Mom presses deeper against my back. Her fingers tighten into my sweater. My arm. Her nails are digging through the wool to bite into skin.
I flinch.
She doesn’t notice.
“Am I the one lying to her, though?” Mom cocks her head as if in challenge. “Have you been honest with her,Kellen?”The way she hisses his name sends a chill down my spine. “Have you told her whyyou’rehere?”
I don’t have to look at the boys to feel their rising tension. It’s a smog, leeching what clean air remains. It’s a hard knot in Kellen’s jaw. A narrowing of Lukan’s eyes. It’s the way Roan shifts like he’s ready to lunge forward and snatch me away.
“What are you talking about?” I ask Mom.
The hand twisted in my sweater unfurls and the arm snakes across my middle. Her chin settles on my shoulder.
“I think they should tell you,” she murmurs, a little taunt in her voice.
My gaze settles on Kellen and I don’t miss the faint glint of silver in his eyes. I pull in a slow breath, bracing myself.
“Kellen?”
“Yes,Kellen,tell her the truth. Tell her about your promise to your God to bring her to him. To offer her as a sacrifice to free him from his prison.” Her hand toys with the hem of my sweater. Drifts up to pick at the button. “Tell her what you actually are.”
“Let her go,” Kellen says instead. “Your fight is with us. She’s innocent in this.”
Mom huffs. “I would never hurt her. I’m protecting her from you and that monster who built his kingdom over the bodies of thousands of humans he slaughtered.”
“You’re twisting the truth,” Kellen bites out, and I realize he’s not denying it.
“Am I a sacrifice?” I whisper, heart thumping even as it creaks.
“No!” Kellen snaps at the same time Mom hisses, “Yes!”
“They need you, need you to lie on their Father’s altar and give yourself as a willing lamb to free him from the prison your people put him in to stop his murderous rampage.” Mom lifts her head to fix Kellen with a sneer. “Rina is coming home with me. Isn’t that right, Rina? We’ll go home to your dad and have stuffing just the way you like.”
“You can’t go with her,” Lukan snarls, taking a furious step forward only to come abruptly short, face slightly pale. “Rina sweetheart, please, come here.”
I think I want to. My brain is telling my legs to move but they’re refusing.
“See? She knows she can’t trust you,” Mom drawls, tugging me back another step. “She knows she’s safe with me.”
“What are you?” I blurt without thinking, head tilting in Mom’s direction.
Her blue eyes that have dulled a little too a murky, dirty dish water gray blink at me. “It’s me. Your mom. You know me, honey.”
But she smells different. Mom never wore anything with a scent. She was always so careful. But she’s drenched in a meadow of wildflowers. Dead, rotting ones under a scorching sun. Baked dirt and something decomposing in the bushes.
“What are they?” I ask instead, tracing the face I’ve known and loved my entire life.
The hand on my arm lifts to brush a lock of hair off my temple. “Shades. Fragments of a useless demiurge desperate for freedom. They wear the faces of those you know and love to gain your trust, but beneath the façade, they are wisps.”
I don’t know if that answered my question, but I’m not as scared as I thought I would be.
“What’s a demiurge?”
She picks at my button with long, talon nails. “A primordial God. A creature older than the stars. One of the original creators of earth. A blood thirsty monster who slaughtered humans for eons, drenched the soil with so much blood that everything that grows in his kingdom was red.”
I wait for the boys to protest. To deny the words. But they continue to watch me with a mix of panic and fury.
“How was he stopped?” I ask.
