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I raised a foot to take a step but when I brought it down, it didn’t feel solid. I stumbled and went crashing to the floor, cracking my head on the corner of the bed frame.
Everything went black.
Rowena was in my life long before I met her at eight.
After the rejection of Seamus, a man my mother deeply loved, a man who might have been our savior, she fell apart. Her heart had taken too many blows.
While my mother was defeated by grief, and out of work thanks to Seamus’s spineless, vindictive way of erasing her from his life, Rowena dispatched the man who would become her pimp. Feigning love, the bastard began his endless manipulations, treating her at first better then finally worse than anyone ever had. By then pain and despair had become Emma O’Malley’s normal. She expected to be abused by life.
Rowena sent the next boyfriend, too, an aficionado of drugs, to introduce her to the only escape she would ever know, besides death.
Her sadistic plan: to subject me to even more pain and suffering, to burn my world down around me as I watched, helpless, to char me beyond repair.
To see what rose from the ashes.
To step in as my savior and rescue me from my cage, hoping for a broken, malleable weapon. One that would despise herself for the darkness within, one so deeply fractured she would grovel for crumbs of kindness, despite the many superpowers that made her infinitely more powerful than Rowena herself.
Her plan worked.
I broke.
But I scarred stronger.
When she found me, wandering Dublin at eight, and realized things hadn’t unfolded according to her careful plan, she used black arts to tamper with my mind, burying the real one beneath a false memory of her discovering me, rescuing me from my cage as I lay waiting to die. Like any good liar, she salted her lie with grains of truth; let me continue to believe I killed my mother by strangling her through the bars. She wanted me tormented by the blade of matricide.
Silverside, I meticulously ferreted out her spells and compulsions. I didn’t get rid of my demons, I don’t think that’s possible for me. But I know them by name now. And they obey me, not the other way around.
After I moved into the abbey, even before I knew the extent of Rowena’s involvement in our lives, I had a dream that I killed her.
Later, when I discovered all she’d done to us, I had that dream again.
I’d hungered to kill her.
I told myself the only reason I didn’t was because the other sidhe-seers would have ostracized me, and I’d wanted desperately to belong. I wouldn’t have felt an ounce of regret; rabid animals need to be put down. My anger would definitely have ebbed.
But there was a deeper reason that gave me pause.
Both times, as she lay dying in my dreams, I’d seen a flash of pure, evil triumph glittering in that sadistic blue gaze.
Glee. Gloating. Jubilation.
Her eyes had said: You are an animal, you are a monster, you are damaged beyond repair. I did that to you and I may be dying but I took you down with me. I may go to Hell but you’ll live in it every day for the rest of your life. I shattered you and you will never be anything but a creature of impulsive reactions, a killer of innocents. You are as ugly and corrupt as me.
I’m glad Mac killed her.
I never wanted to give her the opportunity to look at me that way or feel she had a single reason to gloat.
Because I know a priceless truth: when someone has done everything in their power to mangle your wings beyond recognition, to slice them to shreds so that they can never be used, there is only one way to win.
Fly.
RISING
What the caterpillar calls the end of the world
The master calls a butterfly.
—RICHARD BACH
