I’m growing frustrated with each dead-end, wondering where else the Queen would keep my mom. However, then I open the last door on the right side and my frustration turns to anxiousness. My heart drops to my stomach as the door swings open all the way.
Inside the tiny cell is a woman, her back hunched over as she sits on the edge of the bed. She’s wearing ratty, torn pants and a shirt. Her brown hair is braided behind her head and her blue irises are fixed on the cement floor in front of her bare feet.#p#分页标题#e#
“Mom,” I whisper from the doorway. The word feels strange coming out of my mouth, like it doesn’t belong there.
She blinks up at me, and then looks back down at the ground.
“Jocelyn.” Alex inches around me and enters the cell. “Are you alright?”
My mother only blinks her eyes, refusing to look up or speak. Tears burn in my eyes as pain and the feeling of being unwanted flood me, but I suck them back. Summoning courage I didn’t know I had in me, I step into the room and up to the bed then kneel down in front of her.
“Mom,” I say, lowering my face into her line of vision. “It’s Gemma…your daughter.”
She glances at my violet eyes, curiosity and confusion emitting from her own. Then something flickers in her expression and, suddenly, she’s really looking at me instead of through me. She leaps to her feet and starts to hug me, but then quickly retracts and wraps her arms around herself.
“What are you two doing down here?” Her voice is tight and unwelcoming. “You shouldn’t be down here.”
“We came here for you.” I glance warily at Alex and then back at her. “To save you.”
“You never should have come here,” she says, rocking back and forth as she hugs herself. “How did you even get down here?”
“With an Ira,” I explain, trying not to go into shock over her detached state of mind. She’s been here for a while. She’s been through so much. I ball my hands into fists and stab my fingernails into my palms, shifting the emotional pain inside me to physical.
She frowns up at me. “So you got your father’s power.” She says it with such hatred.
A thousand questions run through my mind, but I bite them back and grab her arm. “We have to go.”
“We need to get to water,” Alex tells her, moving up beside me. “There’s supposed to be a place somewhere down here that will take us up through the lake. A water route maybe? Do you know where it is?”
“We can’t go anywhere.” She shakes her head and shuffles back until the backs of her legs bump into the bed. “The Fey will make us suffer if we try.”
“Jocelyn, no one’s going to hurt you anymore,” Alex says. “We’re taking you home.”
She laughs and then spins in a circle with her arms out to the side. “You think you can escape here? We’re trapped. Forever.”
Great. She’s crazy.
“What about my Foreseer power?” I ask, reaching out to touch her, but fear of rejection forces me to pull back. “Can it get us out of here?”
“We don’t have a crystal,” Alex points out. “We need to find water.”
My mom stops spinning in circles and chews on a strand of her hair as she assesses me, tapping her foot on the floor. “She might not need one if she’s entirely like her father, but if that’s also the case, she’s doomed.”
“Doomed for what?” I ask in horror. “What else could I possibly be doomed for?"
She lets go of the strand of her hair and strides forward, placing her hands on my shoulders. “Evil.” Her smile radiates her insanity.
“I-I’m not evil,” I stutter, though a voice inside my head laughs at me. I don’t know what to say or do. She isn’t the person I’ve seen in the visions. She’s cruel, insane and derisive. “And I’m going to show you right now by getting us out of here, which is a good thing.”
She only laughs, moving away, but she doesn’t argue when I take her hand. “Well, you can try,” she says. “I’m not going to stop you.”
“Okay,” I say determinedly, yet I falter when I realize I only have a vague idea of how to do it. “Now how do I do it? Channel the energy without the crystal and get us to present time.”
“Emotion,” she says simply. “Your father used to do it all the time by getting really angry.” Her gaze skims to Alex. “Or when I would tell him that I love him.”
I shift uneasily. “Is that it? Just feel a lot of emotion?”
She shrugs. “That and you need to have the ability to look a split second into the future then drop yourself into the vision a second behind what you saw, so by the time you make us drop, we’ll have aligned with present time.”