable, but I’m like one second away from knocking you back out myself, you reckless fucking bitch.”
“Don’t call me a bitch, I’m literally on my deathbed.”
“DON’T SAY THAT.”
“STOP YELLING AT ME!”
“The LaMortes are fine,” Nate said, putting a placating hand on Molly’s arm.
“For the witches, the Night Market search was a resounding failure. They lost the ability to cast and a huge fire started up before they could find anything. It’s a miracle everyone managed to evacuate in time, but Owl’s Head Park is looking a bit scorched.
Not too bad—Wardwell is apparently a fire elemental and kept it mostly contained. ”
“On top of carrying out two unconscious bodies?” Joan said. Astoria was so insufferably perfect. “Did Wren help?”
Molly and Nate exchanged glances.
“There was… an argument at dinner that day,” Molly said. “Wren vehemently opposed the plan and refused to partake. Astoria went alone.”
“It was honestly pretty impressive, Wren was shouting at your father,” Nate said. “Reminded me of you, Joan. I’m a little sorry you missed it.”
Wren and Astoria had seemed inseparable, despite their apparently opposing moral viewpoints. For all Wren had said, she was still in New York, and she was still Astoria Wardwell’s best friend. But she’d left Astoria behind rather than invade the market.
And for all Astoria had said about seeing the logic in both sides, she had still invaded the market.
There was a flutter at the door before it flew open to reveal their mother, who rushed in with a clatter. “Oh, baby, you’re alright!”
She gathered Joan in her arms, and Joan let her, because it had been an embarrassingly long time since her mother had cradled her. She smelled like her signature perfume, and her silk shirt was soft against Joan’s cheek.
“I’m fine, Mom,” Joan said around the thickness in her throat, patting her mother awkwardly on the side.
Selene withdrew. “You are certainly not fine! What did the Moon Creatures do to you? Grace Collins still hasn’t woken up.”
“Nothing!” Joan said, horror gripping her. “Moon Creatures didn’t do a single thing to us. Tell me you haven’t spent the last week under that assumption.”
“Astoria confirmed it wasn’t them, Mom,” Molly said pointedly.
Selene cupped Joan’s face in her hands. “Then what on earth happened?”
Joan and Grace hadn’t thought so far as to give a backstory; they hadn’t thought of the aftermath at all. But the only other party who knew what had happened in that tent besides Grace was Mik.
Joan went with the truth, or some version of it. “I was in the market with Grace. She lives in the area and was showing me around. When it was attacked—”
“Don’t use such charged language,” Selene admonished.
Joan’s heart rate monitor beeped faster. “When the market was attacked, viciously and without due cause—”
“Joan.”
“Mom, if you’re pissed off about me saying that, you’re really not going to like what I say next,” Joan said hotly, shaking off the haze of her coma with every jolt of rage that flashed through her veins.
“And I’m not saying it to be contrary, I’m saying it so you stop falsely accusing Moon Creatures.
I am the one who nullified the witches’ casting magic. It was me.”
Every lie Joan had ever told primed her for this next bit. “Grace tried to stop me and nearly died in the process. I knew that without casting ability, the witches would have to retreat, and the Moon Creatures would have more time to get somewhere safe.”
Selene’s hands dropped off Joan’s cheeks, leaving them cold. “You don’t know what you’re saying. You can’t even cast.”
“I interrupted your big plan,” Joan said. “It was me. I channeled without casting, enough that the other witches didn’t have enough magic left to work with.”
Selene’s eyes were a set of lasers, boring through her youngest child.
Joan had been incinerated by this look many times before, but she wasn’t about to back off.
She’d compromised so many principles in her life, being a Greenwood.
Bent her head, borne her way through things, but the stakes had never been this high.
Joan didn’t cower, and she didn’t apologize. She straightened her spine and stared her mother down.
“Molly, Nate,” Selene said, tone icy. “Give us a moment.”
“Mom, you should really—” Molly began.
“Don’t tell me what I should or shouldn’t do, Molly Greenwood,” Selene said. “Go get your sister some ice chips.”
Joan broke eye contact with her mother to nod at her sister, but Molly hesitated another second. Her mouth shaped a word: Uncle?
But Joan didn’t need Molly for this; she’d stand on her own feet. Or sit in her own hospital bed. She didn’t regret what she’d done. The thought gave her a flush of strength.
She didn’t regret what she’d done at all.
“Can you check on Grace for me?”
Molly withdrew. She turned once, like she had more to say, but Nate was there with a hand on her back, and whatever she saw on Joan’s face didn’t prompt her to say more.
Left alone with her mother, Joan had two seconds of silence before Selene exploded.
“Do you have any idea what you’ve done?” Selene snarled, pacing back and forth, hard enough that Joan feared her stilettos would pierce through the floor.
“I had to right our family’s wrong,” Joan said.
Selene scoffed. “Oh, so noble. Did you prepare that? Do you honestly think that’s going to work on your aunt? Your father?”
Joan’s willpower was enormous—somehow, she managed not to flinch at every word out of her mother’s mouth. “I’m not trying to game Aunt Val or Dad. As hard as it is to believe, my actions don’t revolve around either of them.”
“Watch your tone. I don’t care how old you are, you’ll talk to me with respect and about your family with more care,” Selene said, jabbing a finger in Joan’s direction.
“I know this family can be suffocating. I know the rules are endless and the eyes are always watching. But when you act out, it isn’t just you who bears the consequences. It’s all of us.”
“Mom,” Joan said, a bubble of some upset feeling rising in her chest. “Listen to me, please. You’re not hearing what I’m saying.”
“No, Joan, listen to me.” Selene came to a stop at the foot of the bed.
She hadn’t ever been the one to yell at them as children; they had Merlin for that.
But she’d always been stricter, because she paid closer attention.
Joan had known exactly what Selene’s lines were, what things her mother would hate: doing poorly in school, antagonizing Merlin, embarrassing her in public—all of it was a hard no.
When she got pissed, she was Lawyer Mom, and she could out-debate any opponent on any circuit.
“You come back to town after I barely see you for seven years—seven, my own daughter—and promptly skip off,” Selene said.
“No thought to check in with your parents, no sense of responsibility. I call and text, but you give me one-word answers. You were supposed to be at dinner a week ago; if you’d been there, you wouldn’t have been in the middle of that market. ”
“Mom—”
“You wouldn’t have nearly died, Joan,” Selene thundered. She slapped a hand to her heart. “My daughter, my Joan. You nearly died because you insist on being so hardheaded.”
Her eyes shone suspiciously, and that was enough to make Joan feel worse than she ever had. She’d made her own mother cry. What sort of monster did that?
“I’m fine, Mom, I’m good,” Joan said.
“But you almost weren’t, and now you’re saying that the raid’s failure was your fault.
” Selene leaned forward over the bed to grip Joan’s ankles.
“Joan, you don’t know what it’s like not to be a Greenwood, but I do.
I was a Lacey before I met your father, and the life I lived then is worlds apart from the life I live now.
Everyone’s eyes are on us. Everyone’s. People will use any excuse to try to unseat Valeria’s rule.
Our family’s rule. You feed them ammo like it’s nothing.
You have no sense of consequence. You have no shame. ”
Joan looked at her splintered hand, the IVs trailing from it. She was no hero, but she did understand consequence. She’d always done that weighing: What could she do that wouldn’t piss off her parents? How could she conduct herself in a way that made her as unnoticeable as possible?
“Is that what you want from me, Mom? Is shame your greatest wish for your child?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You want me to feel ashamed—you just said that. Should I be ashamed that I didn’t go into law or finance like you, Dad, and Molly?
Should I be ashamed that I can’t cast? Should I be ashamed that I disagree with your opinions?
I told you I channeled enough magic to nullify the entirety of Owl’s Head Park, and your first thought is I should be ashamed.
Which is it, do you want me to have magical prowess or not? ”
The pressure on Joan’s ankles lifted. “You’re twisting my words.”
Joan clenched her left fist in her blankets. “I don’t think I am.”
In the ensuing silence, Selene lifted a manicured hand and wiped a tear out of the corner of her eye before it could spill.
“If you won’t listen to me,” Selene said finally, “we’ll see how your father fares.”
“Great, because you know how we always see eye to eye.”
“I can’t deal with your attitude right now,” Selene snapped. “We can talk when you’re feeling more reasonable and I’m not feeling like I might say something I’ll regret.”
And like she wasn’t in Joan’s hospital room, like Joan hadn’t just woken from a nearly weeklong coma, Selene left the room and her youngest child behind.
The quiet was punctuated only by the beep of Joan’s monitor and her uneven breath. She leaned back on her pillows. She squeezed her eyes shut, and her own tears slipped out.
You did what you had to do, she sternly told herself.
You do not regret it.
You’d do it again.
They left her alone in that hospital room. At no point before she eventually fell asleep again did another person enter through that door.