by Rob Cornell
But I had to pull it together. For Mom. Because what she was saying didn’t make any sense, yet she seemed to believe it with her every fiber.
She sat on the foot of the bed. I crouched to her eye level, put my hands on her shoulders, and stared into her wet and horrified eyes. Threads of her long gray hair stuck to the tears on one cheek. An intense heat rolled from her into me, her magic energy sparked by emotion. Sweat ran from my temple and tickled my ear.
“It was a dream,” I said, each word measured, with an emphasis on the last.
She shook her head. Her mouth opened and closed, but all she could manage was a creak like a rusted hinge from the back of her throat. While the only light came from the hotel’s parking lot, filtered through sheer curtains, I could still see the color blanched from her face. And I couldn’t hear much of a breath from her.
I swallowed and forced in a deep breath despite the rock caught behind my breastbone. Then I sat next to her, put my arm around her, hugged her tightly. “You did not kill Dad. Get that out of your head right now.”
She closed her eyes and pressed a fist against her mouth, her knuckle smashing her top lip. A sob puffed against her hand despite her effort to hold it in. But maybe it wasn’t the sob she wanted to hold back. Maybe she felt a scream coming on. From the look in her eyes, I thought it was a definite possibility.
I squeezed her more tightly against me. I didn’t know what else to do, how to defuse the ticking bomb inside of her that threatened to obliterate her. Not a literal, or even magical, bomb. But the emotional explosion would be almost as deadly. A cold worry filled me that whatever terrible nightmare she’d had might knock her back into the fugue state she had suffered for three years.
I had to pull her out of this.
Had to.
Had.
To.
I shot up from the bed and dashed into the bathroom. I hated to let her out of my sight, but if I didn’t do something soon, it wouldn’t matter. I cranked on the faucet. The water had a faint, coppery smell at first before it flushed whatever gunk had collected in the spigot. A short glass with a paper cover sat beside the sink. I snatched it, flung the paper aside, and stuck the glass under the stream. I held it there until the water overflowed and ran over my hand. I had the faucet cranked to cold, but the water hadn’t yet made it past luke warm.
I growled, dumped the glass with enough force to splash the mirror. I waited with my hand under the faucet until the water turned chilly against my palm. Every second that passed added an extra beat to my heart. It didn’t feel like a stone anymore. It felt like a paint shaker on full speed.
I filled the glass again with as much clumsiness as the first time. I spilled a trail along the floor as I rushed back to Mom.
She hadn’t moved. Her wide gaze stared at nothing. Her fist still pressed against her mouth. The heat of her magic had doubled in the time it took me to fetch the water. So I felt like a member of the fire brigade with a pail of water when I splashed the full glass into her face.
She shrieked like the Wicked Witch of the West right after Dorothy doused her and set her to melting. When she jerked back, she nearly lost her balance and rolled off the edge of the bed. But she threw out the hand that she had clenched to her mouth and planted it on the mattress to catch her fall.
Then her gaze swung my way, still wide, but with shock instead of horror. Her eyebrows drew together, and the way she looked at me sent a stab of guilt through my belly.
It had done the trick, though. Once she got past the initial surprise of a cold dash of water in her face, she regained a bit of composure. She wrapped her arms against herself and shivered, still gaping at me. The water across her face looked like a sheen of sweat.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I…” Her shoulders lifted as she slowly inhaled. She held her breath a second, then exhaled through pursed lips. “It wasn’t a dream, Sebastian. I never fell asleep.”
I’m sure she believed that, but it was past two in the morning. That would have meant she had lain awake for at least three hours. She must have dozed at some point in there without realizing.
“You still don’t believe me.”
“Of course I don’t. Why in the hell would you kill Dad?”
“I don’t know.”
“See?” My voice cracked. If I didn’t believe her, why was I getting so worked up? Over a dream?
She bowed her head and folded her hands in her lap. A lock of her damp hair made a narrow curtain between us, obscuring her eyes. She quivered as if caught outside in the October chill in nothing but the nightgown she wore. “I used a spell,” she said. “It took so much energy. Twice as much as I would have needed. And he…he sat there. He smiled at me. And he cried. And then I killed him.”
I waved a hand and began pacing. I kept shaking my head. No. No. Nononono. Nope. No fucking way.
“Where were you when this supposedly happened?”
She hitched a shoulder. “I’m not sure. Some old house. Dilapidated.”
I stopped pacing. The sudden knot in my stomach made it feel like if I took another step I might rip my guts out from the effort. Old house. Dilapidated. She and Dad had been found in a place like that. First by police after a call from some guy who had meant to squat there. Then by the Ministry when they took the issue away from law enforcement. Then, finally, by me, when the Ministry had called three days later. Only I didn’t see them at the house. The Ministry had already put Dad into their personal morgue and Mom in a magical version of intensive care.
For three days I had turned myself sick wondering what had happened to them before the Ministry thought they should bother letting me know. Then another three months of an investigation that led exactly nowhere. To this day, the case of my father’s murder and my mother’s temporary loss of almost all cognitive function remained open but unsolved.
“What is it?” Mom asked.
I had dropped into a mental rabbit hole and didn’t know how long I had stayed there. I’d nearly forgotten where I was.
I didn’t want to say anything, didn’t want to encourage this delusion of hers. At the same time, it wouldn’t be fair to hold this from her.
“You were found…the two of you…” I licked my lips, but my tongue tasted like chalk and did nothing to moisten them. “You both were found in an abandoned house on Detroit’s east side.”
Mom let slip a soft whimper.
“That doesn’t mean you killed him. If the witches’ ritual is working to bring back your memories, maybe the memories are getting mixed up with…”
“With what?”
“I don’t know. Your dreams, I guess.”
The radiator under the window kicked on with a clank and a long sigh. A warm, metallic scent wafted from its vent.
Mom ran her hands down her thighs, smoothing her nightgown against her lap. “It wasn’t a dream, Sebastian. I remember the feel of my magic pressing out from inside of me. It…it felt like it was going to split me in half. And I remember Walter’s exact expression. I remember the smell of rat piss in the corner of the room. Gods, I even remember what I said to him before I killed him.”
I didn’t want to hear this. I was tired. My abs felt like I’d done a hundred crunches from my stomach clenching after every statement out of my mother’s mouth. But I couldn’t very well tell her to stop talking. Dream or no dream, she was shaken to the core.
She stood, clenched her hands into fists at her sides, and lifted her chin like a kid standing up against a bully. “Did you hear me? I remember what I said to your father before he died.”
“I heard you, Mom. But—”
“I told him I was sorry.” She curled her lip. “Sorry. That was all I could come up with before I murdered my own husband.”
“Stop,” I shouted, my voice vibrating against the walls. “Please. Just stop.”
“How can I?”
“Do you remember anything else?”
Her gaze drifted down and to the right. She too
k a few seconds, then looked up at me. The glaring fake light coming through the window from the parking lot’s lamps made her eyes shine. Her expression crumbled as she broke into tears. “No.”
I went over and hugged her. She wept against my shoulder.
The radiator expelled one last chuff and fell silent.
I thought of a way to, if not comfort her, at least give her a sense of closure for the time being. I didn’t like the idea, but I liked it more than letting my mom fester in false memories.
“Why don’t I take you to the house tomorrow,” I said. “See if it jogs anything loose.”
She drew back to look up at me. Somehow her face had collected more lines, and others had deepened. The night had aged her in an hour’s time.
“You’ll do that?” she asked.
“I’ll do anything for you, Mom. Hell, I took you to a black witch coven to help you get your memories back. What’s a trip to the east side compared to that?”
She touched my cheek. Her fingertips felt like tiny flames against my skin. She had outwardly calmed, but her magic still roiled within her. “Thank you.”
I smiled. It felt tight and rigid, like the plastic grin on a Mr. Potato Head.
“Try to get some sleep,” I said. “We’ve had a hell of a month.”
I don’t know if she managed to fall asleep. I didn’t hear anything more through the open door that joined our hotel rooms.
Me? I sat awake in a chair by the window long enough to see the lights in the parking lot shut off as the sun started its shift.
Chapter Two
Houses like this one had become a cliché in Detroit. The boarded windows. The overgrown lawn. The chimney bricks fallen loose like teeth from a rotten mouth. And speaking of rotten, I smelled something dead hidden in the weeds. The path to the porch looked like a trench with the tall grass on either side of the concrete approach. Mom and I had to walk single file to keep from getting tangled up in it. The cement steps up to the porch had cracked down the middle with one half sunken a couple inches lower than its mate.
Mom led the way, but hesitantly. She clutched her wool sweater closed as if afraid the buttons might pop loose. She had braided her hair that morning, but some thin strands had already slipped free and fluttered in the breeze. She stopped at the steps and looked over her shoulder at me.
I rested a hand on her shoulder. “It’s okay.”
She pressed her lips together, nodded.
“Just watch your step.”
I held her arm on the way up, so engaged with helping her, I nearly twisted my ankle when I stepped on the uneven crack.
The paint-stripped boards of the porch grunted under our weight and had a spongy feel. Much as I didn’t want to rush her, I tugged on Mom’s elbow and pulled open the cockeyed frame of what used to be a screen door. The less time we tested the strength of the porch, the better.
The smell of more dead things hung trapped within the house, the scent stifling. My throat instinctively closed against the bile that threatened to bubble up from my churning stomach. Mom must have had a similar reaction. Her face pinched, making her look pained more than disgusted.
On top of whatever creatures were decomposing under the floor boards and in the walls, more critters had done a good job of painting the corners with piss. The ammonia scent burned in my nostrils. When I tried to breathe through my mouth instead of my nose, I could taste the stink. I hoped that I’d get used to the smell before I barfed onto the frayed shreds of what remained of the carpet.
The front entry led directly into a cramped living room. A short couch stood on end in one corner, almost entirely stripped of its upholstery down to the rotting wooden frame. If any other furniture had been left behind by the house’s last dwellers, it had been broken down to sticks and scraps scattered across the floor among the crumpled cigarette packs and discarded needles.
The place probably looked a lot worse than the day my parents were found there. Squatters and the elements had worked over time in the three years since. Back then, more of the houses on the block had had people living in them. Now, I could have circled the block and found five homes, at most, still stubbornly occupied.
Mom wandered into the middle of the living room, her shoes scuffing through all the trash on the floor. Her gaze narrowed in on the short hallway that led to a couple of bedrooms and the kitchen. She didn’t seem to notice anything else around her. Even the smell didn’t appear to bother her anymore.
Outside, the wind picked up and whistled through cracks in the walls.
I shivered.
“You recognize anything?” I asked.
She pulled her sweater tighter against her. “Not sure.”
With her head tilted slightly to one side, she shuffled closer to the hall. Plenty of light cut through the gaps around the boards in the windows and the open doorway to illuminate the front room, but not enough of it reached the hallway to push back the shadows.
It wasn’t a very big house, probably not more than seven-hundred square feet in all, but the darkness in the hallway made it feel like it might go on forever. I wanted to tug at Mom’s sleeve and tell her not to go down there. But the most frightening thing she would probably find was a raccoon pissed off at the humans disturbing its den.
That, or the memories I had brought her here to find in the first place.
The floor creaked as she took a few more steps toward the hall.
My own feet had fused themselves in place. When I told my legs to walk, the muscles in my calves and thighs twitched, but nothing more. The stink of death and piss somehow grew thicker around me. Instead of getting used to it, I had become even more sensitive.
For the gods’ sake, I had fought and killed Detroit’s oldest and most powerful vampire, had dusted countless others, had lopped off the heads of imps with an axe, had stolen treasure from a dragon, and burned all other manner of ugly beasts that called the Motor City their home.
What the hell was I afraid I might find in the dark hall of a rundown house?
At the hallway’s mouth, Mom stopped and looked over her shoulder at me again. She looked like she wanted my permission to go in. Not sure why. Maybe she hoped I’d tell her no.
Instead, I licked my dry lips and nodded.
She set her jaw, let go of her sweater, and let her hands drift down to her sides. Then she clenched her fists and strode into the shadows.
Chapter Three
I could hear the groan and squeak of the floor under each of Mom’s footsteps. But she had slipped out of my line of sight. From the sound of it, I guessed she had entered one of the two small bedrooms. My stomach clenched.
She and Dad had been found in one of those bedrooms.
My face flushed before I realized I was holding my breath. I tried to relax and breathe like a normal person. Once the oxygen started feeding my brain again with only a little dizziness, I forced myself forward. If Mom recognized anything, or was triggered in any way, I needed to be close by.
I found her in the second bedroom down the hall.
The bedroom.
She had her arms hugged against her with her back to me. She stood so still, she looked unreal, as if I could walk up to her and pass a hand right through her. The bedroom had a single window, and the wooden plank meant to cover it hung askew, allowing a triangle of light through from the top right corner. The naked branches of a tree just outside cast a spider web shadow up one wall.
The wall opposite the shadow had a massive scorch mark from floor to ceiling. Parts of the plaster toward the center of the blackened wall had crumbled away to show the blackened studs within, as if something had struck there, hard. The mark itself formed a starburst pattern outward from the indentation and left only the wall’s corners unmarked. My father had been found on the floor in front of that wall, body twisted at the waist as if a pair of giant hands had wrung him like a wet rag.
The sight of it made my stomach turn.
They had found Mom against the opposite wall
, her back propped against it, her legs splayed out in front of her, her eyes open but completely unresponsive to any stimulus. The only sign she was alive had been the rise and fall of her chest from breathing.
She would remain in that lost state for three years.
The assumption at the time was that whatever had killed my father—something obviously magical, especially considering the residual energy that hung in the air weeks after the two of them had been removed—by “luck” had only injured my mother.
Standing in the room now, imagining the scene as it was that day, I could interpret it a different way. Mom on one side of the small room. Dad on the other. A massive expelling of magical power blasting toward my Dad’s side, creating the scorch mark, but also backfiring to knock Mom out and rattle her brain.
I didn’t need to complete the connection.
Mom did it for me.
She pointed at the blackened wall. “I did that.”
I swallowed and shook my head.
No. It can’t be.
I meant to say it out loud, but my mouth refused to form the words, leaving them to echo uselessly in my skull. My mouth, apparently, had gotten sick of voicing my denial.
Mom pivoted, pointed to the opposite wall. “I stood there.”
Her voice sounded distant and cold, like a coroner at an autopsy describing her findings.
I didn’t know what to say. If I couldn’t deny it anymore, what the fuck could I say? This was worse than anything else that had happened since the day I learned my father had been killed and my mother left only a breath and a heartbeat away from death herself.
Worse than getting infected by vampire blood. Worse than finding myself in debt to a four-hundred year-old vampire in a thirteen year-old’s body. Worse than feeling my own self-control robbed from me while another, even older vampire, used his thrall to command me like a puppet. Even worse than finding out that the woman I had fallen in love with had played a part in the whole damn mess from the start.
No. There was nothing to say.
I moved up behind Mom and wrapped my arms around her. She stiffened at first, then gradually relaxed and started to cry. A few seconds later my own tears screwed up my vision. The triangular shaft of light pouring from the corner of the window broke into a white starburst to match the black one on the wall.
