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Chapter Twenty-Four

LUNA

“Mom?”

One word. A hundred questions.

When did the impossible become possible?

How did she know I was here? How did she get here, and why?

How did she get in? Get over? And mostly, the thing that’s so obvious I don’t even register it right away.

When have her emotions ever looked this regulated?

“Sit down, why don’t you?” She—my mother—turns in her seat, putting her back to me and the gun I’m pointing at her. “And put that thing down before you hurt yourself.” She gathers the cards.

Under the bandage on my neck, the wound throbs in Morse code. Dot-dash-dot-dot-dash-dash-dash . I only know how to dot-dash an SOS. This isn’t it.

“I’m an excellent shot.”

“Sure you are.” She shuffles. “You could put me out of your misery real quick.”

“I should.”

My arms ache from holding up the gun, so it’s either shoot now or shoot never, and if I shoot now, I might not find out what the hell is going on. How she got here. Why the emotions floating around her aren’t choking one another.

“You’re not my mother.” I approach with the gun out. “Who are you, really?”

She doesn’t flinch.

Sleep pushes against the back of my eyes. I’m still exhausted. I don’t remember any Glock I’ve ever held up before feeling as though it weighed down my feet.

“Oh, it’s me.” She looks me up and down, and a ribbon shape rises near her heart. Compassion. Hers was always longer and narrower than any other.

“Prove it.”

She sighs, looks at the square of sky over the courtyard, then back at me. “For a long time, you couldn’t sleep without your Gangnam Style fuzzy socks. You were so upset when you grew out of them.”

“You threw them out because you thought the dance would trigger the Nibiru cataclysm.”

“Now we’ll never know.” She smiles wide enough I can see the empty space where she pulled out her tooth—the one behind the left canine.

She showed me the bloody thing to prove there was a microchip in it.

Even when there wasn’t, she insisted. But now, she’s the sensible one, looking at my feet. “You need shoes.”

Maybe I do, but I don’t care. Footwear is way down the list of needs, near air and nourishment. What I need—truly need—is a cry from my heart that my brain doesn’t understand.

“Where’s Carmine?” I ask for the second time. The first time, her answer was a knife in my heart.

He’s not here.

He took off with that other one.

Face like a runway model and a personality like battery acid.

Serafina was the name.

“I told you. He took some whore.”

“Don’t say that!” What do I find so offensive? The insult to Serafina or the implication that he’s replaced me?

“Then don’t ask that question again. Sit. I found my cards.”

“My…?” There’s too much to unpack and I’m in a half-fog. “How?” I grip the back of her chair to stay standing. My heart is a lost hummingbird, fluttering so fast without a flower for miles. “Why? New meds?”

“You.”

“Me?” Adrenaline gives me a third wind. I stand in front of her and put my fingertips on my chest.

“You brought me here.”

“Are you serious?”

“Are you going to sit down?”

“When you tell me how it is that I never even told you I got on a plane in the first place because?—”

“Thanks for that.”

“—you’re too crazy out of your mind to even hear me?—”

“Are you kids even saying ‘crazy’ anymore?”

“—and you show up three thousand miles away all”—I wave my hand from her toes to her head, indicating her overlay of healthy emotional shapes—“like this, telling me Carmine…” I choke on his name and nearly crack down the center.

“Left with…” I take a hard swallow before I spit the truth.

“He didn’t leave me for Serafina. She hates him. ”

Yeah.

Sure.

She doesn’t eat with strigoi until three in the morning, by the fountain, taking an orange wedge from his hand the way I did on our wedding night. Every time he peeled and every time I bit, there were sexual consequences, and here I am, convincing myself that they’re not fucking each other blind.

“Can you sit, please?” She jerks her arm at the chair on the other side of the table and mutters, “Jesus Christ.”

How does she look so normal? Even before the rewire, she wasn’t this organized.

Watching her carefully, gun still drawn, I sit. “If I called you or something, it was an accident.”

“Was it?” She shuffles the way she always did, with a cut, a ship-snap, and a whooshing bridge.

“I don’t want you here.”

“That? I believe.”

“Don’t make me do something I’ll regret,” I say.

“Like what? Scramble my head? Trust me, you won’t be able to do that to me again.”

“I’m glad you’re healed. I don’t know how. But I’m glad. You look great. Better than ever. You still need to go. I didn’t call you.”

“But you brought me here.”

God, I need her to stop taking up space in my head. I need to figure out Carmine, where he is, what he’s doing, why every cell in my body is screaming for him. Why do I even care about him when my mother is sitting here, in Italy, making full sentences?

The dissonance between my head and heart is excruciating.

“I’m sure it was my fault, and I’m sure it was a mistake. I’m sorry to waste your time. Everything is fine. Please take your sanity back on a plane and go home.”

“This?” She makes a circle around her head. “You did this too. I owe you one.” She slaps the stack of cards before me. “Cut twice. Right to left.”

“These cards give me the fucking willies.” I push them away.

“Lunagirl,” she says the way she did when I was little and I wouldn’t stay still.

That name was preceded by a threat to cut a little deeper than she had to, which she did enough times to train my muscles to freeze in place.

“You can’t know everything all at once. So, cut.

Please. The cards will put it in the order you can hear it. ”

Reluctant, curious, cautious, I sit straight. Normal emotions bubble around her. At first, mostly something big I cannot identify, coupled with a little anxiety, and a bright shot of anger in her singular shape.

“How do you know how to read them?”

“How can a crazy bitch know anything?” Her eyes are clear and bright, though the ponytail holding back her gray hair is scraggly and loosening at the front. She never cared about how she presented herself. She took pride in not giving a shit what people thought.

“Fine.” I cut them quickly and carelessly, slapping the smaller stacks into a row.

“Let’s see.” She pulls a card off the first stack and lays it on the table.

It’s a woman in lingerie, her knee on an upholstered chair. Two crows are on either side of her. The bottom says LEGAL TENDER on a ribbon banner.

“What does it mean?”

“You tell me. Legal tender. Say something about it.”

“There are rules. They’re seductive. I’m seduced. I’m the seducer. I am the law. I don’t know!”

“We need to get Carmine out of the way.” She moves Legal Tender to the side.

“I’m going crazy.”

“Sit up straight.” She spreads a stack. “Insanity doesn’t preclude good posture.”

A card from the center of the fan, flipped.

Red birds in a red sky. A wall with a razor-sharp edge. Fire.

“This first.” She closes the fan. “There was some kind of fight. Bigger. A battle. There were people running around, screaming, blood everywhere. You don’t want to look on the top of the wall, because it’s not pretty. When it was done, I heard her name, then she got in a car with him.”

“She?”

“Serafina.”

“So you were what? Skulking around?”

“Yes.” She shakes her head, confused. “No. What I can tell you is…” She stops and rubs her eyes. “I don’t think I can do this in order.”

I reach across the table and take the top card, slapping it on the table face up.

When Mom moves her hands away to look, I reveal it.

It’s a woman with fire for hair and the label, “Thousand Voices.” It means nothing to me, but it means something to her.

She sits back, gaze steady on me in a way I barely recognize.

“I could read her. Serafina,” she says.

“You what?”

“Where do you think you came from? Did you fall off a truck?”

“Are you a?—”

“Yes. Obviously. And, stop. Let me finish. What I can read in people… it’s not as specific. I read energy.”

“Sure you can.”

“Calling me a liar isn’t going to get you far.” She huffs and fingers her cards. “I can see how much they have and the direction. And what I saw … the little she had was directed inward. Not even at him.”

“You’re making this up. As usual. Everything was made up.

You could look at the goddamn sky and convince yourself it wasn’t blue just to confirm your priors.

And now you read people, just like me, because why?

It’s convenient? Or because you’re done thinking it made me evil and now you think maybe you’d like to try it?

Well, good. Go ahead. It sucks. It always sucked seeing how scared I made you. ”

“Am I scared now?”

“No. But I am,” I say.

“I know.”

“I hate you. Fuck, I hate you. Get out. Just go. However you got here, get home the same way.”

I should turn and go. Don’t look back. Forward only, and if she doesn’t leave, I’ll shoot her. I won’t even care. Carmine won’t care. What’s another dead body in his house? It would be cleaned up before he and Serafina even got back.

My mother must be telling the truth about reading emotions, because hers change when I think of Carmine returning with Serafina.

“Serafina was terrified,” Mom says. “Frozen. Not about him though. About…” She waves her arms, meaning everything . “The sky, the earth. She was rushing into the car because it was safe.”

Serafina told me that after Covid, she developed a fear of leaving the house. Her agoraphobia must be back, and why not, everything being the way it is.

“What about him?” I ask. “What was his energy?”

“You know those things can’t be read.”

“He’s not a thing,” I snap at her.

“If you say so.”

“Did you just roll your eyes at me?”