Above me, heaviness pushed down against me shoulders, icy and startling. I darted my eyes up quickly, and again I came face to face with the darkness that called itself Erebus. The embers and soot of its mouth curled up in the corners, forming a ridiculously terrifying smile.
“You willnotstop me from healing her,” I seethed, shifting myself in front of the darkness.
Suddenly, low guttural murmurs joined the melody that surged through my hands, throaty, thick sounds, ancient and magical.
The darkness wasn’t trying to stop me?
No, it wasn’t.It was singing to me.
Albeit, horribly, but it was giving it a good try.Hopefully my ears wouldn’t start bleeding.
A song, sung through my mind in a dark familiar voice, exploding thunder, rumbling through my chest and reverberating in my heart. The symphony, like lightning clawing across the sky, trailing spidery veins of electricity pulsing through the heavens. But, just like the chaos of a storm, when I tried to follow the song, it began to fade from focus and drift away.
Gradually color bloomed across my mother’s skin, her cheeks filled with life, and her limbs thickened to a healthy girth. Her bones no longer jutted in hard angles against her skin, trying to break free, and her sores closed and scabbed, then faded to no more than pale pink stains.
The darkness that hovered around us hummed then quieted, and I stared into the face of it as it hung from the ceiling a mere inch or two before me, until it receded back into the stone and gravel of the walls.
“This place is like one enormously bad LSD trip,” I murmured to myself, then focused my attention back down toward my mother.
“It was a mistake to have let Addy hide you.” There was a sharp edge to her voice, one that quickened the already-fast pace of my pulse.
“Why would you say that?” I asked, letting her hands go. They dropped heavily to her body, like the life I had just restored in her was too much to bear.
“Things would have been different here if you stayed.” Her eyes gleamed up toward mine, her voice soft and broken. “We could have made him happy again, between the both of us.”
“Who could we have made happy? Hemlock? Why would you care about his happiness? You’re his prisoner. And so am I.”
With great care, she managed to pull herself off the chaise, her milky eyes trailing over every inch of me. “I was never his prisoner, Raine.”
Her words hit me like bullets and sent a shudder up my shine, leaving a hot ache in my chest. “You can’t mean that.”
“But it’s true.”
“No it isn’t.” My voice stumbled out, hoarse and cracked.
Her empty, distant gaze looked past me into the darkened corners of the room. Were her eyes always so vacant? I wished I could remember her when she was a young mother,my young mother. The picture Bain once gave me showed her sad but beautiful, with smooth glowing skin and soft features, not the person who was standing before me now.
If I didn’t get out of here, would I end up like her? Was I looking at my future? I glanced quickly around the room, wondering if Rose was hiding somewhere, listening.
“No one else is here with us,” she hissed, surprising me with the roughness in her tone. A moment ago she was near death and now she was snapping angrily at me.
“If there’s one thing I’ve learned here in Ravenswood, you’re never truly alone,” I said curtly, folding my arms across my chest. “But hold on, back up a minute, let me get one thing straight, you…you want to be here?”
Her eyes lingered on mine as her mouth curled into a smile. “I loved him once, very much.”
“And now?”
“It doesn’t matter,” she whispered.
“Yes, it does. I gave up everything to come back here and save you.”
“You gave up nothing, Raine. But here, you could have it all,that’swhy you’ve come back.”
“I can’t have it all. I don’t even understand what you’re talking about,” I snapped.
“Don’t you?” she asked, cocking her head to one side. “You have the power to give him things no one else can. With you here, I become nothing to him,” she said with a shaky voice. “You become his everything.”
Her admission sent shivers down my spine. “Is that all you’re concerned with? That I’m here to replace you?”
