Chapter 33 #3
Usually, Yasmine had some sort of warning before it happened.
She would see ripples at the edges of her vision; she’d feel her stomach twist. Her sometimes merciful mind would give her the equivalent of a check engine light on a car.
But there was nothing to alert her then.
There was just shock, then disbelief, then sadness, and then the all-encompassing void.
***
Sylvia didn’t know Yasmine could fly.
In fact, she was almost certain that before this moment in time, where she was slowly levitating off the floor, that she could not fly.
While Yasmine kept Sylvia in the dark about many things, her powers had not been one of them.
She was remarkably open about them, and soon after they’d become friends, she’d shared with Sylvia everything she knew about them—I make people visit their demons; I drive everyone I know insane; sometimes, when I get scared, my glassware shatters.
When they were very young, Sylvia thought this was a ploy, some kind of scheme to gain Sylvia’s trust, to get her to open up about the intricacies of Suggestion.
She couldn’t imagine another reason for such a private, calculating woman to divulge such important information about herself to such a dangerous acquaintance.
Yasmine knew better than anyone else how it could be used against her later. But she’d trusted Sylvia with it.
At first Sylvia had been mildly flattered, but then she’d realized, about a hundred years into their friendship, that it hadn’t been a show of trust at all.
It had been desperation.
Yasmine didn’t grow up around vampires. Yasmine didn’t inherit her powers from anyone.
The vampire clan that bit her died of starvation in the desert only a few years later, and very little was known about them except that they were unusually skinny and tall, that they looked more like skeletons than men.
Yasmine had been bestowed with an inheritance she didn’t want, that she didn’t understand, at the hands of her family’s killers—the only thing she could control was her understanding of it.
Sylvia always suspected that’s what got her into science.
A feeling of helplessness.
It was hard to imagine her as helpless now: her body levitating several feet off the ground, hands spread wide, black wisps of smoke collecting around them like serpents.
Everything in the room began to suction towards her, as if pulled by a gravitational force.
The hanging wires, the books on the table, the bags on the floor, they all began to whirl.
The walls shook violently; the building whined. Sylvia pressed Rafael to her chest. Her awe was broken by the very real fact that she knew quite certainly that she could not fly.
“Yasmine!” she shouted. “You’re going to take this tower down!”
But Yasmine was unresponsive. Her eyes had gone completely dark—not red, but two pools of black ink. She was breathing slowly through her mouth, and on every inhalation, the whipping winds got stronger.
But Ileana didn’t seem deterred. In fact, the gruesome witch was smiling, laughing. Even as her daughters were bracing themselves with their wings so they didn’t fly away.
“Oh, Yasmine Sokolov, what a gorgeous opportunity you’ve presented us to test our family’s new power. This could not be more perfect. Thank you!”
She snapped her fingers, and through the flying shards of glass, Sylvia saw Bella shoot up from her chair.
A crater formed in Sylvia’s stomach as she saw the girl walk unsteadily towards the center of the room, so she was standing in front of Ileana like a shield, and glancing up at Yasmine like a helpless child facing the center of a hurricane.
“Oh, you are one sick fuck, Ileana,” Sylvia laughed shrilly, her insides boiling with a rare sense of injustice. “I was going to wait on my wife to deal with you, seeing as I’m babysitting, but you know what—I haven’t snapped a neck in a while. Yours looks nice.”
She stepped forward, eyes flaring red.
“Girls, get her!”
Sabina and Teodora looked at a loss, but then Ileana screamed at them louder, and the blossoming self-awareness was squashed under a thick boot. They flew at her in a fury.
And Sylvia rolled her eyes.
“You, sit down,” she said, shooting a Suggestion straight into Teodora’s amygdala. The girl fell over in an instant. “And you,”—she shouted at Sabina—“Go slap your mother.”
Sabina must have been wanting to do that for a while, because it barely took a flash of Sylvia’s eyes for her to turn around.
Ileana’s smile finally dropped, and Sylvia relished in it.
“Bella! Kill her!” Ileana barked, turning Bella’s attention on Sylvia then.
Bella nodded once, and charged. But the winds only increased their speed, and she lost her footing quickly, struggling to stay upright.
“Use your wings, you foolish girl!” Ileana shouted. “Drain her, now!”
Suddenly, Bella stopped in her tracks, just standing there, bracing herself against a chair. “I don’t have wings anymore, Mother.”
Ileana’s eyes went wide.
“What are you talking about?”
“I apologize for inconveniencing you,” Bella said, with a thoughtful frown. “But I cured myself, before I signed the contract. I don’t have powers anymore. I can’t… drain her.”
“You…” Ileana stuttered. “Did what?”
That deliciously devastated expression only lasted on her face for a split-second—Sylvia wished it was longer, she really did—before Ileana was being smashed through a window.
It happened so quickly, it was almost impossible to perceive with the naked eye.
But Sylvia swore that in the span of a split second, about a thousand flying particles—dust mites, shreds of paper and plastic, paint stripped from the walls, crumbs from food left behind by the workers, shards of glass, so many tiny, unpowerful things—stalled midair, like they were frozen in time, then came together all at once, shooting forward.
And crashed into Ileana like a battering ram.
Sylvia considered herself an intelligent woman, someone with a quick wit, but even she didn’t truly grasp how Yasmine had done it for the first few seconds.
All she could do was stare at the gaping maw left in the side of the building, at Yasmine as she flew out into the raw air, catching Ileana by the collar and holding her over the 13th story drop.
Ileana choked, grappling at Yasmine’s hand at her throat.
“Don’t think you’re fooling me, girl,” she spat. “I know your domain is fear. This is probably some big illusion—that’s why Bella’s powers aren’t activating. That’s not even my daughter in there. That’s one of your—your little fear demons, isn’t it?”
Yasmine looked down at her unblinkingly.
“No,” she said, the air vibrating around her. “All of this is real.”
Ileana’s hands went momentarily limp, but then she shook her head.
“So be it,” she growled, smiling cruelly. “She’s still my slave. You will never get her back. That contract has no expiration date.”
Yasmine’s breathing came faster. Above her, Sylvia noticed a shape start to form.
All those particles she’d seen before were congealing again, but new parts were accumulating now, joining the undulating form—metal being pulled off nearby fire exits, entire bricks being shot out of buildings, all pulling towards Yasmine like she was the sun.
“You’re so pathetic,” Ileana laughed. “You think this scares me? Being dangled over the concrete? Have you forgotten I have wings?”
Her wings shot out of her sides, flapping wildly. Yasmine didn’t even twitch.
The shape above Yasmine’s head, the accumulation of debris, like a work of stained-glass art, had finally compacted into its final form.
In that moment, as Sylvia blinked at the giant stake it had created, it clicked for her.
“You know, if we’re exchanging thank you’s, I might as well go next,” Yasmine said, the stake lifting.
“I’ve been so afraid of my powers for so long, living in fear of what they might do to people on accident, I never really got the opportunity to test what they could do to people on purpose.
It turns out, I don’t just give people nightmares. ”
Yasmine dragged her free hand up, and the stake floated with it. Ileana noticed it for the first time as the shadow of it dragged over her face, like an eclipse over the sun.
“Fears, emotions—I don’t just amplify them, I give them mass,” she said, glancing up at her slowly rotating stake. “God, I’m a physicist, and I didn’t put that together until just now. How embarrassing. Well, late is better than never. Wouldn’t you agree?”
The stake lifted, and Ileana squirmed, screamed, tried to break away—but Sylvia could see a pressure in the air around her keeping her pinned. An invisible force.
“Turns out, there aren’t four fundamental forces of nature. There’s five. Me,” Yasmine whispered. “Consider your contract voided.”
Sylvia covered Rafael’s eyes, anticipating the stake surging down.
She heard Ileana’s daughters scream, a woosh, felt a powerful rush of air, and then a reverberation so loud and so vicious it buckled her knees.
She looked down, expecting to find an Ileana-sized splotch on the cement.
But she was still there—in the air, floating, unstabbed.
And in front of Yasmine was the contract, pierced through the center, ripped to shreds.
Wait… she…
It should have been indestructible.
Several seconds of stunned silence passed before Sylvia felt a hand on her shoulder. It was as warm as a wildfire. Sylvia looked behind her, and saw—
Bella laughed, free as a bird. “God, that’s my girl.”