A pause. “Yes.”
I swallow. No beating around the bush, I guess. “Why?”
“I needed time to think. To process … everything.”
“Since when do you need time to—”
It hits me like a clap of lightning.
One soul destroyed, one soul saved, and one soul earned.
My eyes fly open. “Your soul. Jesse, did—do you know if—”
Wasn’t that his mother’s deal? He helped me break the curse. He saved me.
“I don’t know.” Jesse rakes a hand through his tortured hair, still avoiding my eyes. “Souls don’t tend to send you a confirmation receipt once you’ve earned them back.”
I twist onto my knees and overbalance, dropping like a sack of sand onto the blue crocheted blanket Jesse spread on the grass. Jesse immediately grabs my shoulders and hauls me upright. “What the hell? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. Just a cramp.” It’s my turn to avoid his eyes. I can’t tell him about the numbness yet. For once, I want to focus onhim.“Stop with the quips and the sarcasm, Talbot. You helped me break the curse. You saved me. Those were the terms of your mom’s deal.”
A look of pure devastation flashes across Jesse’s features, there and gone in a blink. It’s heartbreak in its most human form, and it shakes me to my core.
I touch his arm. “Jesse, what’s wrong? What is it?”
Jesse curls away, and to my shock, tears gather in his bloodshot eyes. “I’m so sorry, Mina. I—I didn’t break a damn thing.”
From under the basket, Jesse withdraws my mother’s journal. I recoil so hard I nearly overbalance again. I forgot he still had it.
“A ton of new entries appeared after you ran out of the woods. I didn’t mention it because after everything you’ve been through, you deserve a break. I figured it would be better to translate them on my own and bring the journal to you if there was anything worth discussing.”
I flip through the entries with a single finger, ensuring Jesse doesn’t notice the clumsiness in my hands. Scanning my mother’s writing alongside the pages of Jesse’s notes, I’m struck by the sheer dedication it must have taken to compile this. They spanyears.Attempt after attempt to find ways to break the curse, to end the debt without ending the entire lineage.
The last entry is dated the day before she left for the Haikal villa.
It can’t be broken.
It can only end.
I’ll give her as much time as I can.
I look up at Jesse, hands shaking so violently that his notes slide out of the journal and scatter around the blanket.
Khalto Safa’s voice rings in my ears.When your mother returned to the villa, she never planned to leave.
“When she found out Safa was sick, she went back,” I murmur. “She was going to stay in the villa and feed the curse until she died, just so I could have a life.”
I shake my head, tears clinging to my eyelashes. I couldn’t tell what tore me apart more: knowing how fiercely my mother must have loved me to make that kind of sacrifice, or understating that the monstrous part of her, the Terror of El Agamy part, had never disappeared. She would have killed so many more children, destroyed more families, just to keep me alive.
The journal tumbles from my weak fingers.
“There are Haikals mysteriously dying all over the world,” Jesse says in a broken whisper. “The first deaths started three days ago.”
I lean back, tipping my face toward the sun. I stare until my eyes burn. When I close them, the sparks behind my eyelids rearrange themselves to look like Baba. Rainie, Lucia, Aida, Alex. Like the initials we carved under our lunch table freshman year. My favorite latte at Espresso Yourself. The tooth I buried in the yard of our old house. Mama’s spiteful pomegranate tree that tries to die every winter.
I’m sitting against the towering jacaranda tree, watching its petals float on the breeze. Marveling at the bumps running beneath the concrete where its roots disappear deep, deep below.
Khalto Safa’s last words drip like poison.
