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Chapter Thirty-Three

LUNA

I push open the door of the draining house. From a dark corner, where the sunlight does not reach, comes a tiny, wet mouth noise. Barely a breath. A swallow. A tsk . The sound of a body managing itself.

It’s not Carmine. That’s all I know. I have no logic past that. It’s probably another person who wants to take me somewhere.

Mom is sitting up at the far end of the draining chair, squinting. “Luna?”

“Did you sleep here?” I ask.

“I always wondered what it was like.”

“I can make sure you have a room.” I try to help her down, but she waves me away.

“Where? In that house?” She points in the direction of the villa I’m living in.

“That’s not for me. My side”—she points in the other direction, toward the burned-out house—“is a wreck. There’s a sleeping vampire and his slave in the basement.

” She tilts her hips to get one foot off the apparatus, groaning as if she’s creaky-jointed. “It’s not safe.”

“Who’s the sleeping vampire?”

“Not your Carmine.” She douses a flicker of hope that barely had a moment to spark. She stretches, and her emotions gain the complexity of an awake person. “Don’t look so disappointed.”

“It’s the thrall.”

“I’m starting to remember. It’s all coming back.” She opens two metal doors on a low cabinet, revealing a long-dead fireplace with two blackened logs. “It’s so clear, all over again. Like it never left me.” She motions with her hand and the logs roar to life.

“Mom,” I whisper in awe.

“All these years, I thought I’d dreamt living here. I thought my adopted parents had implanted dreams and memories to cover the truth. But it’s all real.” A pinching move with her fingers reduces the flames. “The power is back. All the training. I know how to use it.”

“Can you get me to Carmine? The way you came here?”

She thinks, looking deep into herself. “I can bring you where I want, and I don’t want to bring you to him.” She looks at me and steps in my direction. “I think I can have passengers. If I touch you, I can bring you home.”

“No.” I step back. “I don’t want you to.”

“What if I could remove the thrall?”

“Have you done it before?”

“No. But I think I know how. I’m almost sure I can, if I can find the right energy.”

“No.” I shift around the corner of the table. “I don’t want you to.”

“That’s the thrall talking. It’s its own protection.

You can’t consent to its removal. No matter how much it’s worn down.

It can be in the background over time, but it’s permanent.

He can disappear for years and still call you back when you think you’ve forgotten him.

In twenty or thirty years… you would abandon your life and family with a single word from him.

But I can undo what he did. You can have your heart back.

Your body will not obey him. You can be free.

” She reaches for me. “Let me look inside you.”

“I don’t trust you!” I hold up both hands as if this will stop her. It won’t, if experience is any guide, but it does, because she’s human and my mother. I’ve hurt her feelings more than warded her off.

“I guess I deserve that.” She sits on a low stool with the fireplace behind her.

“Thank you. And I’m sorry. Everything’s been weird. Very weird.”

“Weirder than your mother?”

A light laugh escapes my chest. I never thought I’d hear her admit even that much.

“I mean…” I pretend to think about it. “Maybe not everything was weirder. Just the vampires.”

“You can read people’s emotions. How were vampires a surprise?”

“Half the population believes in astrology. Psychics. Ghosts. They pray, for fuck’s sake.

What’s transactional prayer but a magic spell that proves itself just often enough?

All of that is, like, one thing. You can’t conflate that with physical dead people physically walking around and physically drinking physical blood. ”

She sighs, putting her hands on her knees. “I confused you.”

“You sure did.” I say it more gently than she deserves, but she seems so different. Is she even the same person?

“I learned to make these fires when I had these little fingers.” She points thumb and index at the flame and it gets bigger. “You can do it too.”

“This isn’t the same as seeing emotions.”

“Never said it was, except it is. Remember that a single consciousness created everything. All matter. Light is particles so…” She encourages me to finish the sentence.

“My grades weren’t high enough to take physics.”

“So stubborn. How has that helped you, Luna?”

“I think it saved my life more than once.”

“Fine. Matter. Light is matter, and the matter is consciousness. It’s touching you right now. Use its energy to make the fire smaller.” With a tip of her chin, she enlarges the flame until it’s almost too big for the firebox. “You can. If you want to.” Bigger. It’s licking outside the stones.

“How? Ma!”

“Your power is in your senses. Use your hands. Squint with the same eyes that see what people feel. Do you see the lines coming from the fire?”

“No.” My denial is a lie as soon as I make it. I can see them if I squint with the same vision I use to blur emotions. The same vision I use to reach into people to make them crazy. They’re dark flashes that appear and disappear as soon as I locate them. “They’re coming from the fire.”

“They’re coming from you. They’re your attention. Your in tention. Your valence.”

They vibrate so fast they blur. They’ve always been there. I thought they were gaps in my talent—mistakes in a vision that never should have existed in the first place.

“What do I do with these lines?” I ask.

The fireplace glows hotter. Flames lick the wood cabinets.

“You and the fire are from the same consciousness. But your valences are far apart. Bring them together before the fire gets bigger.”

“How?”

“Overpower them. Line up attention and intention.”

The problem is that my intentions barely exist. I only want what Carmine intends. My own desires have been drowned into his thrall.

He wouldn’t want his draining house to burn.

That’s when I feel the lines on my fingertips. Little electric pinpricks. When I raise my hands, they bend, align, pulse with me. They come from my mind, the desires of my intellect, my curiosity. They shift when I intend for them to, and they’re still when I want no more.

“What?” I snap out of it. The lines are still there—blurred along with the emotional landscape.

Fuck, this is weird.

“Well done.” Mom stands in front of me, holding my cheeks. “Well done.”

“The fire’s the same. It didn’t change at all.”

“Yes, it did.” She guides me to the raven chair as if she knows how exhausting that was. “Rest here.”

“He wouldn’t want me in his chair.” All I can think about is what he wants, where he’d like me, how I need to be.

“He’s not here.”

“Thanks for the reminder.” I sit. The hard, flat metal is oddly comfortable, but I don’t feel any closer to him. Was I ever close to him? Is it even possible?

“How was that?” She’s pleased she could teach me something.

“It had the same kind of feeling as…” I debate whether or not to tell her this, then lose the fight.

“There’s this thing called blood-lock, and when he’s…

um.” I clear my throat. She is my mother after all, so I skip the details.

“I can see inside him. Not the emotion part I can see in anyone, but something deeper. It was like falling down a well.”

“Hm.”

“Hm?”

“Go on,” she says.

“There’s this kind of… I called it the golden coil because it was like this spiral up the well. I touched it. Not really? But kind of an interior touch? Mental? Spiritual? And he thinks that forced him to love me.”

“Did he ever say you plucked his string?”

The phrase rings a bell. I try to hear it coming from his mouth, but I can’t.

“Yes! He put it in his letter. What does it mean?”

“It was something none of his Strega could do. Make any of these monsters feel anything deeper than their last spurt. And you did it.” She narrows her eyes. “You made him love you, and so he put you in thrall. You’re forcing each other into being attached. Hoo-boy, what a damn mess.”

“I know.” I put my head in my hands. “I don’t know what to do.”

“The Strega said it couldn’t be done, but here you are.”

“I didn’t want to.”

“No?”

“I thought it was beautiful.” I pick up my head. “I didn’t think it would do this !”

“That’s the problem with power. No one is smart enough to wield it wisely.”

“All this power I supposedly have.” I cross my arms. “It’s useless.

I couldn’t free you. I passed that fountain a hundred times and didn’t even know you were in there.

” There’s an uncomfortable silence as I consider the implications of what I’m suggesting.

“Did Carmine know you were in the fountain?”

“That part of me… it’s just magic and power. The memories are incomplete. More impressions than anything. But there was one night, right before you came, when he and Laro were standing there, talking about me as if I was there but couldn’t hear them.”

“Carmine knew ?” My hands ball into fists. I don’t know how I’ll kill him while I’m in thrall, but I will. “He knew my mother was in the fountain the whole time?”

“I was a kid who hung around. Did he know you were mine?” She shrugs. “I doubt it, but if you’re looking for a reason to be pissed, that’s as good as any.”

Damn her. She’s right. Firstly, because he probably didn’t make the connection between the kid and the mother. But most importantly, I really am looking for a reason to be pissed because it feels good. Anger is mine. I own it. He can’t stop me from it. It’s the only true and real thing between us.

Everything else I feel for him is an illusion he forced on me, and his obsession with me is a twisted lie I rewrote his heart to tell.

My mother does not share my rage. She’s got a faraway look and a grin twitching the corner of her mouth.

“Why are you smiling?” I ask her.