The Sovereign Era (Book 2): Pilgrimage (23 page)

She looked down. “Tomorrow morning, we’ll call Drake Ottman and fill him in. Hopefully, we can talk to him before the police come around.” She looked up. “If they do.”

She scratched the sides of her head with her hands. “We’ll have to figure out how this plays into everything else. Once Brenhurst’s people get hold of this, we’re going to be at a big disadvantage…”

“No.” She was so concerned with the legal shit, she wasn’t even paying attention to me. “Mom. No.”

“No, what?”

“No,” I said again. “You…you’re right. I need to…” I faltered.

“What?”

“I need to figure this out,” I said. “I’ve been feeling…I don’t know. Less in control, I guess. I’ve been so angry… It’s like it’s always just, right there, waiting for something to happen, waiting to come out.”

“What do you mean?”

I dropped my head, hands on my knees. I probably looked a lot like she had just a minute before. That familial similarity wasn’t something I was all that happy about just then, so I moved my hands to the couch cushions. Anything to put some difference between us.

“I mean I think I’m losing it,” I said. “I think—I think I’m getting to be more like him.”

She scowled. “Like your father.”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know.”

I grabbed a lungful of air and shot it out through pursed lips. It was time to spring my plan on her.

“I want to find him. I think I need his help.”

“Andrew’s help?” She frowned and laughed. “I don’t think so.”

“Why not? He’s been dealing with this for a long time, right? I think he could tell me, give me some tips. Make sure I don’t lose it.”

She shook her head. “He’s crazy, Nathan. Do you understand? He’s not well.” Her mouth was a thin line. Her nostrils flared. “He’s probably dangerous. Even if we knew where he was.”

“We could start with Denver,” I said. “He helps him sometimes, right? He might know—"

“Absolutely not.”

I stood up. “You can’t say that!”

She kept her seat and looked up at me. Her eyes were like cold metal.

“The answer is no.”

I bounced on the balls of my feet while we looked at each other. My breath came in short bursts. God, I wanted to cry. I couldn’t wait to go to bed so I could do exactly that.

This first.

“You owe me,” I said.

Her eyes flashed. “Careful, Nathan.”

“I didn’t ask for any of this,” I said. “None of it. And you…you lied to me about all of it.” My voice went up in pitch and volume. “All of it!”

“I’m not doing this with you again,” she said.

“Tough! You lied about my dad, you lied about me, to me… If Brenhurst hadn’t forced me and Byron out of town, you’d probably still be lying about it.

“You totally
do
owe me, Mom.” I held out my hands. “I just want your help finding him. That’s all.”

She had caught on something. “Forced you? That’s a pretty self-serving way for you to think of it, isn’t it? No one forced you to sneak away, Nathan.”

“He was going to do shit to Byron! He was on to us!”

“You should have come to me,” she said. “If you had, everything could have been avoided.” Her face darkened. Was she thinking about her own kidnapping by Brenhurst and his pet monsters? “Nothing needed to happen the way it did. It happened that way because of what
you
did.”

“Oh, okay.” I realized I was having the third fight of the night. It was almost funny. “Sure. So if I’d come to you with Byron that night, you would have made it all better, right? You would have told me the truth then?” I laughed. “Sure. Right.”

She didn’t answer immediately. She just looked at me, like I was some weird thing standing in her living room.

Well, fuck.

I was.

That was the whole fucking thing.

Finally, she said, “We are not going to look for your father. He is out of his mind, Nathan. Don’t you understand that? He’s not a…person anymore.” Her face relaxed into something a little more imploring. “He’s of no use to you, Nathan. You have to depend on yourself.”

“That’s been a great plan so far,” I said.

She acted like she hadn’t heard me. “Or the Sovereigns. They’ve offered to take you in.” She was thinking fast. “Byron’s already there. If you accepted their…asylum…the police couldn’t touch you.”

I couldn’t believe my inhumanly sensitive ears.

“What? Now you want me to run to them? Are you kidding me, Mom?”

“Obviously I’d hoped to settle all of this in court, make them pay for what they did to you, and yes, Nathan, what they did to your father.” She raised her eyebrows and her hands in an expressive shrug. “Whatever you did to this idiot tonight has shot that to hell. You have to accept that. We’re lucky if we make it through the night without a knock on the door.”

I shook my head.

“Finn’s not going to talk.” Not tonight, anyway. They’d have to give him something for the pain while they cleaned him up.

I had tonight. I had tomorrow morning.

She seemed to read my thoughts.

“How badly did you hurt him, Nathan? Tell me.”

“I didn’t use my claws,” I said. “Jason stopped me.”

“Jason was there?” That triggered a new flare of angry astonishment.

I nodded. “Yep.”

She bit her lip, closed her eyes, and rubbed her temples. “Another family dragged into our shit.” She opened her eyes and shook her head. “Frank Talbot is such a bastard, too.…” She looked back at me. “So you didn’t use your claws. I’m asking again: how badly is he hurt?”

“He’s beat up,” I said. “Pretty badly. That’s why I don’t think he’ll talk tonight. They’ll have to, like, sedate him.”

She had that my-son-is-a-stranger look on her face again.

“I don’t know what to do with you any more, Nathan. I don’t.”

I’d been pissed off at my mother for nearly a year. Our relationship had suffered, big time. Finding out your only parent has been lying about your origins as the mutant son of your artificially augmented, insane father…pretty much keeping you in the dark your entire life, that’ll do it.

But I tell you what, it never didn’t suck to see that look on her face.

“Just, like, help me, Mom. I don’t like what’s been happening. With me and my stuff. I don’t.”

“Andrew Charters can’t help you,” she said.

I shook my head, hard. “I know it’s a long shot, Mom. If it wasn’t for this…I couldn’t care less about him.” I wished that was true. “And fine, I don’t know if he can do anything for me. But he’s the only one on the entire planet who has any idea what this is like!”

There was some sympathy in her voice now. “You don’t know that. The people at the Institute—"

“Fuck them! Do you seriously trust them?” I knew she didn’t.

“Honestly, Nathan, I don’t know. But they’ve been helping us, all along.” When I opened my mouth, she held up her hand. “Whether it’s more to serve them than us, I don’t know…but they’ve been helping us. Why not find out?”

I realized that this wasn’t going to go anywhere. She was going to continue trying to play parent, only her idea of parenting was now apparently pushing my problems off on the fucking Sovereigns. I was pretty sure their number-one concern was how my particular case could help them, not so much how they could help me.

I already felt like I was their puppet in the whole legal thing with PrenticeCambrian and the government and the Teslowskis. My mother wanted to actually put me someplace where they could literally pull my strings any way they wanted.

Parent of the Year, second year running.

I was on my own.

It was a calming realization, in a way.

“Can I think about it?”

“Sleep on it,” she said. “I can see you’re dead on your feet; one of us will sleep tonight. Tomorrow morning, assuming you’re right about…things…we’ll have a chance to work out a plan.”

She lowered her head and kept her eyes on me. “The plan will not include finding your father, Nathan. I hope you understand why.”

I sighed. “Fine, Mom.” I turned to walk toward the hallway, and my bedroom. “Maybe if I could talk to Byron.”

“Maybe it can be arranged.” She was already sounding more relaxed.

I nodded.

“Nathan,” she said, “I understand you’re worried. God knows, after what you’ve told me tonight, I’m worried too. We have to be so careful, though. You understand what’s at stake, I know you do.”

I didn’t give a fuck what was at stake, beyond figuring out my own shit.

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I do.” I took a step back. “I’m gonna go to bed.”

She nodded and looked away. “All right. Try not to worry. We’ll figure something out.”

I waited a beat, just to test her. She’d stopped wishing me good night a few months after she’d stopped saying she loved me.

That was fine.

Her silence helped me.

From The Journal Of Nate Charters – Fourteen

The police didn’t come to our door in the middle of the night. If they came by Thursday morning, I wasn’t around to find out. I called Jason and woke him up at four a.m.; by four-thirty, I had snuck out of the house and met him at the Gas ‘n’ Sip down the street.

The heat was on in the Bonneville. It felt good.

“Dude.” Jason looked tired. “This is it for a while.”

I felt like I should, I don’t know, clasp him on the shoulder in a manly fashion or give him a hug or something. That wasn’t our style, so much, so I settled for a somber nod. “I know. Thanks.”

He shrugged it off, dropped the car into gear, and popped the parking brake. “So this time I get to go to Kirby Lake.”

“This time isn’t like the last time.”

“Guess so,” he said. “So, you think your mom’s friend is just gonna be cool with you showing up on his door? Won’t he just call her to come get you?”

“Probably.” I looked out the window, feeling glum. The last time I’d made this trip, Lina had been driving. Things had been shitty then, too, but at least she was with me.

“So why bother?”

“I’m counting on Denver being on my side. After all, he’s been watching out for my dad all these years. He even kept the fact of my dad being alive from my mom.”

“What good’s that going to do if your mom just ends up scooping you up?”

I scowled. This wasn’t a great time for Jason to start being all reasonable. “Even if she does, I’m hoping my being up there, like, already, will, like, force the issue. Y’know?”

“Oh.”

Jason got up on the freeway. I turned on the radio. He drove, I changed the station when commercials came on or the morning DJs got to be too lame. Miles passed like that.

We were in the foothills, starting to climb up the 330, when I had to ask, “So…uh…what happened after I…y’know. Left. Last night.”

After I ran away.

Jason grimaced. “Not a whole lot. Lina’s dad scooped her up and got her inside. She gave me a pretty nasty look.”

“She didn’t say anything?”

“Nope.”

“Okay.”

I felt like Jason’s “I told you so” was a cartoon anvil floating in the air above my head and I had just until the Merry Melodies music cue before the thing squashed me, accordion style.

He didn’t say it. He drove, and made a little show of drumming along with the radio with his fingers on the steering wheel.

So I said it.

“You called it, huh?”

“Hm?”

“You told me I shouldn’t see her. You called it.”

He coughed a laugh. “Well, duh, dude.”

“Yeah.”

“You let that guy get to you,” he said.

“I guess.”

He glanced at me quickly. “What, you’re still freaking out? You still think she, what, faked the whole thing?”

That was crazy. “No! I mean, shit, there were witnesses and stuff. Everybody knows what happened.”

“Then, dude, what’s your problem?” He looked fed up. “Why are you fucking this up?”

I looked away from him. “I lost it.”

“Fuckin’ A. I wish I’d never pushed you to go after that guy. If I’d known you were gonna fuckin’ whale on him like that…”

“Dude, I didn’t even know! He pushed me!”

“And you couldn’t just walk away?”

“That’s pretty funny, coming from you.” Jason was well known for acting so batshit crazy, he’d been seen intimidating linebackers.

He shook his head. “Different, dude. When’s the last time you remember me actually getting into a fight?”

Well, fuck me.

“I can’t remember.”

“It was freshman year,” he said. “Norman Raley—remember him?”

His whole family moved away after his mother killed herself right before our sophomore year.

“Yep.”

“That kid was so fucked up, he wouldn’t back down. I didn’t have a choice.” Jason frowned. “Still kicked his ass.” He didn’t look like he relished the memory.

“I didn’t have a choice, either,” I said.

He laughed again. “Oh, c’mon. Norman Raley jumped me and started throwing punches. That rockabilly faggot…all he did was, what, say you were worse than Car or some shit.” He looked at me sideways. “You totally had a choice, dude. Don’t even.”

“That’s why I need to find my dad,” I mumbled.

“You think you’re going crazy. Right.” Jason sighed. “Seriously?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I just…more and more, I just get so…angry. And it’s like I can’t see straight. I can’t think. I just wanna…lash out.”

I looked at my hands. My knuckles were bruised; they hurt, but that wouldn’t last much longer. I healed fast, another benefit from my share of dad’s augmented genes.

“The way I am,” I said, “it’s not good. I could do…worse things than I did to Eric Finn.”

Jason looked thoughtful. “Your dad—he totally smoked one of those dudes with his bare feet, right?”

Ripped out an augmented PrenticeCambrian agent’s guts with his dirty toenails while the guy held him off the ground by his wrists, to be exact.

“Yep.”

I could still call up the way it had smelled.

“So…fuck, dude, what if your dad’s worse now? What if he’s all-the-way nuts?”

Worse, the memory of the smell didn’t seem nearly so bad as it used to. Sometimes, I revisited the memory like it wasn’t even a full-on horror show.

Sometimes, the memory of the smell of that guy’s blood and guts and raw shit falling out of his body made my mouth water a little.