The Academy of Shades 1: Secrets of the Blackwood
Author
Amanda Underwood
Reads
200K
Chapters
63
Mommy Dearest
LARISSA
“What do you mean, you aren’t my mother?!” are words I never thought I’d say.
Yet here I am, staring at the haggard woman who raised me. The air stinks of cigarette smoke and cheap vodka, mingling with the wet scent of mildew from the old, peeling wallpaper. Her eyes are bloodshot, and she sways on her feet, a clear and familiar sign of inebriation. Overhead, a bulb flickers—the only light in her filthy bedroom. It casts shadows across her face, accentuating the deep lines that etch her skin—more wrinkles than a thirty-five-year-old woman should bear.
It all started a few hours earlier, when I stumbled upon an old, tattered photo album in the attic. Amid the dusty pages was a picture of my mother in a hospital bed, cradling a baby that looked nothing like me. Nothing like the few photos of my infancy I’ve seen. I’d been a baby with a head full of dark hair, with wide, serious pale blue eyes. Always so calm that, caught in the stillness of a photo, I seemed more like a doll than a living baby. But this infant in the photo album? Light, wispy hair, and in every photo, its mouth was wide open, face scrunched angrily as it squalled.
“I’m not,” she says, voice a cracking rasp. She pauses for a moment, shoulders sagging, as if this confession is a physical weight she carries. “But I was a teenager. My parents were shit. Your father—”
Her voice catches on the word. The mistake.
“My boyfriend,” she amends. “He’d knocked me up. Dumped me. I was alone and terrified. Willing to do anything to make it.”
Her glassy eyes meet mine, and there’s nothing but disgust in their watery depths. “Even trade my own squalling brat for you.”
A bitter laugh escapes her chapped lips before she reaches for the bottle on the nightstand. She takes a hearty swig and spills a little. It glistens on her chin. “You were quiet, at least. Slept through the night and never cried.”
“Mom, enough,” I say, trying to ignore the hurt ripping me open from the inside. Instead, I focus on my frustration. She’s always been unhappy, even mean, but never truly cruel. Never like this.
I reach for the bottle. “You’re hammered. You need to sleep it off.”
She jerks back, clutching the bottle to her chest—hugging it close in a way that she’s never once hugged me—and backs away on wobbly legs. But her bedroom floor is littered with trash: crumpled fast-food wrappers, moldy dishes, dirty clothes. Her feet catch in the chaos. Arms pinwheeling to keep her upright, the bottle slips from her hand, crashing to the floor with a dull thud. Cushioned by the mess, it doesn’t shatter, but a steady glug, glug, glug sounds as the vodka spills out, soaking into the soiled carpet.
My mother collapses to her knees. Grimy, unkempt fingers scramble to right the bottle, but it’s too late. Nothing remains of the liquor but a wet spot on the carpet, and the strong fumes of alcohol filling the air between us.
For a moment, silence reigns. This room that has seen so much unhappiness seems to hold its breath, waiting to see her unravel further. And she doesn’t disappoint. She falls back on her haunches, face crumpling, eyes squeezing shut. She screams—a raw, guttural sound that reverberates off the walls and wraps around my heart. There are years in that sound. Years of regret, despair…hatred.
I take a single step toward her and her eyes shoot open, pinning me with a hate-filled glare that takes my breath. “Get out!” she snarls.
I raise my hands in a placating gesture. “Mom—”
“I’m not your mother, you…thing! Get. Out!” Each word is a venomous hiss. Each syllable a knife to my gut.
Shocked into numbness, a chill spreads through my body. The room around me—the trash and the grime and the ruined woman amidst the chaos of her own creation—blurs. Again, the faulty bulb flickers, casting eerie shadows that seem to huddle around her, even as her words echo in my mind in a relentless refrain.
I’m not your mother. Get out, get out, you thing, GET OUT!
I stagger back, my own feet twisting in discarded clothing. Aluminum crunches beneath my sneaker as my step crushes an empty beer can, but all I see are those shadows, writhing around the sobbing woman who’d raised me with such constant, casual neglect. The woman who had looked at me with such hate, such disgust.
The shadows pulse, growing stronger. I’ve felt them before—always on the periphery of my senses. But the darkness has never been so strong within me. My ties to the shadows so clear.
The chill in the air grows as I draw in a ragged breath. When I exhale, it fogs the air in front of my face. The shadows make it as cold in the room as I feel inside.
“You’re pathetic,” I whisper, my voice a furious tremble.
Then she’s screaming again. But this time, it isn’t hate—it’s terror.
The shadows thicken, swirling around her like slithering, hungry snakes.
My anger becomes edged with fear as I watch them circle her, and yet I continue backing away. Mechanically, my steps take me past the threshold, into the hall.
The shadows shift with a life of their own, growing, growing, growing until they engulf the bedroom door.
My mother’s scream turns bloodcurdlingly shrill—filled with heart-stopping agony.
But then it stops. Replaced by an eerie stillness. By the silence of the grave.
Cold sweat drips down the back of my neck as the shadows recede. But I can’t look. I don’t want to see what I’ve allowed them to do.
With no other thought in my head, I run. I run, and I don’t turn back.
Out the door, down the gravel drive until an empty, night-darkened street stretches before me. It’s only when the road leads me onto a busier avenue that I pause beneath the glow of a streetlight. I bend over, a stitch in my side making it hard to breathe—my racing heart making it even harder—and try to gulp down oxygen.
It’s then that I see them, in the streetlight’s harsh glare.
The shadows.
They follow me. They return to me.
Adrenaline slams into my veins, flooding my mouth with a sharp, metallic taste. My body should spring into action—but it doesn’t. I freeze. My feet anchor to the pavement, my gaze fixed on the darkness closing in.
The shadows slither across the pavement with a silky, predatory grace that arrests me. That is as beautiful as it is terrifying. I watch, helpless to do anything else, as they reach me.
There, at my feet, they pause. Then they pool together, gathering into a dark mass, shifting and merging, stretching until they form an unmistakable shape.
My shape.
And that’s when the truth of it hits me.
Oh, God… What have I just done?
And, more importantly… What am I?
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