Green-Eyed Envy (21 page)

Instinct had me jumping back and preparing to shift before my conscious brain caught up enough to register that the person in front of me was friend rather than foe: Serise wearing her ordinary mortal disguise. My pulse slowed to a dull roar, only to pick up speed when the next logical worry struck. “Where the hell is my family?”

She jerked me inside the foyer and slammed the door much as my mother had before. “They’re sleeping safely upstairs with two of my sisters guarding them.”

“Two? Last I heard you had a half dozen with you.”

Her lips twisted grimly. “I did, along with two Furies loyal to your mother. My two are all who remain.”

My body sagged against the front door behind me. “Oh gods, Serise. You mean they
all
—”

“Sacrificed themselves so your family and my children could get to safety, yes.”

She kept her voice emotionless, but I knew her well enough to spot the flash of anguish in her eyes. To lose four of the sisters she was pledged to protect in one fell swoop must have hurt like hell, especially for such a wildly emotional race as Harpies, and yet she would not allow herself to openly grieve them. Not in front of outsiders anyway, which was what I was—no matter how friendly we had become.

Grief for my own lost sisters flared, but I could do no less than a Harpy and pushed aside my own sorrow for the Tisiphones who had given their lives to protect my innocent—and fragile—family members. “They found the second safe house.”

A statement rather than a question, but she nodded anyway. “Late last night, but I couldn’t risk contacting anyone while we tried to lose anyone trailing us. Not even you or your mother. This was the only safe place I could think to bring them.” She made that admission with a haggard expression, hands curling protectively over her belly. “I—it makes no sense how they keep tracking us so easily, not with all the precautions your mother and I put into place. Not unless ”—her expression soured—“ unless your enemy sisters are working with mine and have a relative’s blood my ‘sisters’ can use to trace.”

I frowned. “I don’t see how they could be using a relative’s blood. You had all of my blood relations with you except for Mac, my mother, and me . . . ” Horror widened my mouth and eyes. “My gods, no. Surely
Nan
wouldn’t be helping them . . . ”

A tired voice echoed in the air unexpectedly. “Unless, of course, your Nan’s not really your Nan.”

I pushed away from the door and searched for the owner of that voice. “Mom?”

She materialized midway between Serise and me, staggering before I managed to catch her in my arms. Exhaustion was evident in every line of her face and in the boneless way her body collapsed against mine. Her skin seemed a strange grayish-white hue I couldn’t ever remember it being.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” I did an unintentional impression of my sister-in-law. “You look like death warmed over, Mom.” Showing just how true that observation was, she didn’t even make a snarky comeback, just heaved a huge sigh. My protective—and practical—instincts kicked into overdrive. “Serise, get something sugary to eat from the kitchen. And a lot of it.”

She leapt into action while I half carried my mother to the living room sofa and helped her sink into its cushiony depths. A sense of helplessness washed over me as I watched her struggle for each breath. I hadn’t seen a Fury this magically and physically drained in—well, ever—and it terrified me. The thought of losing Mom so soon after getting her back . . .
No, don’t even
think
like that. She’ll be just fine once she gets some sugar into her.

Furies were a bit like hummingbirds in that respect: Sugar helped replenish our depleted energy stores, especially when we overexerted ourselves like Mom obviously had. Okay, make that two respects: We can hover midair and fly backward much like the tiny winged wonders.

Serise bustled back with an entire family-size box of Pop-Tarts, ripping into an individual package and handing it straight to my mother, who devoured the twin pastries in thirty seconds flat and held out her hands for another. The next couple of minutes consisted of her chowing down the sugary-sweet goodies and Serise opening the next package until finally Mom’s color started to look a little healthier. Only then did I finally ask the questions burning inside me.

“What did you mean, Nan’s not really Nan? Have you found something out? Is someone impersonating her like the Sidhe did with Nessa?”

Mom finished cramming the last few crumbs inside her mouth, swallowed, and shook her head. “Not exactly. It’s Nan’s body all right, but I’m afraid she’s not in control of it.”

I blinked. “Whoa, okay, maybe you need to back up and get me up to speed.”

“I’ve been doing some digging since we talked on the phone last, trying to figure out if someone else had a hand in Nan coming out of the coma. Turns out someone besides you and I had been visiting her regularly in the two decades since she killed Medea.”

My breath caught. “Who’s that?”

She hesitated before replying. “Stacia.”

Of all the names she might have said, few—if any—could have surprised me more. True that both Nan and Stacia were Tisiphones, like the two of us, and equally true that each had been maternal figures to me. But Mom and Stacia had been mere acquaintances before my mother’s disappearance, and I’d never heard that Stacia had been close to my grandmother. In fact, thinking back, I’d always gotten the impression Nan hadn’t cared for her much. Then again, I’d been ridiculously young when Nan fell into her coma: It was way before I joined the Sisterhood, way before Stacia took my Fledgling self under her wing. It was just an impression I’d gotten from the few times Stacia’s name came up in conversation between Nan and Mom.

One of those conversations tickled at the back of my brain, since it’d taken place just a week before Nan’s fateful fight with her sister. I closed my eyes and channeled tendrils of magic to enhance faulty childhood memory.

Mom and Nan had sat across from each other at the breakfast nook in the kitchen, unaware I had tiptoed into the formal dining room to peek in on them. So rare to have them both home at the same time; even rarer for me to catch them unaware and in mortal form. Sometimes I liked to just watch them when they didn’t know it. Mom so blond and lovely; Nan red-haired, fiercely handsome rather than conventionally pretty. And in mortal form, so much easier to eavesdrop on.

Hey, I’d been like ten years old and curious as hell. Sue me.

At first, they’d spoken of boring things like the household routine, how I was doing in school, David being away at college, and my parents’ upcoming anniversary, when Nan was going to take me on a weekend getaway so Mom and Dad could enjoy one of their own. But then they mentioned a name that immediately caught my attention. Great-Aunt Medea.

“Stacia believes she knows how to track down Medea.”

Nan had frowned down at her cup of coffee. Even then, I’d loved the strong, rich scent of the gourmet blend she preferred. These days, tasting it sent me into paroxysms of delight. “I know I swore I’d track down Medea at any cost, and I will, but I don’t know how wise an idea it is to trust Stacia in this matter.”

Mom had given a frown of her own. “You don’t trust Stacia?”

“Not so much that, necessarily. She’s a damned fine Tisiphone, and she serves us well on the Lesser Consensus. But her feelings for Medea,
those
I don’t trust at all.”

A deep sigh from Mom at that. “You can’t blame her for grieving when Medea Turned Harpy. If something ever happened to . . . ” Mom’s voice broke slightly, and she amended her statement. “
When
something happens to Geoffrey, I know I’ll go a little crazy myself.”

“Yes, but you don’t have a pattern of going more than a little crazy like Stacia does. You weren’t there that day when she managed to take out the mortals who killed her Wing of sisters. Crazy is putting it mildly. Imagine what she might do when confronted by Medea Turned Harpy. It’s going to be hard enough on me to put Medea out of her misery. No telling what could go wrong if we allow Stacia to go with us.”

Looking back on that conversation with the added wisdom and experiences of my adult self, some of the missed nuances suddenly made a whole lot more sense. Whoa. Stacia and Medea had been lovers—something nobody had ever even hinted to me before. Things had been serious enough between the two women that Stacia had done something crazy after Medea Turned. I made a mental note to find out exactly
what
she’d done just in case it wound up being important down the line.

My eyes narrowed at the next leap in logic. Nan must have convinced Mom
not
to trust Stacia when they went after Medea because, as far as I knew, the two of them confronted Medea alone.
How
they found my great-aunt I’d never heard for sure. All I
did
know was that poor Mom witnessed her mother kill her aunt at the cost of a coma that stole decades of Nan’s life. Knowing Stacia—and her unique brand of crazy—the way I now did, I could say with confidence that would have pissed her off in the extreme. Nan made the most logical target for that anger. So why, then, would Stacia visit Nan regularly in the years to come?

I shifted uneasily as a dozen possibilities flicked through my mind, each more sinister than the last, each I might once have claimed to be more
impossible
than the last. But after the hard truths I learned about my former mentor, I could no longer put
any
thing out of the realm of possibility where Stacia was concerned.

Not even that she was somehow manipulating Nan from the grave.

I voiced that possibility aloud. “You don’t think that Stacia . . .”

Mom twisted a foil wrapper in her hands and pursed her lips. “I’m not sure
who
is influencing her now or how they’re doing it, but I
am
certain that someone
is
doing so. I also find it highly suspicious that she is allying herself more closely with sisters loyal to the Megaera class rather than her fellow Tisiphones . . .”

That
had my eyes blinking triple-time. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Back up there.
The
Megaera?”

She frowned. “I said the Megaera class, yes.”

I shook my head violently. “No, not the class.
The
Megaera. That makes perfect sense.”

“I’m afraid I don’t—wait. You think the
Megaera
is the one manipulating your grandmother now? But—But . . . ”

“You said yourself that things are going to hell in the Sisterhood. Durra claimed the Megaera ordered her to make that hit on me, and I’ve seen nothing to indicate anything contrary to that. Think about who could gain the most by pushing for a civil war to break out in the Sisterhood now, Mom. Which class hasn’t had a sister serve as Moerae since the War ended?”

“Has it
been
that long since a Megaera sat as Moerae?” Mom’s expression morphed from disbelieving to considering as she thought over the past few decades. “Two Alectos, then a Tisiphone, another Alecto, and now Katya. My gods, Marissa, you’re right. The last Megaera to serve as Moerae was Hazuki.”

Hazuki, the Japanese-born Fury who finally succeeded in brokering peace between mortal and arcane more than thirty years earlier. Her time as Moerae had been productive but short-lived: An unknown group of disgruntled arcanes assassinated her not too long after she ironed out the Accord. My mind whirled as it pieced together a dozen different odds and ends of information garnered since I’d become a full-Fledged Fury, trying to make sense of the senseless chaos that seemed to be sweeping across the Sisterhood like a raging flood.

“You don’t think that the Megaeras believe that . . . that a
Tisiphone
was responsible for Hazuki’s assassination, do you? And that we’ve secretly conspired to keep them from being voted in as Moerae in the years since?”

“Gods, Marissa, I don’t know. You’ve certainly been more active in the Sisterhood the past couple of decades than I have.”

“Well, it certainly makes more sense than anything else I can come up with. What other reason could they have for waking up Nan and pushing her to challenge Ekaterina for her seat? Why would they want to go after me and, more bizarrely enough, the
mortal
members of our family? What could possibly be worth risking civil war among the Sisterhood if not gaining political power over the Furies as a whole?”

My brows furrowed as that thought tickled at the back of my brain. Civil war seemed to be brewing not just in the Sisterhood of Furies, but also among the Harpies. Stacia had once plotted to gain control over both the Furies as herself, and the Harpies in her guise as Calaeno’s second, Penelope. She’d been the only Fury in history with the ability to channel Rage as both Fury and Harpy without first slaughtering her Amphisbaena. Now we learned that she’d been not only obsessed with manipulating me to follow in her footsteps but had also been secretly visiting Nan over the decades since Nan killed her lover-Turned-Harpy, Medea. Only I still couldn’t understand
why
she would have visited the comatose woman she believed killed her Megaera lover . . . And then sudden realization blindsided me.

“Oh. My. Gods. Maybe
Stacia
was the reason Nan stayed in a coma all those years. During her visits she could have cast any number of spells prolonging Nan’s slumber. The perfect little revenge.” Mom met my shocked gaze with one of her own. “Stacia’s death was probably the reason Nan was finally able to wake up. But now, for gods know whatever reason, Nan’s wreaking havoc against the Sisterhood. It’s as if she blames us all for what happened to her . . . ”

And gods, as I knew from firsthand experience, hell had
nothing
worse than a Fury scorned . . .

 

 

SCOTT CHOSE JUST THAT MOMENT TO PUT IN a not-so-timely appearance by slipping quietly through the front door and into the living room. Fortunately for the overly distracted Mom and me, Serise hadn’t been taken unaware by his arrival, having apparently catalogued who and what he was way before we did and choosing not to interrupt the thread of our conversation to warn us. Which meant, of course, that he arrived just in time to hear my cheerful observation.