Limbo's Child (64 page)

“
Margarita
,” thought Lucy. It was still weird to think that her mother was a “Margarita” instead of a “Maggie” or even a “Margaret.”

“For what it’s worth,” he stated somewhat testily, “I never hated your mother. It was only that she was so
stubborn
.” He turned the next page furiously. Lucy thought he was going to tear it. She craned her neck to see what he was reading. She couldn’t make out the words, but it seemed to be nothing more than lists of names and genealogy charts.

“I had lost all hope of her ever returning,” he began after a moment, “I don’t know why she changed her mind, but she did. She came back, I believe, to protect you.” Lucy looked up from the book to Moríro. This was the same thing that Amanda had said. “Whether to protect you from the secret, or those that might have done you harm, I do not know, but it is clear there was one thing more than any other she wanted to protect you from.”

“What?” Lucy asked, genuinely curious.

He looked directly at Lucy with the most intense and serious gaze. “
Me
.”

Lucy swallowed hard. He said it without a trace of irony or humor. Lucy pulled her hair behind her ears nervously, though she thought she almost saw Moríro smile when she did this. He went back to his reading.

“There must always be
one
Necromancer, Lucia.” Lucy could hear the urgency of his voice. “Your mother wanted to make sure that before she took over the mantle, she would never have to leave you in my care. That is why she only agreed to become the next Necromancer after you had reached legal age.” Moríro went on, “She wanted those last years together with you, all to herself without any of my meddling.”

Lucy poured this revelation over in her head. What did it all mean? Did her mom want to protect her from this crazy Spaniard at all costs? Was Amanda right after all?! Had Moríro gone mad and her mother knew it? But if that was true, why had she sent the letter to Moríro in the first place and agreed to come? Lucy was very confused. She almost felt sorry for how angry she had felt towards her mother just a moment ago. She was obviously trying to protect her, give her a shot at a normal life. The one thing she wanted more than anything herself.

Moríro had one last thing to say though. “But of course, she didn’t expect to be murdered either, and now there is no one else.”

“Murdered?” thought Lucy. He had definitely said “murdered” and not “killed.”

He slammed the book he was working on shut, and pulled the next one over and opened it. “That is why I’m looking for answers.”

“Answers to what?” Lucy replied.

Moríro didn’t answer.

“ANSWERS TO WHAT?” she repeated, yelling at him.

He took a breath. “
Who
and
why
, Lucia. Who and Why.”

“
Who
and
why
?!” Lucy asked, desperate for clarification.

“WHO knew your mother was the heir to the Necromancer, and WHY did they want her dead.”

Lucy sat there stunned. She didn’t know if this confirmed Amanda’s statements or not. She thought about what Yo-yo had said. How the long-haired witch had scared him into the street and that that was what had caused the crash. Had Amanda killed her mother? She sat there with the milk in her hand. She set it down. She wasn’t hungry or thirsty anymore; she was just numb.

Abruptly, Moríro stood up straight and removed the reading glasses, his eyes frantically darting about.

“Imposible!” he said it in Spanish but she understood that,
no problemo.

“What?” Lucy asked, “What is it?”

“Someone’s here,” he said, and his expression terrified Lucy. If
THE
Necromancer, champion of
Death
, and all those other high-falutin’ titles was this scared, then she was horrified. “Someone who should
not
be here. Someone who CAN’T be here.”

He dropped the glasses on the book and walked towards the front door. “Stay here!” he barked at her, but she thought of Yo-yo and how he was still out there and followed anyway.

He stormed down the hall and out the front door. When he reached the porch, he stopped at the steps abruptly and looked out into the darkness, but nothing was there. Lucy nearly ran into him. He looked back at her contemptuously. For a moment, it looked like he was about to scold her and order her back into the house when a clear and calm voice penetrated the darkness.

“Well, well, well. From the palaces of Castile and Budapest to a rundown farmhouse in Pennsylvania. How the mighty have fallen.”

“Amanda!” Lucy whispered in shock. She hadn’t meant to speak it out loud, but she did anyway. Moríro turned back to look at her in horror and confusion. Then he looked back into the darkness.

“Amarantha? No es posible!” he muttered more to himself than anyone else.

“Amarantha?!! Who the heck is Amarantha?” Lucy whispered frantically to Moríro, but he just brushed her aside.

There was a cold chuckle from somewhere out there in the darkness. It was hard to tell exactly where it came from, but Lucy knew the voice instantly. It was the cold and austere Amanda. The scary-as-a-night-in-a-graveyard-alone-without-a-flashlight Amanda.

“But it is possible,
godson
,” she said “godson” with complete derision and utter contempt. “I have clawed back from the inferno
twice
now. I think I have a better grasp of the impossible than most. I spent twenty very uncomfortable minutes in a near-dead fly you didn’t notice just to get back this time. That moth was just a distraction.”

Lucy shuddered, then said, “Godson?!” She hadn’t meant to say it out loud. Moríro just shushed her and tugged his overcoat away from her. Unknowingly, she was clinging to him, scared. She stepped back, a bit embarrassed, and tried to think. How was Moríro Amanda’s godson?! Amanda said they were all
family
, but Moríro was supposed to be centuries old. At least, that’s what Amanda had said. If Moríro was centuries old, how
old
was Amanda?!

“Come forward!” he called into the darkness.

Slowly, from near the end of the drive, Amanda Tipping walked out of the darkness. She was wearing a long, black overcoat and had both hands in her pockets. She was just as elegant as usual in her chunky, square, amber-tinted glasses, short, dark hair, and high heels. She looked exactly the same as she had the first time Lucy had seen her in the hospital. You would have never guessed that the slim and petite woman in front of them could turn into a phantom-longhaired-witch-monster
thing
.

“I had a
devil
of a time finding this place,” Amanda said utterly calm in a conversational tone, “Your records from the hospital were horribly vague, Lucy, and the road here isn’t even on the GPS. Perfect hiding-space really. Though the décor is certainly wanting.” She looked around the place with her nose in the air, wrinkled in disgust, as she casually strolled towards them. Then she smiled. “Nice garden though. Interesting juxtapositions, don’t you think?”

“What do you want?!” Moríro barked at her. She ignored him but stopped a few paces in front of them.

“Hello, Lucy,” she said pleasantly leaning forward to look at Lucy over her stylish glasses, which she pulled down to get a better look. Even in the dark, Lucy could see her warm, golden-brown eyes. “I can’t tell you how happy I am to see that you’re ok. I was really scared when those boys took off with you.” She looked intently at Lucy with a completely disarming half-smile that looked like a mixture between regret and relief. She looked a lot like her mother when she did that. She raised her eyebrows subtly. “You found out the truth about that boy then, I take it?”

Lucy nodded quickly but retreated further behind Moríro. Amanda stood up slowly, looked directly at her and smiled a smirk almost identical to one her mother gave her. It was a more subtle way of saying “I told you so,” but it burned all the same. Were these mannerisms genetic?! Everyone in the family seemed to have them, even Moríro. She just hated that Amanda had been right about Sky. She worried that she might be right about everything else as well. Yet still, as obnoxious as Moríro was and as nice as Amanda seemed, she couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something just awful lingering below the surface of Amanda’s pretty face. At any moment that long-haired ghost thing was going to pop back up, she knew it. Moríro looked down at Lucy with a look of confusion and contempt. It was clear he was fuming about being left in the dark about Amanda. Lucy retreated behind Moríro a little more. Somehow Moríro, as creepy and rude as he was, felt safer right now. He didn’t feel the need to sugarcoat anything, and that meant that however rude and condescending he was, he wasn’t pretending to be something he wasn’t. Moríro yanked his coat away from Lucy and pushed her back a little further behind him on the porch like a disobedient puppy.

“What do you want?!” Moríro spat at Amanda.

She went on ignoring him and continued to look around casually, hands firmly in pockets. “Oh and sending a mortal henchmen along with the usual bloodsuckers?
Very
clever. Hokharty hasn’t lost his touch has he?” She shot a sly glance at Moríro and smiled, but Moríro wasn’t smiling. “Where
are
the three stooges, by-the-way? Are they around?”

Just then the sound of metal scraping against the gravel driveway met their ears. Amanda’s eyes widened beyond her narrow frames and slowly she turned around with a look of complete disgust on her face. There, coming up the rutted drive out of the woods was the battered and dented cream-colored Impala, its broken trunk bouncing open and closed, clanging with every bump.

“That was supposed to be a purely rhetorical question,” Amanda said through gritted teeth.

The car pulled up to a stop not far from her, the pick-up and the front porch. Out of the passenger’s side, stepped Sky, who was now shirtless and wearing Tim’s white blazer?! Tim got out of the driver’s side wearing Sky’s “Han Shot First” shirt?! Why on earth had they changed clothes?! Lucy thought that was weird. The brooding, red-haired Miles got out of the back. At least he looked the same. There was something else back there too, something jumping up and down agitated, but it didn’t get out just yet. It looked like someone was working hard to hold it back and restrain it. Had they picked up another victim?!

Miles and Tim looked anxious, but Sky just leaned back nonchalantly on the dented fender, folded his arms confidently across his now naked – and impressively ripped, Lucy had to admit – chest while he pushed the sucker around his mouth with his tongue playfully. He eyed Amanda from her heels to her eyes and back down again like a cat eyeing up a mouse.

“Well…
hello
again,” Schuyler said to Amanda in a smoky voice.

“Ugh,” Amanda winced. Lucy couldn’t blame her. Where was that nice, clean boy from the gift shop?! It was like he had been abducted by aliens that had sucked his brain out and replaced it with one from one of those incredibly self-satisfied scumbags you see on reality TV shows. The only thing Sky was missing was the spray tan.

Amanda turned abruptly to face both Moríro and Lucy. “THIS is what the order has fallen to under your leadership, Moríro!” She tossed her head over her shoulder towards the three standing near the Impala, but she didn’t take her hands out of her pockets. “A hapless scarecrow, a strutting peacock and a swarthy, red-haired dwarf?
This
is the best that the Father of All Vampires can manage?”

“Hey!” Tim said, offended.

“You think I
strut
?” Schuyler said almost affectionately.

Amanda continued under her breath, “Hokharty can’t even be bothered to dig up proper minions anymore! The
insult!
”

“Oy! Lucy! Ya aw right?!” someone suddenly shouted out. That was Miles. He sounded genuinely concerned. That surprised Lucy. The last time she had seen him he was turning into a dog and chasing her. Lucy didn’t know how to respond to this apparent concern for her welfare, so she just said nothing.

“And you!” Amanda turned coldly on Miles, “Don’t think I’m finished with
you
either,
dog
boy.”

“Dudes! I got this,” Tim suddenly spoke up. He came around the front of the car a bit nervously, bouncing on his feet anxiously as if trying to convince himself.

“Oy! Tim! Whatch’ya doin’ mate?!” Miles shouted out.

“Yeah…I got this. I got this,” Tim kept repeating.

“Tim…come back to the car,” Sky said as if scolding a child.

“No, it’s cool,” Tim replied.

“Dude…” Sky stood up and took the lollipop out of his mouth, obviously concerned about Tim’s newfound confidence, or overconfidence as he saw it.

“No, I got this, remember, dude, she can’t touch a mortal,” Tim danced up to her like a fighter trying to stay light on his feet.

“Yeah…no sucker punches this time, lady!! This witch is going down!” He rushed at her half-heartedly, withdrew as if he were planning to feint all along then started dancing again. Amanda rolled her eyes at him, but Tim was still selling it. “Yeah, how do you like me now, you bee-yaaah…THAT’S A GUN!!”

Tim fell over backwards and scrambled like a crab on all fours towards the car when Amanda suddenly pulled a handgun from one of her pockets.

“You’re not the only one who’s learned something from our last encounter,” she said coolly as she held it at arm’s length rigidly. She followed his retreat back to the car with the muzzle. Miles and Sky helped Tim back to his feet. Then Sky rolled his eyes at him.