RISING (#2, of Crows and Thorns)

Chapter 129

Cool fingers slid beneath my own and she raised our hands upward. Mine was small in her own larger one. She cradled my hand, palm upward, and stroked a calloused fingertip along the creases and lines, dipping into the valleys. Her touch tickled softly, enough to make me giggle.

The laughter died in my throat and hope dwindled. My smile fell away when I glanced up and realized though hers was a beautiful smile, it was cold and empty without any affection.

It happened so fast that I had no chance to react.

She flipped our hands over and shoved mine on top of the red-hot element.

It was a long cruel moment before the pain registered.

Vicious pain exploded.

It slashed and scorched and obliterated a searing path through my nerve endings. My mouth parted and a shrill scream rushed from my throat. Before it had a chance to escape my mother slapped her free hand across my mouth to silence it. The hand over my mouth stunk of the mildewy forest, while my hand stuck to the red-hot element reeked of putrid burning flesh, the stench shoving itself up my nostrils.

I flailed. I struggled manically. A bird trying to escape a net. I desperately tried to free myself from her fierce grip, to pull my hand from the flesh-charring metal. I screamed behind her hand, an endless sound of agony that ricocheted inside my head and tore my mind apart.

The skin on my fingers bubbled and blistered and melted in whorls. My mother's hand was splayed over mine to keep it there. Her fingers were much longer and were pressed against the red-hot element too. I heard her ragged breaths piercing my ear, but she didn't once cry out in pain or pull away.

I swayed woozily in her perverse embrace as stress sweated my temple and plastered my nightie to my figure. My mind tried to protect me from the wretched torture and started to turn in on itself, the edges of my vision seething in an undertow of black waves trying to drag me into unconsciousness.

Stop her! Stop her!

I stretched my free hand wide, blindly reaching for anything to save me.

My fingers encountered shapes and textures, cold and smooth, round and narrow, I didn't know what my fingers latched around, only that it was long. I grabbed hold of it and struck out, hitting backward to strike her face.

I hit her again and again.

A crack of bone and something warm and wet splashed upon my head and slithered down my neck. I drove my elbow backward, hard, encountering ribs. She jerked back with an oof. Her grip loosened on my hand sticking to the scorching metal. I ripped myself free, spinning around. A hoarse scream of agony and rage battered the room.

The thing in my hand was a weapon and I lost myself in hatred that burned fiercer than my ruined hand.

I struck her again and again.

I hit her gaunt face—

Her bony shoulder—

And left an angry red welt across a sharp cheekbone.

I forced my mother back.

I had her crossing her arms over her face to protect herself against my wrath.

She stumbled as her spine hit the fridge, and she fell to her backside, cowering before me.

The kitchen was filled with the reek of burning fat and flesh, and the sound of my gasping breaths as I gulped down air.

Hot tears swam in my eyes and rolled down my trembling cheeks as my rage dissolved. I glanced down at what I'd grabbed hold of to strike back at her.

A wooden spoon.

My fingers tightened around the spoon's long handle as I soaked up its strength and safety.

An eerie sensation of dark magic swirled inside me, and when I raised my ruined hand the burned and raw, cracked flesh had already started healing, an oozing and crinkling sound as the skin began to reforge itself, the blisters and marks fading, the flesh renewing and smoothing.

My mother lowered her arms and stared wide-eyed, with bruises blooming on her sunken cheeks and blood streaking from her smashed nose to drip upon her nightie.

Is this what she'd wanted?

To see my unnatural healing?

She was hurt too, and she tentatively offered me her wounded hand.

This time, something that had only been hinted at the past few months revealed itself fully. The murky kitchen brightened as my figure began to glow. Fine filaments of otherworldly threads of magic wove around my body, burnishing the shadowy darkness in dustings of gold. It curled across the space, reaching for my mother.

The thing inside me whined eagerly, yearning to steal her pain.

I sank to my knees and took my mother's blistered, ravaged hand in mine as honeyed magic caressed our figures. I didn't know why, I just knew I needed to touch her, to connect us both, so I would be able to take away her pain. "I hate you," I choked out, my lower lip trembling.

Her touch was gentle and tender as she tucked a wild lock behind my ear and wiped the tears from my cheeks. "Good," she whispered with a dash of regret in her tone that shimmered in her hazel eyes. "It makes it so much easier to hate you too."

Her image melted into the murky shadows...

Deepening into darkness...

Darkness comforted me as the unearthed memory waned like an old photograph shoved in a dusty box and stuffed into an attic, forgotten over time, the image fading and its edges curling.

I pried my eyes open as I came back to the here and now. I stood in the Deniauds' mansion, in a modern kitchen, quaking as my mind reeled with the shocking realization of what my mother had done to me all those years ago.

Your aunt's lying to you.

Perhaps that was what the thing had warned me of a few nights back in the Hemmlok Forest. My mother wasn't kind and compassionate. She hadn't put me first. She'd lost herself to madness and grief and she'd hated me.

Movement, a sparkle of moonlight splaying over two figures as they shifted slightly on the spot, caught my eye. I peered through the kitchen window and spied Markel outside talking to Joann, the red glow of cigarillos and smoke wisping up in thin streams as they smoked and chatted with one another.

Relief whooshed out of my lungs and my knees wobbled.

Markel was safe.

But where was my aunt?

The temperature in the kitchen suddenly plunged to a frigid note. Damp air clung to my dress and prickled my bare skin. My breath clouded right in front of me, suspended like mist.

My heartbeat sped up, faster, faster, faster...

Behind me came a deep rumbling sound of air sucked into a yawning mouth. A moment later it blew outward, fetid and rank and stale, brushing up against the back of my neck and flickering the fine tendrils around my temples. The tiny hair all over my skin prickled as terror crashed through me.

A voice, gritty and raspy. "Do you have the wyrmblood, Tabitha?"