Banishing the Dark (The Arcadia Bell series)

by Jenn Bennett

  “She sort of looks like a dragon.”

  Jupe glanced at Leticia, heart thudding in his chest. She flashed him the tiniest, quickest smile he’d ever seen. But it was just enough to give him hope—about her, about him and her together, and about this whole damn mess.

  “Oh, Mistress,” Priya moaned. “I have failed you again.”

  Jesus, what a whiner. Jupe glanced down at the guardian, who was still struggling to stay on this plane. Then Jupe turned to his dad, who looked as if he was seconds away from a heart attack.

  “Come on, people, have a little faith,” Jupe told them. “I mean, it’s Cady. And she’s pretty damn strong. She survived that fight with Dare, and she’s rescued a lot of people. She pulled me down off that roof last fall, and she went girl-on-girl with Yvonne at Christmas. Oh, and she beat the crap out of that girl magician with the school desk—and that was before she could shift into a dragon.” He flashed Leticia a little smile of his own and waggled his eyebrows at her, because just saying all this out loud made him feel a million times better.

  “If she can do all that,” he added, “surely she can handle one crazy mother.”

  White walls surrounded me. I stood next to a perfectly made double bed, which would have perfectly tucked hospital corners if I lifted up the plain bedspread to check. His-and-hers closet doors were both shut, but no doubt the space behind them contained neat rows of perfectly pressed clothes.

  The blinds were tightly shut, just as they were in the rest of the house, to hide dark secrets from snooping neighbors. On the surface, they wouldn’t have seen much if they’d been able to peep inside: no decorations, no paintings, no framed photos—not in here. Those would be out in the living room, to prove to visitors that we were a Normal Family and that there was nothing to see here, move along.

  But not at the back of the house. No need for them. Because we weren’t a normal family, and there was no need to keep up appearances behind closed doors.

  I never was allowed in this bedroom, so naturally, I always tried to sneak inside. And I’m sure I was successful a time or two, but the memories I had of this room had likely been wiped away by magick. And I’m sure that when I did make my way in here, I would have noticed the only thing of interest, a set of closed curtains on the inner wall.

  That’s exactly where my focus was now. Until a confused moan drew my attention.

  My mother looked a thousand times more disheveled in this light, a thousand times more feral when contrasted against the tidy cleanliness surrounding her. And in bringing her here, I felt as though we’d switched places: she was now the one panicking, and I felt as if I were standing in front of a wildcat that had been defanged and declawed and had just had its balls chopped off.

  “What is happening?” she said, looking around wildly. “Where are we?”

  I forced a smile. “Why, this is your bedroom, don’t you remember? It doesn’t exist anymore, as I’m sure you know. Plowed down with the rest of the houses on this block to make way for condos. Miami real estate waits for no one.”

  She tentatively took a step before reaching out for the bedpost. “Mon dieu. What have you done?” A quick anger flared behind her eyes, but the rumble of a truck passing by on the street outside made her flinch.

  Putting some distance between us, I headed to the curtains on the inner wall and wrenched them open to reveal what lay behind. Built-in bookshelves lined the wall below my waist. The lower shelves near the floor were filled with occult books—mostly first-edition copies of my parents’ greatest hits—and on top were a velvet cloth and several ritual items: a chalice, a ritual dagger, a salt cellar, a caduceus staff, and a carved wooden box for red ochre chalk.

  Innocuous stuff found in every magician’s home. I kept far more dangerous things in Tambuku.

  But it was the thing above those supplies that drew my interest. A small two-way mirror let me see into the room beyond. A child’s room with a small bed, bookshelves, a toy chest. A picture map of the constellations on the wall and plastic stars pressed into the ceiling.

  And on the floor, in the middle of a round rug with a woven man-in-the-moon design, sat a slightly older version of the Sélène I’d glimpsed in the winter home. Perhaps four or five years old, she lay on her stomach, engrossed in a picture book, lazily kicking her feet in the air.

  “Did you watch me through here all day?” I asked. “You could’ve played with me instead. Or were you trying to keep your distance so you didn’t develop any pesky maternal feelings?”

  My mother walked up to the window and drew in a sharp breath, a look of amazement on her face. But when the shock wore off, her shoulders dropped as she quietly stared at the child in the other room. I could practically feel her guard drop. “This . . . is an incredible ability.”

  “Useful. It’s good to see the past as it really was. Especially since you stripped so many of my memories.”

  “Enjoy your stroll down memory lane. I will find better uses for this ability.”

  “ ‘Better’ is subjective, but I don’t doubt you would use it for something more ambitious,” I said. “This is exactly what you wanted, isn’t it? I’m sure you stood here watching that child in there, dreaming of having access to powers like this.”

  She tore her gaze away from the glass long enough to give me a once-over. “I certainly did not dream of commanding them in that ugly reptilian body you’re wearing, but now that you have made a hash of my dreams, I suppose I will learn to tolerate it.”

  “Hey, you’re the one who mated with a serpent, not me.”

  Oh, the look she gave me. I wouldn’t have been surprised if it burned right through my eyeballs and out the back of my skull. In the past, that look would have been enough to make me cower but not here. Not now. And when she saw this, the fire fizzled and was replaced by something less sure. She scratched at the bloody symbols drying on her arm and refocused on the mirror. “At least your body is still young.”

  “And I’m not a notorious serial killer wanted by the FBI, so you wouldn’t have to duck security cameras in airports anymore.”

  She cocked a brow. “When I get possession of those powers, every camera in the world will want to take my photograph.”

  That sounded about right. She was always happy when she was commanding attention.

  “Can she hear us?” my mother asked. I didn’t answer—I honestly didn’t know for certain—so she tapped on the glass with a knuckle. Five-year-old me jerked her head to the side and stared up at the window, which I remembered looking like an ordinary framed mirror above a desk from her point of view. “She hears us,” my mother whispered.

  More than heard us, apparently, because little Sélène pushed off the rug and warily walked toward the desk below the mirror. She pulled a chair out from beneath it and stood on top of it, peering right at us. My mother stared back at her. No one spoke. After a few seconds, little Sélène gave up and headed back to her book.

  “Extraordinary,” my mother murmured. “You could always see things no one else could.”

  “Maybe it’s not just me. Maybe you should walk to the kitchen and say hello to your younger self.”

  A small laugh bubbled from her mouth. “You have no idea how to wield this power.”

  “And you do?”

  “Darling, I know things about your powers you couldn’t fathom.” She lifted her chin to the mirror. “In your head, you are still that little girl in there. Naive. Submissive. And only breathing because I’ve allowed you to live. Would you like me to show you the fruits this ability can yield?”

  “I don’t need any more magical instruction from you, thank you.”

  “Oh, I’m done teaching. And I’m done waiting. I’m ready to take the reins now.”

  “And you really believe I’m so submissive that I’m just going to allow you to slip inside my body without a fight?”

  A slow smile spread across her face, cracking the dried blood on her skin. “Ma petite lune, you already have.”
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br />   I snorted, ready to hurl a retort, but there was something about the absolute confidence on her face. It tripped me up. Made me doubt.

  “Use your brain, Sélène,” she said in a low voice. “How do you think I am here with you? We are not flesh. We are observing a moment in time constructed of memories. Your memories. You opened the door and guided me through.”

  Was that true? Was this just a piecemeal reconstruction of a series of memories? The first time I’d experienced this, when I saw Dare talking to my parents back at the cabin in California, was that a dormant memory, something my parents had hidden with magick but not stripped away completely?

  “Dare,” my mother mumbled. “I couldn’t be happier that you burned that devil up.”

  All my muscles turned to stone.

  My mother’s smile widened. “Surprised? Yes, I can read your thoughts. I can see all of you now. Aren’t you listening? You invited me inside. We are sharing the same body. You, me, and that monstrous child growing in your belly.”

  Oh . . . God.

  “Three souls cannot inhabit one body,” my mother said. “Let me show you what power looks likes when the person wielding it knows what she is doing.”

  The white walls melted like spring snow. Floorboards fell away. Nighttime swirled around us, and the musty scent of my childhood home in Florida was replaced by damp earth and trees and the mineral scent of red ochre chalk.

  Trees. Night. A clearing. A rocky hill in the distance.

  Panic shot through me as cool night air chilled my skin. I tried to move, but my hands and ankles were strapped to a post. The metal of a sacrificial oracular bowl cooled the bottoms of my bare feet, waiting to catch my blood.

  Bound in Balboa Park. Last September. We were back where my parents had tried to sacrifice me and steal my power. The worst night of my life. Only it was just the two of us here now in the dark. No elemental creatures bound in the great circle before me. No Frater Blue. No father.

  “Victoire!” My mother’s laughter echoed off the rocky hill as she spun in a circle with her arms outstretched, face tilted up to a full moon.

  I struggled against my bonds as hysteria blotted out reason. Rope bit into my wrists and made my fingers tingle. I tried to rock the post and the heavy oracular bowl and only managed to draw my mother’s attention. She halted her swirling dance and stalked toward me.

  “This is how you wield power,” she said, getting in my face. “You are in my memories now.”

  But it wasn’t a memory—not exactly. Things were missing. I wasn’t naked and covered in a red veil. The ritual circle wasn’t charged.

  “Why do I need protection?” my mother answered, reading my thoughts. “Your devil lover isn’t coming to save you this time. After I kill your soul, I will take control of your reptile body and lay waste to him with fire, exactly as you destroyed Dare. Then I will use magick to snuff out the life of your child.”

  I snarled and strained to bite her cheek, but she jerked out of my reach, laughing.

  This wasn’t actually happening, no matter how real it felt. I had to get control of myself and think. But how could I, when she was listening to my thoughts?

  “Not just your thoughts,” she said. “I see everything. All your mistakes. All your fears. And all your weaknesses. Your friends and so-called family, the mundane life you’ve cobbled together from the scraps I left you and the misplaced loyalty you’ve given away freely. I see it all, Sélène.”

  Unbidden images of Lon and Jupe popped into my head. I tried to shake them away, but it was impossible. My thoughts were tangled, tripping on her words. But when she sighed and closed her eyes with a look of deep satisfaction settling on her face, I remembered Lon telling me how to keep him out of my thoughts when he was transmutated.

  If we were really inside my body, then why was I giving her control?

  My mother’s eyes snapped open.

  I immediately put up a barrier in my head.

  “Go on,” she said, “if that makes you feel better. I don’t need your memories.”

  “Are you sure? Because it seems pretty barren out here. Why did you choose not to remember Dad?”

  “Alexander is dead. He was weak, and I am strong.”

  An oblong shape glinted on the ground between us. She stooped to pick it up and showed it to me: the ceremonial dagger she’d tried to use on me the first time I’d been tied up here. The blade gleamed in the moonlight beneath the white of her smile.

  “That’s not how I see it,” I said, ignoring the fear gnashing at the edges of my thoughts.

  “See what?”

  “You said Dad was weak and you’re strong. But all I see is a middle-aged woman whose life is filled with failure. You failed to create a Moonchild when you had my brother. You failed with your stupid idea to unite all the occult orders. You failed when you tried to take over all the orders by force—double fail, really, because you got caught by savages instead of ruling over the occult world like some kind of pope.”

  Defensive anger flared behind her eyes. “I am not in jail.”

  “No, but you’re a wanted felon who had to leave the order in disgrace and abandon your home to live like a rat. What else? You failed to sacrifice me and siphon my powers last year. You failed to keep your husband alive in the Æthyr.”

  “But I slaughtered the demon who killed him.”

  “Who cares? What do you have now? The shoddy clothes on your back? You have no family, no friends, no roof over your head. Where’s your occult army? No one’s here to defend you. No one’s got your back. Everything you’ve tried to accomplish has backfired. Hell, even your stupid publishing career was a flop—you never had a single book hit the bestseller lists.”

  “That is—” She tried to finish but ended up huffing.

  “But you know what was your biggest failure? Me.” I stretched against my bonds to lean closer and spoke in a low voice. “You had all the power you wanted in the palm of your hand, but you couldn’t control me. Not when I was a child and not now.”

  In a blink, my bonds fell free. I was standing where she stood, holding her dagger. She was tied to the post. Her shoulders jerked as she fought to free herself, a string of French curses spewing from her lips. Feral eyes pinned me as she tried to calm herself, chest heaving with labored breath.

  I could almost see her mind working; even now, she was cocky enough to think she was still winning. It was the same conceit that had buoyed her through her killing spree of the occult leaders and that made her keep pushing forward in the Æthyr to find another way to get at the Moonchild powers, even after my father was dead.

  The entire world revolved around her. If she hadn’t possessed the magical talent she did, if she wasn’t the lunatic bound before me, it was still easy to picture her using all that selfish determination to accumulate wealth or status or fame. A dirty politician. Head of some shady corporation. Amoral scientist. Enola Duval could have been any of those things. She would have been married to her job, obsessed with success. And even without a bloody trail of bodies, she still would have screwed over her coworkers left and right, stepping on their backs to climb up some other kind of ladder.

  And I still would have grown up in a sterile, lonely house with a mother who didn’t give a damn about her daughter.

  I glanced down at the dagger in my hand. “I just want you to know something,” I said in a voice that was surprising calm.

  “And what would that be?”

  “That even though you were an insane monster who treated me like a science experiment, even though you never truly loved me or even thought of me as more than an inconvenient stepping stone, even though you considered selling me like a slave to Ambrose Dare when you suspected I wasn’t your real Moonchild, even when you abandoned me at seventeen with the FBI on my trail—because of crimes you committed—even when you tried to sacrifice me, I still loved you.”

  I brushed away angry tears and stared her down, waiting for a reaction. She didn’t even blink.
She simply said, “Then perhaps I am not the one who is insane.”

  “Maybe not,” I murmured, sliding my fingers to the handle of the dagger. “But I wanted you to know that. And I also wanted you to know that I forgive you for all of it.”

  She stared at me as if I were an unsolvable puzzle or a pet ape that had suddenly developed the ability to use sign language. As if she could almost summon enough humanity to pity me.

  Almost.

  The dagger’s handle fit in my grip like it had been made for my hand—just the right length, just the right weight.

  And maybe I did have some of her crazy genes bubbling inside me after all, because I felt nothing but dizzying relief when I sank the blade under her ribs.

  Silver eyes squinted in front of my face. I shifted down from my transmutated state, and within a blink, the silver turned to green. Lon. No horns, no fiery halo. Just the man.

  The dagger was gone; I’d dropped it before I transported back. But any doubts about what I’d just done dissipated when I caught a glimpse of my hands; they were roughly fisting Lon’s shirt, one of them staining the cotton with blood.

  “Is she . . . ?”

  I pulled back and spotted the fallen body next to us. The relief I’d just been feeling melted into a slow, humming sadness. Not regret, though. It was just my mind getting accustomed to the sudden weight of this burden: I had killed my own mother. Never mind that I didn’t have a choice. Just because she felt nothing for me didn’t mean I was an emotionless machine. I was sad that I had to do it, sad that she was truly, irretrievably gone, and sad that I couldn’t save her—not from herself or from me.

  But like most things, it would pass. And I’d grieved for her too many times already.

  What mattered now were the ones I’d saved by doing this, and they surrounded me.

  “Cady?” Jupe said, eyes big and wary. “Are you in there?”

  “Yes, I’m here.” I grabbed him and fell against Lon’s chest, embracing both of them. Happy tears streamed down my cheeks as Lon kissed the top of my head over and over, nearly squeezing the breath out of me. Even Foxglove tried to get in on the action, standing on hind legs to paw at Jupe.