by Alex Owens
The song “Lump” by the Dead Presidents came to mind and I started tapping my foot to the beat looping through my head. See, I really needed to eat someone on Ativan. Back to the task at hand—spending the night with one of my people.
Once again, I didn’t know who was behind the solid cell door. I’d already visited Bette, so that left Clive, Pete, Cass and Quinn. I hoped it was my daughter; we’d barely had a moment alone to talk and I knew that she needed me more than ever. There was the whole Morgan issue, plus I suspected she had a million questions about what was going on. She must be scared to death.
Noiselessly, the cell door opened and a ball of squeals exploded outward toward me.
“Mom, you came!” Quinn latched onto me with a ferocity I didn’t expect.
I picked her up, kissed her forehead and took her back into the cell. I heard the door lock shut behind us.
“Of course I came, sweetie.” I set Quinn on the bed and took a seat beside her, tipping her chin up with my fingertips. “I will always come for you, because that’s what moms do. Are you okay?”
She nodded and smiled up at me, but her expression quickly darkened.
“Talk to me, bug. What’s the matter?” I kept my tone light, fearing the heavy conversation to come.
“I did something really bad,” she said, fidgeting with her fingers and screwing up her face.
“Oh, really? And what was that?” I held her hands within my own. She wouldn’t look at me.
“If I tell you,” Quinn’s lower lip trembled and she took a deep breath. “If I tell you, do you promise you won’t leave me here with that crazy lady?”
I tried not to laugh, but she was just so danged cute. “You know that you’re stuck with me forever, no matter what, right?”
She nodded, but stayed silent.
“Quinn, look at me.”
She raised her face and I saw her eyes brimming over with tears. It broke my heart. I leaned forward and pressed my lips to her forehead. Her warm skin felt so nice against my cool lips that I held them there for an extra beat before pulling back and lifting her face up with my fingertips.
“It’s okay, sweetie. Whatever you did, I’m sure that you didn’t mean to. Just tell me what happened.” I said.
“I think I... I think I hurt Morgan,” she whispered, ashamed to say it out loud. I felt her little body shudder in my arms.
Oh, that.
I weighed my options: tell Quinn the brutal truth, as much as I could say something like that to a child, or gloss it over and try to explain it better when she was older. In the back of my mind though, I knew that a white lie was still a lie, and I promised that I’d never do that to Quinn. She deserved honesty, even if I’d been lying by omission for nearly two years.
“Okay, tell me what happened.” I scooted up to the head of the bed, fluffed up some pillows and patted the spot next to me.
Quinn scooted and curled up against me, leaning into my arms. “It was when the crazy lady came. Morgan was yelling and trying to get to me and some guy was holding my arms. And another guy was pushing Morgan backwards and I didn’t want him to hurt her. I reached out for Morgan and...”
I waited, letting her get the story out in her own time. I’m not sure I could have said anything anyway. I was too busy picturing the scene as Quinn described it. Thanks to a very active imagination, I could just about see it in my head, flickering like a silent film.
Quinn sobbed beside me. I hugged her and let her cry for a moment. When the sobs died down, I prompted her again. “Did you try to help Morgan, baby?”
“Uh, huh,” she sniffled.
“But something happened and Morgan got hurt?” I supplied.
“Ye... yes. My hands were hot and tingly. And then light just shot out of them. And then Morgan screamed and fell backwards. I tried to see if she was okay, but they dragged me away and out of the house.”
Quinn’s crying began again in earnest. I rocked and soothed her, mad at myself, mad at Venna and just plain mad at the world. It was so very screwed up that she had to experience something so devastating at her tender age. And lacking a time machine, there wasn’t a damn thing that I could do to change it for her. I wasn’t about to try poking around in her brain; I’d learned that lesson the hard way.
“It’s okay, baby.” I soothed and felt her tiny body stuttering against my own. I rubbed her back until the shaking died down again.
“Mama, is Morgan dead?” she looked up at me with those big expectant eyes and broke my heart all over again.
“She is, baby.” I said. “But I don’t think she’d be mad about that. She just wanted to keep you safe. She loved you so much, Quinn.”
“And I went and killed her,” Quinn said, with little inflection, which worried me a whole lot.
“Oh, sweet girl. You can’t think like that; it was not your fault. Not any more than it was my fault for not being home.” I said that last part, but I didn’t believe it, not really.
I should have been there. If anyone was taking the blame on this one, it was me. Or maybe Pete—he’d set the whole thing up. Yeah, I’d be blaming him for a while to come, but I didn’t want Quinn to do the same, so I needed to keep those thoughts to myself.
“Mom?” Quinn said with a slight twinkle in her eyes.
“Yes, baby?” I braced for whatever was about to come out of her mouth. I knew that look. She was about to say something super-silly, weird or wise beyond her years. It was always hard to narrow it down further than that.
“So...magic. It’s real? Like really, real?” she asked.
I nodded and laughed, welcoming the change in topics.
“Yes, it is. And like people, magic can be good or bad. It all depends the intent and how it’s used.” Ever the mom, I couldn’t resist trying to work in a little life’s lesson.
Quinn scrunched up her face. “Intent? What does that mean?”
I thought about it for a moment. “It’s like what you want to do. For example, if you want to help someone with magic, then that is what I’d call good magic. If you want to hurt someone, that would be bad magic. We don’t ever want to do bad magic.”
She seemed to chew on that for a bit, but I could tell the moment where she’d arrived at the meaning behind what I was saying. Her face lit up like a Christmas tree.
“Since I was trying to help Morgan, it means that I was doing good magic, even if it didn’t work out so good, right?” She said, her voice wavering at that last bit.
“Yes, that’s right. Magic can be unpredictable; it doesn’t always go as planned. So how you mean to use it becomes even more important. Try to remember that and for now, I wouldn’t play around with magic. You’ll need some training first.”
“Okay, I promise.” Quinn leaned against me and her body relaxed.
“I know you’re tired, sleepyhead, but I need you to try and stay awake a while longer, okay?” I lifted her off of me, sat upright and crossed my legs Indian-style.
Quinn righted herself and mimicked my pose.
“I always want to be honest with you and there’s something I want to share with you now, okay?” I took her hands in mine.
Quinn’s eye brightened just enough to give me hope that she’d get past the horror of it all, eventually. “You have another secret? More than the magic?”
“Yes, I do. But you can’t tell anyone. It’s a super-secret,” I whispered.
Quinn crossed her fingers and pressed them over her heart. “I promise.”
I held up my pink finger in the air. Quinn giggled, hooked her finger around mine and we both said “pinky swear” at the same time.
“Okay. Do you remember when I went to Orlando for work a couple of years ago?” I asked.
She nodded, frowning. Right... I’d come home from that trip and left Pete for good. I’d forgotten about the timing of all that. I hurried up to explain before her mood darkened again.
“I had a sort-of accident while I was on that trip,” I said. I had to tell her the truth,
just white-washed a bit. After all, Quinn was far too young for all the gory details. And gory they were.
“What kind of accident? Were you hurt?” she asked.
“It doesn’t matter. What’s important is that I’ve changed. Some of it’s a little weird, and I’ve kept that from you. But I don’t want to keep any secrets from you, ever, so I want to tell you all about it now.”
“Okay,” she smiled. “So you’re weird? What kind of weird?”
“Well, not the kind of weird you probably think. I don’t glow in the dark or shoot spider webs out of my hands.” I smiled at her and contemplated how to continue.
As usual, Quinn beat me to the punch.
“Is that why you don’t like going outside when the sun is hot?” she asked.
“It is. The sun gives me a gnarly sunburn now.” I replied. “And I don’t really like to eat much anymore.”
“But you have to eat. You said so yourself. Eat Quinn, or you’ll waste away to nothing.” She mimicked me, and did a pretty good job of it too. The little bugger.
“That is true. And I do eat, just not normal food. And not very often. But I’m fine. Healthy as a horse.” I flexed my arm muscles to prove my point.
“But what do you eat?” she asked.
Hmm, what to say? Well, Quinn, I eat the bad guys? I’m on a strict platelet diet? You know that Twilight movie? Nope. Just nope.
I decided to go for the simplest explanation. “I guess you could call it a liquid protein diet. Like those shakes I used to drink back when I was going through that stupid health faze.”
She accepted that response easily enough and I mentally breathed a sigh of relief. Of course I’d have to fill her in on the details at some point, but I was shooting for when she was much older and behaving like a spoiled, bratty teenager. One flash of fang should put her back in line, I’d think.
“Okay. Did you tell me about all of your weirdness?” She was so cute when she was trying to sound older.
I laughed and said, “I think that covers most of it. Oh, I don’t sleep much at all, and I’m stronger than ever, so if you need some heavy lifting then I’m your girl.”
She chuckled and hugged me. “You’ll always be my girl, Mom.”
As strong as I tried to be all of the time, Quinn sure had a way of cracking through that crusty shell around my heart. And it always caught me off guard, I thought, as tears slid down my face.
“Pink tears! You are too weird.” Quinn giggled.
“Yes, pink happy tears of love, silly girl. Now get some sleep, I’ll stay and keep you company tonight.” I pulled back the covers on the bed, waited for Quinn to climb in and then tucked her in snug as a bug. I curled myself around her form and held one of her hands. And for the first time in a long while, I actually fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.
For those several hours, all was right in my world.
Chapter Twenty
It appeared that I was going to be spending the night locked inside of a room with Pete. That wasn’t exactly what I wanted to do for the next eight or so hours. Not at all. I’d rather get locked inside of a tanning bed and fry.
How did I know it was Pete? I could smell his cowardice through the cell door. There was only one human that could be behind the barrier. My egocentric Ex. The King of Douche-baggery. The Sultan of Self-absorption. The Laird of Laziness. I could go on, believe me, I’ve got a dozen more where those came from.
Right, I needed to get to the point. And the point was he reeked of fear. He could be sweating bullets, waiting on me tearing him a new one, or it could be because of the guard posted outside of his cell. I’d caught the over-zealous Vamp chick harassing him as I came into the common area of the tombs. From what I’d overheard, she’d been rattling Pete’s cage for a while now. I liked her instantly for that. Bitchy vamps had to stick together, you know.
I approached the cell and the vampire guard hissed at me. I hissed back of course, flashed a bit of fang and stood my ground. She sized me up for a beat, then stepped aside to let me pass. I’d earned some sort of approval from her, it seemed. Pulling open the cell door, I saw my sniveling Ex curled up in the middle of his bed, with the covers pulled clean up over his nose. Jesus, could he be any more pathetic?
“You can come out now, the petrifying little girl is gone,” I teased him.
Pete dropped the covers and tried to pick his dignity back up. It was a wasted effort on my account. He climbed out of the bed and walked towards me. His clothes were rumpled, which only accentuated the bags under his eyes. Poor baby was getting no sleep. Well, good.
“Have you seen Quinn? Is she okay?” Pete said in a hushed tone, casting glances behind where I stood just inside the open door.
“She’s fine. And hello to you to,” I replied, pushing the door closed. It creaked louder than I expected, before locking with a sharp clang. I wondered if Venna had bewitched the door to sound creepy as hell, or if it was just like that all the time?
“Where is she? Have you seen her?” Pete shoved his hands in his pockets and shifted from foot to foot.
I sighed and took a seat on a large crate opposite of his bed. There was no way in hell that I was sitting next to him. On a bed. If I did that, there was a good chance one of us would end up bloodless by the end of the night. And I ain’t talking about me.
“She’s fine, like I said. Perhaps if you’d been worried about Quinn’s well-being before, we wouldn’t be in this fabulously fine situation.” My inner bitch was trying to claw her way to the surface. I considered letting her out to play.
His face contorted in anger, switching to a lovely shade of burgundy. I’ll admit it, I was amused. “Don’t you act like this is situation is fine. Only a crazy bitch would think that everything is okay.”
Oh, no he didn’t.
I forced myself to pull in a calming breath, hold it for five seconds, and then push it out through my nose slowly. It was either that, or pluck his heart from his chest and I didn’t want to stain the gown I was wearing. It was an antique after all, and such a delicate fabric.
“If I were you, I’d take a step back and get yourself together like your life depends on it. Because it does.” I flashed a bit of fang and he scurried backwards.
Pete’s mouth gaped open and he stammered, “What...the heck?”
I shook my head and wagged a finger in his direction, “Now, now. Don’t get your panties in a bunch just yet. I needed to make sure that you fully understand the position you’ve put us all in with your selfish scheming.”
“Don’t you try to blame this on me!” he shouted, but backed across the room quickly, just in case.
“Who else should I blame? Your daughter—she got herself kidnapped then? Or maybe it’s Morgan’s fault—she died trying to protect your daughter, but to you that means that she didn’t try hard enough. Is that what you’re saying?” I was on a roll and didn’t see myself stopping anytime soon. Go me!
“It’s your fault.” Pete spat, growing redder in the face by the second. “You brought all of these freaks into our lives, you left me for them and practically abandoned Quinn in the process...” Pete froze, mid-rant. “Wait, Morgan is dead?”
“Yes, she is. And that is on you.” I paused, trying to decide on how I wanted to line the next shot up. Hell, I thought, just go for the jugular. It was my best move, after all.
“Morgan was trying to get to Quinn, to save her from being taken, during a kidnapping that you arranged. And you know what happened? Your daughter accidentally killed her. And now she’ll have to live the rest of her life knowing that. And you’ll have to live the rest of your life knowing that scar was inflicted by you and your dumb-ass, stupid fucking schemes.” I was almost screaming at that point and damn it felt good.
What didn’t feel so hot were the orbs of fire building in the palm of my hands. Well, actually they felt too hot. I quickly shook out the white flames and clenched my fists into balls. I stared at Pete, daring him to say one more stupid thing.
&nb
sp; He opened his mouth, then shut it again. He ran his fingertips through his hair, rubbed the stubble on his chin. He looked everywhere in the room but in my direction. A wave of guilt drifted from his body, like a particularly noxious fart.
“Are you serious? You’re not just yanking my chain?” he said quietly.
“Do you honestly think so little of me that you think I’d joke about something like that? When Quinn is involved? I know I’m a lot of things, but I am a good mother. It remains to be seen if you’ll ever be a good father. So far, you’re mucking it up royally.”
“Me? You’re the one traipsing all over the place, doing god-knows what with god-knows who.” He argued. I detected the stench of jealousy in the air.
“Where I am and who I’m doing is none of your business. You lost that right when you ended our marriage over a text message.” My lips felt tight against the tips of my fangs as I spoke. “I always put Quinn first and you only ever thinking about yourself.”
“You call whoring around putting Quinn first?” He aimed below the belt and I wasn’t surprised. We were going to get everything out in the open tonight. Fine. I was looking forward to it.
“You’re acting like a petulant child and you know it.” I said. “Instead of taking responsibility for Morgan’s death and Quinn suffering—at your hands—you’d rather discuss my sex life? That’s low, even for you.”
“You... you’re avoiding... why, because you know how far you’ve fallen. Even Jesus can’t forgive your sins.” Pete held my gaze for a full second before averting his eyes.
Why, that arrogant little piss ant. In the entire time I’d known him, he’d not had a religious bone in his body. I was willing to bet he started seeing some hot little holy-roller, because the words coming out of his mouth were not his own.
“Well, I’ll tell you this. The next time you and your little girlfriend want to discuss who I’m fucking, give me a heads up and I’ll send you over a video. Maybe then you’ll finally appreciate what you had and realize that I’m so much better off without you in my life. One day, if you continue on this path, your daughter will come to the same conclusion I have.” I hopped down from the crate and stepped in his direction.
