Chapter 184: The Promise I Broke

BONNIE

She stroked my cheek with her thumb, and for a moment, the fear in her eyes softened into something that hurt far more to witness.

"Your aunt has a good heart, Bonnie. I want you to remember that. She loves you, and there are things I would trust her with that I would trust no one else to hold. But a good heart cannot always protect you from what a person does not understand."

She glanced towards the window again, lowering her voice until I had to strain to hear her.

"People are afraid of what they cannot explain, sweetheart. They call it wickedness when they cannot name it, a curse when they cannot control it. And sometimes, when they realise that what frightens them could also make them powerful, their fear becomes something much worse."

Her fingers tightened around mine.

"Power is a peculiar thing, Bonnie. Those who have enough of it rarely understand what it costs to be without it. But the ones who have none, the ones who have spent their lives watching others climb higher while they remain where they are, can become very hungry for it. They will search for any advantage, any weakness, anything they can seize to change their place in the world. And when they find something rare, something no one else can possess, they do not always see a person. Sometimes, they see a ladder."

Her eyes returned to mine, and I saw something terrible in them, the particular sorrow of someone who had learned these lessons long before she should have needed them.

"You must never give such people a reason to look at you and see a way up, my love. Because once they do, they will not care how small you are, how frightened you feel, or how much it hurts to be taken from the people who love you. They will only care about what you can give them."

The words went through me like a nail.

"Mama?"

"Promise me." She kissed my forehead, hard, almost desperately, and I felt the wetness of her tears against my skin. "Promise me you will never do it again. Promise me, my darling."

"I promise."

"Say it properly."

"I promise I will never do it again."

She crushed me against her chest, so tightly that I could feel her heart hammering against my ear, a frantic bird beating itself bloody against the bars of a cage. One hand cupped the back of my head while the other held me against her as though she could keep the entire world away by refusing to let me go.

Her lips moved against my hair. I strained to hear what she was saying, but there were no more warnings, no more explanations. Only the same words, whispered over and over, a prayer or a spell or a plea to something that had already begun to turn its attention towards us.

Please, please, please, please.

The dream began to fray.

The sunlight thinned, and the warm edges of the kitchen faded to grey, the colors bleeding away like ink on paper held too close to a flame. My mother’s arms remained locked around me, but I could feel her slipping. Her shape grew indistinct, her warmth receding, and her voice stretched thinner and thinner until it was no more than a thread I could not quite grasp.

I tried to hold on.

For once, I wanted the dream to stay and keep going. To see what else I had forgotten or locked up.

But the kitchen dissolved around us, and I woke with my own name caught in my throat, the sheets tangled around my legs.

The first thing I noticed was that I wasn’t lying down.

The ceiling was unnervingly close. A cold breath of air moved beneath my back, and my dress hung from my shoulders at an awkward angle. Beside my face, the pillow I had been sleeping on drifted past, turning slowly as though it had forgotten which way the floor was.

Lysander lay beneath me, still asleep, one arm stretched out where it had been wrapped around my waist.

I was floating three feet above the mattress.

For several seconds, I could do nothing but stare at him. At the dark sweep of his lashes against his cheeks, at the steady rise and fall of his chest, at the hand that had been holding me even after sleep had claimed him.

I did not scream. I did not move.

I barely dared to breathe.

All I could see was my mother on her knees in that sunlit kitchen, tears streaming down her face as she begged a little girl to promise something she had not understood.

Never do it again.

Slowly, carefully, I let go.

I had no full idea what I was releasing or how I knew what to do. I only knew that I had to bring myself down, that the space between my body and the bed had to disappear. I concentrated on the mattress beneath me, on the weight I ought to have felt, on the simple, ordinary act of lying down.

I descended as gently as a sleeping child being lowered into a crib.

The sheets barely stirred when I settled against them.

Lysander shifted beside me, his arm curling instinctively around my waist before drawing me back against his chest. He made a quiet sound in his sleep and pressed his face closer to my hair, unaware that anything had happened.

I lay perfectly still, my heart thundering against my ribs, and stared into the darkness.

My mother’s face burned behind my eyelids, no longer the pale blur that had haunted my dreams for years. I could see every detail now, the silver-grey of her eyes, the little notch in her chin, the terror she had tried so desperately to hide from her own child.

Finally, I remembered her.

And with her came something else, something I had never known I was missing.

I had an aunt.

Abra.