Page 46 of A Palace of Smoke & Mirrors
A plague?
I triedsohard to keep the disbelief from showing on my face, but my sister was watching us with eyes like a bird of prey, and she caught the microexpressions before I did.
The look on her face darkened.
Our mother was oblivious, chatting absentmindedly while she brewed a pot of tea with her back to me at the stove.
She talked about all the things that played into John Dante’s decision to ultimately close up shop and retire to his derelict cabin out of town with Patricia Farley to keep him company. From the snippets I managed to glean between my sister’s staring competition and Lucais’s mental telepathy, it sounded like he was putting all of his energy into fighting a million-dollar property development company who wanted to buy up his land and demolish the cabin so they could build a resort.
If I wasn’t torn in so many different directions at that moment in time, I would have snorted at how true to character that sounded.
I rubbed at my chest to soothe the pang in my heart.
Shifting uncomfortably in his seat, Lucais tipped his head towards a pamphlet on the refrigerator when I glanced over at him.They call it a pandemic now. Look at the information sheet pinned up there.He met my sister’s sharp, suspicious gaze and cocked his head to one side as if he was reading her expression like a book.They went into a full lockdown here and lost months of their normal lives,he added after a moment.That’s whywe’ve come back so far into the future. It sped up time for them in a catastrophic way.
Not just for them,I wanted to say. But I kept the thought to myself. The price for abandoning my sister was my cross to bear.
“Grandma’s dead,” Brynn said flatly. I flinched, blushing furiously, and she scoffed. “Grandpa, too.”
“Brynn!” my mother scolded, turning on her. “Don’t be so cruel. You know it wasn’t Aura’s fault that she couldn’t make it to the funerals…”
I’m going to be sick.
My father’s parents lived overseas, and we rarely heard anything from them, but we’d been close to my mother’s family.I’dbeen close to them, but they were moved into residential care on the other side of the country before Brynn was even born. When they stopped being capable of shielding me from the abuse, I’d stopped telling them about it. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d visited, but that clock…
“Oh, hush, child. Ignore her.” My mother huffed, tucking the shawl a little tighter around a body that suddenly looked much thinner and frailer than I’d even noticed before. “Would you like a cuppa, Luc?” she offered, hesitating before taking her seat across from us.
My eyes grew round.Luc?
The High King ignored me, instead opting to flash one of his most charming smiles at her when he replied with, “No, thank you, Mrs. Roberts.”
A ball of nausea bobbed up and down in my throat at the title. She’d cheated on the man with a fucking faerie, but never gave up his last name. Even after she had finalised her divorce in the early days, before he came back with a generational pattern for his daughters to break and an entirely different attitude served on the side of addiction. Somehow, the nausea intensifiedfurther when I heard her response to the High King’s velvet-smooth voice.
“Please,” she said, soft and brimming with endearment. “How many times do I have to tell you to call me mama?”
“Why would he call you mama?” I blurted. It took everything in me not to gag right over the sugar bowl.Why did I think this was a good idea? It’s never a good fucking idea. This is worse than Christmas.
She rolled her watery blue eyes at me and took a sip of her steaming tea. “He’s my son-in-law, the father of my future grandbabies. Why wouldn’t he call me that? It’s better than Mrs. Roberts, like I’m some school teacher.”
I realised that she’d poured me a cup of tea while I was fixated on the pamphlet tacked to the fridge, so I forced my hands to wrap around it. The warmth of the ceramic felt too hot, too real.
“Right,” I muttered, bringing the mug to my lips. And then, into Lucais’s mind, I shouted,Son-in-law?! You rewrote their memories so they think you’re my husband?!
He covered his surprise with a cough.Well. “Husband” seemed a lot easier for them to digest than to admit that I’m your Oracle-fated soulmate with whom you might only accept the bond in order to avoid becoming the leader of all things evil. Because then we’d have to tell her the man she had an affair with was actually from the Court of Darkness, which is highly suspicious and borderline depressing. And I thought you wanted this visit to be short and sweet.
I growled at him inside my head.
“Do you know yet if you’re getting time off over the holidays?” my mother was asking.
With some difficulty, I managed to follow her through the conversation, learning bits and pieces of new information about the life that Lucais had fabricated for me in her mind to avoiderasing me altogether. Since time had sped up so much, the enchantment that he’d placed upon her needed to follow the normal progression of human years. And that meant explaining away my prolonged absence with a fancy new job in another city.
In her mind, my father had passed away in hospital after many trips in and out of the rehabilitation facility during the first few years after I was gone. He’d suffered liver failure due to excessive drinking. By that point in time, I’d already fallen in love with the city and pursued a career in investigative journalism.
My obsession with all of those crime books, murder and makeup videos, and the cast of long-standing television shows turned out to be more than just a phase I went through. She presented me with an article I’d written on the pursuit and capture of a serial killer in the country’s capital, a proud smile lighting up her eyes.
Lucais and I had married two years earlier, and while my mother’s memory of meeting him for the first time was hazy, she loved him and couldn’t think of a better match for me. I gleaned most of this from the way she doted upon him, constantly offering to make him a snack or pour him a fresh drink—even though he had barely taken a sip from the first one she’d finally nagged him into accepting. I gathered that we’d been together long enough for children to be expected, but I couldn’t determine the number of years that had lapsed from our discourse. It made me uncomfortable.
Not knowing how much time I’d lost with them was like an itch I couldn’t scratch. The skin all around it was becoming red and raw as I tried to reach it with the tips of my nails.
