by Hero Bowen
And before anyone could stop her, Basha turned around and hobbled away as fast as she could, through to the already burning kitchen, heading for the back door.
“Babcia!” Nadia tried to shout, but the smoke caught the back of her throat, making her cough violently. She watched her grandmother avoid the flames to reach the door that led out into the garden—though most of the garden had become a forest of towering flames with a snowfall of gray ash.
Basha turned the doorknob, flinching as a searing gust of burning wind swept through the hallway, dispersing the smoke momentarily. Before Basha vanished into a narrow break in the inferno, Nadia glimpsed a scorched line of livid red along her grandmother’s palm—and realized that the tea would’ve also dulled her wish to never feel pain.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“We have to bring her back!” Grace spluttered, eyes streaming from the smoke. “She won’t make it out there!”
Nadia could barely speak through the choking fumes, but fear made her force out the words, if only to stop her mom from running out into that blaze. “She knows what she’s doing. We have to save ourselves!”
Apparently sensing the flight risk, Miles darted forward and swept Grace into his arms. Ordinarily, she’d have gone wild for this kind of heroic display, but not this time. Strangled sobs hiccupped out of her throat as she pounded her fists against Miles’s chest, her reddened eyes fixed on the kitchen door and the terrifying furnace beyond it.
“Let me go!” she cried. “That’s my mama! She’ll die!”
Nadia held on to her mom’s hand as the trio plowed through the dense smoke, unable to see anything ahead of them. They were relying solely on Miles and his finding skill to get them out before the smoke finished them off.
“I know it’s hard, but you can’t say a word to Kaleena!” Nadia stressed, squeezing her mom’s fingers. “Babcia always does her own thing. Death isn’t reckless enough to take her, so focus on that.”
Nadia heard the door wrench open, but the smoke only billowed with renewed aggression, as though it knew it was losing its prey. Following Miles’s pull, her grip firmly on Grace’s hand, she sensed the change in texture beneath her shoes—they’d made it outside. But the wooden slats of the porch groaned underfoot, the agonized creaks seeming to say, Hurry! We can’t hold much longer! All around, flames licked up the side of the house, catching on the wooden shutters and making the gray paint bubble, though it couldn’t do much about the brickwork and the Ionic columns just yet. The blaze had to devour the guts of the house first before it grew hot enough to destroy the masonry.
They stumbled down the porch steps and along the garden path, past the defunct fountain, then slowed as the air cleared. Nadia let go of her mom’s hand and stooped, feeling like she might be sick as she clutched on to her thighs. Sucking in deep breath after deep breath, and coughing out rattling exhales, she could feel the tight, oppressive weight of all that smoke sitting in her lungs.
“Oh man . . . oh man . . .” Miles wheezed, banging on his chest after he set Grace on her feet.
“Kaleena?” Grace’s whisper severed any relief Nadia might’ve had that they’d escaped unscathed. Grace drew air through a clenched hand, like she was holding an invisible paper bag, her eyes wide with shock and sadness.
Nadia followed her mother’s stunned gaze to find Kaleena standing at the iron gates with her arms crossed.
“A warning might’ve been nice,” Nadia said curtly as she approached Kaleena. Miles and Grace trailed her at a distance. “You know, a ‘by the way, you might burn to death if you don’t vamoose’ or something.”
Kaleena pursed her lips. “Where’s Basha? This is her day of reckoning—I wouldn’t want her to miss it.”
Mom, stay calm. Remember what I said. Nadia tried to catch her mom’s eye, but Grace couldn’t stop staring at her eldest daughter.
All of a sudden, Grace stepped forward and slapped Kaleena across the face. Nadia flinched, and beside her, Miles looked as if he might run down the street.
“This is your fault,” Grace hissed at the stunned Wishmaster. “Your babcia, my mama, is dead because of you! You didn’t have to forgive her—you made it blatantly obvious you never would—but you didn’t have to kill her!”
Nadia smothered her shock at the real despair written across her mom’s face. Maybe Grace truly believed Basha wouldn’t make it through the back garden blaze and that it wasn’t just an act.
“Don’t you dare put your hands on me again.” Kaleena stepped away from them, her left cheek an angry pink. “And how, exactly, did I kill her?”
“Babcia wouldn’t come out, Wishmaster,” Nadia said, jumping in. “She locked her bedroom door from the inside, and we couldn’t break it down. You know how thick the doors are in there. She thought you were bluffing about numbing her wishes. She wouldn’t believe a word, and . . . she stopped replying to us, after a while.”
“With the smoke so dense, it probably got to her before the fire could,” Miles added, his face a perfect mask of solemnity.
Kaleena’s eyelids flickered with annoyance. “I suppose it doesn’t matter how the job gets done, as long as it’s done.” She recovered quickly from her obvious disappointment. “Now, once you two have stopped hacking up your lungs, it’s time for us to make a move. Our work here is done.” She waved a hand at Miles and Nadia, deliberately drifting over Grace.
“Tell me you didn’t help with this . . .” Grace grabbed Nadia’s shoulder, forcing her to turn around. Her mother looked more vulnerable than Nadia had ever seen her.
“I didn’t have a choice,” Nadia mumbled. “She’s the only one who can help me get Nick back.”
Grace’s cheeks flushed with a splotchy red. “At the expense of your babcia?”
“I tried to get her out, Mom. I didn’t know she was going to refuse,” Nadia protested, feeling a worm of guilt squirm in her stomach. “But she betrayed me, and she betrayed my sister. Hell, inside, you said she betrayed you! That doesn’t mean I wanted anything bad to happen to her. I . . . didn’t know it would.”
People had begun to gather around the scene of the fire—neighbors watching the blaze from a distance with phones pressed to their ears. However, Nadia could tell they were intentionally keeping their distance from this little group congregated across from the Kaminski Mansion. Grace and Kaleena’s raised voices probably broadcasted that this wasn’t a battle anyone else should join.
“You can’t trust a word that comes out of her mouth, Nadia.” Grace flashed a glare at Kaleena. “Don’t you leave with her. You’ll regret it.”
Unease weighed heavily in her stomach, but Nadia couldn’t see what other choice she had if she ever wanted to be truly free again. “I’m sorry, Mom. I have to.”
“I imagine she enjoyed spilling the beans about the car accident, knowing she’d get you exactly where she wanted you.” Grace’s voice hardened, a sneer distorting her face. “But I bet she kept quiet about what happened to Nick because of her, didn’t she?”
Nadia’s world went sideways, the solid ground turning swampy under her feet. Miles caught her by the arm before she could stumble, and though she wanted to launch a barrage of questions at her mom, all she could manage was a quiet “What?”
“I doubt she even knows that I know,” Grace went on, casting a dirty glance at Kaleena before turning back to Nadia. “I didn’t want you to go after her and get yourself killed. I wanted you to heal and move on. But since your sister doesn’t seem to mind tearing open old wounds, maybe I shouldn’t either.”
“Another trick, little sister,” Kaleena said, but there was something unusual about her tone. It sounded tighter than normal, her body language completely rigid.
Grace put her hand on Nadia’s shoulder. “Listen to me. Nick came to me for a wish over a year ago, but I couldn’t give one to him because of the debt. I never mentioned it because he asked me not to.” Her voice hitched. “I swear, honey, I’d have done my damnedest to break the rules, no matter the co
st, if I’d known he would go to Kaleena instead.”
“Is that what this is about?” Kaleena smiled stiffly. “Sure, Nick asked me for a wish. But I never made that deal with him. Mixing family and business has never ended well.”
“What wish did he want to make?” Nadia growled, clinging on to Miles to keep herself upright.
Kaleena shrugged. “How should I know?”
“You always ask people to do something for you in exchange for their wish,” Grace shot back. “It was Nick working for you, to pay off his debt, that got him killed.”
Kaleena wagged her finger. “Again, not true. Nick wasn’t working for me. He must’ve gone to someone else after I said no, if he really wanted a wish that badly. I don’t know why anyone wanted him dead, but it didn’t have anything to do with me.”
Nadia’s head spun, her mouth dry with smoke and anguish, her chest heaving with latent fumes and the enormity of what they were saying. Bile rose in her throat. All this time, she’d been kept in the dark about her husband’s last hours, days, weeks leading up to his death. She’d tortured herself, night after night, day after day, wondering if there was something she could’ve done, or said, or seen that might’ve saved him. Now, she was hearing that both her mom and her sister had known more, and neither had breathed a word.
“You were in so much pain after he died, Nadia,” Grace said softly. “I didn’t want to make it worse by telling you about the wish. You wouldn’t have been able to cope with it, and when you got better, I didn’t want you spiraling back into that pit or having your memory of him tainted.”
Nadia glanced at Miles, as if for answers. “I . . . don’t understand what’s happening.”
He gave her arm a squeeze, his expression nervous but his voice steady. “You just keep breathing, yeah? In and out, in and out . . .”
Kaleena took a step forward. “Surely, it’s obvious. What further proof do you need about who’s responsible? Our dear mother”—she spat the words—“never wanted you to bring Nick back to life, all so that she could hold you to ransom twice over: for the debt that wasn’t yours and because you had nowhere else to go. Me—I’ve got no problem with it. I’ve got nothing to hide. If Nick were here, he’d tell you I had nothing to do with his death.”
Grace looked like she might slap Kaleena again. “The Wishmaster is only allowing you to go after that goal because she thinks it’s impossible.” She turned to Nadia, her eyes ablaze with righteous fury. “Kaleena says she has nothing to hide, but she does. She’s great at hiding things. After all, she wished to ‘kill those who would do harm unto others, with impunity.’ A clever little workaround to avoid getting blocked by the Wishing Tree. So now you know, Nadia—just like some of her other so-called ‘loyal’ servants. That’s right, Kaleena, one of these days, one of them is going to take it from you.”
Nadia gulped down air, trying to make sense of all this.
“That’s why you wanted the box, isn’t it?” she blurted out, facing Kaleena. “That’s the wish Basha pressured you to make, so she knew the wording, and you don’t want anyone to have it in case they burn the paper and take your wish. And you don’t want anybody to know that you . . .”
Nadia could hardly breathe. If Basha made Kaleena wish to kill those who would do harm unto others, that explained Adrian. But Kaleena having something to do with Nick’s death didn’t make any sense. He hadn’t hurt anyone. Maybe Grace had gotten it wrong. Maybe she was lying. Maybe this was one big misunderstanding. Maybe . . .
“Basha made me make that wish!” Kaleena snarled back at Grace. “I wouldn’t have chosen something so vulgar, but it’s still my wish! How dare you reveal it!”
“Vulgar?” Grace sneered. “Vulgar? You don’t have a problem with its vulgarity when you use it, do you?”
Nadia stared at her sister. With a wish like that, Kaleena could kill anyone without a single shred of evidence ever pointing toward her. What if Grace was right about Kaleena getting Nick killed? What if Kaleena had murdered Nick? The thought alone made her sick to her stomach. Her own sister killing her husband. But why? What would drive Kaleena to do something so unspeakably horrible?
Kaleena scoffed. “Stop looking at me like that, little sister. Grace is wrong, no matter how loudly she screams otherwise. Nick’s death had nothing to do with me.”
“I want to know the—” Nadia began.
“It’s simple. Do you want Nick back or not? I’m offering you the wishes to do it, as promised. Grace can’t—or rather, wouldn’t.” She paused. “Do I think resurrection is impossible? Sure. Will I help you? I already said I would. Don’t be fooled by Grace. She’s just like Basha.”
“That’s not true!” Grace protested. “Everything I’ve done, I’ve done for the two of you. I didn’t deny Nadia a wish because I don’t want her to get Nick back. I denied her because . . . Well, I didn’t want to see her hurt again.”
“Bullshit.” Kaleena shook her head vehemently. “You’ve never done anything for either of us unless it benefited you. You had every opportunity to stop all this, to stop Basha from screwing me and Nadia over, to be a good mother. But you failed. At any moment, you could’ve stood up and said no, but you didn’t. That’s what makes you just as guilty as Basha. That’s what makes you a failure.”
Grace let out a strangled whimper, her face crumpling. “I . . . tried.”
“It wasn’t good enough.” Kaleena glanced back at the street, where the faint halo of blues and reds could be seen flashing in the evening’s dim light. “You’ve got a different punishment coming for you, Grace—bigger than the guilt you’re going to be feeling. After all, there’s a man’s body in the backyard with your fingerprints all over it.”
Nadia’s stomach dropped. It had to be Dominic. Maybe part of the reason Kaleena could “kill with impunity” was because someone else got framed for her crimes. The best way to find out was to stay close to the Wishmaster. And now that Nadia knew the wording of Kaleena’s wish, she could steal it just like Kaleena had done to Dominic, if she ever got her hands on some wishery paper. She would let it burn into the ether rather than take such a nasty power for herself, since that was the best way to ensure Kaleena could no longer use it. That understanding set uneasily on her mind alongside the knowledge that Kaleena knew she knew.
Without warning, Grace lunged forward. “Tag. See if anybody can catch me!”
“What are you—” Kaleena’s eyes widened to the whites as she dodged Grace’s charge. Spinning around, the Wishmaster waved forcefully at a pair of her goons positioned along the sidewalk, beckoning for them to catch Grace before she reached her car.
What the hell was her mom thinking? But then Nadia figured out the obvious: Grace had turned her escape into a game. If she hadn’t been reeling from everything she’d heard, Nadia would’ve laughed at the absurdity of the situation. Only her mom would come up with that type of ridiculous workaround.
One of the goons caught up to Grace by her Range Rover, but she ducked out of his grasp. The other tried to tackle her into the back of the SUV, but she bent back almost double, sailing right underneath his outstretched arm and sending him crashing hard against the rear bumper instead.
Nadia watched, dumbfounded, as her mom evaded Val with a juke that would make an NFL running back envious, then reached the front door of the Range Rover. Before her pursuers could stop her, Grace had locked the doors, and the engine roared to life. As she pulled away, the Wishmaster’s thugs had no choice but to dive out of the way to avoid getting run over.
Keep driving, Mom. Nadia’s chest grew heavier as the car raced down the street and vanished down a left turn. She had no way of knowing if she’d ever see her mom again, though she supposed she could always pay a secret mental visit to find out how she was doing, wherever she ended up.
Apparently Kaleena had the same thought. “Grace touched you. Go into her head, now!”
“It doesn’t work like that,” Nadia half lied. “I have to be the one to touch them, and Mom
was pretty hostile about me being back, so I couldn’t get close to her. If you’d given this wish to Miles, you’d have a direct line, no problem. But I’ll try.” She closed her eyes, pretending to get into Grace’s head. “No, nothing. There’s no link there.”
Kaleena clicked her tongue. “It goes to show that our dear mother is the same as always, not even bothering to hug you in case Basha lost her temper.”
She did hug me. Nadia glanced at Miles, who was staring at the ever-rising flames.
“I’ll figure out another way to find her,” Kaleena said, seemingly more to herself than Nadia. “Too bad you didn’t use your wishes on something useful, Miles.”
Miles turned. “I am what I am. If it’s not short-run gratification, I don’t want it.” He smiled wryly.
“Get in the car,” Kaleena ordered, walking away from the gates. Miles and Nadia obeyed, if only to escape the sweltering heat that came off the house in stinging waves.
Once inside, however, Kaleena twisted around in the driver’s seat. “Nadia, go into Basha’s mind. I want to check if the old hag is dead yet or not. Those fire engines are almost here, and I’d hate for her to get a last-minute reprieve after I’ve driven off.”
Nadia nodded, then concentrated on her grandmother, trembling with the possibility that there would be no mind to find, that Basha was gone, and that she’d been Kaleena’s tool to do it. The familiar vortex sucked her away from her body. As her vision cleared, displaying Basha’s age-blurred view of a weed-strewn passage between two houses a few streets away, she released a small mental sigh of relief. Basha had escaped somehow, though where she was headed was anyone’s guess.
Retreating from Basha’s mind, Nadia returned to the back seat of the Tesla, putting on a show of being freaked out. “It’s just black. I couldn’t feel anything or see anything at all.”
