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Chapter Twenty-Seven

LUNA

Voices. Etta. Silvia. Nunzio. A flow of musical Italian half-sentences.

The bandage on my neck has been removed. It tingles and hums. Cold, viscous something is spread on the wound and it’s left to touch air.

My heart beats stronger and my mouth tastes like a bitter root.

The sun bursts orange behind my closed lids, then only the popping light of the fire breaks up the darkness, then it’s blocked and the mattress tilts.

Breath, warm on my face.

At first, I think it’s maybe Carmine, returned.

But then I smell lavender instead of his cologne or the nothing smell of his body.

The twinge, the pressure that follows… it’s not physical.

It does not have a place on the map of my body.

It’s not in my mind. I am clear between the ears, but my heart’s drapes are open and I am exposed.

Like a gunshot, I am awake, sitting straight, clear-eyed. A woman sits on the edge of my bed, moonlight glinting off her cheekbone just like when I was a kid.

“What are you doing?” I pull the blanket over me as if that’ll keep her from probing again.

“It’s me. It’s just me,” Mom whispers as if that’s comforting. “I’m checking on you.”

Checking.

When she came to my room in Brooklyn or sat on the edge of the bed in California, she called it that.

“This the same as ‘testing’? Because I’ll break your arm before you do that again.”

“I’m sure you can.”

Is that pride in her voice? I’d walk a mile with a rock in my shoe and feel less discomfort.

Nunzio’s draped over the chair like a boneless bag. The rise and fall of his chest is slow and deep. His snake is coiled at his feet. Puzzo. I don’t smell anything.

“I was trying to see the depth of his thrall,” Mom says. “I should have asked.”

“Damn right you should have.” I don’t trust her, but I am her daughter. Screaming bloody murder doesn’t seem right. “What did you do to Nunzio?”

“Something…” She’s looking in his direction, brows knotted. “I knew how to do it before I remembered it existed.”

“Is it magic? Like a spell?”

Carmine told me: I don’t cast spells. I have power. It’s different.

But is it? Was that his ego or objective fact?

“Yes.” She looks back at me. “I’ve been separated from my magic for fifty years. It’s like a stranger is taking up space inside me. And she belongs there. I was half a person for so long.”

“Is that why you were that way? Before I… did it?”

“That way?” She seems honestly perplexed.

“Conspiracy theories, paranoia, confirmation bias.”

“Those are big words.”

“I did my own research, like you told me.”

“Good.” She smiles and squeezes my leg through the blanket. “Smart. Very smart.”

Carmine called me smart. It seemed natural from him, and I believed it. I’m not sure if I believe my mother.

“Smart? That’s a first.”

“I thought you were stupid because you refused to see the world the way I did. But it was me the whole time, wasn’t it?

” She doesn’t give me time to agree. “When the magic came back, it took a split second, and everything was gone. I was little again. I could open the door of the facility with a few words. I could make the guards see anyone but me as I passed, but I couldn’t remember why I was there.

The memory of everything I did between then and now, it comes back so hard, and only when it wants to.

” She squeezes my leg again. “You were the first thing I remembered.”

“How did you find out where I was?”

“Where?” She scoffs as if space is a dumb concept, then puts her fist to her chest. “You were with me, and I wanted you, so… I don’t know what I did.

‘How’ isn’t important. It was so fast, I puked behind the little stone house.

I remembered… apparently I was gifted in using light waves, particles, both. Neither.”

“Jesus, Ma.” My awe is the product of fear. Power to move on light should not be in the hands of someone who believes chips are planted in her head and dust specks are tiny black helicopters.

“It’s fine. I love you.”

“Nope.” I throw the covers off and fling myself out of bed. “Absolutely not.” I go into the bathroom and close the door. “It’s not fine and you don’t love me.”

“Luna, how could you say such a thing?”

“You’re freaking me out.” I pull down my underpants and sit on the toilet to pee. “I’m already so fucked up. My head and my heart are, like, on two different train lines and they’re not crossing. It’s confusing and I am losing my mind, now you come here and?—”

“Thrall.” She cuts me off. “That’s what thrall does to us. It’s how he destroyed us.”

She obviously still doesn’t know shit from shit.

“He loves me.” I flush and go back into the room. When I see her, I feel dumb for believing that, much less letting it come out of my mouth.

“Listen to me, girl. Thrall sets your power against itself. For us, it’s death.”

“Stop saying we’re the same.”

“Oh, we are not. I was here, Luna, I remember it. He took it from us. Left us with parlor tricks.” She raises her arm toward the fire and opens her hand until it’s roaring.

“Look.” She tightens her fingertips together and the flames shrink to the size of a lighter’s.

And, sure. She can control the fire. That’s surprising, and worth a thousand questions.

“And then he was gone and there was nothing.”

“You were here when he was staked?”

“I was.”

She’s freaking me out. She lies to herself.

She makes up things and believes them. This is who she is and who she’s always been.

Now she’s telling me she has a history here, half a world away, with the man who took me as his wife and sucked the blood out of my veins?

Carmine, who thinks I’m powerful and beautiful and perfect?

No. She’s mad that I have my own problems that she can’t solve.

“Mom, you’re from Brooklyn.”

“Half of me is. Half of me was adopted by an American family. The other half stayed here.” She looks at her hands as if she hasn’t seen them before, and yes, she seems manic and a little sideways, but the emotions are just regular, normal-person excitement.

“Stop. Okay? I don’t need new mythologies right now.” I jam my legs into my jeans.

She doesn’t hear me. She puts both palms to the fire and pulls them back as if she’s rowing a boat. The flames turn red, then purple, then blue.

“That fountain outside? Half of me has been trapped inside it, watching the seasons pass, the city below change and… not change.” Blue fire, then green, back to yellow, and around the rainbow again. “I thought I’d never be released, but then, two days ago, you did it.”

Two days ago? I have no idea how much time has passed, but I am sure that two days ago, I was not releasing my mother from anything.

“For real, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Laro, his son, put my magic in there. When you destroyed him, you destroyed his power over me.”

I’m about to argue that I didn’t destroy him. He’s alive, somewhere. But I shut up, because some acts are more destructive than murder.

“How, Ma?” I close the fly as if I’m punctuating the question with disbelief. “And how are you doing that to the fire?”

“You can, too.”

“Sure. Whatever.”

“Listen, there are so many things I haven’t told you.

It’s not because I forgot. No. I was separated from them.

” She’s breathless with excitement. “Consciousness, it doesn’t come from matter.

No. This is what I mean to say. The way we’re taught, that Earth was this boiling soup and then lightning came and made consciousness? It’s wrong. It’s opposite.”

Oh, God, I’ve been here before. Mom has a revelation and runs through every circumstance and coincidence, making connections between unrelated things, and sits me down to listen to the logic of a puzzle with no solution.

“Are we really doing this?” I ask, but sit down. She’s going to do this. I don’t miss it, exactly. But I do miss her being marginally coherent.

“This time, I need you to listen.” She sits on the edge of the bed. “Consciousness came first. And it was that consciousness, the need of it, the manifesting, that created matter. Everything around us.”

“Sure.”

“So everything has a little of that consciousness in it!” She claps once with finality, as if she’s just landed a plane. “That fire has desire. It’s alive. Everything is. Can you not see it?”

“Ma. No.”

“What about feel it? Hear it? Concentrate. There are lines of valence. It’s reaching for you.”

Just to make her happy, I make a token effort and concentrate, but like a recalcitrant adolescent, my shoulders are slumped and my breath comes out in a sigh.

“You need to go inside it the way you went inside Laro,” she says. I hate that she knows what I did and knows how to do it. She’s seen the messes I’ve made of people and the selfish, childish motivations behind them. “Light is made of particles when it has a place, and waves when it moves.”

“Are you literally talking about quantum physics?”

She shrugs hard. “Are you?”

“I barely passed algebra. But I was stuck on QuantumTok once for, like, three days.” I rub my eyes, trying to remember things I didn’t have the confidence to understand. “It’s fine. Whatever. This magic fire. Quantum stuff. Same thing.”

“I guess that’s true.” Between her grin and the puzzle-snap of satisfaction and tension, I know she believes I’m agreeing with her about something.

“I’m taking a shower now. Then I’m going downstairs for breakfast. Then I’m going to figure out where Carmine is.”

“Those women don’t like me.”

“So skip breakfast.” I snap a shirt out of the drawer. “I don’t know what to tell you.”

“When they weren’t looking, Nunzio left something for you.” She points at a nightstand where a water glass sits in front of the lapis clock.

“Thanks.”

“I’ll be in the draining house.” She looks at her hands again, then up at me, smiling. “Come when it’s light. The door will be open.”

Then she’s gone.

Just gone.

“What the actual fuck?!”

But there’s not a fuck, actual or otherwise, that has any idea what just happened.

“Nope.” I take my bundle of clothes to the bathroom. “I am not trying to figure you out right now.”

The shower runs cold. I strip down, noping out of any kind of wonderment. Mom can travel on light particles-slash-waves. Okey-dokey. Great power is in the hands of the people the least inclined to use it properly. Totally checks out.

The first time I see the bite in the bathroom mirror, I’m shocked at how big it is. Did I expect two neat little puncture wounds? That’s not what I got. This is a wound to match the level of pain. Actually, it’s not a wound. It’s halfway to being a scar already.

When the mirror clouds too much to see, I get in the shower.

As soon as I’m not distracted, his thrall takes over.

I have to go to him, wherever in the world he is.

I don’t know where to look, but I know I won’t be able to function until I do.

I rub my body raw under scalding water. I have to be near him.

And if he wants Serafina instead, well, the fact is, I have to please him however he demands I do it.

This is the worst. I don’t even know myself. He’s betraying me at this very moment and I miss him so much I’m having a hard time staying mad at him for it. Fuck. I hate this. Zero stars.

Carmine Montefiore is truly awful, and he owns me in a way that’s not theoretical or abstract. There are only two locations on this earth. Near him and not near him. “Not near” is my jangled nerves. It’s the sense of loss and emptiness. It’s the yawning gap between love and despair.

In my room, clean and dressed, I go for the water Nunzio left for me.

The glass holds down a folded piece of expensive paper like the one Laro gave me in the alley.

A red wax circle with a raven embossed in it seals the edge closed.

“Carmine.” I flip it over to the flat side. There’s a yellow Post-it with block print.

HE TOLD ME TO GIVE THIS

TO YOU WHEN YOU WOKE UP.

—N