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My feet blunder back again, making my movements jerky and unpredictable.
“I remember you. You’re the little monster I made a few shiny coins off of.”
That moment in the cemetery comes screaming back to me with pitchforks and rebellions gathering in my head. Her eyes were spiteful and without any love for her children. And for the first time, the void purrs in anger.
“What is she doing here?” I ask through my clenched teeth.
I know everything I learned from my trips into the past should make me less inclined to kill this woman. I know. She suffered from the Mind Phantoms the same as my father, the same as Charles Offborth. I remember it well.
But the last time I really saw her in person was the day she looked at Scarlett like a poisoned insect.
“She’s sick, dashna.”
I see the memory curdle in front of me, showing me the ugliness of its insides.
“Scarlett deserved everything that happened to her. She’s nothing to me. No daughter of mine.”
Sick? I dart my eyes back into that large, comfy bed. And this time, I focus a little harder on her face. It’s oily, pale, and bony. Her breaths are fast and shallow, like tiny, useless pants.
“What’s wrong with her?”
Kane moves to place a hand on my back in a small show of support.
“That chemical ya government injects to control ya people. It’s like a slow-releasing poison if abused for too long.” Asena looks back at the sickly woman huffing and puffing in her sleep. “I’m so sorry I lied to ya, dashna. But her story should be heard by ya before she passes on. Please.”
Passes on? She’s dying?
I don’t know what to think. How to feel about seeing her again. It’s a firestorm of thoughts and memories warring against my barriers. The void flickers on like a lightbulb I thought had burned out.
I see the conversation my parents had after we were born. I see how our mother’s face was beet red, gushing tears, and the desperation on her face to keep us.
“I can protect my babies. I will protect Skylenna and Scarlett.”
She fought so hard to ignore the prophecy Judas gave them. To defy the plan Sophia was making. All because she wanted to raise us right. She wanted to give us the home and parents we deserved.
“I can’t leave her!” she wails into the void. “I can’t separate my babies!”
“We can go if you want,” Kane says in my ear.
I give him a side-long glance. He looks concerned and a little unsure about this situation. But not in the way he would if he remembered all that has happened to me as a child. To Scarlett. That might be what hurts more than this impossible decision I’m facing.
The fact that Kane can’t understand how devastating this is for me.
“I’ll see her,” I finally announce.
Asena’s body sags in relief.
“Would you like me to wait outside?” Kane asks.
Even though he doesn’t know why this is one of the heaviest moments of my life…I need him right now. God, I need him more than anyone alive. If he had all of his memories, he would have never even thought to ask that question. I shake my head, and he follows me in.
It takes me several seconds to sit down on the soft fur chair next to her bed. But I can’t help but stare down at her, studying how much she looks like me. Older. Sadder. A few scars on her clammy face.
I take a shaky breath in while I sit down.
The creak of my chair has her cat-shaped eyes opening slowly, like she’s trying so very hard to pull herself out of a drug haze, a feverish coma. The whites of her eyes are a dark shade of yellow, covered in so many burst blood vessels.
Those wrinkled eyelids stretch back in drowsy surprise at the sight of my face. Her gasp rattles in her chest from phlegm and unwanted fluids gurgling in her lungs. I hold my wince as her breaths turn to small wheezes.
