Page 83 of Jinxes and Drumsticks

Wren appears with a tray full of tea and an array of interesting looking cakes. She sits down on the other papasan and claps her hands together as if she’s starting a meeting.

“Alright, sluts. Who’s ready to talk about ways we can get Lillith out of the little hell hole they call Del Lune?”

Bastion looks unsurprised by the question, and it occurs to me that maybe he didn’t just show up to get a look at his childhood friend’s new boyfriend.

“Very cute,” Lillith says. “Pretty sure we already established there’s nothing we can do magically to make that happen, aside from breaking the curse.”

“We thought we did,” she says. “But Bastion and I came to the realization recently that that particular line of logic makes no fucking sense. Because someone already has done it, Lillith. And it only took the tiniest bit of digging to find her.”

Lillith’s mouth drops open.

Bastion nods, his expression going almost pitying. “I felt the same way,” he says.

“What?” I ask, not keeping up.

“My mother,” Lillith whispers.

I almost don’t follow. Almost forget one of the first details I learned about her. Then I remember. Lillith’s mother bailed on her. Years ago. She left.

The remaining conclusions all follow the first one like toppling dominoes. If one Nightingale has been able to leave, why not another one?

“Holy shit,” I say.

ㅤ

Ifeel. So. Stupid.

For years, I’ve lived without my mother anywhere near me, and I’ve never once thought to look for her—to find out how she managed to leave Del Lune and not immediately get crushed by an anvil falling from the sky, Looney Tunes–style.

I guess I wrote her off so long ago because of Nan’s encouragement to do so. She’s always been gone, so she’s always been just about as good as dead to me. Or maybe I just assumed she was dead. Because Del Lune has always been crammed into my skull as the only place the Nightingales could live.

But would someone selfish enough to abandon their daughter really leave the town they’re confined to, knowing it meant certain death? Why go through the trouble? Seems like a quick plummet off the Del Lune cliff faces would be a surer way to die. No cartoon coyotes necessary.

“What’s wrong?” Wren asks, pulling me out of my dissociative episode.

“I just... I don’t know why I never thought to search for my mother before this. Now that you’re saying it, it’s an obvious thing to do. For all I know, I could have been working on getting out of Del Lune for years.”

Bastion shakes his head and I think he’s going to ridicule me, but he doesn’t. “There are workings that can dissuade minds from looking too closely at things. They’re often compulsion spells that have been slightly modified to be a little gentler—a little more like camouflage. She probably worked one of those.”

“Why now, though? When she left almost thirty years ago?”

Bastion shrugs. “Maybe she used the Nightingale Pearl as the taglock, and when the demon destroyed it, he also destroyed the spell.”

“Shit,” I say. “Fuck.”

Damien puts a steadying hand on my thigh and I meet his eyes. He gives me a gentle, crooked smile as if to say, be easy on yourself, sweetheart.

“Lilipad,” Wren says gently. “We also knew about your mother and didn’t think of it. It got all of us, you know? It’s not a failure on your part. It was a strong spell.”

Something just doesn’t sit right with me that my mother, who basically turned her nose up at everything to do with magic, including her own daughter, is apparently a powerful enough witch that she can do such a masterful compulsion spell. Something felt better about that when I figured she was living somewhere like Reno, with no magic and no joy.

But no. She successfully pulled the wool over our eyes for so long.

“So. You said you think you know where she is?” I ask.

Wren nods. “I used a little bit of your hair to do a dousing ritual. She’s... actually nearby. Not Del Lune. But in California.”

Close by is relative, of course. It can take upwards of ten or twelve hours to drive up the coast. “SoCal or NorCal?” I ask.