Gods and Mortals: Fourteen Free Urban Fantasy & Paranormal Novels Featuring Thor, Loki, Greek Gods, Native American Spirits, Vampires, Werewolves, & More (49 page)

“Sounds great,” I said. Then — because as much as I hated to drive in Laguna, getting in a car with my mother behind the wheel was a surefire recipe for disaster — I asked if she wanted me to drive to the restaurant.

“Oh, you don’t have to do that — ” Her protest sounded a little half-hearted, though. I think deep down my mother knew she was a lousy driver.

“No problem,” I said hastily. “Um...is Jeff coming?”

“No,” she replied. “I think he was going to the movies with a friend. I told him he should see you, since it was your birthday and everything, but he said you’d understand.”

Which was Jeff code for
Hey, sis, hope you have a good day, but I don’t really give a crap whether I see you or not
. I still hadn’t decided whether the feeling was mutual or not.

My mother and I shared an umbrella as we went back out to the car. For a second I worried that she might to try to convince me that driving her Toyota hybrid would be better than the Mercedes, but since the rain was coming down harder now and the Mercedes handled beautifully in wet weather, she apparently decided safety won out over conservation.

I backed the car out of the driveway and headed back down to the 405. From there we’d pick up a highway that wound its way through the hills and on into Laguna. For a while we were both quiet; I needed to focus on the road, and I thought she could sense that. But after I pulled onto the 133 and slowed down to about fifty to accommodate the winding, slick pavement, my mother stirred in her seat and gave me a thoughtful look.

“Something seems different about you.”

“I’m a whole year older,” I replied, without lifting my gaze from the road.

“No, I think it’s more than that.”

Well, I’ve met the Devil
, I thought.
And he sent me flowers for my birthday
.

I didn’t say anything, though. That was a conversation I really didn’t feel like getting into quite yet.

“How’s Danny?” she asked, her voice altering subtly. Now, my mother is probably the world’s most understanding person. She didn’t even rant and rage and despair when my father left.
We’ve become different people
, she’d said, looking somewhat wistful, but that was about it. With Danny, though, I always got the definite vibe that she didn’t quite think he was good enough for me, even though she would never say such a thing out loud.

“Fine,” I said, lifting my foot off the accelerator as we hit the inevitable crawl that started at Pacific Coast Highway and backed up onto the 133 by a distance determined only by the quality of the weather. Since it was raining buckets, I only had to wait about three phases of the light before I could turn left onto PCH.

“It’s on the right, about two streets down,” my mother instructed. “There’s parking in the back — ”

I caught a glimpse of the restaurant in time, and turned right, then right again into a cramped parking lot. Still, that was better than a lot of places around here, which often had only street parking. For a few minutes we were occupied with getting out of the car and into the restaurant without being soaked in the process. It wasn’t until we’d been seated at a small table toward the back and handed our menus that my mother was able to pick up the previous thread of the conversation.

“You don’t sound very enthusiastic,” she said. “Is everything all right?”

“Oh, sure,” I muttered. What I wasn’t enthusiastic about was the contents of the menu. No meat, of course, but not even anything with dairy in it. I was overcome by sudden visions of cheeseburgers and fries and bit my lip, forcing my mind away from such forbidden fruit. “We just had a little spat a few days ago, that’s all,” I added. I figured it couldn’t hurt to cheer her up a little bit with the prospect of Danny and me having difficulties.

“A spat?”

The waiter showed up, and my mother ordered an herbal iced tea. I asked for the same, since nothing else was remotely appealing.

Then she requested some scary-sounding kind of wrap, and I ordered the pesto pizza, since I couldn’t see anything else on the menu that didn’t frighten me. We handed the menus back to the waiter, and my mother fastened me with a penetrating look, the sort I used to get in high school when I tried to lie about how late I’d been out the night before.

“He forgot my birthday,” I said flatly.

“Oh, dear,” she said.

“Yeah. As you can imagine, I wasn’t too thrilled about it.” The waiter placed the iced teas in front of us, and I figured I might as well go for it. “But that’s all right, because I’ve actually met someone else.”

“You have? Who?”

That was a good question. “Um, just this guy. His name is Luke.”

“What’s he like?” she asked.

If it had been my father or my sister, probably the first question they would have asked would be, “What does he do?” But this was my mother, and of course she cared more about this unknown suitor’s personality than what he did for a living.

Unfortunately for me, neither question offered an easy answer.

“Charming,” I said, after a long pause. “Intelligent. Good-looking.”

“Sounds good so far,” she replied, smiling. “Does he work in publishing as well?”

“No — he’s — he’s sort of independently wealthy.” That was good enough for now. At least it explained the cars and the house in Hancock Park.

She lifted an eyebrow, as if she didn’t completely believe me. But, being my mother, she didn’t press the issue. “So you’re not seeing Danny anymore?”

“Not exactly,” I said. “I guess I thought I’d see what it was like to go out with a few different people at the same time. It’s not as if Danny and I were serious, anyway.”

“That’s not like you, Christa.”

That was for sure. Up until this point my entire romantic life had been an exercise in serial monogamy. Even when it wasn’t really working out, as it hadn’t been with Danny, I was always afraid to try seeing several people at the same time. Nina didn’t have the same scruples; she made it sound as if she were seeing only the unknown Gina, but I didn’t know for sure. During college she usually had at least three guys on the string at any one time.

“I guess not,” I admitted. “But maybe it’s time I tried something different.”

She opened her mouth to reply, but then the waiter showed up with our meals, and I had to spend the next few minutes listening to her gush about the food and how wonderful it was and how healthful, yadda yadda. To me, it tasted as if I were eating the dining-room table run through a blender and covered with pesto, but somehow I managed to keep taking bites and nodding enthusiastically. If it made her happy, I could suffer for a few hours (or maybe more, depending on what this stuff ended up doing to my digestive tract, but I was just going to cross my fingers and hope for the best).

After that she went into a panegyric about the benefits of yoga and encouraged me to take it up. Now, I had to admit that my mother looked fabulous, and if yoga helped her to achieve her current tone, then kudos and all that. But yoga scared me a bit; I worried that I would get myself twisted up into some sort of human pretzel shape and wouldn’t be able to get out of it.

I made some sound of demurral, and then she said, “And I just participated in a croning ceremony, and it was the most empowering — ”

“A
what
?”

“A croning ceremony, to celebrate reaching the third stage of life and achieving a certain wisdom.”

Abandoning all attempts to finish off my pesto and buckwheat monstrosity, I laid down my fork and stared at her. A crone? My vital, still-attractive mother? Oh, I knew she’d said she wasn’t interested in pursuing any further relationships, that she was done with that part of her life, but I just figured it was because of the hurt resulting from the divorce and that eventually she’d get back into the dating scene. Women her age and older got remarried every day.

“Don’t you think you’re a little young to be calling yourself a crone?” I asked at last, trying not to sound overly incredulous.

“Some of the women in my group are as young as forty-nine,” she replied. “It’s just an acknowledgment that we’ve moved beyond the mothering stage and are ready to become active wise women.”

“Moved beyond the mothering stage”? What, did that mean she was finally going to kick Jeff out of the house and tell him to shape up?

I opened my mouth to ask the question and then shut it with a mental sigh. That was between her and Jeff; I’d been out of the house pretty much since I was eighteen and left to attend UCLA. Maybe the “mothering” she’d referred to was simply being of an age to have children.

“I’m glad it’s working out for you,” I said finally. It seemed to me the path she’d chosen was one of personal exploration, and if that was what she wanted, then I’d just have to support her. Despite my current difficulties, I couldn’t imagine not wanting to have a man in my life, but maybe during the past five years she’d come to an understanding of her own strengths and abilities, and had realized she would enjoy going it alone from here. Telling her that she was too young to call herself a crone or that she should just get some highlights and sign up with a dating service would only let her know I didn’t understand or approve of her choices.

She smiled at me, and I returned the smile. I wanted to pat myself on the back for being so mature about the situation, but oddly enough, I just felt tired. And I still had to deal with my father and the dreaded Traci later that afternoon.

I
t was closer
to six than five when I finally dropped my mother back home and then got on the road once more to head into Newport Beach. During our lunch the rain had tapered off, and she’d wanted to take me shopping amongst the various boutiques and trendy little stores that filled Laguna’s downtown area. Since garnets were my birthstone, she bought me a beautiful silver necklace and a pair of earrings set with the wine-colored gems as a belated present. I also spied a truly awesome embroidered black suede jacket in one of the stores, but I decided to pass it by, since I knew any gushing over it would have earned me another lecture about the cruelty of wearing real leather or suede. Maybe that was true, but my feet hated shoes made out of synthetics, and so far comfort had won out over scruple every time.

My father lived in a pseudo-Mediterranean McMansion about half a mile from the ocean. The house had a gorgeous view from the backyard, a black-bottom swimming pool, and about four thousand square feet of pretentious living space. I still shuddered to think what it must have cost.

When I pulled into the driveway, I saw Traci’s white Escalade sitting there as well. Don’t ask me why she felt the need to leave it outside when they had a perfectly good three-car garage. Actually, do ask me — I knew it was because she wanted everyone to see her new piece of automotive extravagance. The point of a Cadillac SUV eluded me anyway; it wasn’t as if she was ever going to take the damned thing off-road.

I went up to the front door and rang the bell. My father answered it almost immediately, since I’d called as I was getting on the freeway to let him know I was about fifteen minutes away. He looked good, with a fresh Hawaiian tan. Or maybe he’d just gotten a spray tan so he could have the look without the sun damage.

“How’s the birthday girl?” he asked.

“Fine,” I replied. I didn’t bother to remind him that my birthday was days ago. With everyone’s crazy schedules, my birthday had somehow bloated into a birth-week.

“Starving?” His eyes twinkled. He’d had to suffer a few of my mother’s macrobiotic experiments over the years as well. I wondered if that was part of the reason why he finally cleared out.

“Not quite, but probably I will be in a half-hour or so.”

“Well, I made early reservations, since I figured you wouldn’t want to wait.”

“Sounds great,” I said, following him into the family room.

Traci was in there, lounging on one of the leather sofas. She had the 60-inch flat-screen tuned to some reality show featuring a bunch of equally plastic-looking people, but she picked up the remote and clicked it off when she saw us enter.

“Hi, Christa!” she chirped.

“Hi,” I said, sounding distinctly lackluster. Probably I should have tried to muster at least a modicum of false enthusiasm, but both the spirit and the flesh were weak at that moment.

“So are Lisa and Nathan meeting us at the restaurant?” Traci inquired, standing up and brushing at her close-fitting taupe suede trousers. No scruples over animal cruelty in this household, that was for sure.

“Oh, are they coming, too?” I wished I’d known that. I always had to mentally prepare myself for extended periods in my sister’s presence.

For a second my father looked a little uncomfortable. “Well, she wanted to be part of your birthday dinner, too, so I thought it would be good for all of us to get together.”

This was just getting better and better. But I knew any sort of protest would make me sound like I was a bad sport, so I mustered a smile and said, “It’ll be good to see them. Lisa and I always talk about getting together, but our schedules, you know — ” I waved a hand, hoping he’d bought the lie. Frankly, Lisa and I talked maybe four or five times a year, if that, and mainly to plan holidays or family birthdays.

Luckily, though, my father didn’t seem to be paying me that much attention. He smiled and nodded, then went and fetched a coat for Traci, since going upstairs to get it herself seemed to be out of the question. She looked tanned as well, her mid-brown hair streaked liberally with blonde. Her French manicure was almost blinding.

“So how was Hawaii?” I asked, praying that my father wouldn’t take too long.

“Great, really great. We found this fabulous new restaurant in Kona — ”

I let her natter away, not really listening, until my father returned and we all piled into the Escalade to go to the restaurant. Of course I had to get in the back seat, which was all right; at least I could just stare out the window at the lights of Newport sliding by and try to ignore the inane chatter in the front seat as to whether they should listen to the jazz station or talk radio.

Some days I really wondered why my father ever bothered to marry that woman. Oh, she was decorative enough, if in a typical sort of way, and supposedly she was a fairly successful interior designer before the two of them got together and she took up her current life of hard-core shopping and travel, but I had yet to hear her string two intelligent words together.