“Thank Gaia, Riel, you’re awake.”
It didn’t take much to see that she was clinging to him just as hard. I rubbed the daisy stem at the sight. A welter of emotions flooded me, ones I didn’t particularly want to name because they made me feel petty.
Riel squeezed him back, then murmured, “Daniel, put me down.”
“Don’t want to.”
I snickered at his mumble, as did Riel and Matt.
“Why aren’t you in your Rut?” he grumbled, patting her back. “Why aren’t you ripping our clothes off?”
“It’s probably been delayed,” I pointed out. “She’s just been through something major, after all.”
“True. I’m just ready for my Claim,” he murmured.
Her eyes softened as she reached up and cupped his chin. “I’m ready for it too,” she whispered, “but everything will happen when it’s supposed to.”
“If I hear more about kismet, I’ll go fucking nuts. I swear, what with those two and your grandparents—”
Her jaw tensed. “My grandmother, what is she—” Her words broke off. “Never mind. I’ll learn the truth from her myself.”
“That’s gonna be an awkward conversation,” I muttered quietly, and when Matt winced, I knew he’d heard me.
“First things first,” she said after she blew out a breath. Lifting her hand, the vortex made another appearance, and a daisy appeared for Daniel.
“Cool! You didn’t do that before.” His good cheer felt weird in the face of my soberness and Matthew’s cool regard.
“No,” she agreed. “I have a few more tricks up my sleeve than before.” Her eyes darkened, and upon noticing it, I scrambled onto my knees and reached for her.
“Riel, whatever it is, you’re not alone. We’re with you.”
Her eyes closed tightly for a second. “I know. I know you are now, but what if I’m too much of a freak—”
“Then you’ll be our freak,” Dan stated simply, and Sol, if that didn’t paraphrase it all.
“He’s right,” I whispered. I knew it was strange that I felt like I needed to compete, but I couldn’t stop myself. The news that my father had cut himself off from Gabriella because of his situation was fresh in my mind. I didn’t want to be separated from her. I didn’t want her to favor one of us more than the others like her grandmother did. The very thought sent chills down my spine. “You’ll be our freak, and we’ll be yours, because as far as I’m concerned, no Fae can turn daisies into metal.”
Dan’s eyes widened. “That’s definitely a new development. What the Sol have I missed?”
I raised my daisy, twisted it in my fingers, and murmured, “Yup.”
“Sol,” he breathed, stepping closer to the small flower and staring at it. “You think we’ll all do something weird to the daisy?”
I cocked a brow at Riel. “She’s the one leading the show.”
Riel’s smile was small, but I could see the pain on her face. I knew it wasn’t physical, but emotional. She knew something, knew it and wasn’t telling us because she was scared.
Scared of herself? Of what she could do now? Had she been experimenting as we slept? Or scared of how we’d respond?
I didn’t know, but I wanted to. Still, we needed to know what we were up against—we needed to have that conversation first.
Dan, without further ado, grabbed his flower, and when he did, he almost dropped it. Light shone from the veins within the flower. Where chlorophyll lay, the pigment that allowed a plant to convert light energy into food, a white glow now burned hotly.
“What the fuck?” he spluttered, raising it by the stem and twirling it so he could see the individual strands of light that had appeared upon his touch. When he placed it down on the bed, the light disappeared, then, when he picked it up again, the glow flashed once more.
“You’re the Energizer bunny,” Matthew rasped, but his attempt to make a joke fell flat.
“If that’s me, then what the Sol are you?” Dan challenged, his attention still on the gently glowing daisy.
“I guess I’m about to find out,” Matt mumbled, and, sucking down a sharp breath, he reached for the flower.
Which instantly disappeared.
As we all gaped at his hand, he shook it, and the flower dropped to the sheets, once again fully visible.
Gulping at the sight, I whispered, “Does this mean we have to wear gloves for the rest of our lives?”
The uneasy silence that followed my question said it all—none of us knew the answer.
❖
Riel
The sight of my grandmother sitting at the kitchen table had my heart stuttering in my chest.
After her death, there had been so many moments of regret. I figured it was normal for any sixteen-year-old though. I’d wished I’d spent more time with her. Wished I’d been more patient and had listened to the stuff she had to say.
But all those regrets and recriminations had been for nothing, because those nine wasted years meant exactly that—nada.
They’d been a lie.
A big, fat, mean whopper.
I just had one question, and she flinched the second I uttered it, “Why?”
As she moved the mug in her hand, the earthenware scraped against the scored Formica table in a kitchen that made my battered family one back in Miami look posh. I knew from the guys that we were in Cuba, in the original homestead where my grandmother had been raised, but seeing was believing.
How had our family been so powerful yet so poor too?
The house was ramshackle to be sure, but the furniture was just as rustic. I figured the place hadn’t been lived in for a while, but it was like walking on to a Hispanic version of a Little House on the Prairie.
And that wasn’t a compliment.
The table was scratched. Deep gouges from only Sol knew what decorated the surface, and she made another scuff mark by rubbing the base of her mug against it. The chair was metal, rusty down the back, and the tiles on the floor, though bright and colorful, were cracked and dirty.
The cupboards made the term ‘rustic’ sound romantic, and the stove looked like it was lit by frickin’ firewood, not gas.
She fit though. Weirdly enough, she fit.
When she raised her head, it was strange to see myself in her face. I’d looked into the mirror a thousand times and had never imagined how alike she and I were.
Her lips curved like she could read my mind. “The de Santos del Sol skipped a generation in many ways.”
“What do you mean?”
“Your mother is beautiful, but she takes after Linford. Your mother is a strong witch, but she didn’t inherit my power—you take after me in both regards.”
I gnawed on my bottom lip, unable to deny what she was saying. “Why?” I stubbornly repeated, not wanting to talk about power or my mother, just wanting to understand why she’d lied about dying. Why she’d put us all through that horrendous trauma.
“I had no choice. To keep you safe?” She shrugged. “I’d do it again. A thousand times over in fact.”
“From the AFata?”
“Yes. They wanted your connections, and I wasn’t about to let them have you. Not until you gained entrance into the Academy, at any rate. At least there you were supposed to learn something, pick up some means of protecting yourself.”
My nose wrinkled. “That didn’t happen.”
“No. Linford told me.” Her brow furrowed with irritation.
“How did you visit me in the bath? What was that about?” My mouth tightened as I thought about just how powerful I’d believed her to be by maintaining a spell throughout her passage across the realms, and instead, she’d been alive all along. I was annoyed about her lies, but more than anything, I was hurting. I felt like she’d made a fool out of us all, and that notion ran in complete contrast to what I’d always believed about her. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t sure exactly whose side my grandmother was on.
She spoke the right words, and yet, by
her actions?
Though I was still uneasy, I shrugged off the thought. She was my abuela—I had to have faith in that.
“Linford has friends at the Academy,” she admitted easily. “One of the healers. She’d kept me abreast of your situation, had told me you were agitated, and then, one day, she saw your magic manifest. I read between the lines and waded into the fray. I knew you needed me, needed guidance.”
My eyes narrowed at her. “You’ve been spying on me.”
“For years,” she said with no shame. “And you’ve needed my aid, our protection. And yet, when it came down to it, though you had more reason than most to be scared, you dove straight into the fray and caught a meteor like you were catching a ball, mija.” She shook her head. “This still makes no sense to me. Why did you do that?”
“It called to me.”
“In what sense?”
“I knew it was coming, felt it. Something wasn’t right, and I knew I could stop it.”
“How?” she pressed, but I got the feeling her question was aimed inward.
I thought about those moments before I’d known about the meteor, and knew that the joining with my Virgo had helped open my mind to something I’d not sensed before.
“Before we initiated the Rut,” I began carefully, “I didn’t sense anything. I was on edge, but I can’t say why.”
“I knew you were supposed to be there. The portal bringing you to Honolulu was foretold, even if the hows and whys weren’t. But this?” She shook her head. “This wasn’t foretold.”
“No Seer gets a true, all-encompassing vision,” I replied easily, my gaze on her as I stepped farther into the kitchen and took a seat. “You left us.”
Her mouth twisted. “I had no choice.”
“There’s always a choice.”
“My lies had come home to roost, querida. I had no choice but to erase myself from the scene. You needed outside help, and yet, your mother was in the dark. I couldn’t tell her, not at that moment. Things had to ride out, otherwise the AFata would have come and taken you away.
“They would have drawn you into their cause, and I wasn’t about to let you be tarred and feathered for my sins.”
“What was that thing with the bath? Why did you visit me that way?” I rasped, pleating my fingers together and staring at my chipped nail polish with the nails that were tipped with some weird shiny foil stuff. With all my other changes, ones that had my Virgo gaping at me a little, I had to wonder when the last time I’d just sat down and painted my nails? The normal act seemed so childish now when I was faced with…
I grunted.
I didn’t know what I was faced with. Not after what my men had done back in the bedroom, and not after what I’d done too.
Still, when she answered, I was glad she realized I wanted more than just a ‘why’ but a ‘how’ too.
“I needed you to realize what the boys were to you. There was no time for you not to take them and start the Claiming process. As to the other ‘why,’ I’ve always had an affinity with water—that was why I used that medium. The only other way to visit you was in dreams, and that skill was never my forte.”
“Why are my Virgo so important?” I shook my head, not understanding her logic. “You didn’t Claim yours.”
“You were fated to Claim yours,” she countered. “I didn’t lie about it all. Just mixed things up. And look how things panned out? If Noa and I had stayed together, if I had Claimed them, then how could Seph be your Virgo?”
My mouth tightened at that. Being without Seph? Never going to happen. Just the prospect of him not being in my life was an agony beyond compare. I mean, I guessed I’d have had a different Virgo, but it wouldn’t have been him, and I needed him to be the exact way he was. Dan to make my mood bubble, Seph to ground me, and Matthew to ask the questions that the answers of which would keep us safe.
Because I couldn’t deny she was right on that score, I demanded instead, “Why couldn’t you tell me the truth? I’d have understood.”
“Because the truth wasn’t something you could handle. Some things need to be learned when the dice fall.”
I blinked at her. “That’s BS.”
She narrowed her eyes at me. “BS it might be, but I’m your abuela and I won’t have you talking to me that way.”
“You can’t pull that card on me. You’ve been dead for nine years. You’re a memory at this moment, and you’ve just come back into my life, lied to me about everything, and think you can pick up the pieces and demand to be reinstated as, what? My matriarch?” I scoffed at her, aware I was pushing things.
Each line had a matriarch or a patriarch, depending on how the magic fell in each family. They commanded respect and were the head of the line. My mother currently held that position… sort of, seeing as Gabriella wasn’t technically dead.
My grandmother gritted her teeth and muttered, “So obstinada.”
“Exactly like you raised me to be,” I snapped.
She sucked down a breath but her mouth twisted in a wry smile. “Perhaps. We must talk, Gabriella. Not about the past, but about the future.” She reached out and grabbed my hand, and even though I was mad at her, I slipped my fingers through hers and clung to her. She was safety, a line of normalcy in a world that had suddenly gone nuts.
I needed my abuela just as I had when I was seven and my magic wouldn’t behave like my mama wanted it to.
She twisted my hand around and stared at my nails. “This is new.” She tugged, with her spare hand, at one of my new blonde curls too. “And this. As well as this.” She cupped my chin, tilted my head back and stared at my eyes. A shake of her head said it all. “The magic manifests in many ways.”
Nodding, I gazed at the foil-tipped nails that were half-metal. It was a strange feeling, one that was only augmented as she raked her fingertips along the edges.
“Metal.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know.” How could I? Below those gilt tips, where the white crescent moons lay, there were still the remnants of my last manicure, and the contrast made my nails look like some crazy form of art. The kind of shit you saw on Instagram that went viral.
She pursed her lips, her focus on the tips. “What you did will change you in ways that you can’t foresee. And I’m not just talking physically either. This is just the beginning.”
I managed to answer calmly, even though everything inside me was roiled up. “I know.”
“You can’t know.”
It was my turn to blow out a breath. “I can. I just had a show in my bedroom.”
“What kind of show?”
With my free hand, I repeated the spell that I’d cast in front of my Virgo. Not that it was a spell, per se, more of a desire. But, unlike before when desires were just fervent wishes, this one was realized. When the daisy lay on my open palm, my grandmother hissed out a breath, and she slammed into the chair’s backrest.
“Cristo.”
I gulped, because that about summed it up.
Magic could do many things, but bring life? Nope. Bring death? Nope. It could do no ill either. There was no bad magic, only the pure, elemental kind that called upon what Gaia gave us in abundance.
“When did you learn you could do this?”
“I woke up and felt different. I cast a few spells and…” I shrugged.
“What made you call upon a flower?” she queried, her hand reaching out so she could pick up the daisy. As she stared at it, I thought about the moments that had followed my wakening.
Two of my men had been there. I’d watched them sleep for a while, and even though something inside me had felt rested, another part had been tense, on edge. Waiting.
For the other shoe to drop.
Those minutes after my grandmother had grabbed a firm hold of the meteor had flooded my memory, as had thoughts of what my grandfather had told me.
“I guess I was testing my limits.”
“Why try to bring some
thing to life?”
“Because I wanted to rip the bedroom apart.”
My words had her growing still. “You wanted to destroy?”
“Yes.” Mouth dry, I thought about those crazy seconds where my skin had felt too small to contain me. I knew my Virgo had made a similar claim, and I felt for them because it was horrible. When your very skin didn’t fit you?
Sol’s lair would be more welcoming.
“So you thought you’d counter that by being creative?” she surmised.
“Literally.” My lips were firmed as I dipped my chin.
“Why? Why did you want to destroy something?”
“I don’t know. I just felt like my skin was too tight for my body again.”
“Again?”
“That was how I felt when the meteor was crashing down to Earth.”
“Can you kill the flower?” she asked in a hushed voice.
I reached over, allowed the glow to form once more, then let the vortex reappear, except this time, it didn’t flow clockwise, but counter-clockwise.
Within seconds, there was nothing but ash on my grandmother’s hand.
“Hostia,” she spat, dropping the ash as though it were toxic. “How did you do that?”
I understood her fear. I was feeling it too, but I’d also recognized there was no need to fear it. I wasn’t a danger to anyone.
Not yet, at any rate.
I thought about how to answer her question, before explaining, “The flower has life. It pulses through it.” That’s what Daniel had exposed with his magic. “I drained that.”
“How?”
“I called upon it. Just as I breathed it into being, I retracted it.”
“But how?”
I bit my bottom lip. “I don’t know.”
“This is bad, mija. If you can do this, what else can you do?” she whispered, eyes wide and with something buried away within those chocolate brown depths, a color I’d shared with her, that had everything inside me freezing.
Needing to connect, I reached over and cupped her cheek. “Are you scared of me?”
The wrinkled face puckered as she stared at me. I knew she was taken aback at my touch, but she slowly shook her head. “Scared for you. There’s a difference.”
The Ascended: The Eight Wings Collection Page 43
