Her eyelids grow heavier, limbs become lead. How deep is her exhaustion? The surrounding darkness is a sweet seductress, tempting Rachel back to where Golvath’s victims live on forever.
Rachel gives in and drifts off, visiting the sisters she couldn’t save, but who are finally free.
Sunlight spills through cracks between the curtains, pooling on Rachel’s bed, the carpet, and painting the walls. She groans as she blindly reaches for the emoji pillow and pulls it over her eyes, hoping to fall asleep again. Rachel lies there for a few minutes, unmoving, before throwing the pillow aside.
Wide awake, she lifts the covers and looks down to where Ziggy is resting by her feet.
“You’re sleeping in, aren’t you?” she half-croaks.
A single, dim flash answers her.
“So unfair.”
Rachel sits upright and stretches, her bones creaking and popping after her dreamless sleep. After a long soak in the bath to soothe her aching muscles, she has a plan to get her life back to a semblance of normalcy. First, Mrs. Crenshaw will be returning home soon and they still haven’t moved her things from the upstairs bedroom to a more accessible location on the ground floor. Then, Rachel needs to figure out if she can retake the SATs—after defeating Golvath, a standardized test will be a piece of cake. Also, there were some college applications still waiting to be submitted.
Getting back into her usual routine won’t hurt.
She stands, yawns, and drags her feet toward her bedroom door where her toes touch the smooth surface of something that doesn’t belong at the edge of the rug. Rachel looks down, her mind not yet running at its full capacity, and finds a white manila envelope lying in a pool of sunshine. She picks it up, stifling another yawn as she tears open the top and pulls out the contents.
A scribbled yellow Post-It note is attached to a heavier folded-up piece of paper, reading:
I can’t do this anymore.
Rachel shakes her head, blinks a few times before unfolding the larger document. A blue frame surrounds the official contents of the certificate. Her name is typed into the first horizontal block, her gender beside it, along with her date of birth in the next space. She’s seen her birth certificate countless times before, so why would her mother—? Wait. This can’t be right. There must be a mistake.
“Mom, what the hell is this?”
Rachel wills the typed letters to reconstruct themselves and change back to how she remembers them.
She reaches out to steady herself against the door, her heart sinking to her stomach as she stares at the document.
“No,” she whispers, unwilling to accept what she’s seeing. She reaches up to touch the umbrella pendant, which Orion had returned to her the previous day, before she unbolts her bedroom door.
It’s a lie, another trick. Golvath must’ve survived. That’s the only explanation.
Her mother’s bedroom door is wide open, the bed never having been slept in. Even from a distance, she can see the destroyed photographs still littering the bed. Anxiety threatens to take over, to tear apart her already-fragile mind.
“Mom?” she croaks. Rachel marches down the hallway, ready to demand answers. “Mom, what’s the meaning—?” She cuts herself off as she enters the room and finds the wardrobe doors hanging open, empty.
Rachel glances at the dressing table. The drawers are all lying on the floor empty. Jenny’s jewelry box isn’t where it usually stands either and her hairbrush is gone. A quick search of the en-suite bathroom divulges a similar picture—the toothbrush is absent, the bottles of shampoo and conditioner are missing, the medicine cabinet is empty of anything essential.
She pivots and rushes back into the bedroom, out into the hallway. Rachel bounds down the stairs, her physical ailments forgotten, and searches for her mother. Clutching the offensive piece of paper, Rachel regards the remnants in the living room. In the corner of her eye, Rachel’s gaze falls upon the open front door, where the morning sun brightens the outside world.
Nausea twists her stomach into knots.
She couldn’t have gone far.
The most naïve part of her believes her mother is sitting on the porch, coffee in hand, beginning her day as she usually does. Rachel steps closer to the door, her heart drumming hard in her chest.
“Mom?”
The two wicker chairs are vacant. Rachel moves off the porch, searching the lawn and hoping to find her crouched in the garden, pulling weeds from the earth or tending to the hedges. It’s not impossible, just highly unlikely.
“Mommy?” Rachel manages to call out, turning her attention to the empty driveway.
Her legs give way, and Rachel crumples onto the thick, green lawn. She stares at the space where the white Hyundai i10 usually waits, wishing it back.
Rachel prays to the universe to take pity on her and return her life to what it had been before she’d crossed paths with the Bone Carver, before he’d poisoned her hometown. She wants to go back to before she learned of the Night Weaver preying upon the children of Shadow Grove, hurting those who were already in so much pain. All she wants—no, needs—is to return to living a life of ignorant bliss.
The despair is too much for her to bear. Time has no meaning anymore, life makes no sense. The creased birth certificate in her hands took everything away. Everything Rachel had ever thought true about herself, about her very existence, is gone.
It’s okay. Everything’s going to be all right.
More lies.
Things will never be okay again.
As soon as she laid her eyes on Misty Robins’ name on her birth certificate, in the place where Jenny Cleary’s name should have been, she knew nothing will ever be the same again.
If this birth certificate is authentic, then Rachel is the progeny of a Halfling noblewoman who’d sworn revenge against the Nebulius dynasty. She is the daughter of a woman who’s indirectly responsible for the death of Orion and Nova’s
