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Chapter Seventy

LUNA

My head hurts, so the brain inside it is weak and lets my heart share its first and only concern.

Carmine.

Does he know? Will he come for me?

If it’s safe, he should, but the thought of him in danger freezes my chest solid. Heart to ribs. Throat to stomach. Putting himself at risk for me is the last thing I want. God, just let me die so I know he lives.

He’d say that was enough of that kind of talk.

I feel my face smile and know that I’m awake and uncomfortable. Deep breath. And another. The air is different. When I swallow, my tongue tastes staler than month-old bread.

This is not a street in Central Park North, or I’d hear the passing cars. No light pierces my lids. Are my eyes even closed?

And the sounds. My heartbeat. The blood in my veins delivering wake-up hormones. Swallowing a second time creates a deafening cacophony from my throat. There’s an asymmetrical squeaking coming from above me, in and out of range with the movement of… something.

One cheek. One elbow. One ankle. All pressed to the floor. I am on one side. My arms are tied behind my back and my ankles won’t separate. My eyelashes brush against something. Fabric? A blindfold.

Less familiar is the reason it’s taking such conscious effort to swallow. My chin is tilted upward as if I’m looking for the top edges of a skyscraper, and I cannot lower it. There’s a piece of metal cupping my jaw and pushing against my collarbones… like a five-inch collar.

Nothing is familiar, but I’m sure I’ve been here before.

“Huh!” I breathe just to see if it’s possible, and it is. I hear the air go in and feel it fill my lungs, but it’s somehow in a tin can, as if my senses are working extra hard to function.

“Luna,” Mom whispers. “Are you up?”

“Mom?” I push my temple against the floor and move my head. The blindfold shifts. Light comes in, but though it’s obviously daytime, the light is as flat and gray as only one place is.

“Oh, good. I thought you were?—”

“We’re in the liminal.”

“Is that a place?”

Rocking my head back and forth against the floor, I work the blindfold looser. “It’s where you go when you blood-lock. When they drink and you make a deep connection, you go to the place between life and death.”

The blindfold shifts enough to let me see out a slit between the bottom and my face.

Mom’s scraping on the floor now, shifting toward me from across the room, in the same position as I am, with a solid silver contraption on her neck.

It looks just like the one I’m wearing feels, except for the open-mouth-sized hole on each side, around the veins.

I must have those too. These must be the Montenegro versions of the draining chair. What have I dragged her into?

“Sorry. I know that sounds crazy,” I say.

“Did you forget who you’re talking to?”

She’s trying to be funny. I work the blindfold away enough to see the room.

It’s a triangle shape, with couches and windows around the perimeter.

The only door is set a few inches over the floor level, on the opposite side of the point.

The sky outside is as gray and lifeless as the inside.

At the very bottom of one window, I can see the very tops of city towers, but otherwise, it’s all sky at this angle.

“Fan-fucking-tastic,” I mumble, getting off the entire blindfold.

“Are they biting us?” Mom asks. “Is this what it’s like?”

I’m not inside a vampire, fucking with his coil.

I can’t see my pants, but I know they’re on me.

No, this is just like the time I wandered into Audwyn’s space and he almost grabbed me.

Or my wedding night, when the McDonald’s had all the reality of a movie set.

Or the street in Naples, where Laro made the flat in-between descend like a fog.

“God, no. It’s not always how you get there.”

“How do we get out?”

“Laro had me in it and… I don’t know how, I just snapped out of it. One time I ran through a door. This feels different. Do you remember how we got in?”

“No.” She rocks, trying to swing herself up, but can’t get enough torque and only ends up lying down closer to me. “I got them all coming at us, then nothing.”

Right after Alex was pulled to the top of the scaffolding, a white van blocked the view of what happened to them, and we were shoved into it.

The van took off, slamming me into a cold, hard vampire body.

I expected the feeding to begin immediately, but we were tied and collared in pitch black.

Then we were here, blindfolded, carried, and dumped onto this floor.

When did I pass out?

“Turn around,” Mom says. “Let me get my hands on yours. I’ll untie you.”

“It’s hard to breathe.” I leverage myself toward her, but the floor’s surface is weirdly frictionless.

“Then don’t waste it complaining.” She heaves herself closer. “Just another little bit.”

“I’ll complain all I want.” I roll my back to her.

“Well, that’s a stupid thing to want.” Her fingers reach mine, and behind my back, I feel for the ropes around her wrists. We start working them away.

“Of course you’d say that. It’s your favorite word.”

“You kept doing stupid things, Luna.”

“I was a child.”

“So was I.”

She had me in her late thirties, but that’s not what she’s talking about.

We lie in silence for a minute, digging our fingers between the seams in the ropes. I don’t know anything about knots. I wasn’t a scout or a sailor or anything useful. My mother was a witch who couldn’t teach me anything and my father was… I don’t know what.

“Can you get us out on a light wave or something?” I ask.

“This light isn’t suitable. It’s…”

“Dead?” I say it as if it’s possible, not knowing much science, because I have nothing but my feelings to go on.

“Yes,” she answers, then grunts to shift herself closer.

“I can’t tell if I’m making it tighter,” I protest.

“Keep working. Only one of us needs hands.”

She’s right, so I pinch and tug at her ties while she does the same to mine. The place where the built-in sofa meets the floor is spotless. No dust. No grit. Nothing like cleanliness to make me believe in magic dead places.

“Mom?”

“What?” She’s annoyed, partly with me, but mostly with the knot.

“What was wrong with Dad?”

“Nothing,” she scoffs. “Not much an exorcism couldn’t fix.”

“Really, Ma?”

“Really, Luna.”

“Sorry. I forgot who I was talking to.”

She doesn’t answer, and as we’re back to back, trying to free each other, I think I’m sorry I asked, then I think… no. I’m not sorry. She’s not going to cut me for asking questions I shouldn’t.

“I need you to elaborate on that,” I say after one particularly frustrating attempt to loosen a tie I can’t see. “You took me away.”

“Here we go again.”

“Yes.” I try to kick her, but my feet are tied together. “We’re going again. Unless half of you is still in a fountain, tell me.”

“Your father wasn’t your father.”

“I look just like him.”

“You have his genes.” She sighs and her fingers loosen for a moment. “There was…” Another deep breath. She grabs my ropes again. “… an entity.”

“Like a ghost? He was a ghost ?” I huff out a short laugh. “Another dead man in my life.”

“Not a ghost. Something much more powerful was following me.”

This statement is so close to the narcissism of my childhood mother that a cold hand grips my heart. Wide-eyed, staring out the window into the flattest gray sky, my mind empties.

No. I am not that kid, and she is not that mother.

“I loved him,” she says. “Your father was the kindest, gentlest soul. He was a truly decent person.”

“Dad?” I’ve never heard her speak about him like this. He was always someone who was capable of the worst atrocities. “My father?”

“The man I met. The man I married. But… ah! I think I got this one.” She grunts, getting closer, and digs her finger under a strand. “He was the TA in my Lit class at NYU.”

This bit of family lore involves Dante’s walk through the afterlife.

She says, “And he preferred Purgatory to Heaven, because… hope. And he thought the Inferno was just spite. Actually, he found the whole thing plain spiteful. But that was who he was. He didn’t like nastiness.

He understood why people lied to protect themselves.

That was human. But when someone told the truth to hurt? Or exert power?”

“That pissed him off.”

“Very much.”

“Oh, don’t move,” I say when my fingertip catches a space. “This one’s coming loose.”

She relaxes her arms while keeping her fingers in position over my knots. “For a long time, I figured I’d tell you this, but you were so headstrong. Always insisting you were dragged around against your will. Like you ever did anything you didn’t want to.”

“That’s as loose as it’s getting. You can move again.”

“This is better.” She twists her wrists in her binds. “You weren’t stupid.”

“I know.”

“You terrified me.” She sighs. “You never seemed smart enough to do what you were capable of, and I was worried you’d…

I don’t know. Hurt yourself. Anyway. Your father was an adjunct at Columbia.

I was trying to get published. We were young.

It was good. We had everything we needed.

One night, he came home… different. Wild.

I’d say passionate, but it was more… forceful. ”

“Oh, Ma. Did he…?”

“We’re not litigating that right now,” she snaps. “He was different. Then he was different again and again, and he never remembered it. Then I was pregnant, and that was that.”

“That was what?”

“He was back to normal, all the time.”

“I don’t know what any of this means!” I’m nearly in tears from the frustration of the knots and the conversation.

“He was possessed. It was the demon that haunted the Strega.”

“Jesus.” I let my arms go slack. This is the Mom I’ve always known and tried so hard to love. She never changed, she just got better at hiding the paranoia that came between us. “Is this the same demon who was afraid of an herb on the door?”