Renegade (44 page)

My mother and I had a complicated relationship the final year of her life and the hurtful things she said to me before she died still rang in my ears. I probably wouldn’t ever forget the way she hurt me. But that had only been a small piece of our time together. For almost my entire life she did nothing but love me and my father.

I don’t know what happened to her before I was born, before my dad came into her life. I don’t know the path she walked on or the choices she was forced to make, but I
did
know whatever those choices were, they probably weren’t easy.

I knew better than anyone that sometimes the choices we make aren’t always the best ones, but in certain moments there are limited choices that a person can make. Sometimes those we have to choose from aren’t what we want, so we pick the one we can live with most and then we pray it turns out okay.

I guess in the end things didn’t turn out okay for her. But if she hadn’t made the choice she did, she might not have had all those wonderful years with me and Dad.

That was something. Wasn’t it?

I thought so.

I also thought she deserved for me to remember some of the good times we had together and not just the bad. And that’s what brought me here, to the house we used to live in.

With a heavy sigh I taped closed another box and stacked it in the corner, then sank onto the bed. I took a moment to look around the bare walls and empty closet.

The mattress dipped when Sam sat beside me, hooking his arm around my waist and pulling me into his side. “We’re not going to get it all done today.”

I sighed. “I want to empty out the desk. Then we can go.”

“We already have a heavy day planned, Hev. Don’t push yourself.”

“I know, but after the desk, this room will be finished.” I got up and went to the small desk against the wall. Cleaning out my mom’s house wasn’t something I ever thought about doing. Sure, I knew the day would come, but I always thought I’d be much, much older. We still had most of the house to box up, but I wanted to get her bedroom done, her most personal space out of the way. This was the most difficult room for me and I figured the sooner I got it done the better.

I began putting all her office supplies in a box and then all the papers and books she worked on for the church in a separate one so I could take it to the church office sometime next week. Sam was there beside me, cleaning out the three side drawers, labeling and sorting.

“I think we should call it a day,” Sam said, not too much later. “We can come back for the boxes tomorrow. There probably won’t be any school then, either.”

“I never even got the chance to ask Gemma about some kind of cure for the students,” I murmured. They were all still sick and being treating for an illness no one could diagnose. As far as I could tell from the news, not that many more new cases had occurred so at least it didn’t seem to be spreading, but no one was getting better, either.

 “Hev.” Sam grabbed my wrist. I stared at the contrast between his skin and mine. He was golden and warm looking, while I was much more pale and cool looking. “Let’s go.”

 I nodded, but then I noticed something I hadn’t before. “What is that?” I asked, focusing on a small box sitting on the desk.

He looked down at it. “I don’t know. It was in the very back of the bottom drawer. I figured you would know.”

“I’ve never seen that box before.” It was just a plain box, really, the size of a small shoebox and entirely black. It had a small silver lock hanging off the latch. “Is there a key?”

“Didn’t see one,” he replied. Instead of searching for the key, he reached out and gave the lock a great tug and it broke in his grip.

Why would my mother keep a box with a lock on it? What could possibly be inside that was worth locking away? I’d already gone through all her jewelry and Gran had already gotten all her important papers.

I pulled back the lid and looked inside. Surprise flickered through me. “It’s just pictures.”

“Pictures?” Sam asked, looking down.

I reached into the box and grabbed the handful of pictures and sat in the wooden desk chair.

“Whoa,” I said as I thumbed through them.

Sam leaned over my shoulder to see. “Is that your mom?”

“Yeah,” I said incredulously. “She’s so young here… and different.”

She couldn’t have been more than my age in these photographs and she was very beautiful with her long, glossy hair and petite frame. But my mother had always been beautiful so that wasn’t the surprising thing. What was surprising was how she was dressed and what she was doing in the pictures.

She was dressed all in black—black jeans, black boots, T-shirt, and even a black leather jacket. She had on a lot of eye makeup, which included heavy black eyeliner. But that wasn’t the most shocking thing. Nope. The most shocking was that she was sitting on the back of a Harley Davidson motorcycle. The guy sitting on the front wasn’t my dad.

“You’re mom was a biker chick?” Sam asked dubiously.

“No.” I protested even as I stared at the truth in my hands. “I mean, this must have been before I was born.”

The other pictures were a lot like this one, all of them featuring my mother dressed in black with some dark-headed guy that wasn’t my dad. There were other kids too, all of them dressed similarly. In some of the pictures they were smoking and drinking beer. A few were taken at night around a bonfire.

“This is so not the mother I knew.”

“Well, Gran said the first night they met her she was different than how you knew her,” Sam said.

As if to prove his point, I looked at the final picture in the stack. It couldn’t have been taken much later the other shots because my mother looked the same age except she’d traded in her scary biker look for a fresh face with no makeup and plain jeans and a T-shirt. My dad was in the picture, standing next to her with his arm around her waist and smiling his charming smile.

“Weird,” I said and put the pictures back inside the box. Why would she keep these? Clearly she didn’t want everyone to see them or they wouldn’t be hidden in a drawer in a locked box. If she was that embarrassed about her teenage years, why not just throw them away?

I couldn’t imagine my mother as a biker, partier kind of girl. She’d always been the kind of woman who kept to herself and was involved in the church. Now, granted, she didn’t become obsessed with the church until after my dad died, but I always figured it was her way of dealing with her grief.

I puzzled for long moments over the box and the photos, about the parts of my mother that were a mystery. But the only conclusion I could come to was I would never truly know those parts of her life because she was dead. The only family I had left now was Gran.

With a sigh I picked up the lid to close up the box of unanswered questions.

I wondered what Sam kept as a reminder of his old life, the life before he turned into a hellhound and was cast out of his home.

Nothing,
he replied, answering my unspoken question.
My true life didn’t start until I met you.

I leaned up and pressed a soft kiss to his lips and then picked up the box with the remnants of my mother’s past and placed it in one of the cardboard boxes we’d already packed. “I think that’s it. You ready to go?”

“I’m starving,” Sam said, glancing at his watch. “Let’s go get a pizza. Then it will be time to meet Riley at the portal.”

We both hefted a couple boxes (okay, Sam grabbed like four and I took one) and headed downstairs. When Sam was out on the front walkway, I remembered I left my purse in the kitchen and rushed back inside to grab it.

The house was almost dark, as the sun had gone down quite a while ago and the only light in the kitchen was filtering in from the back porch light that was left on. Having lived here I was comfortable moving around without the lights, and I remembered exactly where I left my purse. It was still lying beside the kitchen sink. I dropped the box on the island and grabbed up the bag, slinging it over my shoulder, and turned back for the box.

A noise, kind of a groaning sound, came from behind and I turned, peering over the box. It was coming from the sink, more specifically, the faucet. I watched as the silver spigot began vibrating and humming, the groaning becoming louder. Before I could do anything, something like electric blue smoke began pouring out.

I thought water only came out of faucets.

I took a step back only to bump into the island.

The blue smoke/mist went over the side of the sink and poured down onto the floor where it began to take shape.

The shape of a demon.

I threw the box at it and watched in mild surprise as the box went right through it. This was a first. Most demons I fought were solid. How was I going to kick its butt if my fist went right through it?

Sam! There’s a demon.

Not even two seconds later Sam burst through the front room and came racing into the kitchen where the demon and I were staring each other down. It hadn’t made one move toward me, even after I threw the box at it. It just stood there grinning. The hair on the back of my neck stood.

Move back, Heven. Put some distance between you and it.

It was an ugly demon, its entire body that electric blue color and its feet hooved. It had white hair and a white goatee, once again reminding me of a goat. It also had very large, curled horns protruding from its forehead and large pointy teeth.

I took a step to the side, trying to get around the island, but my movement seemed to break whatever was holding the demon back. It made this strange sound and opened its mouth wide. I mean, like, half its face stretched and became a carnivorous gaping hole.

I braced myself for a sucking wind and a pull, but that didn’t happen. Instead, a blue mist, exactly like what came out of the sink, rushed out and wrapped around my body.

It didn’t hurt, but it tingled. It made me feel itchy, like a million little bugs were racing over my skin.

And then everything seemed to happen in fast-forward.

Sam rushed the demon, leaping over the island. But instead of landing on it, he was held in midair, wrapped in the same blue fog that held me. I tried to reach out to him, but I couldn’t. I felt weak and small… so small.

The demon began turning back into the mist and rushing back up into the faucet, pulling me along with him. There was no way I’d fit inside a spigot.

But I did.

And I was getting farther away from Sam, farther away from the kitchen.

“Sam!” I screamed.

He roared my name and fought against the blue mist that somehow turned to concrete around him, trapping him.