“Jesus, Mother. Take a good look around you
and take a good look at me. This is who I am! This is who I’ve
always been. Now, I didn’t choose to be a vampire, but it was
either this or the final death. Archer saved me from something
really horrible and you should be here kissing his fine ass for
saving your only child instead of standing here YELLING AT IT!”
I took a much needed deep breath as my body
continued to shake with anger. I had never spoken to my mother like
that in my life, and felt somewhat bad for my choice of delivery,
but it sure felt good to get those bottled up feelings off my chest
after all these years.
My mother looked completely stunned for a
moment, but then snapped her bottom jaw shut and put her hands on
her narrow hips. “I can’t believe this shit! You turned out just
like your father!”
“What did you say?” I whispered in pure
shock. The room had gone eerily quiet in the wake of her
admission.
“I didn’t leave my career in Boston and move
you halfway across the country just so you could grow up and turn
into the exact thing I was protecting you from! I sacrificed
EVERYTHING for you, Skye. And you repay me like this?” she yelled,
flinging her arm in Archer’s direction. “With one of THEM?! You
truly are your father’s daughter!”
“What are you saying?” I breathed as I
grabbed her arm in desperation. My mother never, ever spoke of my
father. The only time she did was when I was younger and it was
only to tell me that I didn’t have one. “Are you trying to tell me
my father was a vampire?”
“That’s impossible,” Archer whispered and I
looked back at him questioningly. “Vampires cannot procreate.”
“They can if they turn after conception,” my
mother huffed, drawing my attention back to her. Our eyes met and I
saw that under her anger, there was intense sadness.
I let go of her arm and put some space
between us as I tried to come to terms with what I just heard.
“Everyone out,” Archer said quietly and I
watched as Lochlan, Quinn, Aziza, Nola, Thorin, Hagan and Hunter
immediately began to walk across the main floor and disappeared
down the hall toward the stockrooms, giving us the privacy we
needed to have this conversation.
“Would you like a drink, Grace?” Archer
questioned kindly as he walked to the bar.
She sighed dejectedly and ran her fingers
through her honey wheat hair. “Bourbon, neat, and bring the bottle,
vampire.”
I watched her turn and take a seat in one of
the nearby booths. I followed on slow feet, still in shock from her
admission.
“Mama-” I tried when I sat down but she
immediately cut me off.
“What the hell are you?” she asked sharply,
her eyes boring into my black ones. I pretended not to see the
disgust on her face.
“I don’t know how to answer that,” I
whispered, looking down at the table and my folded hands.
“Try,” she commanded. “I can tell by the
black in your eyes that you are not like Archer Rhys and his other
children; you carry some Dark in you…but you are like no Dark One
I’ve ever seen.”
I absentmindedly touched the corner of my eye
and looked up at her. I hadn’t realized that they were still black
until she pointed it out. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes,
calming myself. I felt them flicker back and opened my colorless
eyes again, meeting hers.
“I don’t understand,” she whispered to
herself, intense confusion marring her beautiful, familiar
face.
“I’ll tell you what happened, but I need you
to promise that you won’t interrupt me,” I said timidly. “I only
have the nerve to tell you this once. And when I’m done, it’s your
turn. You will tell me everything you know about my father and you
won’t omit a thing. I have the right to know, especially now that I
know he is a vampire.”
Archer arrived then and set the bottle of
Maker’s Mark and three glasses on the table. Mama poured hers with
shaky hands and immediately downed a generous shot. I stared at
her, concerned. My mother wasn’t much of a drinker but she seemed
to have no problem with the bite and burn that followed her
shot.
“You have my word,” my mother sighed,
resigned.
I told her everything that I had been through
since the day I met Archer at Afterburners and finished with my
planned trip to Boston the next day for my Sacred Vow Ceremony. She
was silent for a long time as she stared at me, apparently deep in
thought.
“Why didn’t you tell me Jesse was stalking
you?” she asked then shook her head, her eyes slowly finding
Archer’s. “Never mind that. Is my daughter truly safe now, Mr.
Rhys? Can this creature escape and find her again?”
“Extreme measures are in place and Amun is
secure,” he explained. “There is no way he can ever escape again.
Your daughter is my very breath, Grace, and I will protect her as
such. You have my word.”
“The word of a vampire…” she scoffed looking
down at her hands as they tightly grasped her glass.
“I don’t know what kind of vampires you’ve
met in the past, but Archer is a man of his word, mama. He’s
protected me, taken care of me, and given me a second chance at a
decent life. You don’t have to like him, or even respect him, but
you will be polite to him while in my presence,” I said stiffly. It
was one thing to be rude to me; it was another thing entirely to be
rude to the love of my immortal life. I could only put up with so
much.
She appraised me with cautious eyes and
sighed. “You’ve changed.”
“Maybe,” I shrugged my shoulders. “Or maybe
this is just the person you’ve refused for so long to
acknowledge.”
We were silent for a long time, each sipping
our drinks, deep in thought. Finally, Archer broke the silence.
“Would you care to enlighten us about Skye’s
father?”
My mother looked up from her glass and
narrowed her eyes at Archer. “I don’t like you, Mr. Rhys,” she said
lowly, venomously.
“I am well aware of your feelings toward me,
Dr. Morrison,” he sighed and put his arm around me possessively,
pulling me tighter to his side. I suppose he was done playing nice
because he fixed her with a venomous gaze of his own. “And I assure
you the feeling is mutual-”
“Enough,” I whispered tiredly as I put my
hand on his thigh under the table and gave it a light, pleading
squeeze. “The same thing goes for you, too. You will be polite to
my mother while in my presence. You don’t have to like each other,
but you will not speak to one another that way around me. I won’t
stand for rudeness. Please.”
Archer growled lowly, obviously unhappy, but
nodded his head in acceptance before my mother begrudgingly did the
same.
She took a deep breath and began her
story.
“Your father and I met our senior year at
MIT; he was my lab partner. We quickly began a sexual relationship
and you were conceived during our second year in post-graduate
school.” She took a deep breath and started fumbling with her
hands. “Your father and I were assigned to a top secret project for
the C.I.A. We were tasked with mapping and studying the brain and
central nervous system of a vampire…a Dark One, as Archer’s race
refers to them. Your father worked hands on with the subject the
most and eventually developed a kind of friendship with him. When I
told your father I was pregnant with you, he informed me of his
decision to become one of the undead. I begged him to change his
mind but he said the decision had been made and that he was turning
in two days’ time. He said he wanted immortality, to live forever,
and that he had no intentions of being a father to you or anyone
else. He threw a check at me and told me to get an abortion if I
didn’t want to raise you by myself.”
“That selfish bastard,” I growled.
My mother’s eyes briefly teared up before she
shook her head and regained control of her emotions again. “The
next day, your father didn’t show up to the lab and neither did the
vampire we were working with. I went to his apartment and
discovered that he had left during the night. Everything was gone
except the few items I had kept over there.
“I gave birth to you, finished my doctorate,
bought a house, and had started working with a local company in
Boston developing a new Alzheimer drug. Life was hard, but we made
it work. One Saturday evening, just after nightfall, there was a
knock at our door. I thought it was our neighbor Susan. You were
almost four and loved to greet our guests, so I let you while I
finished setting the dinner table. I heard you talking to someone
and when I saw who it was, I panicked. You were standing outside on
the porch with your father and he had a lock of your long, red hair
in his hand, studying it; you both had the same hair color as
children. I ran to the door and quickly pulled you inside. I asked
your father why he was there and he said he just wanted to see if
you looked like him. The way he was staring at you, studying you,
sent a cold chill down my spine. It was intense, calculating, and I
was afraid he was there to eat you or take you away from me, I
didn’t know which. He asked me your name and I told him that he
would never know, that we wanted nothing to do with him, and told
him to leave. He said he would find out your name eventually but
not to worry because he had gotten what he came for.”
I sat riveted as I listened to her story. My
father sounded like a real bastard and I immediately felt sorry for
my mother and all that she had to endure as a single parent. I
reached out across the table with my hand and waited for her to
take it. She gazed at it for a few silent moments before her hand
timidly closed around mine.
“I never understood why he decided to visit
us that night, but I wasn’t taking any chances with your safety.
You were never going to see him again and I took extreme measures
to make that possible. I packed us a few suit cases, threw them
into the car, and we left for Houston that night.”
A memory flashed through my mind and I
deliberated for a moment before telling her what I saw. “I
remember. You were crying and telling me to help you pack my little
red suit case. I remember the way you held me as we waited for our
plane. It was so tight and I was afraid because I had never seen
you cry before.”
My mother sighed and patted my hand before
letting it go to pour up another shot. “Your father scared the hell
out of me. The man that came to my door looked like your father,
but the person I once fell in love with was gone. I was devastated
all over again and terrified of his interest in you. We fled so
that he would never get his hands on my precious little girl.”
“I don’t remember him,” I whispered as I
watched her down her drink. “I just remember you crying.”
“Well thank God for that,” she said,
relieved.
Archer was silent during our exchange and I
glanced up at him to see what he thought of the story. He was
studying my mother, a slight crease between his eyebrows, but other
than that he was giving nothing away. I put my hand on his knee and
tried to read his emotions but all I was picking up was anger and
resolution. They confused me and I squeezed his knee questioningly,
trying to get his attention, but his eyes were only for my
mother.
“What was his name?” Archer asked
finally.
“It doesn’t matter,” my mother said, angrily
slamming her lowball glass on the table top. “Nothing about that
man matters.”
I was scared to push her but I really wanted
to know, especially if my father was still alive…not that I ever
planned on meeting him, but still. It would be nice to know the
name of the man who helped create me. “Mama, I want to know his
name.”
“No, Skye,” she crossed her arms over her
chest and gave me a look from my childhood that still scared me to
this day. It was ‘The Eye’. Every mother on the planet had their
own version of it.
“Steven Edward Mitchell,” Archer whispered to
me and my mother’s eyes flashed with rage.
“How DARE you speak his name!” my mother
screamed as she stood and threw her empty glass at Archer’s head. I
had previously thought I’d seen her at her angriest, but nothing
compared to seeing her like this. She looked murderous. My arm
quickly flashed out to grab the glass as soon as it left her hand.
Her eyes grew wide and her bottom lip began to tremble as she
fought off tears. “You are not my daughter anymore,” she whispered,
looking disgusted, terrified, and her heart aching with fresh
loss.
“Yes, I am,” I gasped, utterly shocked.
“No, you’re not,” she whispered as her tears
spilled down onto her cheeks. “My daughter died the second you
ingested their blood.” She grabbed her purse off the seat beside
her and quickly walked across the floor to the entrance.
“Mom! Please. Don’t leave me!” I cried out as
I flashed to stand. “Mama!”
Archer grabbed my wrist, stopping me from
following her, as he wrapped his other hand around my waist. “She
just needs some time,” he whispered into my hair as we watched her
exit the club on a sob.
I was devastated by her reaction to me and
held on to Archer as he gripped me tightly to him. “She doesn’t
need more time, Archer. I’ve become the very thing she was
protecting me from. I’m a monster in her eyes… worse than that. I
am my father, the person she despises most in this world.”
Archer growled fiercely and gripped my upper
arms tightly as he got in my face. “You are your own person, Skye
Morrison! You are not Amun and you are not your father. You are no
one but yourself. Do not let her prejudices effect you.”
I pushed him away from me and turned my back
on him as I tried to come to terms with what had just happened with
my mother. After hearing her story, it was no wonder why she never
let herself get close to another man. Reading between the lines, it
was apparent that she loved my father very much at one point. She
opened herself up to someone, only to have her heart crushed as he
left her pregnant and utterly alone.