Page 32 of Madness Behind the Mask
But his fingers leave me, and that makes me panic. My mouth is forced open with his telekinesis. I rear back, but hedoesn’t let me move, holding me open, my teethwideapart as something is shoved into my mouth.
I cry on ajerk I can’t make as pain ruptures all over my mouth, open nerve endings pushed upon by a severed tongue held up by magic.
“I’m so sorry it hurts, Sau. I’m sorry, but I need to reattach it.” His words are strained in his concentration as he holds me still with his power and pulls snapped nerves and blood vessels and muscles back together at the same time.
Streaks of tears, no longer singular in their fall, cascade down my cheeks as the pain strengthens to the point of blessed black –
“Stay awake, Sau,” Caden rasps.
“A good wife never disobeys her husband,”Mamatells me as she braids my long black hair.
Mama?I blink at her, standing inside this reality in the adult body I now have.
Mama!I shout as her and my younger self, sitting in front of a mirror, are pulled away in a pinpoint of black.
I want to go to her, back to that time of innocence, back to that time when she was still alive and my future was bright and perfect. But I’m running through pitch-black molasses, and my feet are sinking, holding me still, ripping me back into the world of the living. Of the now. Of the nightmarish reality I can’t escape.
I shudder as my tears increase like two waterfallsthat arejoined by rapids of snot and pain.
“Sau!”Caden’s voice is strong, his tone an order that I don’t dare disobey. “Heal yourself.Now!”
My magic pulses out, flowing into my mouth, or maybe he’s pulling it from me because I don’t feel in control of it. I don’t feel in control of anything.
But my tongue heals itself, guided by the connected paths he created, holding my severed parts together.
His arms come around me now, his fingers no longer preoccupied with guiding his own magic, like a conductor guides an orchestra. Without such strict control, magic can easily kill its user.
He pulls me to him as I shake and shudder and retch and cry.
“I didn’t...want to...die,” I sob against his chest, his naked flesh now wet with my tears.
He holds me close, stroking my hair, his body vibrating beneath me, like my shaking fits are affecting him just as much, just as terribly.
“I won’t ever let you,” he says as hekisses the top of my head. “I’ll never let you leave me again,Sau. You’re mine. Till the sun dies and the heavens fall.”
“But you…you have a…a son,” I cry, the words barely understandable beneath the tearing chasms of my heart. I can’t explain how much that hurts. How much it tells me I failed in everything Dad wanted me to be. I was raised to be a good girl, engaged to Caden before I was even born, promised to him as a good wife. And instead I failed him. I failed my family. Failed at being a woman. A mother. I should’ve been a mother.
“WithJade,” I say, spitting my cousin’s name out even as I mourn her loss, her never-ending questions, her cute little screwed up face of concentration. She had a sweet voice and so much spirit. Even if her constant questions were annoying, I want her back. I want them all back.
But they’re gone from me. Ripped away, making me feel so utterly alone and wrong for being here when they are not.
“Sau, my sweet, look at me,” he says, cupping my chin and lifting. He shakes his head, and as my bleary eyes stare up at him, he wipes his thumbs across my cheeks. “Sau…I’ve never broken our wedding vows.”
I sniffle. “But that boy…Leon. He looks…” My throatclogs with words I don’t want to say.
The thumb on my left cheek trails down to my mouth. It presses against my lips, shushing me. His sharp green eyes soften as he murmurs, “He’sours, sweet girl. And he’s not the only child we have.”
My jaw drops behind his thumb; wordless questions flow across his pad. I slept through my entire pregnancy? Pregnancies, I correct as that second sentence of his hits me. My mind reels. My breath catches. I clutch at him with muscle-bare fingers, hope so hesitant to bloom.
“You didn’t…?” I swallow hard. “They’re mine?”
Somethinggoodcame out of these last thirty years?
He nods. “All six of them.”
“And they’re healthy?” I ask, breathless and afraid they’re about to be ripped from me all too soon. Although the War to End All Wars was across the Atlantic, there was a more dangerous war brewing between two families not long before my wedding. Terra Harrison and Cara Jervis – two heads of powerful Familiesin the Midwest,both specializing in the creation of disease,started to fight over the expansion of their territories.
A curse that mimicked influenza blossomed, allowing them to take lives mercilessly without getting caught by the SCU – the only governing body of us sups on Earth. But as is common with dark magic, it spiraled out of their control and started taking lives they did not personally mark. Dad feared what a curse crafted by such powerful witches would turn into, and there were already hushed whispers of thousands of deaths by the time Caden and I married. Dad suspected it might rise into the tens of thousands, its dark reach spreading across the world.
