If it happens, I warned myself.
After a few hours with Peyton and Zeke, I was no longer anxious to jump back in the car. Now, I dreaded the moment when Mom’s illness reared its ugly head and scared them off. It was one thing to have strangers witness me chasing her down the street while she shrieked about unleashing the hounds of hell. It was another thing to have people I actually knew witness it.
Not that I really knew these people yet. But I wanted to. I was a dry sponge soaking up information about how real people my age lived, what they did, how they talked. I was fascinated. Captivated. I wanted to know more, to be part of what they had. Maybe in some way, Mom had sensed how much more humiliating it would be to have friends witness her episodes, and she’d sheltered me from it by making sure I never got close to other people.
It wasn’t fair, but Mom had never let me believe in the myth of fairness. I didn’t expect life to be fair, and I didn’t expect some rich guy Mom had met online to want us around after he experienced one of her episodes in person. I doubted she’d even told him about it, and seeing it was in a whole other realm. My scars could be hidden forever, but hers always surfaced eventually.
To my relief, Mom was snoring quietly in the room they’d given us, just like she’d promised. I kicked off my shoes, peeled off my garage sale jeans, and realized I was still wearing Zeke’s hoodie. I didn’t want to take it off. He’d made me feel comfortable here, like I belonged. For a few hours, sitting on the deck with him and Peyton, I’d forgotten about Mom, and running, and the constant feeling of waiting for something to catch up to us. I’d felt like I was living someone else’s life—a normal life.
Shame washed over me when I caught sight of Mom’s face, her lips parted, small wrinkles lining her skin. It wasn’t her fault.
Without allowing myself to indulge in any more sentimental feelings, I peeled off the hoodie and tossed it on a chair in the corner, my T-shirt still inside it. I’d bring it back tomorrow.
As I reached for my duffle to find my pajamas, the door swung open. Instinctively, I dropped to the floor in a crouch, wrapping my arms around my knees as Eliot stepped in. He froze, too. The longest three seconds in history ticked by before I lifted one of my arms to block his view of my boobs straining against my dingy second-hand bra. “Did you see anything?” I blurted, praying I’d covered my scars in time.
Eliot covered his glasses with one hand, but I could see a grin fighting to break loose on his smooth lips. “I saw you come up like two minutes ago,” he whispered. “I thought you’d still be up.”
“I am up,” I whispered back.
“I didn’t realize your mom was in here. You can have your own room. We have plenty.”
“We’re fine.”
“Right,” Eliot said. “Cool.”
“Want to let me get dressed?” I hissed, glancing at my mom as she stirred.
“Not really,” Eliot said. “But I will. Goodnight, Gwen.”
With that, he stepped back out of the room, his hand still covering his eyes, and pulled the door closed.
The awkwardness had nearly choked off all my oxygen, leaving me lightheaded. I slid onto the bed, checking that Mom was still sleeping, and tried to catch my breath. In the books I read, guys like Eliot were always the nerdy virgin type. I’d been wrong about the others, so maybe I was wrong about him, too. But I didn’t think so. If he’d never seen a girl in her underwear before, that explained why he didn’t want to leave. But still. He’d been awfully unruffled by my appearance. He hadn’t even blushed.
To be fair, I hadn’t either, but it was probably just out of shock. If I’d thought about it, I would have. I was just glad he hadn’t seen the ugly burn scars. I squeezed my eyes shut, but instead of being humiliated, I found myself smiling. Giddiness rose inside me, and I couldn’t help smiling the whole time I got ready for bed and fell asleep.
I woke in the night to the all-too-familiar sound of my mother having a nightmare. She spoke in tongues, yelling garbled sounds that weren’t even words.
“Mom,” I cried, grabbing her and shaking her shoulders, fear thundering in my chest. “Wake up. It’s just a dream.”
Selfishly, I had hoped we’d get to stay in this luxury resort for a couple more days. Try a few new foods, sleep in a bed that seemed to hug my skinny body, talk to other people my age who didn’t look at me like I was a pariah with unwashed hair and unfashionable clothes.
But it was over now. I could hear footsteps running our way.
Instinctively, I huddled over my mother’s body, blocking her from the inevitable scrutiny of whoever was approaching.
“Fenrir is coming,” Mom howled.
“It’s not Fenrir, Mom. It’s probably Neil,” I said. If that wasn’t an innocuous name, I didn’t know what was. It seemed to calm Mom, who opened her eyes and looked at me blearily. Behind me, the door opened. I positioned my body to block her from view, though I knew I couldn’t avoid the questions.
At first there would be concern and curiosity, but it would be quickly replaced by pity, then distrust, and awkward self-consciousness as the people made quick excuses to get away. This wasn’t their problem, and they didn’t want to get involved.
“Is she okay?”
Not random people, but Neil. A man whose house he had opened to us for reasons I still didn’t understand. Until I did, I wasn’t going to reveal my mother’s condition any more than I had to.
“She’s fine,” I said. “She has nightmares, that’s all. She’s okay now that she’s awake.”
I tensed as he entered the room instead of going back to bed as I’d hoped. Circling the bottom of the huge bed, he studied my mother. When he’d reached the far side, he sat down on the edge of the bed. He was wearing a pair of flannel pajamas, but even they looked chic instead of frumpy on him. He ran a hand through his salt and pepper hair and sighed.
“How long has she been like this?” he asked, looking down at her glazed, confused expression.
I’d woken up with stark clarity, but she looked like she had no idea where she was.
“It’s just a nightmare,” I said. “She’ll come out of it in a minute. Sometimes they linger, that’s all.”
We don’t need your help, I screamed at him silently. I wanted to shove him off the bed, to claw his eyes out so he’d stop looking at us like that. I took a breath to calm my nerves. He was already at the pity phase. I prayed for a quick transition to the escape phase.
“I’m sorry,” Neil said, looking straight at me.
Go away, go away, go away…
“I didn’t know she was like this,” he went on. “I don’t know how much she told you, but I’ve been looking for you for years.”
My heart bucked in my chest, and I had to swallow sour bile in my throat to keep from choking. “What?” I whispered.
That sense of familiarity that had raced over my skin like goose bumps when we met… Did he know us?
Memories were strange things. They didn’t work like photographs. They weren’t visual. I remembered the feel of my dad’s presence, for instance. I remembered riding on his shoulders, and that he was tall. Sometimes, I’d pass the greeter at Wal-Mart or the guy standing in line at a gas station bathroom, and Dad would flash through my mind. But I didn’t actually remember what he looked like. I didn’t know what prompted those flashes of memory—the way someone stood, his cologne, a physical feature, or something else entirely.
And I didn’t know how I knew the Keens, but I was sure that I did.
“Who are you?” I asked, my voice like an accusation as I pulled my mother’s head into my lap, away from him.
“I’m someone who knows you’ve been taking care of your mother for a few years if not longer,” he said. “You don’t have to do that anymore. I’m here to help you both in whatever way you’ll allow. A child shouldn’t have to take care of her parent, Gwen. Let me take that burden off your shoulders. We have plenty. You don’t have to live that way.”
“We’re fine,”
I said through clenched teeth. “How many times do I have to tell you? It was just a nightmare.”
He gave me a pitying look that said he knew I was full of shit. I didn’t know who he was or what Mom had told him, but he knew more about us than I wanted him to know.
“You said you were looking for us. Are you a friend of my dad’s?” I asked, cradling my mother in my arms.
“The chain can’t hold Fenrir forever,” Mom said dreamily. “The giants will come, and the gods will die.”
“Do you know who Fenrir is?” Neil asked, his eyes following my every move.
“Of course I know who he is,” I snapped. “That’s what gives her nightmares. It’s a wolf in a myth. It’s not real.”
But to her, it was real. She never told me about her nightmares, but she often woke up screaming about Fenrir and the giants. So I’d looked him up once when we were at a library. It hadn’t clarified much, but at least I knew it was a Norse myth and not someone from her past trying to hunt us down.
“Why don’t you get some sleep?” Neil suggested. “There’s another guest room at the end of the hall. I can take it from here.”
“I’d rather stay with her,” I said, holding her head to my chest. “We’ll be fine, really. We’ll leave in the morning.”
“You don’t have to do that,” he said, standing. “I’ll leave you two alone. But I meant what I said, Gwen. This shouldn’t be your responsibility.”
“Well, it is,” I said, watching warily as he walked to the door.
“It doesn’t have to be,” he said again. “We’ll talk in the morning.”
I waited for him to close the door behind him before I slid down in the bed beside my mother. My heart hammered. What if he called someone, a mental institution or child protective services? I didn’t think he’d call the cops—they’d believe me when I said it was just a nightmare. But what if they tried to take her away? Or me? I couldn’t let that happen. I wasn’t abused or neglected. I was loved fiercely. And my mother may not have given me a conventional upbringing, but she didn’t belong in a nut house.
Once when I was a kid, I asked my mother if we were homeless. “Right now, we don’t have a home,” she’d said. “But that’s by choice. We don’t know what it’s really like to be homeless. We’re just traveling.”
But as the years went by and we never had a home, I wondered. Mom tried to make it seem like a fun adventure, our gypsy lifestyle. Sometimes, it was like that. Just me and my mom, laughing as we crested a hill and saw the Hollywood sign across the valley or the ocean sparkling in the distance. It was fun crossing off every state on the map as we traveled through. It was fun flying over the Golden Gate Bridge or the Mississippi River in our rattle-trap car, or cruising the Vegas strip and gazing out across the Grand Canyon.
But it wasn’t fun to wake up with flea bites all over because the latest car was infested with them. It wasn’t fun running out of gas and having to walk miles on an icy road to the nearest gas station or risk being picked up by cops or creeps. It wasn’t fun not being able to stay at hotels like other travelers because we didn’t have a credit card, or driving all night because we couldn’t find a place to pull over behind some bushes to sleep. It wasn’t fun having our car found and being chased off someone’s property.
As I held my mother and waited for morning, I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep again that night. My heartbeat had returned to normal, but every little sound made it race again. I was sure they were coming for us—not monsters but people. If Mom was in any condition to drive, I’d insist we leave before I had to face that humiliation. She was always kind of dazed and unresponsive after a vision or nightmare.
All I could do was lie there and wait, my stomach churning with nerves, my limbs heavy with dread. My brain refused to stop cycling through the last day, every event and conversation, every incredible and terrible feeling. I thought again of what Neil had said. My heart throbbed with adrenaline, and I clung tighter to my mother, praying she’d snap out of it soon.
Maybe she wasn’t as crazy as she seemed, because now I was the one who wanted to get the hell out of there, despite the comfort and apparent hospitality around me. I shivered under the warmth of the blankets, glancing at the window. It stared back like a black, sightless eye. Outside, the wind whistled through the marsh grasses, and in the distance, the waves lapped the shore. The hour before dawn was always the darkest, and tonight, it was the longest.
All those years, Mom had known someone was watching us, chasing us. Now, it seemed she’d led us straight to him. But why?
Chapter Ten
Gwen
As Mom began to stir, I slipped from the bed and ducked into the bathroom. When I came out, she was standing in front of the dresser, braiding her hair.
“Mom, we need to get out of here,” I said, shoving yesterday’s clothes into my duffel. I yanked my t-shirt from inside Zeke’s hoodie, barely registering his garment as I tossed it onto the bed. Hanging out with him on the deck the night before had been a sweet dream. This was reality.
“What are you talking about?” Mom asked. “We just got here. Calm down, Gwen.”
“Don’t you remember last night? Neil came in when you had a nightmare. He’s not going to want us around, and if he does, it’s with questionable motives.”
She smiled sadly at me in the mirror. “I’m sorry I didn’t bring you here sooner,” she said. “If I’d known about him, I probably would have. But it’s okay now.”
I narrowed my eyes at her. “What does that mean?”
“I told you, it’s safe here,” she said.
“What makes you think that?” I asked. “What if we move in and Neil refuses to let us leave when it’s time to go?”
I couldn’t ask the question I really needed her to answer. What would happen if she was trapped, unable to run when her demons caught up to her?
“There’s power here,” she said, locking eyes with her reflection. A strange edge entered her voice, the one she got when she’d told fortunes for people in New Orleans or Conway or Vegas. But it turned out that people only wanted to hear the good stuff. Fortune telling wasn’t a very lucrative business when half the time you were told that you would toil in frustration all your life and never get ahead, or die of a heart attack before making amends with your father.
“Mom, seriously. We need to leave before the others wake up.”
“It’s too late,” she said to the mirror, her eyes boring into their reflection. “The pieces are already falling into place.”
I threw my hands up in frustration. This was the reason I never tried to persuade her to stay somewhere when she wanted to run. All I got back was nonsense when I tried to talk sense. I wanted to grab her and shake her, tell her this was our lives she was messing with.
Before I could argue further, there was a tap on the door.
Well, the knock eliminated at least two people in the family.
I opened the door to find Finn standing there, looking a bit lost. A flicker of confusion crossed his face, as if he didn’t know who I was or why I was in the room he’d just stopped at.
He flashed a quick smile. “Hi.”
“Hi.”
Maybe it was the fact that I’d never been around guys my age before, but I couldn’t seem to get enough of them. Every time I saw one of them, I wanted to drink him in with my eyes. Today, Finn’s long hair was pulled up into a topknot that probably would have looked ridiculous on most guys. Somehow, he pulled it off, maybe because it looked like an afterthought rather than someone trying too hard. With his hair pulled back, his angular features stood out, highlighting his good looks and those gorgeous, dark lips.
“Have you been down to the beach?” he asked.
I shook my head.
He shifted nervously and stuck his hands in his jacket pockets. “Uh…want to?”
I hesitated, glancing back at my mom. I did want to. I wanted to a lot. Mom had let me go to the beach lots of times—for about five minutes. Just lo
ng enough to dip my toes in the water, or, if she was feeling generous, a quick swim. Then it was back on the road, heading inland.
For once, she wasn’t telling me to pack up, to get in the car, that we had to go. I opened my mouth to turn him down, but then I closed it. This was my chance to do the things I’d never done, things I wanted to do so badly it ached inside me. I’d missed so much of life while I sat in the car.
“You should go,” Mom said, as if sensing my indecision.
I kept glancing at her as I pulled on my jacket, waiting for her to do what she always did after a nightmare. When I had my jacket snapped—the zipper didn’t work—I turned to her. “Are you sure? You’ll be here when I get back?”
“Of course,” she said, looking hurt.
“Right. Sorry, Mom.” I crossed the room and bent to quickly kiss the top of her head. “Come get me if you need anything. I won’t go far.”
Outside, Finn led me down a set of winding steps with a handrail all the way down to the sand. The wood looked new, still tan instead of weatherworn grey like the shingles on the houses. The stairs led through rosehip bushes, their red fruits bright against the grey stems, other bushes, and tufts of beach grass. As we descended the steep staircase, I ran my hand along the railing, afraid I’d lose my footing and pitch headfirst down the stairs.
Finn trotted down the steps ahead of me, his stride as easy and comfortable as an athlete. His shoulders were broad and square under his jacket, and a few wisps of hair had escaped his topknot and curled against his skin. I had the weirdest urge to reach out and touch them, to see if they were as soft as they looked, or to nuzzle my nose into the little nook at the back of his neck.
When he reached the bottom of the steps, he stood back and watched me descend the last few.
“Those are steep,” I said, relieved when my feet were on the flat sand. Stairs were not a popular activity with Mom. Like beaches, high buildings did not offer ready escape routes.
Emerge: A Reverse Harem Paranormal Romance Page 6