by Noelle Marie
“Mom,” I tried louder. I didn’t want to startle her, however, so instead of giving into the urge to touch her shoulder or smooth her hair out of her face, I kept my hands clutched firmly in my lap.
Tears welled in my throat when she once again failed to respond.
It was so hard seeing her like this.
She hardly resembled the woman she’d been a year ago – six months ago, even. What had once been soft, brown locks had been replaced with greasy, gray-streaked hair. (She had refused her shower this morning. Yesterday morning, too.) Shining hazel eyes had turned dull and sunken. Fair skin had become weathered. Also new was the constant confused wrinkle of her forehead. The ever-suspicious gleam in her eyes.
I blinked. She was finally looking at me.
“Mom,” I muttered, allowing the relief I felt to leak into my voice.
But it fled a moment later.
“Who are you?” she demanded, eying me distrustfully. “What are you doing in my room?”
I forced myself not to react. After all, despite the tears that wanted to spring into my eyes, it was hardly the first time she hadn’t recognized me the past few weeks. “It’s me, mom,” I reminded her, making sure to keep my voice steady. “Sloane.”
“Sloane,” she repeated, her tongue wrapping around the name like it was some foreign thing. Like she hadn’t said it a million times before – in anger, fear, love. Like she hadn’t named me it. “I don’t know anyone who goes by that name,” she denied.
I swallowed. “I’m your daughter,” I explained carefully.
Sometimes she accepted it; other times she went back to ignoring me.
“Liar.”
I stiffened.
But she had never reacted like that before. “What-?”
“You heard me, devil’s spawn! I don’t have a daughter! I can’t even get pregnant! You… you’re a demon come to trick me, that’s what you are. But I won’t fall for it!”
I wondered vaguely if she was reliving the period of her life before she and my father had had me. She’d told me countless times about the trouble they’d had conceiving me. It was one of the reasons she had been so protective of me before she’d fallen ill. “I would never try to trick you, mom,” I said, foolishly attempting to reason with her. “I love you.”
Smack!
My face burned where her hand connected with the skin of my cheek, and for a moment, time stood still. The slap hadn’t really hurt all that much… not physically, anyway. But on the inside, I was crumbling.
On the outside, I remained frozen in shock.
“Shut your wicked mouth,” the woman who so closely resembled my mother spat. “Out, get out, devil’s spawn!”
Somehow, I managed to speak around the lump of tears in my throat. “Mom, please!” I begged, not really knowing what I was pleading for.
A moment later, however, my mother’s nurse came rushing into the room. “What’s the commotion?” she demanded, eyes darting from my mother’s disheveled form to me. I opened my mouth. I had no idea what was about to come tumbling out of it, but whatever it was, my mother beat me to it. “This she-devil came to bewitch me!” she accused, pointing a finger at me.
“Mom!” I objected, horrified.
The nurse attempted to get my mother to relax back against the mattress. “Try to calm down, Mrs. Radcliff,” she said, making sure to keep her voice low and soothing. Then she glared at me over her shoulder. “Can’t you see you’re upsetting her? Out with you.”
A protest was on the tip of my tongue when a gentle hand landed between my shoulders. I glanced behind me.
When had Marianne gotten there?
Regardless, I was grateful for the warmth of her palm on my back as she led me away. “It’s alright, Sloane,” she attempted to console me. “You know better than to take what she says personally when she’s like this. She’s just having a rough day.”
Nearly all of her days had been rough after that. I recalled sneaking into her room the night after the incident, unable to suppress the urge to check on her.
Taking a deep breath, I squeaked open the door and peeked into the bedroom. “Mom?”
My mother blinked sluggishly from her spot on the bed. “Sloane?”
She was lucid, and relief bombarded me… followed almost immediately by guilt. She looked so tired. Bags were pulling at the skin under her eyes – eyes that she was clearly struggling to keep open. “I didn’t wake you, did I?” I asked, already taking a step back out of the doorway. “I can come back later.”
All the while, I was pleading internally that she wouldn’t make me.
Like she somehow knew how much it would kill me if she said “yes”, my mother shook her head. “Nonsense,” she insisted, pulling back the covers and gesturing for me to join her in bed. “Come here, darling.”
I all but scrambled onto the mattress, quickly settling and allowing my head to rest on the pillow next to hers.
She turned and smiled at me, but the happiness soon faded from her expression. “What happened?” she asked, running gentle fingers over the already yellowing mark on my cheek.
I froze.
“I… w-well, I fell,” I managed to say eventually, giving the most cliché excuse in the book. “Down the stairs,” I added, to give the lie more substance. “I hit my face on the banister.”
It was worth it, though, when she snorted in amusement at my answer. “You’ve always been clumsy,” she teased.
It was true enough. “I think we both know who I get that from,” I said, poking fun right back at her.
I had been hoping for a smile, maybe even a laugh.
I wasn’t prepared for her expression to crumble, for her to bury her face into my shoulder and start sobbing. I lay in horror as my mother’s tears soaked my night shirt. “Mom, what’s wrong?” I asked, unable to hide the alarm in my voice. Did something hurt? Had I accidentally done something to set her off? “Mom!” I cried.
She shook her head against my shoulder. “I’m sorry, Sloane,” she sniffled. “I’m so sorry.”
My stomach plummeted.
Perhaps my mother realized she was responsible for the bruise on my face, after all.
I didn’t know what to say to assure her it wasn’t her fault – that she hadn’t been herself when she’d hit me. Before I could find the words, though, she mumbled more into my shoulder. “We never should have taken you.”
She’d whispered it so softly that I almost wasn’t sure she had spoken at all. But then she said it again, voice just as bleak. “We never should have taken you.”
I wrenched myself from the memory, recalling how I had spent the rest of the night attempting to comfort her. My mother had been inconsolable though, nothing else she said close to coherent. Eventually, she’d cried herself asleep against me. I, on the other hand, hadn’t slept a wink, her words reverberating endlessly in my head.
Kind of like they were doing now.
“We never should have taken you.”
They had haunted me for days – weeks – afterwards. My mother’s condition, however, had made it nearly impossible to interrogate her. I remembered I had managed to ask her about it once before she’d died, and she had looked so confused by the question that I hadn’t had the heart to ask again afterwards.
What could she have meant by it?
Surely she didn’t mean that they – my parents – had actually… taken me, right?
I recalled Marianne’s slip of tongue in the flower garden, how she had claimed that she’d been working for my parents since they “got” me. I thought, too, of the photo album I’d just flipped through, and how it was mysteriously lacking in baby pictures.
Was the big secret that I was adopted? That was hardly something worth keeping hidden… unless, of course, the process hadn’t been strictly legal. That was possible, I suppose.
Or maybe they really did just take you – kidnap you, a voice goaded.
I shook my head at the preposterous idea. It was crazy. And ye
t…
My eyes drifted down to the picture I still held in my hands, the photograph of my mother and me. I took in our matching smiles. Besides the whiteness of our teeth and darkness of our hair, however, we didn’t really look alike. She had hazel eyes, a long, regal nose, and sharp cheekbones. My eyes were brown, and my face much rounder, features softer.
I certainly didn’t take after Cornelius, either, with his blue eyes and bulbous nose.
Nausea swirled in my belly at the mounting evidence.
Unfortunately, I was so distracted by the feeling that I didn’t see the figure looming in the doorway until it was too late.
“What are you doing in here?” a sharp voice demanded.
I nearly jumped out of my skin at the sound of it, fumbling with the picture frame and almost dropping it before managing to replace it on the nightstand. I turned to face my father.
Cornelius’s face was white with rage. I didn’t think I’d ever seen him look so mad. “Explain yourself,” he ordered.
“I-I… I…” I stuttered helplessly.
I didn’t know what to say.
Apologizing would be a good place to start, a stressed voice hastily suggested.
I imagine it would have been.
And yet, when I opened my mouth, what came out was: “I’m not your daughter, am I?”
CHAPTER TEN
“Too close to what?”
“To answers. To them… the Vanderbilts. They’re why my wife – why your parents – are dead.”
* * *
“Explain,” I demanded tersely, unable to comprehend exactly what Abram was saying.
The man’s mouth twisted into a sneer. “What’s there to explain?” he muttered. “They’re dead.” Abram’s eyes flashed black. “They’re all de-ad,” he repeated, choking on the last word.
I could physically see the bear roll beneath Abram’s skin as he fought the urge to give into the beast, to let him take over because the truth – whatever it was – was too painful to face as a human.
I wasn’t about to let that happen.
Faster than he could blink, I gathered Abram by the collar of his shirt and shoved him so harshly against the side of the house that the cladding rattled. “You don’t get to do this,” I hissed through my teeth. “Have your mental breakdown later, I don’t give a shit. I’ve thought for years that the fire – that the hunters – were my fault. You owe me an explanation, and you owe it to me now.”
Abram stared, genuine surprise lurking in his eyes as he examined me up and down… yet he didn’t open his mouth. I shook him. “Don’t you get it, old man?” I yelled. “Wisp, she’s my-” She’s your what? a voice mocked. Your mate? – “she’s my… person,” I decided on finally. “And she’s staying with these people.” I had sent her to them. “Now tell me what happened.”
After a tense moment, Abram nodded his head in agreement, and I none-too-gently released him.
“Well?” I demanded when he didn’t immediately launch into an explanation.
“I don’t know where to start,” he admitted.
“I suggest the beginning,” I snarled.
“The beginning,” Abram repeated before nodding. “I suppose it all started with your father and his damn near insatiable urge to help people.” Abram snorted, and added, sounded both disgusted and fond, “I don’t know if you remember, but Boone had a saving people thing.”
Of course I remembered. How could I not?
While bear shifters typically preferred nature over people, Boone had been the exception to the rule. He loved both. My father had been a pillar of the Pine Ridge community, and while Abram had been an actual member of the town’s miniscule police force, Boone had been an honorary one.
I’d told Wisp about the time he had used his shifter senses to help them find a toddler who had gotten lost in the woods nearly twenty years ago, but that was just the tip of the iceberg when it came to the list of his good deeds. He’d saved a woman’s life by using his shifter strength to wrench open her warped car door after she’d been in an accident. Her car had erupted into flames minutes later. And a while after that, he’d used his quick thinking and even faster tongue to talk a young man from jumping off a nearby bridge and taking his own life.
For all intents and purposes, Boone Blackwood had been a local hero.
“I remember,” I deadpanned.
Abram nodded, like he’d expected that answer. “One of our buddies at the station told us about a teenage girl that had gone missing a few counties north of here. She was the daughter of a friend of a friend or something like that. Your father, being who he was, thought that he could help. He grew fixated on the case – especially when he discovered that at least half a dozen other girls had gone missing from the same area over a matter of months.”
I frowned. That seemed like it would have been big news. “Why don’t I remember any of this?” I demanded.
“You wouldn’t,” Abram said. “The girls who went missing ranged in age from seventeen to twenty years old. They were labeled as runaways or were considered full-fledged adults who could do what they pleased in the eyes of the law.” Abram ran an agitated hand through his salt-and-pepper hair. “Your father wouldn’t leave it alone, though, and he asked me to do some research on the missing girls.”
“And did you?” I pressed.
Abram scoffed. “Of course. And almost immediately, I understood why he was so captivated by the case. I recognized two of the missing girls’ last names – Merriweather and Greendale – as belonging to well-known shifter families. A little more digging, along with a few meet-ups with some of the girls’ family members later, revealed that they all did.”
I frowned. “All the girls were-”
“Bearers,” Abram finished my sentence for me. “Yes.”
For such a large group of bearers to go missing in the shifter world was nothing short of catastrophic. Bearers were precious to all shifters, especially to their families. Only one bearer was born per every three male shifters. No one knew why exactly, but it was theorized that it was nature’s way of protecting us from normal humans. After all, less bearers meant less bearing, which aided in keeping our very existence a secret.
“Why would anyone kidnap a bunch of bearers?” I asked, pondering the question aloud more than anything.
Judging by his grimace, though, Abram knew the answer. “Your father and I suspected there was some sort of trafficking scheme at play,” he revealed. “You know how coveted bearers are. Not only are there less of them than us, but since they don’t actually shift, there’s nothing stopping them from abandoning the shifter lifestyle for a more… human one if that’s what they want. The desire to mate a bearer and fill her belly with cubs… some would do anything, pay anything, to ensure it becomes a reality.”
The thought of young, innocent girls – girls like Wisp – being auctioned off to perverted assholes caused a white-hot anger to spark in my belly that had my hands curling into fists. And yet… I failed to see what it had to with my parents’ deaths.
“That’s repulsive,” I said, “but if you would get to the part of what any of this has to do with the Vanderbilts and the hunters that killed my parents, that’d be great.”
“Don’t you get it?” Abram snapped. “It wasn’t hunters that killed Boone and Rose,” – the man’s expression faltered – “that killed Fiona and my baby girl. It was them – the Vanderbilts.”
Something wasn’t adding up. “And why would the Vanderbilts kill my parents? Your wife?” I asked.
“Because they were the ones behind the girls’ disappearances!” Abram all but shouted at me. “I researched these girls until all I could dream of were their fucking names. Besides being young bearers, there were no connections between them – no connections except the Vanderbilts. One was the daughter of a family friend. Another worked under Henry Vanderbilt’s wife. One link was so obscure that I think the girl only rented an apartment in a building that the Vanderbilts owned, but the connection�
�� it was there.”
“But… why?”
It made no sense. Based on the research I’d done on the Vanderbilts when I’d found out that Wisp was engaged to one of them, they were rich business tycoons who had money coming out of their assholes; why delve into the business of abducting and selling young girls?
Abram shrugged. “Why does anyone do anything? Maybe they weren’t moving enough real estate that year, and Henry Vanderbilt wanted to try his hand at other endeavors.”
I shook my head. “Even if you and my father were right – that the Vanderbilts were responsible for the disappearances of these girls, why go after you? You said yourself that there was no solid proof. How could they even know you suspected them?”
Abram sighed. “Because your father was a fool who desperately wanted to save those girls. I don’t know how, exactly, but he was able to arrange a meeting with the head kingpin himself, Henry Vanderbilt. The plan was for him to go in under the guise of being a prospective client of the man’s… side business,” Abram decided on eventually. “I don’t know what went wrong – I never got the chance to check in with Boone – but something obviously blew his cover, because the next morning he was dead,” – Abram swallowed – “they were all dead… with the Vanderbilt family crest burned into what remained of your parents’ front door.”
I stared at the man in shock.
I had no recollection of that particular detail of the fire, but my memories of the entire day were a blur, the finer points of the event overpowered by the smell of smoke clogging my nose – filling my lungs – and the feeling of heat against my skin as the billowing flames slowly tapered off.
The fact that I hadn’t been responsible for the fire after all these years of assuming my reckless actions had been to blame was a lot to process. Somehow, though, knowing didn’t alleviate the guilt.
I supposed I should have been angry at Abram – at my father, even – for the part they’d played in it all, but I wasn’t. How could I be when they were just trying to help a group of young girls who hadn’t been able to help themselves?
