“Perhaps you should have done a better job erasing my memory,” Stoker hisses back.
Not erased, just buried a bit. You always find a way back to this point eventually. Such a clever boy. But now that you’ve finally gotten this foolishness out of your system, we can concentrate on important things.
“Foolishness?” Stoker puts his hands on his hips and stomps his stiletto hard onto the floor. “This is not just what I do, Mother. This is who I am!”
The snake recoils at the roar of Stoker’s voice. No, not Stoker’s voice. Felicity’s. A wash of relief settles over Felicity, like she’s been welcomed back home after a long, long visit to a foreign land.
“So,” Felicity says to her mother. “You want to talk about important things. We can start off by discussing why I’m having this conversation with a snake.”
Not a snake, dear. Felicity’s mother slithers down the tree’s trunk, then coils her way up Felicity’s body, until she’s wrapped around her forearm. I’m no more a snake than you are a kidney, or a liver, or a heart. Its essence runs through me, but what I am . . .
Palm fronds shake again, but this time they part on their own, branches bending, trunk twisting, roots pulling from the black earth. A vaguely human form emerges and steps out from the potting soil. The form of a woman. Her face presses through the swelling tree bark, and foliage stretches above her in a luxurious yawn, transforming into arms and hands and fingers before Felicity’s eyes.
She gently takes the snake from Felicity, and it slithers contentedly down the gape of her blouse, its form there one moment and gone the next.
Felicity swallows hard. She feels like she should be in a state of shock, her mother belonging to a-whole-nother Kingdom and all, but her mother has always had this weird obsession with plants. Felicity thinks of the earthy musk of her mother’s skin that she never could quite hide under perfumes, remembers the fights she’d had with Father over installing an indoor arboretum in their home, and the fit she’d had when he’d brought home a freshly cut tree one Christmas. “Well, I guess this explains your aversion to hardwood floors,” is all Felicity can think to say to her.
She laughs and grabs her daughter by the shoulders. “You haven’t been honest with me, but I haven’t been honest with you, either. I saw the way that crowd fell in love with you. A few songs, and you had them eating out of the palm of your hands. You’re a charmer, dear. That’s what we do. Only you do it better than anyone on this planet, better than anyone has for centuries.” Mother pulls Felicity closer, and she gets the distinct feeling that her mother is speaking from personal experience. “I hope you understand, I only wanted the best for you. I never doubted that you could move the hearts of thousands of fans. Millions. But as premier, you could have moved mountains.” There’s a hint of hurt in her voice, and it pains Felicity, too. Sure, her mother is overbearing, pushy, and manipulative, but she’s always loved her, she can’t deny that.
“This is what I want. This is what makes me happy.”
“Okay,” Mother says after an airy pause.
“Okay?” Felicity asks. “No more fund-raisers? No more pressure?”
“None, I promise.”
Felicity gives her mother a long once-over and pulls her in for an overdue hug. It’s been too long since they’ve been this close, inhaling those lovely earthy undertones, reminiscent of childhood. “You really think I could have thousands of fans?”
“Millions, dear.”
Felicity can hear them right now, and at first she thinks it’s just her alpha bot looping through the performance video again, but then she realizes these screams are distinctly different—the terror-ridden screams of the actual audience, and Felicity’s alpha bot is nowhere to be seen. The dressing room door hangs ajar. Felicity runs over and looks down the hall to find her alpha bot hauling tin ass toward the stage.
“Come back,” Felicity commands it. The alpha bot turns around, its mono-eye flashing red, before it continues on its way and disappears through the cloak of curtains. Felicity slips back into her other stiletto, then sprints after the alpha bot like only a diva can. The sound of chaos mounts with each step, and when she parts the curtains, she’s overwhelmed by the smoke and dust in the air—and judging from the odd tingling in her lungs, marijuana and who knows what else. Panic surges all around her. Someone needs to step up and calm things down before people get hurt. No—not someone.
Her.
This is her moment to make a difference. She steadies herself, takes a deep breath, then dives into the mayhem.
Chapter 37
Sydney
If there were ever a time to stay focused, it’s now. But it’s so hard trying to stick to her plan for world domination when that no-good, talentless hack Felicity Lyons just upstaged Sydney in the exact same dress! So yeah, now Sydney feels like a two-bit knockoff of a two-bit impostor, and she’s carrying that around in the back of her mind as she absorbs exponential amounts of fear from the crowd while trying to keep Nomvula in her sights. Oh, she’s a slippery little piglet. Sydney nearly lost her a few times, but thankfully, that alphie lagging behind in the bright pink coat is too big of a target to miss.
Ire itches her insides as it churns like colliding winds, an agitation before the storm. She’s going to need a lot to take down Nomvula. The girl’s got more power than she realizes, but with thousands of people here, all in various stages of panic, it’ll only be a matter of time.
A gunshot rings in the distance, and seconds later a piece of scaffolding falls from the ceiling. The crowd roils up at Sydney’s back, but she’s got no time to rubberneck. She sucks up the oncoming fear that washes over her like a tide. It sputters in her chest, not enough to strike, but enough to seal all the emergency doors with a flick of her wrist. They’re all trapped now, no escape. Sydney’s tapped the little bit of power she’d built up, but she doesn’t need it for the next phase of her plan. Only a lighter and some kindling.
And the best type of kindling is the kind that screams.
A sweater here, a long skirt there—she pauses long enough to set them ablaze, then turns a sharp eye back to the bot in pink, a few paces beyond. Shrieks come in all directions and Sydney smiles at the first scream of “Fire!” In minutes she’s regained some power, and as people are trampled, the storm begins to take hold inside her, becoming denser, until the power of a category five hurricane swells within the confines of her chest.
Soon.