I wondered if her little trip to the bokor had anything to do with that.
Clue number three: the sweet tea was unspeakably sweet, which meant a) the Sisters were sneaking into the kitchen and dumping sugar in the pitcher, the way they did with salt in the gravy, b) Amma was so out of it she couldn’t keep track of how many cups of sugar she was dumping in, or c) something was wrong with me.
Maybe all three, but Amma was up to something, and I was determined to find out what. Even if I had to ask that bokor myself.
Then there was the song. With every passing day, I heard it with greater frequency, like one of those Top 40 songs that plays on the radio so much that it’s always stuck in your head.
Eighteen Moons, eighteen fears,
The cries of Mortals fade, appear,
Those unknown and those unseen
Crushed in the hands of the Demon Queen…
The Demon Queen? Seriously? After the literal translation of the Vex verse, I didn’t want to imagine what a run-in with a Demon Queen could mean. I hoped my mom had confused it with homecoming queen.
But the songs were never wrong.
I tried not to think about the cries of Mortals or the hands of the Demon Queen. But the thoughts I refused to think, the conversations that remained unspoken, the fears I never confessed, the dread building inside me—I couldn’t escape them. Especially not at night, when I was safe in my room.
Safe, and the most vulnerable.
I wasn’t the only one.
Even within the Bound walls of Ravenwood, Lena was just as vulnerable. Because she had something from her mother, too. And I knew she was touching one of the things in that dented metal box when I saw the orange glow of the flames—
The fire ignited, flames curling around the gas burner one by one, until they created a single, beautiful blazing circle on the stovetop. Sarafine watched, fascinated. She forgot about the pot of water on the counter. She forgot about dinner most nights now. She couldn’t think about anything but the flames. Fire had energy—power that defied even the laws of science. It was impossible to control, leveling miles of forest in minutes.
Sarafine had been studying fire for months. Watching theoretical ones on the science channel, and real ones on the news. The television was on all the time. The second there was a mention of a fire, she would stop whatever she was doing and rush to watch. But that wasn’t the worst part. She had started using her powers to set small fires. Nothing dangerous, only tiny ones in the woods. They were like campfires. Harmless.
Her fascination with fire had started around the same time as the voices. Maybe the voices drove her to watch things burn; it was impossible to know. The first time Sarafine heard the low voice in her mind, she had been doing the laundry.
This is a miserable, worthless life—a life equal to death. A waste of the greatest gift the Caster world has to offer. The power to kill and destroy, to use the very air we breathe to fuel your weapon. The Dark Fire offers itself. It offers freedom.
The laundry basket dropped, and clothes spilled out onto the floor. Sarafine knew the voice wasn’t her own. It didn’t sound like her, and the thoughts were not her own. Yet they were in her mind.
The greatest gift the Caster world has to offer. The gifts of a Cataclyst—that’s what it meant. It’s what happened when a Natural went Dark. And no matter how much Sarafine wanted to pretend it wasn’t true, she was Dark. Her yellow eyes reminded her every time she looked in the mirror. Which wasn’t often. She couldn’t stand the sight of herself, or the possibility that John might see those eyes again.
Sarafine wore dark sunglasses all the time, even though John didn’t care what color her eyes were. “Maybe they’ll brighten up this dump,” he said one day, looking around the tiny apartment. It was a dump—peeling paint and broken tiles, heat that never worked and electricity that shorted out all the time. But Sarafine would never admit it, because it was her fault they were living there. Nice places didn’t rent to teenagers who were obviously runaways.
They could’ve afforded a better place. John always came up with plenty of money. It wasn’t hard to find things to pawn, when you could make objects disappear right out of people’s pockets or store windows. He was an Evanescent, like most of history’s great magicians—and thieves. But he was also Light, using his gift in this vile way to keep them alive.
To keep her alive.
The voices reminded her of that every day.
If you leave, he can use his parlor tricks to impress Mortal girls, and you can do what you were born for.
She shook the voices out of her head, but the words left a shadow, a phantom image that never entirely disappeared. The voices were the strongest when she was watching things burn—the way she was now.
Before she realized it, the kitchen towel was smoking, blackened edges curling inward like an animal recoiling in fear. The smoke alarm screamed.
Sarafine slapped the towel against the floor until the flames turned into a sad trail of smoke. She stared at the charred towel, crying. She had to throw it away before John saw it. She could never tell him about this. Or the voices.
It was her secret.
Everyone had secrets, right?
A secret couldn’t hurt anyone.
I sat up with a start, but my room was still. My window was shut, even though the heat was so stifling that the sweat running down my neck felt like the slow crawl of spiders. I knew a closed window couldn’t keep Abraham out of my room, but somehow it made me feel better.
I was overwhelmed by an irrational panic. With every settling board, every creaking stair, I expected to see Abraham’s face emerge from the darkness. I looked around, but the dark in my room was simply the dark.
I kicked off the sheet. I was so hot, I’d never be able to fall back to sleep. I grabbed the glass from my nightstand and poured some water on my neck. For a second, cool air swept over me, before the heat swallowed me back up again.
“You know, it’s going to get worse before it gets better.”
When I heard the voice, I almost jumped out of my skin.
I looked over and my mom was sitting in the chair in the corner of my room. In the chair I had laid out my clothes on the day of her funeral, then never sat in again. She looked the way she had in the cemetery the last time I saw her—kind of blurry around the edges—but she was still my mom in all the important ways.
“Mom?”
“Sweetheart.”
I crawled out of bed and sat on the floor next to her, my back against the wall. I was afraid to get too close, afraid I was dreaming and she would disappear. I just wanted to sit by her for a minute, like we were in the kitchen talking about my day at school or something trivial. Whether or not it was real. “What’s going on, Mom? I’ve never been able to see you like this before.”
“There are…” She hesitated. “Certain circumstances that allow you to see me. I don’t have time to explain. But this isn’t like before, Ethan.”
“I know. Everything is worse.”
She nodded. “I wish things were different. I don’t know if there is a happy ending this time. You need to understand that.” I felt a lump in my throat, and I tried to swallow it away.
“I can’t figure this out. I know it has something to do with John Breed’s Eighteenth Moon, but we can’t find him. I don’t know what we’re supposed to be fighting. The Eighteenth Moon? Abraham? Sarafine and Hunting?”