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Amoira’s Story: Mother Dearest III

~JEBIDIRAH~

The Tampering

“Pray tell, Mother, what is the plan here?”

We stand in a human child’s bedroom nearly two decades in the past, while a young girl sleeps beneath cartoon-themed sheets. The room is dark save for the faint glow of a nightlight casting shadows on the walls.

“By my calculation, she should be old enough to form a coherent wish but not so old that she will recall this moment as reality,” Mother says, her voice a whisper against the quiet.

The child has messy, dirt-colored hair, longer than it is in the present day, but it is unmistakably her—Dolly Jones, the master who will one day turn Arrik against his own blood. The one who, in the future, carries his seed and will give birth to a half-human, half-djinn monstrosity .

Mother is right to stop this madness.

“You mean to grant her a wish? But how can we do that if we cannot interact with her in the past?” I ask, recalling a fact drilled into us during wish-granting studies.

“As I told you, Jebidirah, if your brother is fated to her as the djinn reader claims, then you share a piece of her destiny. It should grant you the agency to interact with her across time and space, so long as you have a strong enough conduit.” She retrieves the vessel I stole from Arrik out of the satchel on her hip. “I know of no stronger conduit than the very relic that led your brother to her in the first place—the vessel bequeathed unto him by your father’s whore.”

She passes the bottle to me, and the moment my fingers twist around its neck, a tingling sensation runs up my arm. This feels different from a normal vessel. It’s heavier, charged with something I’ve felt inside no other artifact.

“If it works, what sort of wish should I instruct her to make?” I ask.

“A human master can alter no one’s fate but their own. Have her wish to send you to the moment her fated mate is chosen by the heavens, and wish for the power to alter it.”

“That is a weighty wish! Do you mean for me to take her entire soul?” My voice echoes within this disquieting plane that is not quite reality.

“From what I hear, this human has an exceptionally strong soul. I suspect she may be a valkyrie reborn.”

“I’ve never heard of such a thing,” I say, making my skepticism apparent. “They say she is fully human.”

“She is still fully human,” Mother confirms. “I mean her soul.”

She attempts to touch the child Dolly but passes through her as if either were a phantom. It’s a relief she cannot touch her.

“You try, my son.”

If this will stop Arrik from impregnating her and handing his lairdship to the nymph, I will do it.

With Lady Evangeline’s vessel in one hand, I set my other on the child’s shoulder. Surprisingly, she is solid beneath my touch, and she stirs. But the moment she sees me, her eyes fly open, and she screams. I quickly cup her mouth.

It’s too late.

Light streams in from the doorway, and a man’s silhouette appears in the frame. “Folly, Lolly—” he calls out, his voice groggy but concerned. “What’s up, Dolly? That monster back under your bed?”

“No, Dad!” she cries in a shrill voice. “It’s a ghost! A scary one, right there!”

She points at me with a pudgy finger, but her father cannot see me. Yet he pretends to. “Be gone with you! No scary ghosts allowed! Only nice ones in this bedroom!”

I spin away, quick to dull the inhospitable aura over me. When I turn back, she is no longer afraid.

“Did that work, honeybun?” her father asks.

“Yeah, Dad! There’s just a nice one now.”

“Alrighty, babydoll. See you in the morning.”

The father closes the door, and this strange human peers at me like we’re friends. “Oh, you’re a handsome ghost.”

“Er, thank you?”

Mother’s voice shakes with the loose grip of her budding psychosis, jealousy simmering even for this child version of Arrik’s fated master. “On with it, Jebidirah,” she hisses.

I crouch beside Dolly Jones’s bed, the vessel firmly in my hand.

“How would you like to make a one-off wish?” I ask softly.

“A wish?” she repeats, her voice painted with innocent curiosity.

“Yes. All it takes is a small taste of your soul, and I’ll make sure no bad ghosts visit you ever again.”

“You can do that?”

“Shhh,” I hush her. She is not my master, and I am under no oath to tell her the truth. I’ve made many one-off deals in the human world. This should be no different.

“Jebidirah.” Mother fans at me, her patience wearing thin.

Arrik’s mate’s eyes shine at me in the dark, full of trust. I do not desire her to look at me that way, like a dog seeking to prove its loyalty. I avert my gaze as I tell her, “Listen closely, this is what you must wish for...”

“I am fairly certain what we’ve just done is illegal,” I mumble as we appear within a musty tunnel at an unknown point in the past—the moment when Dolly Jones’s fated mate is chosen by the heavens—a wish made by her child self.

“Don’t be silly, my son,” Mother coos, her thumbnail grazing my cheek. “There’s no need to fear the law when staring into the face of the apocalypse. Once this task is through, time as we know it will be rewritten from this moment on.”

I hadn’t fully understood that at the outset. There’s no need to fear any of my brothers’ wrath for this betrayal. Paradoxically, it will be as though it never happened. I wonder if fate will become knotted because of it.

Mother doesn’t care. She stands beside me in the dark, her eyes gleaming with manic determination. Ahead, there are voices and a warmth I recognize but have not felt since childhood.

We must be within one of the many hidden passages of the Reilhander manor.

“Stay here, Mother,” I say, hoping to shield her from the sight of Adelle Evangeline’s ethereal beauty. “I will go on ahead.”

I grip the stolen relic in my hand—the vessel that will eventually lead Arrik astray and bind him to a human—and leave Mother in the dark as I move down the tunnel, the voices of Father and his nymph growing louder.

I couldn’t fully comprehend her light or her beauty as a child. The fuller-blooded nymphs seem to glow with an inner radiance.

“Arrik is your secret apprentice,” Lady Evangeline is saying to a younger version of my father in a small clearing backed by a wall of treasures. “You intend for him to become laird of the manor.”

“Why do you believe that?” Father looks at her in a way he has never looked at another.

I was right to spare Mother from this .

“Is it true?” Lady Evangeline presses, her voice filled with concern.

A replica of the special vessel—the past version, I suppose—sits on the shelf before them.

Neither of them can see me. To all but Dolly Jones, I do not fully exist in the past.

“You don’t desire Velis to become laird?” Father asks.

“I don’t. But making Arrik laird-in-waiting will put him in danger. And as he is now, he’ll never accept it.”

“He is just a boy,” Father replies. “He has much to learn. And I intend to make the position desirable. They are motivated now only by competition. He will want it if it is gifted to a partial brother.”

“That’s not a game you should wish to play with your children, Elrick,” Velis’s mother defends. “I won’t allow it.”

“This is how the djinn rear their young, my love. It is how the rich learn to be cunning and to stay ahead of society’s whims. It is how we continue to survive.” Father stops there.

Velis’s mother takes his cheek, responding, “Then I will have to make plans of my own to combat yours, my love.”

She appears to be about to make an announcement, but she stops.

Our father stops.

The flamelight dancing on the walls stops.

Time is frozen.

My eyes burn with Maka-blue fire, and I no longer have control over my actions. Under the compulsion of child Dolly’s wish, I turn and smash the vessel against the wall, cutting up my knuckles. Compulsion moves through me, forcing me to bend and sift through the debris for a bow that shouldn’t have been able to fit inside.

Eyes still aglow, I rise from the pile of broken glass and pull back the arrowless string, imbued with the ‘power to alter’ the chosen mate, and therefore the fate, of Dolly Jones.

I release the string, and an arrow of blue light shoots through Adelle Evangeline.

Time unfreezes—

“Velis is an abnormally strong empath already, and each day he makes me prouder and prouder.” She appears surprised at her own proclamation. “He will be the one to change our family.”

“Then Arrik will become his protector,” my father agrees.

Just as Mother intended, the threads of destiny have shifted; the bottle in the used goods store will no longer hold Arrik’s fate.

It will hold Velis’s.

Feathers of corrupted fate swirl around me, and I, Mother, the pile of glass, and everything else we knew in our timeline exists no more.