She moved through it, as well.
“That is the power I can give you,” she said. “All you have to do is take my hand, Son. The Machina will do so much more than you imagine.”
Clem surprised us all as she bolted to the bar cabinet and snatched a shallow dish from one of its shelves and threw the thin crystal container at my mother. It was a clumsy attack that scattered grains of coarse salt through the air. The container sailed past my mother’s head with inches to spare, and she laughed at my friend’s futile maneuver.
But then Clem unleashed a blast of screaming wind from between her outstretched palms. The violent corkscrew of turbulence grabbed hold of the salt and transformed it into a spiral that slammed into my mother’s face and ground the coarse grit into her eyes.
As she screamed and raised her hands defensively, my mother backed away from us. Her serpents were poised to strike, but without her eyes to guide them, they were useless.
Eric took advantage of the opening to pummel her with a blizzard of fiery bolts. The attacks peppered her body and left behind burning holes that leaked black blood and silver jinsei.
But even as she bled, my mother’s defensive techniques kicked in. Supernatural forces guided her body away from the worst of Eric’s assault. She fell into a crouch and spun away from Abi’s heavy fusion blade before it split her in half. A burst of speed carried her in a cartwheel across the deck, her serpents acting like three hands as she vaulted over Eric and landed on the wall of his house. She stuck there like a spider and unleashed a web of dark strands that streaked through the air like a hunter’s net.
Vision of the Design showed me the technique in the split second before my mother unleashed it. I used that head start to shout a warning to my friends as I dodged away. Abi, the only one of my friends close enough to reach, yelped with surprise as I grabbed his arm and dragged him to safety outside the net’s reach. I turned back and saw the dark strands settle over Clem and Eric, both of whom had their backs to my mother. They’d run forward out of instinct and ended up directly under her trap.
My mother’s web closed around my friends and ripped them off their feet. The constricting strands tangled them together and dragged them into the air. Jinsei poured through the web in a rippling pulse, and Eric and Clem both shouted in surprise and pain.
“Enough,” my mother called down from her perch. “I will not fight my son. Accept my offer, Jace, or I’ll drain the life from these two. As powerful as you are, you cannot defeat me. I made you. End this foolishness, now.”
Abi tensed beside me, and I felt the corrosive edge of anger pulse through the threads of fate that bound us together. The confused whispers of his thoughts intruded on my mind. That gave me an idea.
When I give you the word, grab my mom and turn to stone, I thought to Abi.
Unsure of whether he heard me or not, and not wanting to tip my hand by looking at my friend, I taunted my mother to keep her attention on me.
“You can’t, Mom,” I said. “Clem and I are bound together. If you kill her, you kill me.”
“Lies,” my mother hissed. But she scrambled down the wall a bit to get a closer look at her web.
“He’s telling the truth!” Clem shouted.
My mother’s serpents carried her down the wall to the deck. Dark emotions washed over her face, pulling the corners of her mouth down into a frown, pulling her lips back from her sharp white teeth. “Why would you do this? You have jeopardized everything with your foolishness.”
Anger tinged my mother’s words, but there was a stronger emotion there. Sorrow, deep and sharp. The sound of my mother’s broken voice ached in me like a broken rib. For a moment, she wasn’t a maniac bent on destroying me, but the woman who’d raised and kept me safe. Her disappointment and loss were more real than my anger or fear. It pulled at the deepest and most primal bond mortals had: the ties between a mother and her child.
“I didn’t have a choice, Mom.” I let my fusion blade wink out and held my arms out at my sides, palms raised to show her I wasn’t a threat. “But you do. Let them go. Neither of us has to die here today.”
A sad little smile banished the shadows from my mother’s face. She brushed the hair out of her eyes with the back of one dirty hand, a gesture I’d seen a thousand times before when she’d return home from a long shift in the fields. The years rolled back from us in that moment. I was a kid again, sitting at the table and struggling with my homework while a pot of algae noodles bubbled on the stove. She was a young woman, worn thin by years of hard labor, but unbowed, unbroken. We’d been through so much together, and the kid in me knew that she would always have my best interest at heart.
“They took everything from me,” she whispered. “Your father. Larissa. My work. Now you.”
Tears streamed down my mother’s face. The crystal-clear beads carved channels through the grime and blood on her cheeks, revealing the ageless, pale skin beneath. She let her head hang low, and sorrow dripped onto her filthy feet. The weight of all she’d done crashed down on my mother’s shoulders, and the sobs that racked her slender frame seemed like they’d never stop.
This was my chance to end her, to stop the cycle of pain and chaos and violence that followed her everywhere she went. But the idea of killing my own mother in
