Maisa reached out to put herself in Sable’s mind, first just a tentative foot upon the path to travel, testing for stability, then with force they all arrived.
“Oh, you are fucking not.” Sable reached into her pocket for the pills to knock them back.
The action alarmed, escalating one threat into another. The mothers had come with a purpose and they would not be stopped. Rolling vibrations shook the air.
Sable’s eyes widened in alarm. Pills in hand, her anger flipped to fear and she muttered, “No, no, no, please, not now,” and turned to run. Struggling to open the foil, the rumbling current overtook her. She watched the guard on his radio buckle with her to the floor.
Behind her, the softest shifting of the mother’s robes mixed with the thrumming of their voices, bringing them close, sending Sable out into the distance to call for Aidan, but her plea for help fell haphazardly through the empty space, spiraling in the dark until she dropped into Amele. She reached out blindly to stop the descent, grappling for a hold, shrieking through Amele’s awareness as she tumbled, but the droning hum in her muscles shook her bones and yanked her back to the stone floor of the palace hall.
Crawling to escape, Sable remembered To hell with subtle and put the whole packet of six hazardous tablets in her mouth to chew through the thin metal. Choking on the crumbling powder, bleeding from the foil, she struggled to swallow.
“I’ve seen what you’ve done.” Maisa slid her hand around Sable’s waist to lay it flat against the coughing tension at her abdomen. Sinking down beside her, she gently raked Sable’s hair away from her face to whisper, “Now let me show you the future you have made.”
Coughing blood into her mouth, rasping in pain from the cuts along her throat, Sable kept forcing down the pills while Maisa wrapped her other hand around Sable’s neck to murmur the bleakest revelations.
“Your nights are long and yours alone.” But in the vision there was no darkness, just bright burning lights to ward off the solitude. “Your love is barren.” Maisa clutched at the empty space a child might have lived until Sable cried out in grief. “Your heart is dead, frozen cold, it’s made of ice.”
On hands and knees, Sable tried to grab Maisa’s wrist, but the mothers’ voices were trembling weakness, and she collapsed instead without support.
“You have wasted his affection. He does not want you. With your darkness, you have destroyed all he felt. You have devoured every form of providence so that your destiny is void.” Sweetly kissing her check, Maisa told her, “You are a monster only a mother could love.”
The General entered the main hall prepared for Sable’s madness with all the anger to bark her down already held in his lungs. The ferocity doubled when he saw her on the floor, held in a mother’s embrace, her fingers pulling at the breaks in the stones, trying to drag herself free.
Soft footfalls padded fast into the hall, bringing Amele and the sisters.
Rolling his own thunder, the General was stalking the floor, roaring, “Stand clear. Get away from the Queen,” while a second storm was blustering threats with Amele’s voice rising from the squall, “Quiet, mothers. Quiet like the night.”
The murmuring mothers were silenced and Sable quaked with the exertion of getting her hands under herself to push up. In the gathering of his second breath, the General heard Maisa’s biting kind invitation, “Only we will have you now. Return home with us.”
The General was still coming, bellowing at Maisa, “Move away. Keep your hands off the Queen,” but Maisa pulled Sable up with her, turning them both away from the descending fury, into the protecting shelter of the mothers.
The clamor in the hall was shrieking into chaos as the circle of mothers moved off for the western wing, making Amele call out for them to stop while the sisters underscored the demand in such piercing resonance, the General had to shout louder to be heard, but the mothers moved steadfastly on.
The General was nearly on them when Sable cleared her throat and found her voice.
Wailing lament from the hidden center of the mothers’ defense, Sable made them cringe. Then the volume escalated with unrestrained grievance and the mothers cowered back to give her space. Wiping blood across her mouth, she looked around for an escape before her attention rested on the door leading back to the King. She moved forward with a sob of gratitude, but then abruptly the visions returned and she stopped as Maisa told her, “He has no solace to offer. You are only a mother to the Cloitare.”
Her eyes were gone, replaced by rising terror, so the General changed his focus, reaching out to pacify, “Calm down, Sable. Come to me.”
But a mad denial bent Sable at the waist, screaming wordless anguish.
Wincing, the General stepped back and then back again, but Sable’s voice was still gaining strength. He felt sorrow turn baleful and put his hands to his ears, then, stooping to avoid it, he twisted away to deflect the sound. Face drawn together with dismay that she could get louder and louder still, he groaned and staggered to find equilibrium until she shattered the balance completely and he slipped with the tipping of the floor.
He heard her incant something malign and terrible, “Back into the night, reverse the Creator’s light, I return to the dark,” and off the edge into the black, she dropped every person in the room.
A straight plunge through the abyss and into the void, he followed her cry to go home. She alone stood in the upheaval, mouth directed at the unseen sky, pulling down decimating havoc with the damning verdict, “I call your creation profane, your act abominable. In the darkness, I undo and destroy.”
The General heard her wail turn inarticulate and saw cities begin to crumble in his mind. Buildings sheared off into rubble revealing a skyline set alight. Razed and ruined, the world was collapsing into ash, but the extermination knew no end as Sable called up devastation from her lungs. The ground, smoldering with wreckage, opened like a sinking hole, eating away the edges, showering dust and flames into the widening chasm until there was nothing left to lose. The isolation was vast, the emptiness complete, yet the brutality continued as Sable fought her way toward mindless obliteration.
Afraid and pained, the General kept his hands clamped over his ears, but squinting into the darkness, he could make out light pushing in from the edges. He saw Amele laid low at Sable’s feet, arms wrapped around her head to shield against the violence, pleading loud to be heard, begging, “Mercy, Mawan. Mercy.”
He felt the first pulse of peace break the despair. He saw Aidan forming from light.
But Sable struck out at the brightness, wrapping it up, pulling it under, accusing, “How dare you make me to feel? I return to you in multitude what you have shared.”
The General felt her grief lash against his body, piercing his ears with an unintelligible howl that stabbed his heart and suffocated all reason. He felt the darkness running hot through his veins, chasing down every particle of light. He tried to flee but his muscles trembled and caved beneath his weight. His eyes leaked tears or blood or both while black vertigo and nausea curled him into a ball.
The General could not escape the reckoning coming from Sable’s mouth. He could not hide from it, or fight it, or deny it. Heavy and delirious with dread, he dropped with her voice into the desolate void.
Mawan
Remy felt it like a stab, the deepest loss. He twisted with the pain, flinching from the chest. Her name came from his mouth with alarm, “Sable.”
He left his rooms to find her. Forcing the door to her rooms open with too much strength, he called her name, but she did not answer. The room felt empty, as though it had been vacant for years.
He entered the main hall to see bodies sprawled feeble across the floor and knew at once she had done it. Dropping to his knee beside Lucas, Remy pulled at the hands locked over the General’s ears and groaned to see them streaked with blood.
Using Berringer’s phone to call for help, he looked over the destruction she had wrought to give an account of the number injured. The mothers
were piled together, Maisa clutching her damaged heart, the rest swaying to lift their heads, sniffing back blood that spilled far enough to color their lips.
The guards and the sisters lay motionless, faces bloodier than the mothers. Curled on her side, Amele opened her eyes onto him, red spilling across her cheek like tears. Remy asked her, “Where is she?”
The answer was a whisper on Amele’s lips, “Into the blackest night, the Mawan travels.”
Sister Sable (The Mad Queen Book 1) Page 35
