“Ah, you poor thing. Let’s get you a room.” The lady handed her a registration card that must have been printed decades ago, and Cindy made a big show of taking it over and asking her father what she should write down, then bringing it back to the lady along with the cash.
“You’re a good daughter,” the woman said, taking the paper and looking it over. Her gray curls shone silver under the desk light.
“Thank you, ma’am,” Cindy said, ducking her head in fake embarrassment. She had given up that meek gesture decades ago, but it had once served her well in ingratiating herself with adults and would probably do so again.
“Normally we ask for an extra deposit for cash customers, but I think we can let it go in this case, sweetheart. Let’s get your father to bed.”
The woman insisted on walking Cindy and her father to the room and helping settle him. Though she was annoyed by the intrusion, Cindy was grateful for the physical help. Anton was having more and more difficulty moving his limbs. Once they’d settled him on the bed, where he collapsed wheezing and groaning, the woman realized they didn’t have a proper bath kit with them and scuttled off to fetch complimentary toothbrushes for each of them. Then she ran off and brought extra towels and blankets as well. Maybe Cindy had succeeded too well in bringing out the woman’s maternal instincts.
Finally getting the well-meaning busybody out of the room before she insisted on making them sandwiches or soup, Cindy leaned heavily against the door. After a brief pause, she peered out the window to make sure the woman had actually left then walked over to the bed to once more check on her father.
Asleep again. The effort of all that movement had worn him out. He wasn’t saying so, but Cindy could tell it took more direct effort and control for even simple movements. His nervous system was barely functioning. His breathing was quick and shallow. Thready. His qi was obstructed. At this rate, he might not last much longer.
Cindy listened to him breathe a moment or two longer, then took the car keys from the nightstand. At one of their earlier stops, she had picked up some cheap glassware and a few other things she needed. The room had a microwave and a coffeepot. With the bits of emerald dust she still carried, she could make some more of her formula.
Her concern was the dwindling supply of emeralds. When she’d run away from the college campus after the firefight, she’d only been able to recover the few pieces Jessica had been wearing in a bag around her neck. She’d used half that sample in the past six months, stabilizing her own condition. Though she’d been weaning herself off the formula, and her reverse aging seemed to have stopped even without further treatment, contemplating running out of the key ingredient terrified her. Especially since her experiments with other emeralds had been only partially effective.
After months of study, she knew not all emeralds were created equal when it came to their more unusual properties. Other samples from the same supplier had weaker resonance properties. If she had the time and the resources, she’d fly to China herself and inspect the mines. Some variable still remained a mystery to her, and without defining that X factor, it was impossible to replicate. That was why she’d always kept her supply close to her chest—literally in a small pouch on a string around her neck and in a secondary bag in her pocket.
When they grappled in the operating room, Jessica had stolen the pouch from around her neck, though Cindy didn’t understand why the young woman wanted it. Cindy was left with these scraps of the original sample and some shards of the stones that had worked best out of the other samples. Maybe she should have hidden her supply better, but she’d been afraid to let them out of her sight.
She was faced with a decision. A life-and-death decision, at least for Anton Lorre. If she used the formula on her father, she’d go through the remaining emeralds quickly, a problem she’d have to find a solution for soon. If she could get back to Springfield, to her storage unit, there was a significant supply there. Progress always required risk. She’d find a way.
Hoping she’d waited long enough for the desk clerk to have turned in, she went out to the van to retrieve the supplies. The moon was large and hung low in the sky. Cindy jingled the keys in her pocket as she walked to the stolen van and considered once more just getting inside and driving away, leaving her father’s body for the maid to report in the morning.
Sure, she didn’t have any place to go, but she was resourceful. She could figure something out—she always had. Every time her life had fallen apart—more times than she’d like to admit in her nearly seven decades on Earth—she’d built a new one. She’d practically invented reinventing oneself. And now, she’d given herself a truly fresh start. With her formula, she’d wiped the effects of years away like a bad dream, leaving herself a young and healthy body again. A second lifetime stretched before her, full of beckoning possibility. Did she really want to tie herself to the madman dying on the bed in there?
She turned and looked back at the motel room. A lamp was still on, and the sickly yellow light made the curtains glow a little bit. It might have been beautiful if she hadn’t also seen the distinct shape of a cockroach wandering across the glass. She closed her eyes for a moment, the better to quiet the whirling thoughts in her head and listen for the stillness at the center.
Grunting to herself, Cindy resumed her walk to the van. Rummaging around to find the supplies she’d come out to retrieve, she hummed tunelessly as she often did when thinking. Dancing Queen by ABBA. Pausing after “seventeen,” she pulled the remaining emeralds from the sachet in her pocket and examined the shards in the palm of her hand. They glowed a little in the darkness. They were warm, and not just from their time in her pocket. They radiated heat from within.
Carefully, she closed the pouch and tucked it away, then picked up her bag of supplies again and locked the van, resting a hand against it. Generally, Cindy knew what she wanted and moved heaven and earth to make it happen. This wishy-washy feeling was new and distasteful. She wondered to what degree her youthful body and the surge of adolescent hormones was to blame. Was looking like a child giving her the longings of one? Did she just want her daddy?
Having hefted the bag to her shoulder, she looked up at the moon one last time. As a child, she had believed Chang’e, the Chinese moon goddess, lived there. She’d mixed up the story with the one about the rabbit and had imagined a laughing woman chasing Bugs Bunny around the lunar surface. Cindy hadn’t thought about the woman in the moon in years but was amused to realize she had created something very like the immortality elixir that had transformed Chang’e.
Like that, her decision was made: she would use her formula on her father. It would keep his stolen body functioning so he would no longer have to kill to preserve his own life. She hadn’t yet made her peace with the man, and she would give herself the gift of more time. It wasn’t time to abandon him or let him die. Not yet. Not until she understood and made him understand in turn. She wasn’t done with him yet.
Mary’s Mother Simmers
“Mom?” Mary Braeburn called louder this time, but her mother still didn’t respond. She kept raising fireballs in the palm of her hand and flinging them into the pond, one right after another. They sizzled on contact and bounced across the water like flaming skipping stones before they went out.
Mary and her mother had been at the family vacation cabin for three days. After she had rescued her mother from the Department facility where she’d been held during the months she’d been missing, Mary hadn’t known where else to take her. They needed someplace isolated and, as far as she knew, her mother still owned the cabin they used to vacation in when she was a child. So she’d gone there, hoping it would suffice as a place for recovery and making a plan.
Helen slept for the first day, while Mary obsessed about hiding the stolen car and inventoried their supplies, not sure how long they might need to hide out and if anyone had tracked them this far. Helen spent the second day sulking and muttering like an angry child. When Mary couldn’t get her to focus and ta
lk about what had happened and what they should do, she took long walks and tried to decide if she should be taking her mother to the hospital. When she admitted to herself that wasn’t an option, the panic rose again.
Today Helen had been stomping around, fuming and flaming, for two hours. Mary was quickly tiring of her mother’s temper tantrum. Her own nerves were frazzled, and she had no idea what to do from here. Her mom needed to get it together.
She’d worked hard to free her mother from the Department, risking her own life to get her out, and if they didn’t come up with a plan, they were just going to get caught again. A possibility made all the more likely with her mother playing with fire in the yard—private pond or not, all it took was one person seeing the smoke and making a call.
Nor could she get help. They had, after all, escaped a secure facility where her mother had been detained after engaging in a literal firefight on the local college campus last spring. When they’d made their escape, leaving a trail of ashes and melted metal behind them, Mary had brought them straight here, to “Aunt Maureen’s.”
There wasn’t any Aunt Maureen. The name was sort of a family joke, a way to say it was time for a quiet getaway. It came about because the property received mail for Maureen Sinclaire, mostly ads for casino travel packages and catalogues featuring sweatshirts with shiny cats appliquéd on them. Mary and her parents used to look through the junk mail, laughing as they created a collective vision of who this “Aunt Maureen” might have been.
Right now, Mary wished there really was some crazy maiden aunt living here. Someone who would offer whiskey with a conspiratorial wink and who could tell her how to help her mother without landing one or both of them in jail.
They should be talking about this, making a plan. Sooner or later—and Mary’s bet was on sooner—agents from the Department were going to show up to haul them in. She wondered why they hadn’t already arrived. And what was her mother doing? Pitching a shit-fit like an angry three-year-old. Enough was enough. Somebody had to be the grown up here.
Striding across the field separating the cabin from the pond, Mary called her mother’s name a few more times to no avail. Finally, she arrived at Helen’s side and laid a hand on her shoulder. “Mom?”
Helen spun, her arm raised high, ready to throw the next ball of flame that sat twirling in her hand, licking her palm. Mary shrieked and jumped back, falling on her butt in the muddy patch beside the water. Her mother’s face was a mask of manic glee, horrifying to behold. Her reddish-gold hair blew around her face as if she stood in a wind tunnel. Her pupils were fully dilated, and her gaze jumped from place to place. Most frightening of all, there was no recognition in her face.
Mary crawled backward, crying out. “Holy shit. It’s me, Mom. It’s Mary. You’ve got to stop.” She looked around for something she could use as a weapon. Could she take down her mother without hurting her or getting burned?
But then Helen did stop. Her body shook all over as if she’d suddenly become cold. She crouched and clasped her hands together, extinguishing the flames. When Helen looked back up, her face was her own again, or at least what her face might have looked like after a three-day bout with a fever. Her reddened cheeks glistened with sweat, and her damp hair stood out in crazy strands. Her voice cracked when she spoke. “I’m sorry, Mary.” She did look sorry. Her eyes welled up with tears.
Mary stood and held out a hand, then tugged her mother to her feet again. “Come on, Mom. Let’s get you inside.” Helen followed her daughter, neither of them looking back at the still-steaming surface of the pond.
Once she helped her mother clean up and settled her with a television show and a bowl of chicken noodle soup from a can that had expired years earlier, Mary stepped outside and pulled a pack of cigarettes from her back pocket. Her fingers shook as she tried to operate the lighter, but she eventually got the cigarette lit and took a slow, soothing drag, holding the smoke for a long moment before letting it slowly out. Probably not the kind of mindful breathing her yoga instructor had intended, but, nonetheless, highly effective.
She had to face it. Whatever had happened to her mother in the past few months had damaged her. Maybe the Department had done something to her when they’d had her hidden away, or the injuries the Lizard Woman and the flying lady at the campus had inflicted had affected her mind, or these were additional side effects from the hot flash treatment from Cindy Liu that had given her the firepower in the first place. Whatever the reason, her mother was dangerous. And Mary was the only person who could help her. She was also the most likely to accidentally go up in flames.
Stepping on the cigarette butt, Mary turned and went back inside. Her mom hadn’t touched the soup, and Mary took the bowl back to the kitchen and re-warmed it in the microwave, then delivered it again.
“Mom? Aren’t you hungry? You should eat.”
Her mother bobbed her head from side to side, trying to peer around her daughter at the television screen. Mary reached back and turned it off with one hand.
“Hey, I was watching that.”
“You’ve seen it.”
“I like the next part.”
“We have to talk. We can’t stay here forever, brooding. We have to decide where we’re going from here.”
Her mother slurped a spoonful of the salty broth and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “We’re going to find Cindy Liu.”
Mary sighed and crouched in front of her mother, tucking her light brown dreads back into her scarf so they wouldn’t tickle her face. “You say that like it’s going to be easy.”
Her mother looked at her sideways. “What do you mean?”
“Don’t you think people have already been looking for her? The police? The people at the Department?” An image of the Director flashed across her memory, with an unexpected heat attached. That slow smile of his and his gawky frame, so much like Jimmy Stewart in After the Thin Man. She still couldn’t tell if she could trust him or not, but part of her obviously wanted to. In spite of herself, she liked him.
Her mother’s grunt pulled her from her thoughts. “But they don’t know where her stuff is.”
Mary’s head snapped up. “What stuff?”
“The stuff we moved out of her house, before the fire. To the storage unit.”
“But you know where it is?”
“Of course I do. I helped her move it there.”
Gears started spinning in Mary’s mind. There was no telling what kinds of things were in this storage area, what information they might be able to find. And there was a good chance no one else even knew it existed. If Mary and Helen could get in there without being discovered, they might be able to catch a break.
She pulled the other chair around and sat down. “So tell me about this storage unit.”
Mary stood huddled over the pay phone at the convenience store at the edge of the National Forest road, grateful the twentieth century relic was still there for their use. Her mother went inside to shop for more cans of soup and those nasty square crackers she liked, leaving Mary alone to stare at the silver push buttons and work up the nerve to call Jorge.
She had hooked up with Jorge—was it really only a few weeks ago? He worked with her at The Market food co-op. They’d come together over her missing mother, and he’d told her about his own search for his missing brother. He’d eventually found Miguel up in the northern end of the city and thought the boy had been taken and experimented on medically by some unknown group. Back then—it seemed impossible that it was a matter of weeks ago—Mary had thought him a charming sort of conspiracy nut until the true strangeness of her own mother’s story had come out. If the Department was out there, pulling people like Helen Braeburn off the street, who was to say something similar hadn’t happened to Jorge’s brother?
Jorge had led her to the rabbit hole, and she’d jumped through, and here she stood, phone in her hand, wondering if he would come if she called him. They’d had a connection—emotional as well as physical—but she had d
isappeared. She wanted to believe he could be trusted. Her instincts were usually good. Still, she hoped Jorge was as into her as he seemed because this was one helluva big favor she was about to ask. If he’d just wanted a tumble with the cute chick at the register, he’d have no reason to help her now. There was only one way to find out.
Blessing her habit of writing things down on paper, Mary turned to the sketch she had made of Jorge on a night he’d stayed over. His sleeping face half covered by his own hair, the sketch was little more than a nicely squared jawline and a generous mouth, but his name and phone number were jotted in the bottom left corner. She dropped in a quarter and dialed the number.
Voicemail. A simple message, just, “Jorge. Sabes que hacer.”
She sighed. He might be at work, unable to answer, or he might have let the call go to voicemail because he didn’t know the number. A message then. “It’s Mary. I will call back. Answer.”
As she waited, she paced around the little parking lot, stepping up onto and down off the concrete bumps that marked the parking spaces in the otherwise unmarked square of packed-down gravel. She could remember doing this a hundred times in her childhood. Walking the length of each berm, then trying to leap to the next one without touching the ground between. It was easy now, with the long legs of a grown woman, but once it had been quite a challenge. She circled the little lot five times before deciding it had been long enough to try again and see if Jorge had simply been screening his calls.
Face the Change (Menopausal Superheroes Book 3) Page 2
