“Is Mother lying?” he asks. And I can’t tell from his tone whether he thinks Mother lying is a good thing, a bad thing, or something I’m supposed to deny.
“Mother has her own version of reality,” I say.
“What’s yours?” Danny asks—and there’s no mistaking his tone. Completely hostile.
“My version of reality?” I ask. “It’s a little different.”
“Spill,” Fabe says, and at first I think he means I’ve spilled my water, which I did the first night at this table, and you’d think I nearly ruined it. Legions of staff (we’re not allowed to call them servants) scurried in from the kitchen as if they’d been watching (and later, I learn they have—on closed circuit television or something like that, supposedly without sound) and wiped and polished and cleaned while one guy held my plate and asked me if I wanted to continue eating while he held it (creepy, I think) and another guy refilled my water glass.
But then I realize that Fabe wants me to talk, and yet again, I’ve encountered slang I don’t know. Before we all came to the mortal plane, Tiffany made us watch a ton of movies and TV shows so we could get the English dialects and slang just right, but I’ve found that those things are worse than useless. What slang I learned is out of date, and my accent is hopelessly tinged with an odd mixture of ancient Greek and Upper-crust British, and no matter how hard I try, I can’t get rid of it.
“How does your version differ from Mother’s?” Gordon asks, his mean little eyes bugging at me.
“Mine just has a little more magic than hers,” I say.
“Huh?” E asks.
I pull my plate closer and stab some asparagus. “I’m not supposed to talk about my father.”
Which, of course, makes matters worse. Now they want to know everything, and they pressure me through the dessert course, which I’m not allowed to have because I’m “large.”
So finally, I give up and say, “Yes, my father looks like Aristotle Onassis. Only, if you want the truth, Onassis looked like my dad because my dad has been around a long, long time.”
“Onassis was really old when he died,” Gordon says in his snobby way. (I have no idea how eight-year-olds can be snobby, but this one sure is.)
“He was married to that Kennedy lady, and she was old when she died,” Danny says.
“Which is before you were born,” E says, and for all I know (and I don’t know a lot about this) it might’ve been before E was born too. I think it might have been before Mother was born, which is just weird all around.
“So how old is your dad?” Fabe asks.
I shrug. I don’t know this kind of math.
“C’mon,” E says. “You have to know how old your dad is.”
“Why?” I ask. “He doesn’t even know.”
“How can he not know?” Danny says, like I’m the one lying about it.
“Because,” I say, “he was born sometime after the world was created, but before people started measuring time.”
They all look at me like I’ve just ripped off all my clothes and thrown them out the window.
“You could just say you don’t know,” Fabe says.
“I did say that,” I say.
“Then you elaborated,” says Gordon the Snot. “You didn’t have to elaborate.”
“You asked,” I say.
“No,” Gordon says. “E asked.”
Like it’s E’s fault for being curious. His gaze meets mine and he just shakes his head.
“Some people don’t know how old they are,” he says to the other three. “Some places don’t have birth certificates, or didn’t even in the middle of the 20th century.”
I decide to leave it at that, but Gordon doesn’t.
“Is that true?” he asks. “Is Greece so primitive that it doesn’t have birth certificates?”
“Greece has been around a lot longer than this place, buddy,” I snap.
“So?”
“So?” I say. “So most of your culture comes from us.”
“Us?” Fabe says. He caught the personal tone in my reply.
“Yeah, us,” I say.
“I thought you’re American,” Fabe says. “Mother says so.”
“Because Crystal’s an American citizen, dummy,” Danny says. “Anyone born to an American citizen is an American.”
“Even if they don’t know where the Empire State Building is?” Gordon asks, keeping his gaze on me.
They’re never going to forget that incident. I was standing at the edge of Central Park, looking directly at the Empire State Building, and that’s when I asked where it was. How was I supposed to know it was in my line of sight? How was I supposed to know what it looked like? I was lucky just to know it existed.
“What do you care about culture?” Danny says. “You didn’t even know what Lincoln Center is.”
“Leave her alone,” E says, and I look at him gratefully. He smiles, just a little. “So your dad is really old.”
“Yes,” I say.
“Then why was Mother interested?” E asks.
“He doesn’t look old,” I say and then bite my lip. That gets into the magic. Mages don’t age the same way as mortals. We do age, but only with extreme magic use, and like usual, Dad found a way to exempt himself from that.
“How come?” Danny asks. “Plastic surgery?”
“He’s not like Mother,” I say and there’s a collective gasp around the table. I guess we’re not supposed to talk about Mother’s too-smooth face, either.
“So how does he look young?” Gordon asks in that tone that just tells me he’s going to criticize whatever answer I give.
So I smile at him. It’s my breezy, I-don’t-care smile. “He’s magic.”
All four of them stare at me like I’ve smashed each plate on the dinner table.
“Magic?” Danny asks.
“Yes,” I say.
“You believe that?” Fabe asks.
“I know it,” I say.
“Prove it,” Gordon says.
“Look it up,” I say. Tiff used to say that to me, and I’ve been wanting to use that one on someone else for years.
“How can I look it up?” Gordon asks. “I don’t even know what your dad’s name is.”
I answer so fast that I don’t even give myself time to think about it. “It’s Zeus.”
“Zeus what?” E asks.
“Zeus,” I say, beginning to get annoyed.
“One name?” Danny asks. “Like a dog?”
“Like a god,” I say. “He’s the Zeus.”
They stare at me again, and this time, I can feel the malevolence.
“Jeez,” E finally says. “If you didn’t want to tell us about him, you could’ve just said so.”
“Yeah,” Gordon says. “It’s not nice to lie to people.”
“Or to make fun of them,” Fabe says.
I, of course, never tell them that they’ve been making fun of me. I’m outnumbered.
That was Day Four. They tried again on Day Seven, and one more time on Day Ten (and no, I don’t know if they waited three days on purpose or because that’s how long their attention span extends). I kept telling them the truth, and they kept accusing me of lying, and then they stopped talking to me altogether—except on those rare occasions when Mother or Owen came to dinner.
Then we’d discuss our days or the books we were suppose to be reading or the shopping I still needed to do to make myself presentable.
And that’s my home life. I have a life outside of the home. I’m supposed to go to school, and I do sometimes. But mostly, I shop. Because I can.
So far, it seems, that credit card doesn’t have a limit—at least that I can find.
Supposedly, that credit card is a perk of my new lifestyle. That’s what my real sisters, Brit and Tiff, say. They’re envious of the unlimited money, because, they say, it’s hard to learn how to use the stuff properly.
I haven’t really learned. I just use the credit card.
I used it to get them e
ach an iPhone, so we could talk and text whenever we wanted to. I sent the phones to them, and their mothers Freaked Out, like major big time.
Their mothers called my mother, and it got ugly. My mother hates dealing with me, and she had to after that.
So I was in trouble for being nice.
Everything gets me in trouble. Just breathing gets me in trouble. And without the iPhones or my sisters, I can’t tell anyone how I feel.
Because no one seems to care.
Read more in the next Interim Fates book, Crystal Caves, available from your favorite bookseller.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Called “The Reigning Queen of Paranormal Romance” by Best Reviews, bestselling author Kristine Grayson has made a name for herself publishing light, slightly off-skew romance novels about Greek Gods, fairy tale characters, and the modern world.
She writes romantic suspense as Kristine Dexter and historical mysteries as Kris Nelscott. She also writes in a variety of genre, from literary to science fiction to contemporary romance, under her real name—Kristine Kathryn Rusch. She has won dozens of awards for her writing
As Kristine Grayson, she also edits the romance volumes of Fiction River: An Original Anthology Magazine.
For more information about her work, go to the Kristine Grayson website and sign up for her newsletter.
Look for These Other Titles from Kristine Grayson
The Interim Fates:
Tiffany Tumbles
Crystal Caves
Brittany Bends
The Fates Trilogy:
Simply Irresistible
Absolutely Captivated
Totally Spellbound
Holiday Novellas:
Up on the Rooftop
Visions of Sugarplums
Dressed in Holiday Style
Sign up for the WMG Publishing newsletter to receive updates about new releases, bonus content and more at wmgpublishing.com
Table of Contents
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
Book Excerpt: Crystal Caves
About the Author
Look for These Other Titles from Kristine Grayson
Copyright Information
Tiffany Tumbles: Book One of the Interim Fates Page 15
