Shattered (17 page)

The last thing I remembered
was standing in snow.

It smelled like John, so I
was afraid to open my eyes. I hated the smell of cigars. He used to puff away
in the living room after Mom had spent all day cleaning. The suds in her mop
bucket could mask the scents that made me want to vomit–smoke, John’s rotting
odor, and her dying flower scent. Mr. Clean used to make everything okay for a
little while. Until John would come home, take my mother away, and fog the
house with smelly cigars.

I opened my eyes slowly,
praying that his ghost was nowhere near me, and gasped. I was sitting in a
silver box. One of Lydia’s silver boxes.

I couldn’t be here. I slammed
my eyes shut to clear the nightmare. There was no way in hell I was really in
Lydia Shaw’s prison. I didn’t have anyone to testify against.

Something jingled as I moved
my feet. A chain? Definitely a chain. I tried to move my arms and heard more
jingling. I opened my eyes again and stopped breathing altogether. I wasn’t
dreaming. This silver box didn’t have a table. There was one door with a tiny
glass window, and there wasn’t a doorknob, just a lock. I was in a cell. In
chains. Oh my God.

“I taught you well.” Lydia’s voice
sliced through the silence. I nearly pissed my pants. “Your shield was
incredibly hard to break, but I did.”

I turned to the sound of her
voice. My entire body ached, either from stopping a shift or … whatever it was
that landed me here.

She was sitting in the corner
of the cell like I would expect a female world leader to sit–legs
crossed, in a fancy dress, with heels sharp enough to pierce my skin.

She lifted a cigar to her
mouth and inhaled deeply. She held the smoke in her chest, and then let it
balloon out of her mouth dramatically.

“What’s going on?” I asked. “Why
am I not at Trenton? Did something happen?” She nodded slowly with a slight
smile on her face. “Was I attacked?” She smiled bigger.

“Yep.”

“By?”

“Almost Kamon. Then me.”

She drew in another long drag
and held it. This time, she released the smoke in artistic rings, like a
professional smoker. “Lydia, what’s going on?” I asked. “Why am I here?”

“You will call me Your Honor,
shifter,” she said, still staring at her smoke rings. “Say my name again, and
I’m going to rip your tongue out of your mouth.”

Oh my God. How did we get
here? How did I go from being her secret helper to a prisoner? From her calling
me Nate to calling me
shifter
?

“Why are you smoking?” I
asked, of all things to ask. There were about a million questions fluttering
through my mind.

She chuckled and sighed
after–a long, strained sound that made me shudder. “To calm down,” she
said. “I know myself. I know myself
too
well, and if I don’t calm down right now, my daughter will hate me for the rest
of her life.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because I might kill her
boyfriend.” I meant to do a lot of things in that moment–respond,
breathe, blink–but I couldn’t manage any of those things. Before I could
muster anything up, she spoke again. “You know the treaty well, don’t you,
shifter?”

“Um … yes.”

“Would you be so kind as to
recite Statute Fourteen for me?” My heart stopped. “Now.”

I cleared my throat and
reluctantly quoted the treaty. “
Any
shifter found out of control or having a suspected imbalance, shall be
imprisoned by an authorized hunter or agent. If deemed unable of
rehabilitation, the shifter faces a certain and legal death.”

She sighed. “That rolls off of
the tongue so smoothly, doesn’t it? Sophia wrote that. Did you know that? She
and Gregory wrote the whole thing. I know … it’s odd because they’re so nice,
but back then, shifters really did want to eat small children. They had to be
strict about the importance of control.”

“I can explain.”

She laughed. “Please do.”

“I haven’t been myself
because I’m under a lot of pressure. I-”

“Tell me something, shifter,”
she interrupted. “Some people say I’m crazy. Have you heard that?”

Okay … apparently, she didn’t
want to hear my explanation. To her last question, I nodded. I didn’t want to
lie. I’d heard worse things than that about her. Things I couldn’t bare to
discuss with Chris, even when she was just her idol. After we’d learned Lydia
was her mother, Paul, Emma, and I had decided to never speak of the things we’d
heard.

I was slowly starting to see
that everything Devin had told me was not a lie.

Without taking her eyes from
mine, she held her right hand open, and a glass I hadn’t seen lifted from the
floor to her hand. The clear liquid didn’t smell like water, but she chugged it
like it was. It was another method of calming down, I assumed.

“Do
you
think I’m crazy, shifter?”

“No, ma’am.” That was a lie.
She sort of seemed insane right now.

“You would be wrong,” she
said. She chuckled, and her glass floated back to the floor. “I found out a long
time ago that I’m crazy about the things I love. What do you think I love most,
shifter?”

“Um …” I paused for a moment,
wondering if the answer was family or specifically her daughter.

“That’s incorrect,” she said.
“The answer is not … um.” She puffed her cigar again. The thick smoke floated
out of her mouth like a cloud. “The love you have for a mother and a father is
strong, unbreakable, but nothing in comparison to when you fall in love with
someone. And that feeling doesn’t have shit on when a little person depends on
you for life. The thought of it makes you crazy. Makes you do things a normal
person wouldn’t otherwise do. Are you following me, shifter?”

I nodded.

She took a long smoke break
and cleared her throat. She and this entire cell smelled like fury. Murderous
rage. It felt like I was being soaked with gasoline, and at any moment, she
could toss her cigar at me and send me up in flames. I didn’t know why, but it
felt like my odds of seeing Chris again were getting bleaker with each passing
second. Dissolving like the smoke in the air.

“I understand that me being
out of control might make you nervous because you love her so much, but I would
never hurt her.”

“But you did!”

“I wouldn’t. I know myself,
Lydia. I wouldn’t!”

“What did I tell you to call
me?”

She stood slowly and dropped
the cigar into her empty glass. I struggled with the chains around my ankles,
uselessly trying to get away. I wanted to keep my tongue. “I’m sorry,” I said.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” She was only a foot away now. The chains scurried up
and down the leg of the chair. I tried to lift it, but it didn’t budge. “I’m
sorry, Your Honor. I’m sorry. I love your daughter. You know that. Please.”

“Do I?” she said. “I thought
I knew a lot of things, shifter. But when it comes to her, for some damn
reason, I never see what I’m supposed to see.”

She needed another cigar. She
needed one now. She smelled like she was about to kill me.

“I was worried,” I said. “I
didn’t want to be locked up. That’s why I didn’t say anything. But I would
never do anything to her. I love her.”

She stopped right in front of
my face and screamed, “I saw you today! And I read her mind. She lied to us!
You hurt her. You shoved her today, and you broke her wrist the other night!”

“What?” I panted. “I don’t
know what you’re talking about!”

After a long pause, she gripped
my chin and forced me to look up. She held a phone close to my nose. The
picture showed me pushing my girlfriend. It was from one of those stupid blogs
that always posted things about Chris. In the picture, my hand was pressed into
her shoulder, and her feet were off balance. The bend of my neck was just off
enough for me to notice it. I was shifting.

 
“This really happened?” I asked.

“Yes!”

“And I … broke her wrist?” I
asked, trembling now. “She didn’t fall?”

“No, and that makes me
legally able to kill you, shifter. Even if she wasn’t my kid. Even if she
wasn’t the tiny person who depended on me for life.”

I bowed my head. I didn’t
really care about the Statute Fourteen violation anymore. I didn’t care about
anything anymore. It felt like someone had turned all the lights off inside of
me. I felt as hollow as an empty building. Lydia’s screams were nothing but
phantom sounds echoing through my empty halls.

She asked me a series of
questions that I didn’t answer. I didn’t want to talk anymore. I didn’t want to
be in this body anymore. I told myself to shift, but my skin didn’t budge. The
start of the change churned in my stomach, but the rest of me didn’t follow.
How cruel. The one time that I didn’t want to be Nathan, I couldn’t get away
from him.

I couldn’t believe I’d hurt
her … like … like I was always afraid of him doing. John. He never hit my
mother, but I always knew it wasn’t because he wasn’t capable of it. He didn’t
need to hit her. His words were enough. And I used to worry that, one day, they
wouldn’t be, and he’d strike her. Break something.

Like a wrist.

I needed to shift. I felt
myself dying.

For some reason, I thought of
Christine’s face the first time she’d laughed with me. I was preparing to nurse
her to health for years like I’d tried to do with my mother. Not Chris. She was
amazing. The night I chased her around the kitchen in New Orleans and heard her
giggle was the first time I’d felt real joy in years. I never, ever wanted to
hurt her. The thought of it burned like nothing I’d ever felt.

“Tell her … it’s okay,” I
said, unsure if I’d interrupted Lydia. She could have been talking.

“What?”

“Tell her I said … it’s okay.
I won’t see her again, so I won’t get to tell her this. But, if you don’t mind,
tell her I remember everything she’s ever said to me, and those were the first
words.
It’s okay.
Tell her I didn’t
like her voice. It was too small. It didn’t match her.”

My chest hurt too much to
hold the tears in. I stopped fighting them as more final words came to me.

“Tell her she was beautiful
but way too skinny. It bothered me. I couldn’t think of anything else from the
moment I saw her. I don’t know if she noticed, but I kept feeding her. I’d show
up with some kind of food every time I wanted to say hello. Even if it was
right after dinner. And she ate it. Always.”

I caught my breath, thinking
of eating popcorn with Chris as her scent revealed how hard she was working to
be normal. And her face revealed how effortless it should be to be beautiful.
My mother would’ve killed to look like Chris or have John go out of his way to
inform her of it. But still, she was clearly broken, and it felt like I was
born to fix her.

“I would listen all night,” I
said. “…over all the other sounds in the house, to see if she was going to
throw up. To see if she had that kind of problem. She didn’t, but I barely
slept that week. Maybe that was why I yelled at her when she told me
everything. I was a nervous wreck. Happy but extremely on edge.”

Lydia’s scent changed. She
smelled sadder, apprehensive.

“Tell her I’m sorry,” I said,
while I had a chance. “I’m sorry I lost control, and I’m sorry I hurt her. And
tell her something else happened to me. She’ll be sad, so just … tell her I ran
away. Don’t say I’m locked up or that you killed me or whatever you’re going to
do. And tell her I love-”

I shifted. I broke out of her
chains and landed on four feet.

Lydia wasn’t even standing
over me anymore. She was sitting in her chair again. She leaned over her knees
with her face in her hands, crying now. I watched her for a while.

She pulled out her phone and
wiped her face. The number she dialed wasn’t saved. She typed it slowly, crying
harder than I would imagine possible for an infamously deadly superhero.

“Christopher, I think we’re
going about this all wrong,” she whispered. I heard Mr. Gavin clearly on the
other end.

I don’t.

“It’s just that … he doesn’t
know what he’s doing or what he’s done. To be fair, the treaty is not for
people like him.” Her voice was less intimidating with tears in her throat.

He hurt her.

“I understand that, but we
were both very upset before. I told you what I saw in her head, and we just
sped past the part where he’s not doing okay. We went right to what he did to
her. We didn’t think this through. I can’t charge him with anything. He doesn’t
belong here.”

That’s so like you to be on his side. It makes sense for you to
condone someone hurting the person they claim to love. Well … guess what. I
don’t want my daughter with someone like that. I don’t want her loving someone
who can rip her life apart!

“Are we talking about them or
us, Gav?” Her voice was small and strained, like she was squeezing it through a
tiny opening in her throat.