I woke up on the floor. When I looked in the bathroom mirror, my face was black with soot. I spent the rest of the day trying not to cough up ash.
I had been sleeping even worse than usual since my argument with Macon, or whatever you’d call it. Fighting with Macon usually led to fighting with Lena, which was more painful than fighting with everyone I knew combined. But now everything was different, and Lena didn’t know what to say any more than I did.
We tried to avoid thinking about what was happening around us—the things we couldn’t stop and the answers we couldn’t find. But it was always lurking in the back of our minds, even if we didn’t admit it. We tried to focus on things we could control, like keeping Ridley out of trouble and the lubbers out of our houses. Because when every day is the End of Days, after a while they feel pretty much like every other day, even though you know that’s crazy. And nothing is the same.
The bugs got hungrier, the heat got hotter, and the whole town got crazier. But more than anything, it was still the heat we all noticed. It was proof that no matter who was scoring or dating or lying in a bed at County Care—underneath everything, from the minute you woke up in the morning to the minute you fell asleep, and all the minutes in between—something was wrong and it wasn’t getting better. It was getting worse.
But I didn’t need to feel the heat outside to prove it to me. I had all the proof I needed inside—in our kitchen. Amma was practically connected to our old stove on a cellular level, and when something was going on in her head, it found its way into the kitchen. I couldn’t figure out what was going on with her, and she sure wasn’t going to tell me. I could only piece it together from the few clues she left, in the language she used the most—cooking.
Clue number one: rubbery chicken. Rubbery chicken was useful, mostly in terms of establishing a state of mind and a timeline, like rigor mortis on a cop show. For Amma, who was famous in three counties for her chicken ’n’ dumplings, rubbery chicken meant two things: a) she was distracted, and b) she was busy. She didn’t just forget to take the chicken out of the oven. She didn’t have time to deal with it once it was out. So the chicken sat too long in the heat, and even longer on the cooling rack. Waiting for Amma to come around, like the rest of us. I wanted to know where she was and what she was up to all that time.
Clue number two: a general lack of pie. Pie was gone, and when it wasn’t, there was no sign of Amma’s famous lemon meringue. Which meant a) she wasn’t speaking to the Greats, and b) she definitely wasn’t speaking to Uncle Abner. I hadn’t checked the liquor cabinet, but a lack of Jack Daniels would seal the deal for Uncle Abner, too.
I wondered if her little trip to the bokor had anything to do with that.
Clue number three: the sweet tea was unspeakably sweet, which meant a) the Sisters were sneaking into the kitchen and dumping sugar in the pitcher, the way they did with salt in the gravy, b) Amma was so out of it she couldn’t keep track of how many cups of sugar she was dumping in, or c) something was wrong with me.
Maybe all three, but Amma was up to something, and I was determined to find out what. Even if I had to ask that bokor myself.
Then there was the song. With every passing day, I heard it with greater frequency, like one of those Top 40 songs that plays on the radio so much that it’s always stuck in your head.
Eighteen Moons, eighteen fears,
The cries of Mortals fade, appear,
Those unknown and those unseen
Crushed in the hands of the Demon Queen…
The Demon Queen? Seriously? After the literal translation of the Vex verse, I didn’t want to imagine what a run-in with a Demon Queen could mean. I hoped my mom had confused it with homecoming queen.
But the songs were never wrong.
I tried not to think about the cries of Mortals or the hands of the Demon Queen. But the thoughts I refused to think, the conversations that remained unspoken, the fears I never confessed, the dread building inside me—I couldn’t escape them. Especially not at night, when I was safe in my room.
Safe, and the most vulnerable.
I wasn’t the only one.
Even within the Bound walls of Ravenwood, Lena was just as vulnerable. Because she had something from her mother, too. And I knew she was touching one of the things in that dented metal box when I saw the orange glow of the flames—