I hesitated, then glanced toward the door. “Henry,” I called softly, and a moment later my boyfriend stepped tentatively through the doorway. His normally tan complexion looked pale as he laid his deep brown eyes on my parents, his handsome face a mask of tension.
At least he had offered to come meet them today. I’d let him in through the back door first thing this morning, and hoped it would help soften the blow of what we had done once they saw that he was a sweet guy. Marriage was a big step for anyone, and while I wished we had come to my parents with news of our engagement, I loved Henry too much to pressure him into it.
“Good to meet you, Mr. and Mrs. Sylvone,” he said tightly.
Silence reigned once more over the room, as both of my parents glared at him. It occurred to me then that inviting him into their bedroom might not have been the most sensitive move.
“Henry’s eighteen,” I said, desperate to break the quiet, “and he works part time at the camp during the summer. He lives on the Meadfield Estate.”
My father’s gaze darkened as he exchanged a glance with my mother, and I looked anxiously at Henry. He came from a humble background compared to me—very humble, in fact. He’d dropped out of school at sixteen to work in the factories and help his parents pay to keep his two younger siblings, and while that shouldn’t be an impediment to us being together, I knew it had to be playing on my father’s mind. I was sure he’d had the son of one of his governor friends in mind for me, although he’d never come out and said it.
There would be little to no financial support for our child coming from Henry’s side, but that didn’t have to be a problem, because my parents had no shortage of money to support an extra child. Hell, they’d been talking about hiring another nanny and doing another adoption recently anyway.
We could pull this off easily. If my father could accept the situation for the sake of his grandchild.
The pause that stretched between us seemed endless, as my father turned his back on us and faced the window. His broad shoulders rose and fell as he took deep breaths, and I feared it was all he could do to keep himself from exploding.
I’d borne the brunt of his temper before, over the years, when I did something to irk him. But I’d never done anything like this. I knew how strongly he was against intimacy outside of marriage. He’d told me time and time again.
Still, I couldn’t help but feel that sometimes you just couldn’t plan love. And since contraceptives had been banned before I was born, situations like mine were hardly uncommon.
But they are uncommon within governors’ families, a small voice in my head reminded me. They train their children well.
It was true that I didn’t know anyone within my social circle who’d been in my position. Which was why I was so nervous about this. Even now that I’d told them, I still didn’t know how this was going to go down.
I looked to my mother, but her expression was stoic, unreadable, as she watched my father’s back. She was avoiding looking at me, waiting for my father’s reaction.
“I’m sorry, Robin,” my father said finally, heaving a sigh and turning back around. “We welcomed you into our family with open arms, raised you as our own. But this… this I cannot, in good conscience, sustain. Your stay here is over. You must leave.”
I gaped at him. I had feared this would go badly. I’d expected some sort of punishment for my indiscretion. But leaving?
My voice choked up and I looked to my mother again, but she was still avoiding eye contact.
“B-But Dad,” I gasped. “What do you mean, leave? Wh-Where will I go?”
I had not a cent to my name. Everything I owned, including the clothes on my back, belonged to my parents. Leave? It was… It was absurd.
I… I was pregnant. This was my home.
Tears flooded my eyes as a surge of panic took hold of me. This couldn’t be happening. I had to get him to see reason.
“Sir,” Henry spoke up, before I could attempt anything. He had gone pale as a sheet and his own voice was raspy as he hurried toward my father, his palms open in a peaceful gesture. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry this happened, but please, don’t ask Robin to leave. I-I’ll marry her. We… We’ll get married before the baby’s born.”
His words made my heart expand, and I prayed this would be enough to fix things. Then my eyes returned to my father’s face, and I saw the deep scowl that remained there.
“Unfortunately, it’s too late,” he grated out. “You were more than willing to mess with my daughter behind my back, and you’re saying this now only because you’re desperate. The two of you have already revealed your mentality to me—and it’s one of the ailments of our country. Irresponsible people like you are what led our great nation to crisis twenty years ago.” He shook his head bitterly, his eyes returning to me. “No restraint. Despite all I have done to try to mold you, make you into an honorable human being, it’s all gone to waste. I can no longer maintain my association with you. You have disqualified yourself from living in our household. I won’t have you infecting your siblings with your bad example… So get out. Now.”
“No, Dad!” I choked out. I rushed toward him, trying to pull him into a desperate embrace, but he gripped my arms as though I were a stranger, and pushed me backward.
“You’ve lost the right to call me that,” he said, then stalked out of the room.
I followed him out at a run, not knowing what else to do. This couldn’t be happening. If I was thrown out, I’d have no means of supporting myself during my pregnancy, and Henry and his family were stretched to the max as it was. If I couldn’t get the money together, then…
“No, Dad!” I cried out again. “Please, just stop!”
I didn’t even know where he was going as he sped down the staircase to the entrance hall. All I knew was that I had to get him to change his mind. I had to get him to see reason. I could hear Henry’s footsteps pounding behind me as I raced after my father, who, I realized a moment later, was heading toward his study.
He ran to the door and pushed it open, and when I entered a few seconds after him, it was to the sight of him rummaging through the drawers of his bureau, his face dark, his eyes a quiet storm.
I realized, then, as he pulled out a brown binder, what he had been searching for.
My adoption papers. He tore them from the folder and drew a huge red cross over each of them with a marker, then ripped them apart, one by one, the pieces scattering all about the room.
“I’m sorry, Robin. But we’re done here. You’ve left me no choice. And now you two are as good as trespassers—your boyfriend in particular. I’ll have the neighborhood know that you have forsaken me and are no longer anything to me, so I suggest you leave and never show your face around here again. You two have made your bed, and now you can damn well lie in it.”
“No, sir!” Henry surged forward, and the next thing I knew, my father was pulling a gun from one of the drawers, his eyes glinting with a rage I had never seen in him before.
He fired at Henry’s left leg before I could scream out for him to stop, and then Henry was crying out and crumpling to the floor.
“No!” I gasped and rushed to him, pressing my hands down around his wound to stem the blood flow while he writhed in pain against the carpet.
“I told you to leave!” my father hissed. “Now, before my children come down here.”
“No, wait! I need to call an—”
My father’s hand closed hard around my wrist and he yanked me up from the floor, then grabbed Henry by the arm and hauled him up, too. His strength was enough to allow him to drag us both out the front door, and he cast one last glowering look at me before he slammed it shut behind us.
Henry collapsed again the second my father let go of him, and I stumbled to help him back up, even as my whole body trembled in shock. Adrenaline lent me strength I didn’t know I possessed, and I managed to support the hobbling six-foot boy down the steps and out onto the street.
I staggered down the s
idewalk with him, praying our neighbors were in and would allow us to make a call. It wasn’t a fatal wound, and if an ambulance arrived quickly, I knew Henry would be okay.
But I also knew then that, barring a miracle, the baby I gave birth to would never be mine.
Chapter 1
I stared at the girl in the mirror. At her long, dirty-blond hair. At her light hazel eyes. At her narrow bone structure and thin lips. She was me, and yet she was a me I was still getting used to.
Two years can do a lot to a person. And just about everything that could have gone wrong in a person’s life had gone wrong in mine.
And yet, here I stood. A survivor.
It would be a lie to say, though, that I hadn’t been convinced I would break—more than a few times. The days had been dark and long after my adoptive father banished me from home. I had no choice but to move in with Henry and his family, and it was there that I experienced what life was like outside of my comfy little bubble for the first time. I experienced what life was like for the unprivileged.
I was forced to quit my private school, with no means of affording the tuition, and wound up getting a job at the same clothes factory in which Henry worked during the week. The pay there was a pittance, just enough to cover living and travel expenses, given that I was still under eighteen and had no prior work experience.
And then, when I could no longer work due to my pregnancy, it became a waiting game—waiting for the day my baby was born, and a member of the Ministry for Welfare arrived to inform me that unfortunately, I was not eligible to keep my child.
I became a victim of the same system that had punished my birth parents, all those years ago, when they were forced to give me up. The Child Redistribution Adoption System, the CRAS, aimed at the poorest of society. President Burchard’s genius idea to solve the Great Crisis our country found itself in, which was, if we were to believe the news channels, precipitated by the spike in family welfare costs over the past century, thanks to our country’s deteriorating morals. When it reached the point where taxes rose to unprecedented heights to meet the expense of welfare, his regime swooped in to solve the problem by instituting the CRAS, whereby only those who could afford it—the wealthy of our society—would shoulder the “burden.” They would take in children under the age of three, which allowed for an easier adjustment period than older kids, thus relieving the government, and everyone else, of the expense. The system would work particularly well, they argued, because many upper- and middle-class families with career wives tended to have few or no biological children anyway, and wanted to adopt.
I lit up as a bright red flag on the Ministry’s audit system, labelled as someone who would sap too many resources from the government because I didn’t have adequate means to support my child. I became part of the bottom 20 percent of the population—those who were in danger of being targeted. In fact, I was probably closer to the bottom 5 percent.
And so a minister arrived the day she was born. My beautiful baby girl, whom, during those few precious hours I got to hold her in my arms, I named Hope.
Because she was my Hope, on that bright, sunny morning. That someday, things would change. That someday, I would live in a world where I could see her again.
I cried and whispered to her that I would find her, though it was a promise that was virtually impossible to keep, given that it was illegal for parents to seek out their children after they had been resituated, and detailed adoption records were kept in cyber vaults.
It was the same reason that my birth parents had never found me—because I was sure they would’ve sought me out if they could.
If they had experienced anything like I had, that day I gave birth, then it was a certainty. I had never thought I’d be the kind of girl to have a baby before her mid- to late-twenties, with the academic path carved out for me by my parents. But when I held Hope, it felt like a huge piece of my life had been missing until her arrival, and I didn’t know how I could’ve lived without her. Couldn’t bear even imagining a life without her.
But I had to.
The tears stopped after a week, once the Ministry took her away, and numbness settled into their place. The ordeal took its toll on Henry and me, as a couple—although, to be honest, I’d felt the beginnings of a crack in our relationship when my father shot him in the leg.
Not that I could blame the poor boy. He was probably afraid to have anything more to do with a governor’s daughter after that—even an ex-governor’s daughter. And the time he spent with me during the pregnancy and birth was more out of duty than anything else. Henry would never admit it, but it became clearer to me in the months that followed that my father had been right about one thing: he hadn’t been intending to commit to me anytime soon. We’d both been caught up in the passion of a first-time, forbidden summer romance, and had let it go too far. I’d thought that maybe our relationship could survive it, but after the baby was taken away, it became clear that she had been the only thing holding us together. Once she was gone, Henry announced that he had accepted a job transfer to another factory up north, and left.
I guessed different people reacted differently to trauma. Some people drew closer together, while others drifted apart. Our relationship was never as deep as I had thought it was, in my naïve seventeen-year-old mind, which was why he hadn’t proposed until he’d been guilt-tripped into it.
In any case, we lost touch, and if he’d started seeing another girl in his new town, I honestly couldn’t say I would have minded, or even felt the smallest twinge of jealousy.
Hope’s absence ate at my soul, and I could barely even think of anything else.
I moved out of Henry’s parents’ small apartment as quickly as I could, to get away from the memories it held, and managed to get another job in a factory—as I had given up my previous one to have the baby. I found a little cabin in the woods to call home, and it was where I lived to this day.
The sound of barking outside my window made me start, and I turned away from the mirror. I padded out of my little five-by-seven bedroom, over the rough wooden floorboards, and into my only slightly larger living room, toward the front door. I pulled it open with a creak and switched on the lantern outside. The beams illuminated a small pack of local wolves I had befriended, standing in the darkness of the late evening. They had basically become part-time pets—ever since I’d allowed them to sleep in my living room last winter, during a particularly bad storm.
“No food today, boys,” I muttered, bending down to stroke their silky fur. They nuzzled against my face, and I kissed them each gently on the nose.
“Nor for you, girl,” I added, my eyes falling on the female. I felt particularly bad about having nothing for her, as she was heavy with pups.
But I was earning just enough to support my lifestyle, with only the occasional money to spare, which I tried to save up. I did occasionally give them treats, but it wasn’t something I wanted them to get into the habit of expecting.
Besides, my day-to-day diet wasn’t suited to them, anyway. I grew potatoes and greens in a small dirt patch round the back of my cabin, and those, along with grains and milk from the local farmer, were basically what I ate. Except when I was in a rush. Then I resorted to Nurmeal, a meal-replacement drink. But I preferred real food in my mouth when I had the option. Living alone didn’t exactly motivate me to cook fancy, either way. I just consumed what did the job and kept my food bill as low as possible so I had more flexibility in my budget for other things.
After a couple minutes of back stroking, I closed the door on the animals and retreated back inside, gazing around my little cabin with a sigh. It contained only three rooms: my bedroom, the living area—which was combined with a kitchenette—and the bathroom. It had taken a while to get used to living in such a raw environment, but the months I had spent holed up in Henry’s parents’ apartment had gotten me accustomed to small spaces. By comparison, I had more room to myself here.
Still, the first few months I’d spent in
this cabin had been the hardest of my life. The dark and cold seemed to seep out of every nook and cranny, and it was the kind that no amount of cozy lighting or fur rugs could drive away. The depression had come close to consuming me, and the only thing I had to look forward to every day was work at the factory, to take my mind off things. Not that the mind-numbing work was ever really a distraction…
But then, seven months ago, things had changed. The darkness was still never far away, lurking in the shadows of my mind like a waiting monster, but the bad days were far fewer, the motivated, optimistic ones the norm now. Seven months ago, I found a renewed purpose in life…
The sound of my phone ringing brought me back to reality—and told me that I had been spacing out. I hurried to my bathroom counter, where I had left the small device, and picked it up. After checking that my phone’s encryption app was running and the line was secure, I accepted the call and pressed the speaker to my ear.
“Hey, Nelson, what’s up?” I said.
“Coordinates have changed for tonight,” a low, crackling voice replied, only barely distinguishable as female. “You need to head to the Roundhouse, and we’ll launch the mission from there.”
“Oh… Everything okay?”
“Yup. Just a slight, unexpected shift of target. So we’re gonna have to approach from a different angle. Get over there and you’ll get a briefing.”
“Okay. I’m leaving now,” I replied, and then she hung up.
I hung up too and slipped the phone into my pocket, then hurried to tie my hair back into a tight bun and slide into my jacket. After pulling on my backpack and grabbing my keys, I left the cabin and swung onto my motorcycle, kicking it into gear.
As I drove out through the woods toward the road, I breathed in the crisp evening air, taking a moment to just… feel the mix of emotions coursing through me. They came whenever Nelson got in touch, and while I looked forward to her calls, they didn’t exactly fill me with light or happiness. Nor could I even say with excitement. No, it was with something much darker than that. Something deep and burning, almost primal… Perhaps the kind of thing only a broken mother can feel.
A Shade of Vampire 60_A Voyage of Founders Page 27