by Ramy Vance
My mother clasped his hand and instead of shaking it, he turned her wrist so that the palm faced downward and kissed the back of her hand.
“What a charmer,” my mom said.
Without missing a beat, he said, “You must be Katrina’s mother. I would have gone with the classic line that you are her sister, but that would have been disingenuous. I suspect you are far too refined a woman to fall for such overused platitudes. So instead, I will ask what it was like to have a daughter so young.”
“A real charmer.” My mother’s smile touched the corners of her eyes. “I am, and I did have her young. Very young. And none of this ‘Ms. Darling.’ Please call me Charlie, or CC for short.”
“Very well, Charlie—what brings you to such juvenile surroundings as a college quad?”
I noted that they were still holding hands. I also noted that as charming as Egya could be, this was clearly just a show to annoy me. Egya was a werehyena (well, an ex-werehyena), and hyenas, I’d come to learn during my friendship with Egya, really did love to play their games.
This game was that he knew full well about my strained relationship with my mother. He knew all about my father, and how he died. Truth be told, Egya was one of three people on campus who knew pretty much my entire bloody past. So he knew how uncomfortable I was in this moment—and played his games anyway. Or maybe because I was uncomfortable. Freaking werehyenas.
I had to admit, though … that was what I both hated and loved about him. And when he gave me a knowing wink, I couldn’t help but tip the scales more toward love.
OK—so Egya and my mom talking was bad, but manageable. Now I just had to get them apart and I’d be—
“Kat!” I heard another voice call out.
I turned to see a tall boy with lush, black hair and impossibly blue eyes trot toward us.
GoneGodDammit!
My boyfriend too.
↔
“AND WHO IS this tall drink of water?” my mom said, leering way too much for comfort.
“Ahhh, Mother—this is Justin. He’s my, ahh … friend.”
Justin winced at this, and to my continued horror he didn’t recover quick enough for it to go unnoticed. My mother, being my mother, gave him a sultry smile that I’d seen her use on drunken sailors and horny construction workers alike and said, “ ‘Friend’? Darling … swoop this one up, lest I do.”
At this, Justin’s wince turned into a scarlet blush.
My cheeks turned red, too—but not out of embarrassment.
“OK, guys—thank you for saying hello, but my mother and I are catching up and so, you know—”
“Nonsense, darling. I am so pleased to meet your friends,” she hissed, the s in pleased lingering a bit too long for my liking.
“But Mother—we were discussing important matters and I really think we should finish up.”
My mother, not taking her eyes off Justin, nodded. “I fear Ms. Practicality and fruit-of-my-loins is right.”
Both Justin and Egya laughed at this, but I was happy to hear it sounded less sincere and more polite.
“We must continue our discussions,” my mother finally conceded. But that doesn’t stop us from meeting for dinner. Say, eight-ish?”
“And I know just the place,” Egya said. “There’s a new diner across the street from the old abandoned theatre: Mama’s. Supposed to have the best poutine in the city.”
“Poutine?” my mother said, lifting an eyebrow.
“Oh, you are in for a treat, Ms. Da … ah, I mean Charlie.”
“Then it is settled. Justin and Egya will join us at Mama’s. Mama’s … fitting name given our recent reunion, don’t you think, Katrina?”
Gritting my teeth—lest I resume my old habit of biting—I nodded.
↔
WITH DINNER PLANS IN PLACE, I shooed Justin and Egya away. The Ghanaian left with a chuckle after handing me a photocopy of his Psychology notes (good guy, that Egya), but Justin wasn’t so easy to push away. He wanted a kiss goodbye, I could see it in his eyes—but as much as I love Justin’s lips on mine, I wasn’t going to do that in front of my mom. Too much fodder for her to use against me later. So instead I gave him an awkward, impersonal kiss on the cheeks—both of them—and walked away.
I’m going to pay for that later, I thought—unfortunately out loud.
“Indeed you are,” my mom agreed.
↔
WITH THEM FINALLY GONE, I turned to my mother and, not hiding my anger, said, “No more games. Danger, you said. Where? When?”
“The amulet, dear? The key? Don’t you want to know how it is you have it?”
“The museum,” I said, shrugging.
My mom lifted an impressed eyebrow.
“I don’t own any amulets, Mom. The museum has several. It was the only obvious place it could be. Not that hard to guess. Now—the danger. These bad people who want it … where are they and when are they showing up?”
She crossed her arms and sniffed. “All business. Just like your father, I see.”
I didn’t respond, just stared at her until she finally caved and answered my question.
“I don’t know when, all I know is that if I could track the amulet to this place, then so can they. Intel says they are currently unaware of the amulet, so it could be some time. The important thing is to retrieve it and wipe out any record that it was here so that they never come.”
“ ‘Intel’?” I chuckled at the word. The mother I knew would never use a word like intel. It was too hokey, too much of an abbreviation. A part of me wondered how she’d react if she knew “Quad” was an abbreviation, too. She was more of a “My people say …” or “A little birdie told me …”
Intel. I stared at her. My mother was acting so different, so bizarre, that it was hard for me to believe this was the same person I’d known for three centuries. And then it dawned on me that maybe she wasn’t being honest. Should have been obvious, really, but I was letting that small part of me that still wanted a mother cloud my judgment.
“What’s your angle, Charlie? Someone paying you to retrieve it? One of the bad guys, perhaps?”
My mother put a hand on her chest and gave me a faux hurt look. “Darling, I would—”
“Save it. The truth.”
She kept her hand on her heart, her face frozen in mock indignation. Then, perhaps realizing she’d lost, she sighed and nodded. “Very well. I work for an organization whose sole purpose is to keep the peace between Others and humans. When we learned the amulet was here, at your University, they tasked me with retrieving the amulet because, well, of our history.”
“If they had any brains, they would have sent someone I didn’t know.”
Now my mom gave a real hurt look and I knew I had gotten to her. It felt amazing.
“Yes, perhaps. But as soon as I knew you were a part of this, I asked to come. I wanted an excuse to see you and figured that if I just showed up, you’d push me away.”
“You did just show up.”
She charged on. “But if I came on an important mission … like I said—I see so much of your father in you. And before you say anything else—yes, I’m being paid. Like I said, it’s my job.”
I scanned my mother’s face, looking for any hint of a lie, and saw none. She was telling the truth. Or at least, she thought she was telling the truth. What’s the expression? The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. If that were true, my mother had an expressway named after her.
↔
“OK—WHAT’S THE PLAN?” I asked.
“Retrieve the amulet. Have dinner. Leave,” she said in a matter-of-fact way.
I shook my head. “Have dinner. Prove to me that you really are working for the good guys. Retrieve amulet. Leave.”
“Proof? Would a phone call suffice?”
“From who?”
“Whom, darling, from whom.”
I gritted my teeth. “From … whom?”
She smiled. “Why, the President.”
�
��Make it a FaceTime, and maybe …”
DORM ROOMS, CHANGELINGS AND CALCULUS
I never got FaceTime with the President—probably for the best. I did, however, get routed through several very official-sounding guys all assuring me that my mother worked for them. They used acronyms and lofty terms like “assets,” “divulge” and “clearance” practically every third word and I just couldn’t imagine my mother going through all that trouble just to trick me.
Then again … this was the same woman who once turned the captain of an Aircraft Carrier just so she could—as she put it—travel the oceans in style. After talking to several more people with even more inventive jargon, I decided to—maybe, cautiously, grain-of-salty—believe my mother.
I dropped my mom off at her hotel—which was the closest possible hotel to the University Dorms, I noted—and went home to regroup. If I was going to survive dinner tonight, I needed some me time.
Sadly, me time is virtually impossible when your roommate is a changeling.
The first time I met Deirdre, she was standing butt-naked in our room, trying to staple AstroTurf onto our dorm walls. Being a child of nature (and not in the hippie, let’s-all-get-along way, but in the literal Mother Nature sense), she needed to have the natural world around her.
I kind of thought of her like a penguin. They can live on land, but need to be by the ocean to live. Deirdre was my penguin, and today I came home to find her sitting on the floor, wearing the crawler vines we attached to our wall for a dress, nursing baby—
What are those?
“Rats?” I cried out.
Deirdre looked up at me and frowned. Her eyes welled up. “I found them in a dumpster. Their mamma was dead. Poison. Luckily I got there before any of these little fellows drank from her teat; otherwise they would have died too.” She held them up to me. “Katrina, meet Captain Excellent, Hannibal King and Van Wilder.”
“Captain Excellent, Hannibal King and … let me guess, those are all characters Ryan Reynolds has played?”
Deirdre was obsessed with Ryan Reynolds. More than obsessed. Absolutely in love with him. I’d already had more than a few nightmares about bailing her out of jail on stalking charges. But then again, given how absolutely beautiful Deirdre was, it might not ever make it to trial.
Deirdre confirmed my guess with a nod. “Yes … Ryan is the best,” she said in a dreamy voice as she held three toy baby bottles between her fingers and fed them what I hoped was milk … as in, from a cow. You never know what lengths a changeling would go through to accommodate an animal in need, and I wouldn’t put it past her to find some mamma rat and “borrow” its milk. Or try to make her own.
“You can’t keep them,” I said, knowing full well that I was inviting a conversation about rules and regulations, and how some humans were adverse to rats, mice and just about any other type of rodent, especially when said rodent’s previous home was a literal dumpster.
But instead of the usual conversation where I explained the way things worked in the GoneGod world, she simply nodded and said, “I know. As soon as I can, I shall release them into the forest and let them find their way.”
The tears were suddenly back.
“There is so much that will eat them … I just want to give them a fighting chance to survive.”
I ignored this, opting to plop myself down on my bed.
I got into bed and pulled out Egya’s notes. Even though his handwriting was very neat—too neat, if you asked me. His handwriting made the paper look like some sacred text you’d find on a Dead Sea Scroll or ancient tomb’s wall. I felt shame just touching it.
I don’t know why Psychology 101 was giving me so much trouble. I suspect it was because I had spent so long not being a human, I was having trouble relating.
Egya liked to tell me my mental block on the subject stemmed from a fear that I’d get outed as not being human. I had spent the last four years hiding my vampiric past, and now I had to write about the human condition—and I was being graded for it. If I did it wrong enough, surely I’d get caught.
I could just imagine my prof holding my test, pointing at me and yelling, “Not human! Not human!” I’d had that nightmare plenty of times, too, which I’m sure could have been explained somewhere in Egya’s notes on the human condition. Oh, the irony. I’m also sure these thoughts were just driven by my anxiety over failing. And I’m extra sure my thoughts about my thoughts were inspired by this class.
A vicious cycle, really.
I shook my head, driving out these distracting thoughts. All I needed was a C and I’d pass Psychology 101. Just a C. Then I’d never have to pretend to know what it’s like to be human ever again.
I started to go through his notes and got about halfway down page one when the incessant sucking noise from the baby rats grated my brain.
“Can you stop that?”
Aggression as a response to anxiety—maybe I was human after all.
Deirdre looked up at me, confused, the movement causing the vines that had been draped over her various lady parts like an old Eve painting to move, and suddenly I was exposed to her … well, let me phrase it using a term from my era: whispering eye.
I shook my head, took a calming breath, averted my gaze and said, “Can you feed them anywhere else? I need to study.”
“They’re done anyway,” she said, standing up, exposing all her glory—and let me tell you, Mother Nature gave her tons of glory—and put the mischief of pups in an aquarium filled with grass and other stuff she’d dug up from the forest behind our dorm. Then, gently tapping the glass wall, she said, “Poor guys, growing up without a mother.”
I snorted. “They don’t know how lucky they are.”
Deirdre turned and gave me a curious look. “Why would you say that?”
I didn’t answer. I had enough of talking about my mother for this century, let alone one day. Clearly Egya’s Psych notes were making me vulnerable.
The changeling gave me an admonishing look—no small feat to accomplish when you were fully naked, but GoneGodDammit if Deirdre didn’t pull it off—and said, “Don’t speak so ill of mothers—they are the vines from which all life grows. They are the fountain which nourishes—”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, Mother Nature’s the tits—I get it, Deirdre, but can you spare me the lecture in which every other word has something to do with nature? I’ve really got to study.”
And with that, I stuck my nose into my books—and failed to study.
Instead, my mind wandered to another time altogether.
THE PAST AND ALL THAT JAZZ
O ld Scotland—The Day Before Katrina Darling’s Death
NO FULFILLED BIRTHDAY wishes for me. Instead, I was turned one fateful evening just after my fifteenth birthday. That evening there was a cèilidh in town—one of our old Scottish traditions, a gay old time with song and dance and stories—and I was determined to go.
My mother, of course, was determined I did not.
Her reasoning was this—young Gareth Classes, handsome and from a good upbringing, had his sights on me. And I, being fifteen and falsely convinced that I was a woman now, welcomed said sights with my flirtatious glances and coy smiles. My mother, being my mother, wasn’t convinced: He was a bit too handsome, in her opinion, and he’d spoil me! His upbringing wasn’t that good—she’d heard there was a half-cousin twice removed somewhere in the family tree who had a unibrow. “And that, as we all know,” she’d say every chance she got, “is a sign of inbreeding.”
I was not to go. My father was not to escort me, as would have been proper at the time. So, denied, my father’s hands tied, I went sulking to my bedroom.
Or so I pretended. But I had already known that my mother wouldn’t let me go, and had prepared. I was fifteen—I wasn’t born yesterday! And so, pulling out my dress from beneath my bed, I climbed out my window and ran to the old birch behind the barn where I had tied up my horse (saddled and all—wasn’t born yesterday, remember?).
Before ridi
ng off, I tipped the new farm hand my father had hired not to tattle on me. The young man nodded, grateful for the extra coin.
I knew my mother would leave me to my mourning till morning, letting me cool off before engaging me again. That was her pattern, and she never broke her patterns, so I was fairly sure that I would get away with it.
And if not? Well, I was willing to suffer the consequences of being caught. Gareth was waiting.
Once at the dance, I quickly dressed and joined the festivities. My dance card filled up upon arrival—not that I was all that popular with the lads, but Gareth’s name managed to find its way to almost every slot.
We danced the Gypsy Thread, Strip the Willow and Duke of Perth, Knot on a Ferry, Fairy Ring and White Sergeant (not as racist as you might think—at the time, pretty much every sergeant in Scotland was as white as curdled milk).
And when the cèilidh ended, Gareth—handsome and of good upbringing—offered to escort me home. Gentleman that he was. And lady that I was, I accepted graciously. We both had the same gleam in our eyes, but, hey, we kept that from the others. My first engagement in foreplay, in a weird way.
We rode up halfway, before stopping near the loch and beginning to commence in the very activity my mother had tried to protect me from.
It was a brisk night, but desire and teenage foolery kept me warm. It was also a full moon, which meant there was just enough light to illuminate his face (did I mention it was handsome?), but not enough to warn us as a dark figure approached, moving far too silent for what the landscape suggested possible.
Gareth was gently kissing my neck when he was ripped off, his body tossed ten meters away from me as if one were discarding a sack of potatoes. I did not know it at the time, but Gareth died before he hit the ground.
And then the monster—the monster that had, ironically, saved my maidenhood—climbed on top of me, replacing Gareth’s gentle kissing with fangs and pain.