Page 43 of Raven

He leant into her, a sneer on his face. "You don’t scare me." He flicked his hand up; I moved to intervene, thinking he'd strike, but instead, a blast of water hit her face out of nowhere, drenching her

My mother staggered back, choking as water spewed from her nose and mouth. Water fae.

"Take the bike and go. And don’t mess with things that have nothing to do with you." He grabbed Lyra, rough enough that she yelped.

My mother was bent over, water dripping from her, and she heaved out clear fluid. She gasped for breath, trying to recover.

"Are you okay?" I asked.

She didn’t even look at me. But her eyes were locked on Malachai. "Get your bike."

NINETEEN

I didn't know if it was the bike, the situation, or whoever that Lyra woman was, but something was off about my mother as we left the scrap yard. Her eyes had blazed at Malachai, and I didn’t like the way he looked at her. But there was more to it. I might not have been able to read my mother, but I could read him. There was anger there, anger and a whole lot of something else. He glared at me as we left, our eyes meeting, and I let my top lip peel back to show him the panther teeth that’d come down in my jaw. I didn’t need to speak. The message was clear. He might have been fae and full of magic, but he was in our world now.

We got my bike to the car park of the cafe, and my mother said nothing. No comments, no instructions. It was not like her, but I used it, pushed against things I knew she’d normally complain about. She even let me ride with her going pillion. If I couldn’t feel there was something wrong, that’d have been the biggest hint, because her letting me be in control of anything … not a chance.

These kinds of moods when she got them niggled at me. They made my skin itch, and I’d wait. It was like waiting for a volcano to explode, because you knew it was going to. It was just a matter of time. Part of me just wanted to scream at her. Just bloody tellme what it is so we can get it out of the way. But I bit my tongue and carried on.

The bike was in pretty good shape considering. In all honesty, I was pretty sure it’d be long gone, or if I found it, it’d be smashed just because the humans knew it belonged to an Other. Yes, that’s how pathetic they get. I guess I should have been grateful that Malachai was going to keep it for himself. I’d be sure to thank him one day, especially if he ever looked at my mother like that again.

There was a slight tear in the seat, one of the handlebars had lost its cover, and the petrol tank bore a slight scratch—nothing I couldn’t buff out later.

We got to our building. My mother unlocked the garage so I could put the bike in. Surprisingly, she left me to it, not helping and still not speaking. I stared at her for a good long moment as she went back to the door of our place, but she didn’t even look back at me. Her silence was getting under my skin. There was something different in this.

When I got upstairs to our place, it was no different. She was in the bedroom, probably getting changed, because that was where she kept her clothes. We shared the bedroom. Not the bed. I got the room mostly, but if I wasn’t there, then she used it. The wardrobe was split between our clothes. Not that we had many, but it was fine. We didn’t need stuff.

While she was in there, I went to the lounge and plonked myself down on the sofa. I even opened one of my college books, which was useless, because my head wasn’t in a place to read it. In the end, I sat with my head in my hands. My mother came out of the bedroom, and I expected her to say something to me, but all she did was mutter a goodbye and leave.

I tried reading her, sending out my ability, threads in the air, but she was back to her normal, locked self. It was like hitting a thick, dark membrane that any time I tried to penetrate it, Igot thrown back. It took me a moment to shake it off. I’m pretty sure my mother knew about what I could do. Probably before I did, which was why she had her shields up in the first place. But I wasn’t trying to invade her mind. I wanted to scope out her feelings and understand what the fuck was going on.

It had to be the fae and Lyra.

I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen her this rattled. It was like a live wire had been cut, sparking and fraying at the edges. Normally, she only got this way when it was something about me, and we’d talked out everything I’d done wrong already.

I clenched my jaw, knowing better than to ask. Her walls were up, higher than usual, bristling with an unspoken warning. She was a vault, and I didn’t have the key. Her problems were her own. She’d always played the adult card, locking me out of her world. My job was to pass school, pay the bills, and keep my nose clean. Her rules. Her life. I was just a kid trying to stay in line.

I guess it didn't matter. My mother would deal with it, and it'd pass, and then we'd never mention it again. I had to go and meet Lachlan.

I had only ever done a couple of reverse shiftings before. It wasn’t often people came back from Exile. Usually, they went there to hide, to go under the radar. Not that Exile was anything special. From what I knew of it, it was a hostile place, but it had a level of freedom. No one cared, basically. So why would someone come back? I guessed we’d see.

I went down into the underground to meet Lachlan. It was already late, and we’d probably not make it back before the ten o'clock curfew. That gave us an hour to get there and back, which was never going to happen.

There were roads we could use, ways we could go without sweepers monitoring, but those routes cut through areasdominated by Others or controlled by Society. Most were sketchy backstreets that humans didn’t give a shit about. But if we were careful enough, we could slip through without anyone seeing us.

The underground was a sprawling cavern, once an underground railway system, shut down a decade ago. Stray Others had taken over, and no one bothered to kick them out. Some tracks still remained, while others had been pulled up and covered with makeshift flooring.

The archways were useful; strays had built shop fronts or facades around them, creating a semblance of an underground world. It had been there so long, it functioned well, but it wasn’t the most welcoming place. As nice as it might sound, the people down there had nothing. No money, no property. They had carved their world out of poverty, living the best they could with what little they had. This was where the desperate came when they had no other options.

The main track of the underground went as far as the next station. It was covered and lit up, with doors lining the sides. I assumed those rooms had been maintenance rooms or something similar when it was a working railway. The place was so vast, stretching across two stations. The other station came out at the river, where the infirmary had been built. It spanned a good few shipping containers, the large metal kind stacked onto boats and shipped out with cargo. I had no idea how they’d got them down there or when. The thing with strays—just because they weren’t part of Society didn’t mean they were useless. This entire place, this world they’d created for themselves, functioned maybe on a better level than the one up top. They hadn't just got the shipping containers down here; they'd engineered them into a proper hospital. Plus, they’d used many of the boxes, stacked to make places for the Others down here to live. It was nothing short of impressive.

Hands in my pockets, I followed the path along the station where this side of the underground started and headed up to the main drag. Various people nodded at me or said hello, but it was when I was within spitting distance of Madame Sian’s that the woman sitting outside leapt out of her seat and rushed to me, arms wide open and the biggest grin on her face.

Of course, I returned it and caught her. “Raven …” she squealed. She threw her arms around me, and I did the same with her. My arms went all the way around, and I picked her up easily. She was a little bird, so delicate.

She peered back a little to look up at me. “I swear to god, you get bigger every time I see you. What the heck has your mother been feeding you? And where can I get some?”

I laughed. “What can I say, it’s the genes.” If you held Sue too tight, she’d snap or break something. She wasn’t skinny in an unhealthy way. She was just little, and it suited her.

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