Unchained, the Dark Forgotten (2010) (11 page)

“Dumb.” Standard response.

“What kind of dumb? Other- kid dumb? Teacher dumb?”

“This place is just totally stupid. I did all these classes already at Saint Florentina’s. I’m bored, bored, boredboredbored. I want to go back. I’ve only been gone a few months. I’ll catch up.”

Ashe understood. The school hosted students from all corners of the globe and had an excellent academic program. It taught its charges to stand out, not fit in. Adjustment to a regular school wouldn’t be easy. “If you went back, wouldn’t you miss Grandma and Aunt Holly?”

Eden shrugged, fiddling with her music player. “I guess.”

“But you miss your old friends, too,” Ashe said gently. “I get that.” She signaled and pulled into traffic slowly, cautious in case some young’un dashed out from behind a car. One of the mothers waved. Ashe waved back with a bright smile.
See, this mom thing isn’t so hard
.

“Yeah, I miss them. A lot.”

Poor kid
. New school, new people. New country, even. A mom she’d half forgotten. It made Ashe feel like every conversation was open-heart surgery, and she was wearing boxing gloves. Eden had run away when she first arrived, making it as far as the bus station. Something Ashe hadn’t mentioned to Bannerman, because she prayed it would never happen again. “Have you met anyone here you like?”

“They know I’m not from around here.” Eden said it with the acid bite of someone far older.

Oh, crap. What has been going on that I don’t know about?
“I guess that makes you exotic.”

“Yeah, right.” Eden sat up, ending the rag-doll act. “I’ll wear black lace and dance the flamenco.” She giggled at her own joke, raising her arms like someone holding castanets.
“Viva España.”

Slowly, the tension in Ashe’s gut uncramped, as if that laugh were a powerful drug. “You should be showing off all that high-class international education.”

“Yeah, well, Marcy Blackwell and her friends laugh at me because I know all the answers in class but I don’t know the names of all the stupid baseball players.”

“You’ll learn about North American sports, and you don’t want to play stupid to please somebody else. Trust me on that one. It never pays to pull yourself down so that someone else feels better.”

“I want to go back to Saint Flo’s.” Eden turned her face to look out the window. “At least they don’t call football soccer.”

“Barbarians.” Ashe drove, forcing herself to pay attention to the mechanics of driving. Past the corner store with buckets of flowers on the sidewalk. Past the coffee shop and the place with Jamaican food. The neighborhood where they rented a suite was filled with narrow streets and too many suicidal cyclists to let her mind wander.

“Why can’t I go back?” Eden asked.

“You’re that eager to go?” Ashe said quietly.
Why are demons easier than kids?

“I just make you feel weird. You don’t like being my mother. That’s why you sent me away, right?”

Ashe gripped the wheel hard, a hot, guilty flush making the back of her neck prickle with sweat. “Of course not.”

“Then why?”

“It was for work.”

“Slayer work?”

“Yeah.”

“Huh, well, hard to know. You used to say you were a giftware sales rep.”

Ashe bit her lip before she could swear. “You were too young for a lot of the details, Eden. I didn’t want to scare you. Slaying isn’t a pretty job.”

“And it’s hard to do with a kid tagging along.”

“It’s dangerous, Eden. The vamps didn’t like me coming after them.”

“Well, duh. Big pointy stick and all.”

“I was worried you’d be hurt if they came after me.”

“Well, why won’t I get hurt now?”

Ashe swallowed hard. “I quit doing that job. I’m hoping they’ll leave us alone.”

She turned onto their street. Huge chestnut trees made a nearly perfect canopy over a road designed for a single lane with a horse and carriage. The century-old houses here had been beautiful once, but these days the owners were opting for funky.

“Why can’t I go back to Saint Flo’s?”

Ashe was irritated. Funny how a kid could make you feel so small. “I thought maybe we could be a family for a while. Y’know, give it the old college try.”

She turned the steering wheel to navigate the sharp angle into their driveway. At the same time, she could almost hear the wheels turning in Eden’s head. Ashe parked, braked, and turned off the motor. There was a sudden bubble of silence.

She unbuckled and turned in her seat to look at Eden. “We’re going to get to know each other, okay?”

Eden looked suspicious. She had those scary-smart eyes kids get when they’ve had to grow up too fast. “I’m getting to know you, Mom. Whatever you’re telling yourself, you put me in boarding school when it suited you and took me out when it suited you. What suits me never crossed your mind.”

Ashe felt her jaw drop. The words were both true and not true in a thousand painful ways.
How did this get so messed up?
“There’s too much you don’t understand.”

Eden opened the door and grabbed her backpack, pausing only to lock gazes.

“I hate you.”

“Eden!”

This had to be one of those extra-early teenage moments that had started to crop up. Her daughter slouched out of the car, resentment following her like a black fog. Ashe squeezed her eyes shut, looking for the calm that helped her smack down werewolves, and not finding it.

A
she got out of the car too quickly, forgetting the short skirt and high heels. It took her a moment to find her balance and by that time Eden was up the front steps. Ashe followed at the slower pace demanded by the shoes.

Eden slammed the door. The loud, spiteful
wham
pushed Ashe from guilt toward anger. A hot flush scalded her cheeks.
Slow down, deep breath. Don’t make it worse.

She went up the porch stairs and into the front hall. The first floor was divided into two suites. On the left was the English Mrs. Langford, who pronounced the existence of the supernatural “stuff and nonsense” no matter what the television and newspapers said. The tiny apartment on the right belonged to a real estate guy who was never home. Ashe and Eden had the whole upstairs.

Ashe climbed the stairs to the second floor, wishing she were back with Reynard and chasing the vampire. That was simple. Reynard was easy to work with. She knew what she was supposed to do.

Anger was swinging back to guilt and grief, getting tangled up with an urge to justify herself to someone too young to understand. Hell, Ashe didn’t understand half of why she did what she did when Roberto died. Her first instinct had been to die right along with him, but there was Eden. Kids put a whole new face on the need to survive.

So many emotions crammed her throat that Ashe couldn’t speak. Eden was sitting on the floor of the landing, her back to the suite door and a look thick with distrust in her eyes.

Ashe clenched a tight fist around her temper. It would be too easy to explode and turn a spat into a war. A war that could end up with Eden running away again. Wordlessly, she reached over her daughter and unlocked the door.

Eden stood up, grabbing her backpack, and ran to her bedroom.

Being alone for a moment was a relief. Ashe kicked off her shoes and shed the suit jacket. There was a brief span of quiet, nothing but dust motes spinning in a shaft of light.

The living room was warm because it faced west. There wasn’t a lot of furniture, but the apartment had a comfortable feel, with fir floors, built-in bookshelves, and lots of light. Ashe had done pretty well, finding this place. There was even a big park down the street with other kids to play with.

I try. I really do
.

Which meant she had to put an end to the day’s skirmish. She tapped on Eden’s door. “Hey, you.”

“Go away.”

For a moment, Ashe was reminded of her little sister, Holly. Was there a bratty gene? Had Ashe had it at that age? Ashe turned the handle and invaded. Eden’s room was decorated with a mix of stuffed animals and posters of pouting pop bands barely old enough to shave. A scattering of books. No more than a day’s worth of clothes on the floor. Nothing to alarm the mother unit.

For now. She wondered how long it would be before the boy bands came down and someone less appealing appeared in poster form. It was hard to know what was a miniphase and what would stick.

Eden was facedown on the bed, picking at the strap of her backpack. Ashe perched on the edge of the bed bedside her daughter, smelling the mix of schoolroom and peppermint gum that clung to all Eden’s clothes. The storm of her emotions died as suddenly as it had blown in. She put a hand on the back of Eden’s head, caressing the soft brown curls.
Goddess, I love her.

Ashe drew a long breath. “I sent you away because I couldn’t protect you, and I’m sorry for that. But if I didn’t go on with the work I was doing, a lot of people would have died. I couldn’t let that happen. That’s all I can really tell you, because that’s all I understand myself.”

Eden hunched her shoulders, inching away from her mother’s touch. “Won’t people die now that you’ve stopped being a slayer?”

Ashe removed her hand. “Maybe, but some things are different now. Vampires and the rest of the monsters have been out in the open a few years. They’ve got ways to police themselves that they didn’t have before. The good vampires don’t want bad vampires causing problems any more than we do.”

“Why not?” Eden stopped picking at the backpack, actually listening now.

“They’re trying to fit in. It’s not easy living in secret, especially when there are so many of them. If the vampires behave themselves, they get to have jobs and credit cards and all the advantages humans have. It’s to their own benefit to be good citizens.”

Eden finally turned to look at her. “Is Uncle Sandro a good vampire?”

“Yeah.” Ashe sighed, thinking of the many times she had butted heads with Alessandro Caravelli. “He’s a good guy. I didn’t like him much at first, but he proved himself to me.”

Eden nodded slowly. Ashe could see her thinking, putting pieces together. The girl rolled onto one elbow and propped her head in her hand. “So Uncle Sandro is with Aunt Holly, and she’s a superpowerful witch and she put a no-biting spell on him and stuff and they even had a baby, which vampires aren’t supposed to be able to do, right?”

“Uh, right.”

“And I’m going to be a half witch someday.”

“You’re already a half witch. You’ll get your powers soon. You’re the right age.”

There was a flicker of buoyant excitement, but Eden didn’t say anything. Ashe knew there would be a million questions, but not now. Not until Eden had a chance to mull things over and plan her attack. She had a great future as a prosecutor.

Right now, she was giving Ashe the third degree about something else. “So how come you don’t do magic? I know you can feel ghosts and stuff, but how come you don’t cast spells like Aunt Holly?”

Crap
. Ashe made herself smile, as if she were okay with the topic. “I told you that. When I was sixteen, I did a really stupid spell and blew up my own powers. I nearly nuked Holly’s, too. She had trouble with her magic for a long, long time.”

“What kind of spell?”

Ashe swallowed hard. The weight of the memory dragged like shackles. “It was for personal gain. They say you should never do magic for yourself, and that’s not entirely true, but you can’t mess with other people. The first rule of magic is to do no harm. I did harm, for a bad reason, and it came back on me big-time.”
But not as much as it should have.

“Did you get in trouble?”

“Sure I did. I let everyone down. They thought I was a better person than I turned out to be and, to tell you the truth, that was the worst part. I had to live with what I’d done.”

“Mom, what did you do?”

Ashe felt the question like a noose, but now was not the time to lie. Not when they were finally talking. “I wanted to go out to a concert instead of babysitting Holly, but I knew I’d get in trouble if my parents got home and found me missing. I gave them car trouble so they’d come home late.”

“That’s it? That’s all? You lost your powers because of that?”

How much could you tell a ten-year-old? How much did she have the guts to say?

“The spell backfired.” Ashe looked Eden in the eye, willing herself not to flinch. “I thought that because I was pretty and popular and got good grades I couldn’t make mistakes. Remember that when you start casting your own spells. Magic doesn’t care about the surface stuff. It knows what’s in your heart. The spell knew I was being stupid and it took away my active powers.”

Eden’s face softened a bit. “That sucks.”

“Yeah, it sucked pretty bad. Really awful, and for a lot of reasons. I didn’t even start to get over it until I met your dad.” Ashe touched Eden’s cheek lightly. For once her daughter didn’t pull away. “He didn’t see a broken witch. He saw a whole person. I remembered how to be happy when I was with him.”

We called you Eden because we thought we were in paradise.
Sappy, but true.

Eden squirmed into a sitting position, close enough now that Ashe felt her warmth. They weren’t touching, but the girl’s body wasn’t rigid anymore.

“I miss Dad.”

Ashe swallowed hard, and it felt like something jagged caught in her throat. If she didn’t get out of this conversation, she was going to start crying. With her world already upside down, a weeping mother was the last thing Eden needed.

Besides, real slayers didn’t cry.
Yeah, right.

She slid off the bed. “I miss him, too, babe. Every day. Now I’m going to get out of this monkey suit and cook us dinner, okay?”