Silver Crescent Shadows

Chapter3

Blood in Cell

Emma POV

"Wake up, moonlight. Wakey wakey..."

The voice floated through layers of consciousness, familiar and yet unreal. There was only one man who had ever called me that.

I struggled to open my leaden eyelids, squinting against the blinding brightness. No walls, no ceiling — just endless white all around me. I squinted, looking for something to orient myself in the darkness.

"Mom?" My voice was small, a child’s plea resonating into void.

I heard her footsteps before I heard her footsteps—the sound of the newspaper slipping from her hands onto the floor—and her smell arrived before her too: warm cookies and fresh-brewed coffee, the fragrance that clung to her skin long after her café had shut its doors. I’d always assumed it was from long hours in the kitchen, but the what she smelled like had clung to her all these years, as if her body had absorbed the comforts she had shared with others and they were now permanently released from her skin.

“My beautiful baby girl,” she said from behind me.

I whirled around so fiercely that vertebrae crackled in dissent. There she was — not the gaunt, hollowed version toward the end, but my mother as she’d been in her glory. Vibrant. Whole.

"Mom!" I lunged forward, longing to throw my body into her arms, but she held up a hand to stop me, an invisible shield distanced between us.

"Baby girl, I'm so sorry." Tears shone but did not fall from eyes like my own. "I should have prepared you. I should have told you all before leaving this world. Now here you are facing it all on your own, no guidance.”

Confusion washed over me. "Told me what? Mom, I don't understand—"

“You’ll meet someone soon,” she said, as if before an unseen clock. “Someone who will keep you safe, take care of you, make sure you’re never alone in this world. Her gaze intensified. "You have a destiny, Emma. It might come off as daunting but do not panic. “People have been placed along your pathway throughout your life to assist you with it.”

Questions pressed against my tongue, but she was already dissolving, the very edges of her outline going blurry.

“I love you, moonlight,” she said, voice fading away. “I’ll always be watching over you.

Always watching? That bitter thought was my last before consciousness slammed back into me.

I shot up in bed, sheets sticking to sweat-slicked flesh. The stale smell of my room—musty wallpaper and cheap air freshener waging a losing battle against neglect—anchored me in reality.

First dream of my mother since we put her casket in the ground and already she speaks in riddles? Destiny? Protectors? I rubbed trembling palms into my face, streaking yesterday’s mascara across my cheeks.

Through a haze, I stumbled to the wardrobe, which stood cracked in my small room, and glowered into the mirror. The likeness had grown uncanny with age — same high cheekbones, same full mouth that appeared eternally caught between smile and sorrow. The eyes were the only difference — hers a warm amber, mine a deeper green. But everything else was her bloodline, as if her ghost had chosen to haunt me through my own face.

I collapsed against the wall opposite the mirror, my knees at my chest. The confusion that remained took form, something clearer and sharper, more painful.

Where were these maternal warnings all these years? Where was her “watching over me” when Aunt Elise’s palm slapped my cheek? When her rages had me sleeping in parks cause she was an alcoholic? When her tuition dreams went up in smoke because her sister declared I was "no longer her responsibility"?

Where was this supposed guidance when I sobbed myself to sleep, the cavity in my chest so wide I felt it might swallow me whole?

Hot tears carved channels down a day’s-old makeup as I glared at my reflection. “Some guardian angel you turned out to be,” I said silently.

The mirror reflected me have a breakdown, and then my right eye sparked with luminous gold.

I stopped in place, breath stuck in my throat.

My reflection winked at me.

Not me — not my conscious movement — but my mirror image, moving by itself. The glass rippled like agitated water, and for a single heartbeat, the face reflected back wore an expression I had never made.

I scrambled backward, spine slapping the other wall with bruising impact. When I mustered the courage to look again, I saw only my terrified face in the mirror, smeared makeup, eyes their usual shade of green.

Had I imagined it? Sleep deprivation dragging tricks? Or something more sinister?

The possibilities scared me more than any nightmare could.