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“Kara.” Arden surges forward as Mama Valari’s weird but adamant wingman. “Listen to me, damn it. You haven’t exactly been on a pleasure cruise lately, which is why I’ve given you a pause of patience here.”
I spread my fingers and splay them hard against the scarf tucked into his shirt. “You’d be best served to take a breath and find that rare gem called your manners.”
“Donotinterfere, Kane. Not now.”
“Already have. And always will.”
“Stop,” Kara pleads. “What’s so urgent?” she demands to Arden. “Have you heard something? From the underworld?”
Before he can utter a word, Hecate steps forward and swooshes out both hands.
“Enough,” the goddess intones. “Can’t you see that she’s already worn out? The trauma she’s been through—”
“Which could have been easily prevented,” Arden snaps before a force whips him up and away from me like a hurricane gale. Five feet up. Twenty feet back. Awhackon the wall and a shudder of the windows.
Kara and Circe gasp. I tilt a thankful grin toward Hecate, but she doesn’t acknowledge me. The full brunt of her stare, as violent as a thousand daggers in the sun, cuts into Arden.
“I. Said. Enough.”
“AndIsay put him down.” The venom in Veronica’s reprisal is unmistakable.
With awhunkthat makes us all grimace, Arden drops to the sala’s wood floor. To his credit, he springs back to his feet and into a fighting stance. But not for long. He’s pulled backward as soon as Veronica stalks forward and hooks an elbow through one of his.
“Arden,” she murmurs. “Let’s go.”
Arden’s face mottles to a crazy shade of dark red. “We can’t just—”
“We must and we will. There’s still a little more time. We’ll simply have to use it wisely.”
Her words prompt new stress across Kara’s features. “Still more time? For what?”
Veronica snaps back with such severity, I yank Kara in again. But the violence of her voice has turned into something else across her face. From her dark eyes to her corded neck, there’s nothing but sorrow. A desperation she pummels into Kara now.
“All I ever wanted, and fought for, was for you, Jaden, and Kell.” Air skitters in and out of her trembling lips. “I don’t expect you to believe that. Not without the chance to fully explain. But if I have to do it this time without your approval, I will.”
In any other time and place, I’d be stomping forward after a heavy eye roll. The theater is classic Veronica, accusation and evasion in a tidy trio of sentences. But I’m witnessing her despair in living colors and textures, from the stiff battlements of her shoulders down the coiled length of her form.
And now, in how her energy takes over Kara too. My little demon is a solid ball of empathetic anxiety and fear. So much fear.
“Mother. Just tell me what on earth you’re talk—”
But while she struggles to stammer out the words, Veronica grabs Arden and sprints from the room, almost as if they’ve been given a cosmic triple-speed button.
Hecate’s command for pursuit is also too late. We all rush outside, but neither of them is to be seen. Seemingly turned to mist and then carried off by the wind.
The only proof of their disruption is the disgustingly long list of questions at the forefront of my mind. And, judging by her nonstop shivers, in Kara’s.
On the sala’sporch, I pull her close. Tenderly, I tuck her head against my shoulder and her small body into my larger shelter. But she refuses to release her tension. I feel it in the balls of her fists in my chest and in every clenched vertebra down her back.
“What did she mean?” she grates. “And why did she even do this? And say all those things? But then withhold so much more? What’s she getting at—and what thehelldoes she want fromme?”
“Because it’s her MO.” Hecate paces over to us, cloaked in more of her don’t-bump-the-chakras solemnity. But right now, I welcome every thread of it. “You know this, Kara. AndI’veknown it since the day I first met your mother, many years ago.”
Kara swings her head around. “You…already know her?”
“Defineknowing,” the goddess returns. “We have definitely met, if that’s what you want to know. Giovani reached out to me once the girl reached her unruly years, hoping I could help with recentering her wild thoughts and ways.”
I nod, hoping to convey commiseration. At the same time, Circe cocks a hip and glowers.
