She wouldn’t tell me anything I needed to know, but she would take my place without realizing she was even helping me. It could buy me time to find the trapped gods. Even if it didn’t, even if I found nothing, I needed her to take my place. I could never, never give myself to Hemlock. Ew. Just no.
“Our bodies look nothing alike, we couldn’t fool the king.”
She was seriously thinking about it—trying to figure out a way it could work. “Well, I just pulled a piano out of the shadows and played music for a bunch of lost souls. I’m sure I could slap some of Ravenswood magic on you and make you look just like me.”
Chapter 19
My mother sat at my dressing table as I stood behind her, silently running a brush through her hair. Each time I combed the bristles through, her hair darkened to a deeper shade of chestnut, matching mine.
I wasn’t sure if Ravenswood would help me. I didn’t know if it was Ravenswood or the gods imprisoned somewhere that were allowing me to use whatever energy or magic there was here. All I felt was an overwhelming need to have my skin against the cold stones of the palace, so I kicked my shoes off and placed my bare feet down against the floor while I readied Mary.
Vibrations coursed through the soles of my feet and the tips of my toes immediately. It felt as if I stood on hot coals, warmth and fire pressed up and through my legs, tingling through my knees and spreading heat through my veins.
I had Mary scrub her face clean and change her clothes into something the king would have asked me to wear—a black-laced bodice and sheer skirts with small white skulls adorning the trim.
I twisted her hair into twin braids and spiraled them into great horned shapes, pinning each one in place. She watched me quietly through thinly slit eyes.
In the drawers of the dressing table were powders and oils Rose once used on me, and I rummaged through them until my hands knew which ones to choose. A thick layer of dark oil across her forehead and down the bridge of her nose—a brush of alabaster powder along her cheekbones and jaw. Black kohl around her eyes and mouth, drawing her features like a sugar skull. With each stroke of the brush, with each press my fingers, my mother began to look more and more like my twin.
“How are you doing this?” she whispered into the mirror.
My hands stilled and my cheeks warmed, but I said nothing.
“You were always drawn to the wicked things here. The forbidden,” she whispered.
“I’m surprised you remember me at all.” My words were harsh and cruel, as bitterness coated my mouth.
“How could I forget you, the strange thing that grew inside me when I was only sixteen. Just the idea of you made my life a living hell.”
I froze, anger bubbling inside me.
“Yet,” she whispered to herself, “Hemlock would never have chosen me otherwise. He wanted a child born in death and that is what I gave him. I didn’t realize then he was raising you to be his queen. I thought it was me he loved.”
My eyes filled with tears and I pressed my fingers to my cheeks trying to stop them from brimming over. “And if you knew?” My voice broke. “If you knew in the beginning it was only me he wanted?”
She put a hand to her lips and smiled at her reflection, admiring it. Tilting her head each way, she examined her image, then plumped the cleavage that spilled out and over her corset.
I kept thinking I wanted her to say something motherly. I wanted warmth and kindness and belonging. I wanted a mother who—
“My meeting him saved your life. I was on my way to Planned Parenthood when I first saw him. He wooed me and promised me the world if I kept you.”
I began to unravel, my nerve endings fraying and sparking as I stood there before her. I sank into the chair next to her, trembling. My feet hung above the floor and the energy that Ravenswood always poured into me seemed to mist up from the stones and curl in fog around my toes.
I placed my hand against my heart and realized my shirt was damp from tears. It hurt too much to believe—I wanted her to be under some sort of evil spell, a curse where she was enchanted by Hemlock and didn’t remember she was supposed to love and cherish me. If there were places like Ravenswood, couldn’t fairy tales and curses be real as well?
She kept smoothing her hand over the hair at the nape of her neck, murmuring words I couldn’t hear. Petting herself and making duck-like faces into the mirror, she was practicing for when she would see Hemlock next.
She truly didn’t care about me at all. I was never wanted, never loved. My throat tightened, making it hard for me to speak. “You’ll spend as long as you can with Hemlock now. Go to him and give him everything he asks for.”
Her smile sickened me.
“But I promise you, it will be the last time you ever see him,” I spat.
She was gathering up her skirts when I said the threat and she stilled instantly, staring at me with wide eyes. “What do you mean?” she asked.
“He promised to give you the world if you kept me, that’s what you said, correct?” I didn’t wait for her to answer. I stood up from the chair and walked toward the shadows in the corner of the room. “You failed your end of the bargain.”
“What do you mean?”
