Luisa screams. “OK! Just leave him alone.”
“Say the words,” Salvador shouts, turning back to my mother, who’s been struck dumb — either by magic, fear or disbelief.
Luisa puts a shaking hand on the invisible barrier. Salvador puts his palm against hers, and tugs my mother behind him, yanking her up like a bridal ragdoll.
“By the magic of touch, I bind you,” Luisa says.
My mother’s face is frozen in a perpetual mask of horror, her mouth opening and closing silently. Salvador’s powers must be making her weak.
I search deep inside of me for an emotion, a fleeting surge of love, but I feel nothing. I feel as empty as she looks.
“You.” Salvador turns his attention to me next. “The words.”
I gulp. Rafi’s face is still bleeding heavily. We are not getting out of here until this psycho gets what he wants.
I lay my palm against the barrier.
“In truth, I join you,” I say weakly.
Satisfied, Salvador turns to his bride. With a flash of the blade, he cuts my mother’s hand wide open, then his own, grinding their palms together — a crude version of our blood ritual earlier tonight. Blood soaks the silk bind turning it scarlet, pooling at their feet in inky puddles. I absentmindedly wonder if it’s enough to kill her, if I’m witnessing my mother’s death at the hands of the man she told me she loved so dearly just a few days ago.
And yet, I still feel no pity. Just the cold, wet dread of what’s to come.
“Say the Ascension words, Solina,” he growls, his other hand clasping her face in a vice-like grip.
I watch in horror as my mother pronounces herself First and Salvador Second. A blinding light erupts from the moon, drowning the room in white, and the new First collapses in a bloody heap.
Beatriz’s wail is the only sound cutting through the tension of the silent basement. I blink. My mother is on her knees nursing her wounded hand, and Salvador is marveling at his own cut palm as if he can’t believe his dumb luck.
“Let them go now,” Luisa cries.
Salvador shakes his head, tutting, clearly enjoying himself like the fucking madman he is. Another heart-wrenching sob from Beatriz has him twisting his face in exasperation.
“Stop crying, hija,” he says, flexing his fingers. “You have nothing to be sad about. Once I kill Solina, you will be my Second. We will rule the MA together, just like I always promised you.”
Kill Solina? That’s his plan?
My stomach drops like a cannonball. This is the day I watch my mother die.
“How could you do this?” Beatriz wails. “How could you do any of this?”
“Don’t be so ungrateful, Beatriz. If it wasn’t for your affair with that abomination, Solina wouldn’t have had the perfect excuse to call off our wedding. Even though I took care of it.”
“Took care of it?” Beatriz says, her voice a mere whisper. “Papa? What did you do?”
Luisa gives me a somber look as the truth seeps in, and slowly we start to connect the dots. Now I understand what my mother and Salvador were talking about in Maribel’s office.
“Our bloodline is meant to rule,” Salvador shouts at Beatriz through the glass-like division. “You almost squandered that for some winged hijo de puta.”
“Xavi,” Beatriz says his name like a prayer. Her eyes dance wildly across the basement as the realization sets it. “You killed Xavi?”
“What was I meant to do? Let you destroy everything I’ve built? You know that mating with a Shifter is a mark of shame.”
Beatriz’s face is pale beneath the magical moon, her face crisscrossed with streaks of black mascara and tears. She doesn’t make a sound.
I should be, though. I should be screaming as Salvador holds the knife to the throat of his new bride. I should be banging on the partition, even though it’s futile, and I know I can’t stop him. I should be crying and trying to save my mother. But I’m not. So it’s me Solina stares at as the tip of the Silencer’s blade pushes into her flesh, and a piercing wail rocks the room.
But the cry doesn’t come from my mother.
“ENOUGH,” Beatriz roars, her palms stretched out towards her father.
With a splintering crash, the forcefield separating us from our parents shatters at our feet into a million slivers of crystal.
Chapter Thirty
Salvador drops my mother and lunges at his daughter, but he’s too late. Light is emanating off Beatriz, something akin to lightning shooting up her limbs and cracking on her fingertips.
Luisa gasps loudly, and I notice Beatriz is elevated off the ground a good ten inches, her hair flowing in an imaginary wind.
I’ve never heard of a Witch do this before!
Salvador holds his hands out further, trying to cancel his daughter’s magic, but instead bright threads of lightning shoot out of Beatriz’s fingers and wrap around his wrists like handcuffs. She tugs, and he falls to his knees.
“Hija, what is happening?”
Her voice is calm now — much scarier than her sobs.
“I inherited Mother’s powers after you drove her mad.”
“Impossible,” Salvador says under his breath.
But he’s wrong, even I’ve heard of this. Sometimes, Mage magic can pass onto one’s kin when they die, or if it’s taken from them. Beatriz’s mom was sectioned years ago. Has Beatriz been harnessing her powers ever since? Is this what her mother was sending her in exchange for Beatriz’s crow messenger dreams?
Luisa and I look at one another, too afraid to move or make a sound.
“You broke her, Papa,” Beatriz says. “You Silenced her for too long. Why? Were you hoping her magic would go to you?”
“She was ill. She went crazy!”
His untruths ring in my ears. “He’s lying.”
Salvador drops his head. “I just wanted to clear the MA path for you, hija. I love you.”
“If that were true, you’d have left me with a mother,” Beatriz
