RISING (#2, of Crows and Thorns)

Chapter 129

Thorny pain flared from the cut. The skin immediately reddened with the barest beading of blood at its frayed edges.

I felt it, that strange thing inside me that had begun to show itself slowly over the year. Dark magic bristled and rose up and slithered along my bones to gather at the wound. I swore the sensation was like a puppy eagerly licking fingertips as it soothed away the stinging pain.

My mother and I watched the welt fade away and the skin knit back together.

"Unnatural healing," my aunt had told me when she'd seen it firsthand.

My mother tapped the hairbrush across her palm—tap, tap, tap.

Internally I cringed. I could feel her interest crawling all over me. The way she stared, gone to that other place inside her head where I couldn't follow, sent a flurry of ice creeping up my toes, twining up around my legs to fill my chest with glacial fear and tingle the tips of my fingers with chilling unease.

"Come with me. If you're hungry let's get something inside that belly of yours." The hairbrush clattered on the top of the vanity when she tossed it down.

We left the bathroom and slipped into dressing gowns. I looped a bony arm around hers after we left our bedroom and silently padded down the hallways, sinister in the quiet hours of the early morning with menacing shadows slinking along the walls and floor, almost as if they followed, curious.

The cooking smells lingering in the kitchen air were pure torture because I was ravenous. I licked my lips with hunger. The fridge, with its low electrical hum, was a white noise in the background. I thought my mother would make a sandwich and I moved toward the fridge thinking I could help.

My mother, however, had other ideas.

She shifted to the kitchen counter where a dishrack was stacked with crockery and cutlery and cooking utensils that someone had washed earlier and left to air dry.

"Where have you been?" I dared to ask even though I knew the answer.

"In the forest," she replied, leaning over the front of the big bulky stove and turning on an element. One of the front smaller ones, not the far back one which was a wide metal plate that we used to fry in bulk quantities. "Talking with a friend."

I wondered whom from the Houses she'd met up with to speak to. What were they up to every night in the forest as the constellations shifted languidly over the horizon?

She'd turned the element up to the highest number. The coiled metal turned from dark charcoal to burnt orange, and waves of heat stroked outward in banks of warmth to lick my chilled body where I stood by her side. It was mesmerizing watching the coils of metal growing hotter and hotter, brightening to red-hot.

My mouth watered as I wondered what she was going to cook. Maybe she was going to boil a pot of water and we'd have eggs in shells and soldier toast. Maybe she'd make an omelet with onions and ham and gooey melted cheese.

I glanced up with a grin on my face.

My mother smiled down at me.

My heart stuttered in shock to see her smile. Sorrow had ravaged her beauty for so long that I couldn't remember the last time she'd smiled. She hadn't stopped grieving the loss of my father, a father I'd never known. Though he was dead and I was living, he always seemed to come first in her thoughts.

My heart expanded with sheer delight, swelling bigger and bigger inside my chest. Hope ballooned and the sensation felt like I'd lost my footing on the earth and I was floating away in wonderment. Maybe things were going to get better. Maybe she'd return back to the living.