Inherit (31 page)

Before I can assure him that I do understand and have it all under control, the door explodes open and my mother is in front of me, screaming incantations and casting a huge, firm
boble
around my aunt. It’s pure white and blue and gorgeous, but Hina raises her hand and smashes through it, clawing for my mom. She grabs her by the wrist and my mother screams.

My mother.

Absent, always.

Uncaring.

Unknowing.

My mother.

The
smør
is already casting, released from my fingers on a pulse of sure power, the final solution to Hina’s destruction, the ultimate forgiveness from me to my mother, when Jonas rolls in front of it and puts up his own
Smør
shield. His glistens with the whites and blues of my mother’s magic, and, like two magnets at the same poles, the shields repel.

For an instant.

The drape and power of my shield seems to weigh down on Jonas and it melds to his shield like warm rubber over metal, dripping and coating every seam. The muscles of his arms quake and bunch as he pushes with all his power. Hina laughs and strikes at my mother again.

Time stops for a long second. I can save her, or I can save him.

I can’t save them both.

And the truth is a freight train to my brain; it’s my arrogant stupidity and hate that brought them where they are.

“Wren! Save him!” My mother points at Jonas, his arms going slack, as Hina flies at her, hands at her throat.

Because my heart is too decimated to make this decision on my own, I listen to my mother and go to Jonas, sliding my arms around his, taking the impossible weight of the two warring shields. “I can’t.” I flex and push, I dig my feet into the ground and twist my body until I’m sweating and every single muscle aches, but nothing I do is remotely enough. My own toxic magic is going to crush me and the guy I love. “I don’t have the strength to do this.”

“Crush the
boble
,” he gasps.

“These are
smør
,” I say through my brand new, insistent sobs. “I’m going to take the weight, alright? I want you to duck out of the way, do you hear? When the shields fall into each other, they’ll negate. They’ll destroy each other.”

His laugh is a hammer striking a nail dead center. “And you’ll be killed when they do, you little idiot. Crush the damn
boble
. Around my neck.”

“What will it do?” I reach for it with one twisted arm, but when he adjusts his shoulder to redistribute the weight, the
boble
slides out of my reach.

“The kiss,” he grits between his clenched teeth. “Magic made from love is crazy strong.”

Corny sweet love, concentrated in this little trinket? How strong could it possibly be? This is a
boble
, the shield that’s mostly good for defense.

Maybe it’s the underdog of all shields?

But I have a feeling this isn’t going to be the dark horse that explodes out of the gate to win the race for us. I have a feeling that this is nothing more than a trinket and breaking it open will produce, at best, a strong, repelling
boble
that will give us a quick minute of relief before the end. I make up my mind to use that last minute to kiss Jonas one more time. A final sweet before it’s all over.

I let out another sob I wish I could bite back, but do what he asks. I grab the
boble
and crush it open, then roll in Jonas’s arms so we’re facing, and press my lips to his, attempting to transfer every ounce of love that I’ve been holding back now that we only have a few seconds left.

The clack of the breaking shell is deafening. Jonas’s eyes go almost pure blue as his pupils shrink to tiny pinpricks in the blinding light. I look over my shoulder and see that the
boble
has sent wild arms of power snaking and shooting out and around us. It jumps from my hand and a solid white core blinks once, twice, and finally detonates. A flashbulb light pulses through the room and sends both shields ricocheting with an earsplitting boom through the wall and out of the house.

We’re alive.

Without a pause, without a breath, I jump up and run to my mother, lying on the floor, Hina next to her. Sakura stands over both of them, her chest rising and falling, her gold and violet eyes rabid. I fall to my knees next to my mother and brush some of that damn spun-gold hair out of her face. She moans and moves her head from side to side. In that second, I don’t care about coming off as brave or smart or tough. I sob my ass off because my mom is okay and so is Jonas. Against all odds, I have them both with me. I cradle her head in my arms and run my hands over all that irritatingly gorgeous hair and hold her close, my beautiful, alive mother.

My mother is going to be fine.

Hina, in contrast, is grey-skinned and murky-eyed. When I look closely, I can see the sheen of a
boble
snared tight around her face and neck. Like someone cast one over her and pulled it tight, suffocating her with it.

The underdog shield. I definitely misinterpreted how powerful it could really be.

Sakura stands a few feet away, studying her hands, which are shaking and glowing a sickly green.

Jonas rushes over, pushing me out of the way so he can chant and perform his healing methods on my mother.

“Will she be okay?” I have to dare myself to ask.

He pauses the chant and looks up. “Just fine.” He picks her up and moves her to the couch, talking to me over his shoulder. “She’ll be asleep in a few minutes, and I’ll get someone to look her over. But she’ll be fine, Wren. Don’t worry.”

I wring my hands and bite my lips, but I do trust him. I do, so I just put a blanket over her, tucked to her chin, like I always wanted done when I was a tiny kid, and I step back to let her heal.

My woozy attention steals to Sakura, still staring at her hands. I drift closer to her and try to keep my eyes off the corpse of her mother on the floor between us.

“You saved my mother.” I work hard to unstick my voice from the back of my throat. “You saved her.” Loki trots out from between the destroyed pieces of wall and broken glass and rubs against my ankles. I pick her up and hold her tight in my arms, serenity spreading quickly through my body. There is finally some silence, some calm in the air. This feels like the beginning of peace among the rubble of our festering fight, even in the wake of Sakura’s enormous blood sacrifice.

My cousin finally takes her oddly mismatched eyes off her hands and regards me with a contempt so severe, I’ve only ever seen it at that level on one other person’s face, and she’s dead on the floor. “I don’t give a solitary fuck about your mother, Wren,” Sakura seethes. “How could I? I killed my own. And now I have a power you couldn’t begin to understand.” She flicks the tips of her fingers and a frothy, dangerous slew of
boble
s foam out like so many evil minions.

“Sakura, what your mother drew, this power, it’s really, really dangerous. I’m talking nuclear, toxic danger. Trust me, it almost made me kill—”

“That’s your problem,” she snaps, marveling at the frenetic magic
boble
s bobbing and tipping off the ends of her shredding fingers like the fizzing overflow from countless cans of shaken soda. “You
almost
kill. You
almost
dominate. You
almost
have the guts. But my mother was wrong. You’re not the one who will revitalize the Kochi name. You aren’t strong enough. Smart enough. Tough enough. You aren’t enough to bring pride back to our pathetic family name. There’s a place of honor reserved for the most powerful witch in the coven. That’s my place now, and there sure as hell isn’t enough room at the top for both of us, bitch.”

Before I can talk her out of her madness, embrace her, thank her, warn her, threaten her, there’s a thunderous crack, a flash of green light, and she snaps out of my sight like a mirage, leaving the heady threat of dangerous déjà vu to come.

Vee’s hand on my shoulder loosens an abbreviated scream from my throat. Jonas looks over, worry in the lines on his forehead and around his eyes. “She’s gone,” I tell no one in particular, staring at the spot she left shimmering with her mutated energy.

“Gone,” Vee repeats, pressing her hair back from her forehead and licking her lips. “Let’s hope she stays that way, hon. Cause I’ve seen about all my sanity can handle of that crazy pink-haired witch and the rest of her insane entourage.”

Jonas approaches us, dark purple rings under his eyes, shoulder muscles slack, mouth determined. Too much emotion slides and crashes behind his eyes when he looks at me, but when he turns to Vee, it’s nothing but calm, deep waters. He takes her hands, and I know exactly how soft the skin is and that the lilac glitter of her nail polish is a color she reserves exclusively for spring. But I flash back to the ocean in her brain and realize that there’s six times more I don’t know about my best friend compared with what I do know.

My rushing thoughts are dulled by the roll and crash of Jonas’s ancient chant, directed at Vee with every spare scrap of energy he can muster. She relaxes like she’s under the spell of a skilled masseuse, rolls her shoulders and moans. “Mmm. I have no idea what you’re doing, but please keep doing it.” After another minute of his low, deep chants, it seems like she’s sleeping on her feet.

I wave my hand in front of Vee’s face and shoot Jonas a wary, questioning look. You could bounce a quarter off his smile. “She’s sleeping. Kind of. She’ll sleep a ton, and when she wakes up, this will all be really fuzzy.”

I wrap my arms around him slowly, carefully. “Thank you. For everything.”

He kisses the top of my head. “Don’t thank me just yet. There’s a ton of cleanup to do, and I need to get busy.” He looks into the corner, and tenses, pushing me back slightly.

“What is it?” I ask, looking where he’s focused. Then I see it.

Two red handprints on the wall. And no Magda.

“Where did she go?” I whisper, a chill running through me.

“I have no idea.” Jonas’s words are a stark lie. I know it. I can tell. But it’s a lie I’m willing to live with right now, when I need the cushion of a few lies to soften the hard crack of my current reality.

Chapter 29

Bestemor lies in the middle of a webbed maze of blipping, beeping monitors and machines that would have pissed her off to no end, pre-coma. These were added to her room after a steady stream of priests, priestesses, mediums, shamans, healers, herbalists, doctors, and specialists shrugged their shoulders and told us they had no idea what was wrong with her.

At first I stomped my feet over all the nursing-homish medical stuff, but I finally agreed when it occurred to me that Bestemor might hate it so much that she’d miraculously wake up just to order us to get all the clutter out of her bedroom.

It didn’t work.

Of course.

So I try the old soap opera trick of sitting by her side, holding her hand, waiting for her to wake up and just be fine.

Fine. Like my life, now at a level of normal that’s the best it can be.

As in, I hang out with Vee and put up with Zivalus. I’m struggling through my schoolwork at home, since I’m still suffering from some faux illness on paper. Sakura is off terrorizing the Pacific, I guess. Mom and Dad and I live together in the little half-falling down house that I’ve been waiting for them to come back to all my life. And Jonas?

I have to skip Jonas for this second.

Gorgeous, loyal Loki sleeps curled in a ball at night and trails me like a shadow all day. I wish, I want, I desire, and it all blooms into being like the unbelievable peek of spring flowers before the last of the snow has completely melted away.

Every wish of mine is answered except one.

I’m holding her hand, willing her pale skin back to pink. Her lips look painfully chapped, so I grab a pot of cherry lipgloss from my pocket and make two shiny swipes on her lifeless mouth.

No! Not lifeless.

Just paused. Just slightly paused until we can push play, and it will be better than before. Loki naps on the floor under Bestemor’s elevated hospital bed, and I run a foot over her fur, scratching behind one soft ear with my big toe. She rolls closer to me in her sleep.

My mother’s footfalls break my vigil. I’m still getting used to having her so close so often. I once bought this fantastic jacket because it was on sale. It was also a size too small. No matter how much I wanted it to fit and look amazing, there was always this tightness in my elbows or squeeze in my shoulders that kept me from being able to really enjoy wearing it.

My mother’s presence is exactly what I always wanted, and something I just can’t get comfortable in.

“Any changes?” She sits on the edge of the bed, and, even though she’s Bestemor’s daughter, I feel a twinge of territorial aggression.

“Nothing. Do you think it’s a spell?” My fingernails bite into my palm at the thought that Hina cast something complicated and died before it could be undone.

“Your father doesn’t think so.” She wraps her arms around herself. “Um, Wren?” Her voice pulls out all the consonants of my name. “We need to talk. About the powers you unleashed with Magda and Hina.”

The bite of my fingernails doesn’t just hurt my palm. My fingertips are still sore and scabbed, yellowing with aging bruises and stitched here and there by my father while my mother watched with big, scared cornflower eyes.

“Yeah. It got pretty out of hand. I won’t be doing that again.” I have no idea if that’s true, but I really don’t want to discuss it with my mother. Usually she backs off when I placate her, but this time she keeps nosing in.

“The thing is, you’ve opened something. It’s not just going to be put back in. You accessed a rage-based set of shields, a set that no one since our oldest ancestors has ever attempted to use. I had a feeling you might be able to unlock them, which is why I pushed you to learn the classical shields, the ones based off of calm and love.” She presses her thumb and index finger to the bridge of her nose. “Of course, as usual, it was too little too late. That seems to be the theme of my mothering, doesn’t it?”