“You know what you must do,” Abuela says.
Although she looks at me, I know my grandmother is speaking to Mamá. Now I see my family for what they are, and like the rest, she is a coward. She will force my mother to torture me as retribution for a crime I never actually committed. I might have fancied the idea of escaping, but that was not part of the plan.
I do not bother trying to convince her that my intentions were only to find Will, to make sure he was okay, because even though these words are true, she will never believe them.
Mamá stares at me, and I meet her gaze. I want her to look me in the eye as she strikes me down. Mamá has only struck me in anger once and it was with deep regret. I wonder how she will live with herself as she commits untold violence against me, her daughter, a witch, because of the order from her elder. I hope her guilt eats her alive.
A quick flash of guilt pierces her eyes, and I think she is going to cry. But almost as soon as these emotions overwhelm her, they are gone. She no longer stares at me like a mother stares at her wounded child. Instead, she looks at me with regret. But fake sympathy does not deceive me. She is not regretful of what is to come but of what I am.
She firmly believes my decisions have brought me to this moment, and that I deserve every slice of misery cast my way. She might be right. Maybe I do. I did choose to become a vampire, but I did it for all the wrong reasons. I did it to protect them, when I should have been focused on protecting me. Because there is nothing worse than being a witch and sacrificing yourself for those who would burn you at the stake.
I feel the sudden rush of elements erupt within the room. At first, I welcome the heat. It stifles the bitter cold, but too quickly, a sheen of sweat coats my skin. I swipe at my forehead. The humidity is making it hard to breathe, and the lack of oxygen is making me sleepy. My eyelids are heavy, my limbs weak.
I rest against the stone wall, lolling my head back to look at Mamá. Her eyes are emotionless pits, and the reality of that smacks me in the face. She does not care that she is using her magic to torture me. She just wants me to fall in line, to submit to her will. But I refuse.
My T-shirt is soaked through, and the heat is becoming almost unbearable. I ache to remove my jacket, but I will not. I do not want them to know just how seriously their elemental control is affecting me.
I try taking long, deep breaths, but the air is stifling. I think my tenacity angers Mamá, because she frowns and snaps her fingers. Almost immediately, the heat dissipates, and it is replaced by a burst of icy air. My breath releases as puffy steam before my eyes, clouding my vision as I try to maintain my tormentor’s gaze.
Lip quivering, I shake violently, squeezing my hands into balls to protect my fingers. I shove them into my pockets, searching for warmth.
Beside me, Will is also freezing. His teeth are chattering so loudly, I can hear nothing else but the sound of bone clinking against bone. Several inches separate us, and I scoot to press up against him. I realize combining body heat is a useless feat when paired against a witch’s magic, but my body moves on its own. I am responding on a cellular level to my mother’s torture, and I have submitted to fight-or-flight responses.
“Enough! This is child’s play,” Abuela says. “Teach her a lesson, or I will.”
The threat hangs heavy in the air, and I pray Mamá will not leave me to Abuela’s anger. She will be vicious in her attacks, torturing me as she did Will. My grandmother will not stop until I beg her for mercy, and I cannot yield. I am too stubborn to grant her that. Together, we are a recipe for death and disaster.
The first time Mamá calls upon air, she uses it to whip me, but it does not hurt. It does not even leave a mark. I frown, wondering if the cold is playing tricks on my mind. Sadly, it is not. Mamá is holding back, and when it becomes obvious she is being lenient, Abuela loses her temper.
Furious, my grandmother uses her air magic to assault Mamá. It slams into her torso, and my mother shrieks. Trying to break her fall, she trips over her feet and lands on the ground in a fumbling heap. My grandmother’s air magic moves her body with such ease, it is as if my mother were as empty and light as a tumbleweed on a hot, dry day.
My mother looks frail, weaker than I have ever seen her before. When I was a child, she looked so powerful, so formidable to me. As I would sneak around aimlessly in the night in search of souls we deemed evil, I feared her reaction. I never wanted her to discover my secrets, but I do not worry about that anymore.
As I look at her now, where she cowers on the ground beside me, I do not envy her position in this coven. Thanks to her mistreatment, there is a part of me—small but undeniably ruthless—that wants to ask her how it feels to be the center of this unwanted attention. I want her to glance my way, because I yearn to see that acknowledgment in her eyes. I want to witness the moment she recognizes that in the eyes of her high priestess, she has fallen to my level. I want to watch as she bears that truth.
But she does not look at me. With legs bent awkwardly beneath her, Mamá pushes herself upright and looks at my grandmother in disbelief. I wonder if this is the first time she has ever used her magic in anger before. I think about Holland’s warning. Have they already gone mad? Perhaps I am too late. Maybe the darkness coursing through their veins already has its hold over them.
Abuela has never liked my mother—and she has never been shy about her feelings for her—but she tolerated her for Papá’s sake. After he died, she was kind to her as a courtesy to me, the person she ordered to be the future leader of her coven. Now that the black magic has seeped into her pores, she is losing sight of what is right and what is wrong. I know I must stop this before she is too far gone.
“Stop!” I scream. “Can’t you see what this magic is doing to you?”
Abuela faces me, her eyes so dark, they look black. Maybe they are. I do not know if it is the basement’s dim lighting or if the dark magic has worked its way to her mind. Once it gains control, do the victims of black magic change appearances too? Will everyone who looks at her bear witness to its mark? I know too little about the black arts, and Holland seems light-years away from aiding me.
“You were always weak,” Abuela says, spitting her words at me with such shame and disgrace.
I fold under her accusation, her words worming their way into my heart. In true familial fashion, my grandmother knows just what to say to truly hurt me.
After Papá died, I admitted to her that I feared I would fall victim to a vampire too, that I would be too weak to survive an attack. I was young when I said this—too young to be showing signs of any real power—but now that I am older, when I think about the concerns I had back then, I wonder if I was already showing signs of spirit. Was my fear a vision? I had nightmares for years after Papá died, but Mamá said they were just the result of an overactive imagination. She doubted me—even then.
If only I could go back and comfort that young girl, I would tell her the truth about the people she loves. I would save her the greatest disappointment of her life—watching as she is forsaken by her coven for offering the very last thing she could to protect them: her mortality.
“I am not weak,” I whisper.
“¿Qué? ¿Qué dijiste?” Abuela asks, seething. I know she heard me, but I repeat myself.