“Give me the gun,” I say, turning back around to face my mother. “If they storm in here and see you holding the gun on me, they’ll shoot you.”
“And you don’t want them to shoot me,” she says, her voice confident, but also tinged with hope.
“No,” I reply, and I mean it.
She empties the bullets from the chamber and hands me the revolver. I set it on the ground by my feet and stare at my mother as an equal. I collapse into her and hug her fiercely, luxuriating in her smell, in the comfort of her arms.
“I can’t believe what you did,” I say. “I don’t understand it. I will never understand it. I’m not like you. I never was and I never will be. You can’t possibly understand what you have done. And what you have lost.”
“I know what I have lost,” she says, looking me in the eyes as she releases me from our embrace.
She bends down and kisses Alistair on the forehead and then Gabriella. She closes Alistair’s eyes. There is blood on her lips, which she blots with a Kleenex from her pocket.
“I gave them all their life and then I took it back,” she says. “And now it is you who has everything. All of my love. All of my attention. Didn’t you ever wish me back to life? Well, here I am. What will you do with me?”
I don’t know what to say. I want to scream. I want to jump out the window.
“Never mind,” she says. “We will figure it all out together, darling.”
I have won. But what have I won?
My mother seems eerily calm as she grabs my hand and leads me down the stairs. We pause together by the White Room, where she squeezes my hand and pats my cheek, and then she throws open the front door and we move outside together: her, an unforgivable monster who has satisfied a lifetime’s worth of revenge, and me, the one she has left alive to tell the tale.
***
Dani Lamia Collection
(Elevated Horror and Supernatural Thrillers)
ISBN: 978-1-933769-70-7
When a dream world stalker begins killing her tormentors in a world where dreams and reality overlap, a bullied high schooler must stop The Raven’s attacks on her behalf.
ISBN: 978-1-933769-68-4
When an idealistic priest learns in the confessional that a psychopath is murdering locals, he must find a way to stop her, without giving up everything he believes in.
ISBN: 978-1-933769-62-2
When a young woman who has always suppressed her disturbing psychic powers finds herself faced with a hostile witches’ coven, she must embrace her power in order to save her life.
ISBN: 978-1-933769-60-8
When a struggling director chooses a haunted bed and breakfast for the location of his next film, the darkness within him turns the otherwise peaceful spirits into a nightmarish reckoning for him and his crew.
ISBN: 978-1-933769-64-6
When the spirit of a vampire is unleashed during a séance, a resident finds herself growing more youthful even as her friends rapidly age. She must find a way to stop the process before everyone she loves is dead.
