Mortality Bites Box Set [Books 1-6]

by Vance, Ramy

  I wince at hearing myself say that. I hated how she referred to this entire continent as the Americas. But she comes by that word honestly—it was the term used in our time. I let it slip by habit, which was becoming a … habit … around this woman.

  “Both—but mostly I mean the GoneGod World.” She stopped walking and turned to me, taking my hand. “Oh darling, I’m falling into old habits of not saying what I mean and still wanting you to understand me. I am so sorry.”

  Old habits. Like mother, like daughter, I suppose?

  She took my hand in hers and for a long moment, I stared at it, not sure what to do. In the three hundred years and change we’d both been vampires, we were constantly at each other’s throats—literally—always trying to hurt one another with words and with teeth.

  And here I was—newly human and holding the hand of the woman who both gave me life and tried to take it back.

  But that wasn’t the most confusing part. She’d just apologized. To me. Without me holding an axe to her neck (long story). She never apologized. Not as a human and certainly not as a vampire.

  Although my brain told me that this was an act, my heart said it wasn’t. I know my heart—after three hundred years you get to know yourself in a way no self-help book or shrink could do for you—and it both told me what I should believe and what I wanted to believe.

  Trouble with should and want is that neither of them mean true.

  Still. I clasped down on her hand and said, “So what do you mean?”

  “I mean me, darling. Me. I’m the one who is struggling with this new GoneGod World. Ever since I lost my powers, I’ve just been … floundering. Before I could hear your every thought, whether you were speaking out loud or not. Now, I can barely hear you when you are standing right next to me.” She scanned the Quad. “I could sense danger before it was anywhere near me, I could hardcore-parkour myself from here to the top of that building without breaking a sweat.”

  “Hardcore parkour?” I asked. She’d clearly picked that up from a college kid on the way to the library.

  She ignored me. “I could see a bee’s ass from five hundred meters away. Now I can’t do any of that. I’m just … just …”

  “Human?”

  She nodded, pulled away her hand and dug into her purse, finding a cigarette. Lighting it, she inhaled a deep breath and slowly blew out a menthol-filled puff of smoke. She calmed down, whether with the nicotine, menthol, simple act of smoking or all three.

  “Mom,” I said in soft voice that surprised even me. “You shouldn’t smoke—those things will kill you.”

  “Oh darling, darling,” she laughed, “you always did care for others. Must’ve gotten that from your father.” Then, looking at the cigarette as if appraising a diamond, she sighed. “Alas, I just can’t kick it, darling. I have been smoking for nearly two centuries without consequences … and now that there are consequences, I frankly don’t give a damn.”

  “You could vape,” I offered.

  She gave me a blank look that simultaneously conveyed that she didn’t understand what I meant, nor did she care too. I let it go. I was used to that look.

  “I get what you mean,” I said. “To lose all that strength … all our abilities. But it’s not all bad.”

  She tilted her head, narrowing her eyes, challenging me to prove it.

  “For one thing,” I said, “we can get our food from a grocery store instead of … you know.” I made a chomping noise.

  She raised one eyebrow, as if to say that wasn’t a positive life change at all.

  I added, “For another thing, we’re standing outside. In the sun. Together.”

  At that she looked up at the sun and smiled. “True. So very true.” Then her face went somber again. “Darling, I’m afraid I have put you in grave danger by being here … and if I had any other choice I would have stayed a million miles away.”

  “So you’ve mentioned. Can you tell me what this is about?”

  “The gods are gone.”

  “I know,” I said, feeling my old teenage anger flaring up at my mom’s ability to state the obvious and prattle on without actually saying anything at all.

  “Ever wonder where they went?”

  “No, not really. Golf resort? I just figured that the gods were being selfish pricks by going and causing all this trouble.”

  My mom, a devout Catholic despite the Scotland of her childhood being Presbyterian, would have never let me get away with using the word “god,” or even “gods,” and “prick” in the same sentence.

  But instead of the expected tirade, she just nodded. “You might not have wondered or cared, but do you think that is true of those around you?” She gestured at my fellow students on the Quad.

  I looked over the crowd of Others and humans and knew that most would love to know where the gods went. Their departure—their GrandExodus (who names these things?)—was so sudden, and the appearance of the Others was so unexpected, that the world was thrown into chaos. And even though this university had opened up admissions to all species, I knew I was living in a bubble.

  Elsewhere, people were suffering. Violence had never been higher, and was only rising. People were dying. And all because their once loved gods didn’t care enough about them to stick around and keep the world in line.

  I was sure that many would want to know where the gods went. And why they left. Not because the knowledge would change anything, but because it would offer some semblance of closure. Perhaps even peace.

  Returning my gaze to my mother, I nodded. “I suppose many would want to know.”

  “And what would that knowledge—if it fell into the wrong hands—do?”

  “I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

  “Think about it, darling. If some master manipulator or fantastic liar were to get this knowledge, can you imagine the harm they could do? Force people into believing something that isn’t true. Develop a new religion based on getting the gods back—or keeping them away forever. Force Earth’s resources into developing technology to follow the gods to whatever golf resort they fled to.”

  I stared at her, not responding.

  She forged on. “Use it as leverage to take control, darling. That is the power of that knowledge—of the greatest unanswered question—should it fall into the wrong hands.”

  At first, my natural inclination was to insist that she was wrong, that she was just being dramatic. But as soon as my knee-jerk, parents-don’t-know-anything reaction subsided, I thought about what she said carefully and couldn’t deny that she was absolutely right. There is no telling what Others and humans alike could be manipulated into doing or believing if they knew where their gods went.

  And knowing where they went was one step before knowing why they left. Why was far more dangerous than where. Why would carry all sorts of implications with it—we weren’t good enough, devoted enough, powerful enough. Entire cults had already sprung up, either to atone for driving the gods away or to appease them enough to return, or, in some cases, with a level of cognitive dissonance only achievable by religious nuts, somehow both. And all of it was built on baseless speculation.

  Give them a reason that was real and—

  I shook my head. “I doubt most would believe them.”

  “Ahhh, you were always a sharp one, my dear. But what if I told you that we could not only find out where they went, but also verify the absolute truth in that knowledge. This isn’t a ‘maybe’ or ‘possibly’ scenario. This is a without-a-shadow-of-a-doubt situation.”

  “How?”

  “Magic, darling. Magic.”

  “Magic comes with a price.”

  “But think of the knowledge, darling. Knowledge, mind you, that would have proof behind it. Knowledge that would be absolutely verifiable. I know it’s a lot to take in. But it’s true. And what’s more,” my mother said, leveling me with an ominous stare, “you have the key to unlocking this knowledge.”

  Danger, Lost Gods and Boyfriends

&n
bsp; What a load of centaur shit.

  “You’re thinking out loud again, darling.”

  I glared at my mother. Good ol’ Mom, piquing my interest despite myself. “Key?”

  “Well, from what I understand it’s more like an amulet—”

  “OK, OK, slow down for a second,” I said, trying to remind myself that I was staring at a woman who had done a heck of lot of evil in her life. Granted, all of that was as a vampire, and she was human now—as far as I could tell—but I had once been a vampire, too, and I can honestly say with firsthand knowledge that losing your soul doesn’t change who you are.

  Not entirely.

  It just removes the consequences of your actions, which in time whittles away your guilt. After all, if you were going to live forever and it was virtually impossible to kill you, why care about what you do? And what’s more, if all that power depended on you sucking some blood out of normal people who didn’t have any power—well, after a few decades, you start to have as much regard for them as one might a slab of steak bought from a grocery store (and before you ask—I have never met a vegetarian vampire, partly because blood is simply too tempting, but mostly because if you didn’t drink, you didn’t live).

  A slab of meat … yikes. Sorry for the visual.

  Anyway, now that I’m human again, I really don’t feel that different. Sure, I don’t need blood and I’m no longer super-strong, super-fast or super-anything. But it’s more than that. It’s not like my personality changed. Well, completely, anyway.

  That’s the hardest part about being human now. Deep down you always knew killing was wrong, but you did it anyway. You did it because when given the choice between killing and dying, you chose killing. And now all that blood followed you around in life, and this time it wouldn’t quench your thirst.

  That was what it was like for me.

  But my mother—she was something else. Someone else. Free of consequences she did as she liked when she liked, no matter who was hurt, and she never blinked an eye weighed down with an ounce of remorse. At least that’s what I saw.

  Thinking all this and still trying to find my mom’s angle, I said, “So you’re one of the good guys … trying to keep the amulet out of the bad guys’ hands.”

  “Oh darling, you always ask the question behind the question. You should be asking how it is that you have the key—”

  “Kat. Kat!”

  I didn’t need to turn around to know who it was. I could recognize that Ghanaian’s voice in the middle of a hurricane.

  “Hi, Egya,” I said, not turning around.

  Caught at college with my mother. How embarrassing.

  ↔

  “Kat, where have you been? You missed Psych class.”

  My eyes opened wide and I think my pupils must have shrunk because my mom put a concerned hand on my shoulder. “Shit,” I muttered.

  “We reviewed for Tuesday’s test. Lots of good information,” Egya said, his white teeth accented by his dark skin. Tall, muscular and handsome, Egya had all the signs of a strong, stable man. Then he spoke and almost everything that came out of his mouth was a joke or game.

  But me missing Psychology 101 was no joke. I was barely passing the class and if I didn’t get at least a C on the test I’d flunk and be forced to repeat it or change majors. Right now that didn’t seem like a bad thing—why did you need Psychology in Business School, anyway?

  “I totally forgot …” I started.

  Egya ignored me, pushing past and extending his hand to my mother, his voice suddenly as formal as Cinderella’s ball. “Hello, Ms. Darling—I am Egya-Boi Awoonar. Katrina’s classmate, friend and person who bails her out with his most excellent notes.”

  My mother clasped his hand and instead of shaking it, he turned her wrist so that the palm faced downward and kissed the back of her hand.

  “What a charmer,” my mom said.

  Without missing a beat, he said, “You must be Katrina’s mother. I would have gone with the classic line that you are her sister, but that would have been disingenuous. I suspect you are far too refined a woman to fall for such overused platitudes. So instead, I will ask what it was like to have a daughter so young.”

  “A real charmer.” My mother’s smile touched the corners of her eyes. “I am, and I did have her young. Very young. And none of this ‘Ms. Darling.’ Please call me Charlie, or CC for short.”

  “Very well, Charlie—what brings you to such juvenile surroundings as a college quad?”

  I noted that they were still holding hands. I also noted that as charming as Egya could be, this was clearly just a show to annoy me. Egya was a werehyena (well, an ex-werehyena), and hyenas, I’d come to learn during my friendship with Egya, really did love to play their games.

  This game was that he knew full well about my strained relationship with my mother. He knew all about my father, and how he died. Truth be told, Egya was one of three people on campus who knew pretty much my entire bloody past. So he knew how uncomfortable I was in this moment—and played his games anyway. Or maybe because I was uncomfortable. Freaking werehyenas.

  I had to admit, though … that was what I both hated and loved about him. And when he gave me a knowing wink, I couldn’t help but tip the scales more toward love.

  OK—so Egya and my mom talking was bad, but manageable. Now I just had to get them apart and I’d be—

  “Kat!” I heard another voice call out.

  I turned to see a tall boy with lush, black hair and impossibly blue eyes trot toward us.

  GoneGodDammit!

  My boyfriend too.

  ↔

  “And who is this tall drink of water?” my mom said, leering way too much for comfort.

  “Ahhh, Mother—this is Justin. He’s my, ahh … friend.”

  Justin winced at this, and to my continued horror he didn’t recover quick enough for it to go unnoticed. My mother, being my mother, gave him a sultry smile that I’d seen her use on drunken sailors and horny construction workers alike and said, “ ‘Friend’? Darling … swoop this one up, lest I do.”

  At this, Justin’s wince turned into a scarlet blush.

  My cheeks turned red, too—but not out of embarrassment.

  “OK, guys—thank you for saying hello, but my mother and I are catching up and so, you know—”

  “Nonsense, darling. I am so pleased to meet your friends,” she hissed, the s in pleased lingering a bit too long for my liking.

  “But Mother—we were discussing important matters and I really think we should finish up.”

  My mother, not taking her eyes off Justin, nodded. “I fear Ms. Practicality and fruit-of-my-loins is right.”

  Both Justin and Egya laughed at this, but I was happy to hear it sounded less sincere and more polite.

  “We must continue our discussions,” my mother finally conceded. But that doesn’t stop us from meeting for dinner. Say, eight-ish?”

  “And I know just the place,” Egya said. “There’s a new diner across the street from the old abandoned theatre: Mama’s. Supposed to have the best poutine in the city.”

  “Poutine?” my mother said, lifting an eyebrow.

  “Oh, you are in for a treat, Ms. Da … ah, I mean Charlie.”

  “Then it is settled. Justin and Egya will join us at Mama’s. Mama’s … fitting name given our recent reunion, don’t you think, Katrina?”

  Gritting my teeth—lest I resume my old habit of biting—I nodded.

  ↔

  With dinner plans in place, I shooed Justin and Egya away. The Ghanaian left with a chuckle after handing me a photocopy of his Psychology notes (good guy, that Egya), but Justin wasn’t so easy to push away. He wanted a kiss goodbye, I could see it in his eyes—but as much as I love Justin’s lips on mine, I wasn’t going to do that in front of my mom. Too much fodder for her to use against me later. So instead I gave him an awkward, impersonal kiss on the cheeks—both of them—and walked away.

  I’m going to pay for that later, I thought
—unfortunately out loud.

  “Indeed you are,” my mom agreed.

  ↔

  With them finally gone, I turned to my mother and, not hiding my anger, said, “No more games. Danger, you said. Where? When?”

  “The amulet, dear? The key? Don’t you want to know how it is you have it?”

  “The museum,” I said, shrugging.

  My mom lifted an impressed eyebrow.

  “I don’t own any amulets, Mom. The museum has several. It was the only obvious place it could be. Not that hard to guess. Now—the danger. These bad people who want it … where are they and when are they showing up?”

  She crossed her arms and sniffed. “All business. Just like your father, I see.”

  I didn’t respond, just stared at her until she finally caved and answered my question.

  “I don’t know when, all I know is that if I could track the amulet to this place, then so can they. Intel says they are currently unaware of the amulet, so it could be some time. The important thing is to retrieve it and wipe out any record that it was here so that they never come.”

  “ ‘Intel’?” I chuckled at the word. The mother I knew would never use a word like intel. It was too hokey, too much of an abbreviation. A part of me wondered how she’d react if she knew “Quad” was an abbreviation, too. She was more of a “My people say …” or “A little birdie told me …”

  Intel. I stared at her. My mother was acting so different, so bizarre, that it was hard for me to believe this was the same person I’d known for three centuries. And then it dawned on me that maybe she wasn’t being honest. Should have been obvious, really, but I was letting that small part of me that still wanted a mother cloud my judgment.

  “What’s your angle, Charlie? Someone paying you to retrieve it? One of the bad guys, perhaps?”

  My mother put a hand on her chest and gave me a faux hurt look. “Darling, I would—”