Windswept

1. Cry Wolf

1Cry Wolf“Tanzy.” My mother murmurs my name without reaching for me.

My hands tremble at my sides. I should meet her gaze, but my focus is drawn to her throat. I want nothing more than to cradle my cheek against the soft curve of her neck, to feel safe in her embrace. To feel like her child again. How many times over the course of this past year have I wanted to feel exactly the same way?

A girl steps between us—a girl I met moments ago. Her name has already escaped me, incinerated by the shock of seeing my mother come through the cloak of fog and trees. Whatever else she said, mere seconds ago—something important—has scattered from my mind like ash in the wind.

My mother. My mother is here. Here, in the woods lining Vanessa Andrews’s house. Vanessa, who’s been playing mind games with me for months, who knows what I’m going to do before I do. My mother wouldn’t, couldn’t be on Vanessa’s property without her knowing, could she? If she knew what danger she was in, she’d never have come. But she’s here. . . . She’s here.

What if this isn’t my mother at all? What if it’s an Unseen creature borrowing her face? A chill pricks my thudding heart, slowing it in my chest.

“Who are you?” My voice falters, and I withdraw behind a line of shadows. The taste of metal floods my mouth, and everything inside of me begins to hum. I mean the question for my mother, but the girl answers instead.

“I’m Jayce, remember?” she says. “We’re here to help you, Tanzy. Both of us.” Her fingers are strangling the strap of her messenger bag. Her white-blonde hair frames her narrow face. The ends are dyed pink, a shock of color against her alabaster complexion. Faint lines of darker pigment zigzag across her exposed skin. Two bright stripes descend from the inner corners of her eyes, tapering to a point at either edge of her mouth.

I recognize those markers immediately—the stain of Vires blood flowing through her body, which means she’s met Asher. If the pattern on her skin is any indicator, he transfused her with the blood of a tiger. Fresh suspicion prickles my spine, and I’m suddenly comforted by the knowledge that I’m one of the strongest mortal creatures on this side of the veil.

Jayce may have the stripes of a tiger, but the deepened hue of my skin, my long lashes and dark, wild hair, all of it emerged after my transfusion in the hospital. Asher completely siphoned my blood and replaced it with the Vires blood of a wild horse—the horse Spera saved from death a thousand years ago. The horse who laid down its life for her, and for her future incarnations, apparently. The horse now rendered to porous stone in Vanessa’s magnificent mansion, not a hundred yards from where we stand.

Vanessa, who I trusted. I wonder if I’ll ever trust blindly again. I hope not. I clinch my hands to fists and step out from the shroud of shadows.

“Who are you?” I say, staring hard into Hope’s eyes this time so there will be no misunderstanding.

“I’m your mother,” she says meekly.

I close my eyes and steel myself against the rising memory of the letter she left in my empty room:

Tanzy,

This house is no longer your home. I am no longer your responsibility, and you are no longer mine. Don’t look for me. You won’t find me. Our paths will not continue unless we walk them alone. Leave, Tanzy, and don’t come back.

Hope

She signed it with her name instead of her role. Perhaps that hurt worst of all. Not my stripped belongings, the bedroom she left bare save a lantern and a pathetic scrap of a note. Not the days I spent in the hospital wondering if she was okay, when she should have been worried about me. Not the hundreds of unanswered phone calls.

She locked up the house. Our home. Abandoned it. Abandoned me. She isn’t my mother anymore. She’s just . . . Hope.

“Even if you are my mother, I’m no longer your responsibility, remember?” I say through my teeth, my eyes brimming with tears.

“Please, I don’t have much time.” Her hands dangle at her sides. I catch myself staring at them, willing them to reach for me. They don’t even flinch in my direction. I could die a day from now; an hour. Or worse, I could be taken by Asher and kept alive for an eternity. If today is any indicator, it’s a matter of when, not if. She can’t possibly understand what I’m up against, but shouldn’t a mother recognize when a daughter needs her most?

In a way, her distance confirms her identity. An impostor would’ve tried to hug me by now. This shred of proof is sharp and hot.

The pressure in my chest creeps up my throat. “You’re wrong.” My voice cracks. “I’m the one who’s running out of time.” I turn away from her and move deeper into the trees. I can’t think in a straight line with my world so categorically flipped on its side.

“You have to stop her,” my mother cries out, choking on a sob.

Keep walking, I tell myself, but my stride slows. My pulse soars. I strain to hear the note of desperation in her voice—desperation for me. As if . . . as if she actually cares.

Footsteps, too light and quick to be hers, scurry in my direction.

“Hear Hope out, Tanzy,” Jayce pleads. “If you don’t, you’ll regret it. Trust me.” She steps in front of me, blocking my path, and hugs her arms to her ribs.

Regret. Trust. Those words make me want to laugh. Or vomit. I glare at her, but the sight of her stripes stirs something inside of me. Sympathy, remorse. Do those feelings belong to me, or to Spera? Does it matter?

I remember Jayce now, and who she once was a thousand years ago—Cavilla. I saw her in Spera’s memories. Another soul marked by Asher. Guilt creeps around the base of my throat and draws tight. A thousand years ago, my first incarnation ended hers.

Does any piece of this life belong to me and me alone? Or is my every move and relationship colored by the decisions Spera made during her existence? Is anything in this life really, wholly mine? Is even my mother a piece of this puzzle? A pawn like me? Or something else . . . something worse?

It should have been you in that river. Her words come clawing forward in my mind, the words that drove me back to Wildwood and into Asher’s carefully laid trap. And yet, she repeatedly warned me away from Wildwood, tried to forbid me from ever returning.

“Why is my mother here? What’s she doing with you? What’s her part in all of this?”

“She needs to tell you good-bye.” Jayce toes at the ground with her sneaker.

I press my hand against the ache in my chest, stunned there’s any piece of me left intact enough to break. I am no longer your responsibility, and you are no longer mine.

“She already told me good-bye,” I mumble, turning away. I can’t take anymore. I can’t endure another blow and be able to keep walking, keep fighting.

“Fine,” Jayce calls at my back. “Don’t talk to her. But don’t run away, either. Please, Tanzy, you have to stay with me.” Her footsteps punctuate her words as she follows behind me, and I have to stop myself from taking off at a run. “We need you, and like it or not, you’re going to need us, too. If not for her, if not for yourself, then do it for Lucas. He’s going to need all the help he can get.”

Lucas. My heart lurches against my sternum. My face snaps to the side, where Vanessa’s stone house is peeking through the trees. In my head, I hear myself calling Lucas a killer. I see the agony painted on his face, feel the burn of his eyes on my back as I turn away and leap through the window, leaving him in Asher’s murderous hands.

“I forgot . . . How could I . . .?” Freeing Lucas is my plan. At what moment did I lose focus?

“Hey, you didn’t forget him. For ninety seconds, you got distracted.”

Jayce touches my elbow. The slight contact makes me crash back into the dreary woods, gray and slick with mist. I yank my arm from beneath her fingers.

She lifts her hands in a show of surrender, then lets them drop.

“Lucas is part of one life for you. Your mom is part of another. When one showed up, the other took a back seat. I get it. What you need to square with is that Hope and Lucas are very much a part of the same life. The same world.”

“I highly doubt it.” But doubt has made a home in me, its reach consuming and breathtaking. My mother is the last piece of the world I once knew. Lucas is everything else, a lighthouse in a sea full of teeth. He was there when lightning struck me. When I died and was resuscitated. He was there day after day, sitting beside my hospital bed, filling that stale, white room with wild flowers in mason jars. Turning me into the light of the sun.

He was there when I woke in the hay shed after my trip through Spera’s memories. Guarding me. Always guarding me. And where has my mother been all this time? Even before she left, she was leaving me, more and more every day. Leaving me for a year, when I needed her most.

“Let Hope explain it to you,” Jayce is saying. “Please. This is the one lifeline you’re going to get. You can try to survive on your own, and we won’t stop you. But if you come with us, we might be able to save your soul.”

I wrestle with her words, indecision gnawing within. No one has mentioned saving my soul, only the price I will pay for living, and the price I will pay for dying. The prophecy of the Vessel is horribly simple. If I choose to open the door between our world and the Unseen world, I will live forever as Asher’s queen and deliver the Novus, the one Unseen child in all of time. The Seen world will not survive. If I choose to seal the veil, I’ll die, my soul never to return, and Unseens will be trapped on their side of the veil forever. I can’t decide what’s less likely: the possibility of some kind of ancient loophole, or the idea that my mother is somehow involved in all of this.

I work my lower lip between my teeth as Jayce returns to my mother’s side.

Always look a gift horse in the mouth, Tanzy. Always. My father’s voice echoes in my head, and I close my eyes, absorbing the warmth from the memory of him. If I’d heeded his advice, if I’d examined Vanessa’s friendship more closely, I might not be in this mess.

At last, I raise my gaze and stare at my mother. She’s thinner than I’ve ever seen her, pale as wind-driven snow, and just as shaky. I would know her face, her hands, her laugh among a million. But in this moment, I realize I know absolutely nothing true about her aside from two facts: that she loved my father, wholly and unwaveringly, and once upon a time, she loved me too.

I armor myself with these truths, and ascend the hill.

Jayce steps to the side as I approach. My mother visibly swallows. Her face is a canvas of desperation. A blue sheen ripples beneath her ivory skin. Sweat collects along her brow. Her lips move to form a word, but the lines around her mouth blur. She looks sick, dangerously sick.

My tears come, hot and disobedient and all at once. “What’s happening to you?” I take a step closer and reach for her.

“No!” She recoils from my touch. Her movements are weak, shaky.

It doesn’t make them hurt any less.

I stagger back, doubling the distance, and gulp in air as if I’ve been struck.

“I can’t, Tanzy. I want to. You have no idea how much I want to. But I can’t. What I wrote in that letter, I had to.” She struggles to catch her breath. “I couldn’t help you as a human. I had to . . . to turn back.”

Jayce’s earlier words return like the melody of a song: What you need to square with is that Hope and Lucas are very much a part of the same life. The same world.

The Unseen world.

“You’re an Unseen,” I whisper, as ringing floods my ears and the world around me blurs.

“Yes.”

I press my lips together to keep my chin from quivering. The final layer of foundation crumbles beneath me. She was in on this the whole time. She knew one day Asher would come for me, and she never said a word. I’ve been little more than a pawn from the moment I was born—reborn. But how was I born at all? Unseens can’t have children. It’s impossible. The prophecy of the Vessel states there will be one Unseen child in all of time—the Novus. I am not the Novus; I am destined to be its mother.

Hope draws enough strength to continue. “I am an Unseen, nothing but a piece of wind and sky. For a short while, I became human. Not a masked Unseen. A true, mortal human.”

“How? Why?” I nearly choke on the questions, their weight and velocity a most damaging combination.

She shakes her head, a tremor rocking her body. “The kind of help you need now . . . I can’t give it to you as a human. I found a way to change back, but nothing comes without a cost.”

“What price are you paying?” My voice breaks.

“You.” Tears roll down her face, taking strips of color with them. “The price is you. I’ve been given this time to tell you good-bye. Then I can never appear to you again. You will not see me after this. We cannot exist to each other. I promise I won’t leave you . . .”

“How long do we have?” I whisper. Please don’t go. I have so much more to say. Don’t you? How am I supposed to do this without you?

“A few minutes. Maybe less.”

“Haven’t I already paid enough?” I cry out. Everything inside of me quakes as whatever binds me together threatens to explode.

“I will find some way to make this up to you one day. Stay with Jayce. Stay alive. We’ll find a way to save us all.” She closes her eyes.

“Wait! How do I save Lucas?” I plead.

Her form brightens, glowing white at her core. “He doesn’t deserve saving,” she says. Her voice is like air, but her gaze is heavy and sad. She knows I’ll try to save him anyway. Spera would save him, and Spera and I . . . we’re two different people. But we’re also the same. “The less they have to use against you, the longer you can hold them at bay.”

Save yourself, Tanzy, she means to say. But I can’t. I won’t.

You’ve taken care of people for so long, you don’t even see when you’re the one who needs help. That was Dana, Dana who knew me well enough to betray me. But she was right. I tried to save my father from the shadows on the ridge. I tried to save my mother from herself, tried to save Harbor from those beasts, tried to save Vanessa from Dr. Andrews. Saving people . . . that’s who I am. Me, Tanzy.

It’s who Spera was, too.

My mother’s skin is fading. Becoming translucent.

“Don’t go,” I rasp.

Her face falls. A wind sweeps through the trees, distorting her form into wisps of light.

“I love you,” she whispers. Her voice hangs in the air a moment longer than the traces of her body. Then even her words are gone, claimed by the damp gray.

I reach for the space she occupied a heartbeat ago. The wake she’s left is cooler and charged. I curl my trembling hand, trapping the sensation in my fist. The chill of her slips through my fingers, and is swept into the fog.