Part 11

Ammie’s lungs couldn’t fill properly with air. Her chest ragged in and out, senses kicking into overdrive. 

Eyes flickering all around the room, she noticed the rumpled blankets on the ugly tan couch, the crumbs that littered the wooden console in the middle of the thing. Shadows skittered in every corner--that makes sense, she thought, it was still dim outside. 

Everything looked normal. There wasn’t any blood, any portal to another dimension.

Wrong, Ammie’s bunch of stones said, the gray elemental objects still clenched in her one hand. 

“Ammie,” Tristian took a step forward. His arms were open, expecting her to run into them at any moment.

I want to. I so desperately want to. Ammie bit her lip until she tasted blood. The grinding of her teeth was all she could do. 

A proper response wouldn’t form.

“Ammie, dear, why are you being so cold?” Her mother’s weak voice filtered through the quiet living room over to her daughter, beseeching and desperate.

“I’ve called Sylvia,” she added, eyes glittering with a waterfall of unshed tears. “Everything can go back to normal now.”

Ammie shook her head soundlessly. How could she explain? How could she break her mother’s heart--again? 

Eyes turning, at last, to rest fully upon her brother, Ammie’s lip curled instinctively. Tristian is still alive.

But you’re not him.

Oh, the face-stealer was good, Ammie admitted begrudgingly. Every detail from the nicks on Tristian’s chin from his first shaving mishap ending in the emergency room, the fine red hairs and black streaks, just like hers, at the front of his long side bangs. The tall stature, the clothes--everything fit Tristian’s style. 

But…

“Mom, have you looked into Tristian’s eyes since he’s gotten home?” Ammie asked through chattering teeth and roiling blood.

You’re good, Lommeil, but you can’t fool me.

Ammie’s mother tilted her head. “Of course, sweetheart. Those beautiful green eyes--I thought I’d never see them again,” she covered her words with her hands, the sobs wracking her frame finally letting loose from the week’s pent-up grief.

“You’re right, mom. They’re green, just like Tristian’s. But they don’t look right, do they?” Eyes filled with viper-like condescension. That was all Ammie saw. “Tristian’s eyes were gentle, and they glowed with the light of a thousand lanterns. He could literally light up a room, and everyone listened to him because of it.”

“What are you saying, dear sister?” Tristian cocked his head, an unnatural gesture that once again sent skitters of derision coursing down Ammie’s body. 

Too bad her mother hadn’t seen it.

“Mom, you have to get away from him,” Ammie kept her voice as gentle as she could while also staying firm. “I went to Hamsen tonight, and I found a horde of faceless people converted into monsters by a human face-stealer using magic. His name is Lommeil,” Ammie narrowed her eyes, expecting the man to show something now that he was cornered. 

But the man wearing her brother’s face was not moved. 

Ammie’s teeth ground together, her vision once more tinting that dark red of blood.

“Mother, please, come over here,” Ammie’s voice careened slightly, causing her mother to look up. “He’s dangerous, mom, please.”

Ammie’s mother blinked slowly, confused. Then she looked to her son and back to her daughter.

“I don’t understand,” she shook her head slowly. “I don’t understand why you’re doing this.”

Ammie’s eyes nearly bulged from her head. 

Taking a deep breath, Ammie’s mother stood with her arms crossed. Small, she looked so small. “If this is about the hero mark, then we’ll talk about it. Maybe you can both be the hero and go on different missions.”

“What?” It was all she could say. The fake Tristian’s mouth slid into a slow and carefully hidden smirk behind her mother’s back.

“Your brother is home, Amélie,” her mother’s waffling emotions had settled on anger, it seemed, “so stop this selfishness.”

“What?” Ammie shrilled. “Are you really saying that to me right now?”

Unable to take the hidden smirking in the background, Ammie finally lost it. Gripping her stones so hard in her hand that it hurt, she yelled, “Stop smirking like that! My brother never looks like that, you a*****e. And you,” she rounded on her mother, “how dare you imply that I would rather Tristian be dead so that I could be the hero? Are you so stuck in your own mind that you can’t tell the difference between your real son and a fake?”

Ammie’s mother gasped and flinched backward. New tears fell from her eyes. “Of course, I know my own son. I know my son. I know him, you ungrateful daughter.”

Ammie took one step forward. “I’m ungrateful? Because you gave me life? So everything you do means that I just have to shut up and take it because you’re the reason I can even live in the first place? You just accused me of wanting my brother dead!”

“Mother,” Tristian came up to rest his hands on the woman’s trembling shoulders, “Ammie.”

He grinned at Ammie, and she could finally see what lay beneath. A broken skeleton with charred bones and eyes swirling with unnatural power. 

“Take off my brother’s face!” She yelled as Lommeil said, “Why don’t we just move on from this?”

“Amélie!” Her mother reprimanded.

Ammie was lost. Her mother didn’t believe her. 

She would rather maintain the facade that Tristian was back home and everything was fine, even though logic and intuition raised nothing but red flags about the situation.

How could I have had the mark put on me if Tristian was well enough to walk around? How did he get into La Ville in the middle of the night without anyone noticing in these pre-dawn hours? How is he so calm, oozing affection like it’s a disease? 

But even if Ammie started spouting off all of the flaws in his miraculous return, she knew Lommeil would just sidestep them. And her mother would take it all, completely at ease with conjuring a world of lies to fit her needs.

Who was the selfish one?

“Mom,” Ammie said through tears burning the back of her throat, “I need you to listen to me. Just once. Look at me. Just once.”

She waited until her mother’s teary green eyes flickered behind the smudged readers on her nose. 

Ammie nodded once, readying herself. If this didn’t work… If her mother still didn’t hear her…

“I know Tristian is alive. I’m more sure of it now than ever. I believe that he is out there,” she ignored the face-stealer’s stolen form and pleaded with her mother with her eyes as well as her words. Believe me. Believe me. “I don’t know if it’s because I’m connected to him by the hero mark. This thing on my hand, it--it warms when it hears his name. This mark--this destiny--all of it is so weird, even for us witches. A power granted by the gods.

“Somehow, though, I can tell that it loves Tristian. Just like it loved all of the heroes from the past. I’m not sure about the succession rules, nor am I sure about the limits to a godly gift like this, but I--I know that this mark believes that Tristian is alive.”

Heart hammering in her chest, Ammie unearthed the mark from her long hoodie sleeve. She could hardly bear to look at it, even after she’d realized how the mark felt about her brother. Its full moon shape, jagged shards chiseled away from it in uneven spikes. It was still nearly unbearable.

“I know how this sounds. I know it sounds like I’m crazy,” Ammie closed her eyes briefly. “But that man is not Tristian. He’s a face-stealer that wrecked Hamsen and is here to do the same to La Ville. We have to stop him. Now. Before people get hurt.

“Please,” Ammie finished, “listen to your heart. What is it telling you?”

Ammie watched her mother waver. She watched the clarity and hope cross her face, first a widening of her brow followed by a flickering of her eyelids. 

On the cusp of taking a chance and believing in her daughter for the first time, Tristian whirled her mother to face him.

In one moment, it was over.

Ammie reached out her stone-filled hand, sending panicked wind blades without her wand’s focus skittering all around the room and wrecking the furniture. 

But she’d been too late.

Her mother’s body crashed to the floor, blood immediately oozing into the tan carpeting.

In Tristian’s hand, a thin film of flickering flesh was dripping blood onto her mother’s corpse.

“No!” Ammie dashed forward, falling beside her. Maybe she wasn’t dead.

Flipping her over, Ammie almost threw up at the red mush that was left behind once her mother’s face had been ripped off. 

“Don’t bother,” Tristian’s voice grew louder, bouncing off the walls in a self-assured cockiness that sounded so, so wrong with his voice. “It’s a death spell that kills the victim once their face is pulled off. She died instantly.”

Bile rose up Ammie’s throat, and she pressed her stone hand to her mouth while the other tugged uselessly at a body that wasn’t moving, wasn’t moving, wouldn’t ever move again. 

Ammie looked up at her mother’s killer. In her reddened vision, his face was the color of strawberries, his already-red hair darkened to a sinister crimson.

“What have you done?” She rasped.

“I know, I know,” Tristian waved a hand. “I’m far too impatient to ever pull off a solid identity theft. But you almost had her, Amélie,” his eyes considered her. “You’re good.”

“This was all brought about by you, you know,” Tristian crouched down before her, the skin flap still held casually in his right hand. He swung it around as he talked.

“Oh, you look like you’re going to kill me,” he mused. “You witches are actually violent sorts, aren’t you? I mean, how can you not be, when you have all this power at your disposal? It’s just--unfair.”

“What?”

“Why do only witches get to be born with magic? Those ears and that black tail--they tell me that you’re not human. Your hatred of me, though, tells me that you are. You’re really not so different from me,” he stood once more, leaving the face flap carelessly on the ground.

“How--” Ammie choked on the word, “can I possibly be like you?”

Spinning gracefully, Lommeil held his bloody hands out like a magician finishing a trick. “Your ancestors got their power from somewhere, right? Well, so did I. That makes us the same. In a few hundred years, there may even be a new kind of witch clan. One that started with me.”

“You’re grandstanding right now? After you just killed my mother?”

“Oh, do you still not get it? I’m sorry, let me explain better,” he put a bloody hand to his chest, smearing red over the casual top he wore. “I’m not just going to kill your mother. Tell me, Ammie, haven’t you heard what’s been happening outside?”

Ammie’s heart was thundering too loudly in her chest for her hearing to expand outside of this room, this moment, this horrorshow. “What are you talking about?”

“Why, I thought you met my friends on the way here? They’re outside now, in your little village.”

“No,” Ammie shook her head. “The gate would repel them.”

Tristian tilted his head, nodding casually. “True, true. Unless I already converted somebody inside, who could open the gate and let them all in.”

Ammie’s eyes narrowed sharply, an involuntary flinch. Oh, Moon Goddess.

“No,” she said again, shaking her head slowly one way, then the other.

“I would run now, dear,” Tristian’s eyes shined with the love of murder. They suddenly seemed too large for his face, too prominent as they burrowed into her mind. Those eyes assured that only death awaited her in that room.

Run. I have to run.

Tristian leaned down, and Ammie saw that his nails had turned the same black as the facelesses’ bones. “Boo.”

Ammie sprang away. Her backpack slowed her down, but she didn’t dare stop to divert her energy away from anything but running. 

Away, she had to get away.

Flinging the door open, Ammie nearly ran into Sylvia, her silver hair and green eyes rounded over a heart-shaped face. 

“Ammie? Your mother told me something important happened and to come right away,” Sylvia said, her voice strained from disuse, glancing behind her to the village beyond, “but I think something is happening near the gate.”Ammie grabbed her fragile arm, pulling her into the same chaotic run as her. “Run! Just go! Don’t look back. Do not look back.”