“No.”
“A little space, please?”
“You’re not going to the toilet now. You’re answering the door.”
“Not usually a dangerous thing.”
“It can be. Do you recognize the older blue Corvette?”
I glanced out the picture window. “No, but this isn’t the haven.”
“You are the Erus Veneficus of the Regional Vampire Lord now. Like it or not, your world is changing.”
I was already irritated with her, and those words didn’t help. “Back off.”
Maxine retreated two steps. At my arched brow, she relinquished one more step and arched her own at me.
This was going to be annoying.
“I answer my own door, okay? I’ll call you if I need help.”
Maxine took a pose of readiness behind the opening from the dining room to the living room, just out of sight from whoever was on the porch. Stepping into the hall, I opened the door.
And was totally unprepared for who I saw.
In black jeans and a light-blue long-sleeved T-shirt, she stood an inch shorter than me, even in her snakeskin cowboy boots. As she stared at me, her lips moved soundlessly, saying my name. Her hair was the same dark brown as my own, but hers was lightly streaked with gray and fastened into a loose braid. She was me, with twenty-four extra years and twelve extra pounds.
Eris. My mother.
She reached for the screen door and clumsily jerked it open, hands shaking. The smell of menthol cigarettes hit me hard. “I saw you on TV. I traced you through an online people finder.” She swallowed hard; her voice was shaking as well. “I thought you might be living at the haven now, but I had to try here before I went traipsing into a place like that.” She forced a smile. “And—what luck!—here you are, my girl.” Her dark eyes welled up with tears, imploring me to say something.
After sixteen years, she’s standing on my doorstep.
I was too stunned to speak.
I opened the floodgates—the reservoir of anger I’d saved for this moment. I let that anger flow free … only to find the reservoir had dried up. All the words I’d meant to say were gone.
My heart recognized this was a critical moment, a remarkable chance, but my brain sent a signal down my arm and, without breaking my stare, I slammed the door shut in her face.
“I was such a fool,” she pleaded from the other side.
I flipped the lock. This is how things are supposed to be. The barrier of a door between us, me locked in.
The knocks become angry pounding.
I’d felt those fists on my body, once. I turned and walked away.
How dare she show up here.
Why now?
The news coverage. Was she worried about me now? That would be ironic. It was more likely she thought I’d acquired some status that might benefit her somehow.
She didn’t say she was sorry.
I don’t know how long I stood there in the kitchen or how many times Maxine prompted me by calling my name. When the car’s motor revved, it snapped me out of my astonishment. I found I could breathe again when the sound of the tires throwing gravel was followed by an engine’s roar as it rocketed up the road.
“Get out,” I said. The women sent here to protect me couldn’t shield me from this pain.
No one moved.
I grabbed the Lady of Shalott coffee mug from the counter and pitched it at the wall. It shattered. “Get out!”
My favorite mug was in pieces all over the floor. With my vision blurry from tears, the cleanup process was more troublesome than productive, and it wasn’t until my fingertips were bloody from multiple little nicks that my emotional fog dissipated enough for me to remember a broom and dustpan were ideal for this kind of chore.
I wiped my face on my sleeve and turned toward the pantry to see Zhan silently shutting it. She held the broom and dustpan. “Allow me, my lady,” she said. Her voice was so soft.
“I can get it,” I snapped, grabbing the broom from her. I wasn’t mad at her, I was just mad and I’d told her to get out and she hadn’t. But it wasn’t like me to be so rude. Even as I rejected the basic human kindness she was offering and got back to the mess I’d created, the tears welled up again. It wasn’t like me to be angry with an innocent bystander over something I did myself.
But it was like my mother.
Suddenly I felt so ashamed. “I’m sorry.”
Zhan took the broom back with a gentle smile and I fled to my bedroom. With the door locked, my shaking fingers sprinkled an imperfect circle of salt around me on the floor. I sat.
“Mother, seal my circle and give me a sacred space,
In which to think clearly and solve the troubles I face.”
My meditation switch flipped “on” and I hit the alpha state. In my visualization, the lakeshore stretched before me, and the familiar willow tree was at my back. The sun was blazing, the breeze anxious. “Amenemhab!”
The jackal, my totem animal, did not answer.
I stomped around the shore looking for him, but normally he appeared after I’d dipped my toes in the water and let my chakras cleanse. Realizing I was wasting my time searching, I jerked my shoes and socks off and sat where the lapping water would ebb and cover my feet. It took an effort to relax my chakras into opening and releasing my negativity—no surprise—but several minutes later, I had achieved it.
Letting go of all the negative energy made me calmer and more in control of myself … but my pain wasn’t resolved when the rumble of the garage door opening invaded my meditation and I knew Nana was home. I left the tranquil vision before I could get my totem’s counsel and awoke in my room.
I was grateful for something to do, even if it was hauling in the groceries. I met Nana in the driveway, Maxine on my heels. Nana climbed from the car humming to herself. As she loaded my arms and Maxine’s with bags, she was grinning.
In the kitchen, I saw Zhan had cleaned up the mess. I was unpacking box after box of Twinkies when Nana entered. “Leave them in the bags,” she said. “It’ll make carrying them out to the men easier.”
Out to the men?
I couldn’t imagine the big, burly Beholders eating Twinkies, but Nana could. She wasn’t naïve about what these men were, but she’d seen the building permit for her new bedroom: Nana was grateful they were going to build it. She was walking on clouds right now. I didn’t want to ruin her mood by telling her that my mother—her estranged daughter—had finally shown her face.
Eventually, though, I would have to tell her.
Nana had gone upstairs to quilt and I’d herded Ares into the room with her. Neither of them seemed to care for the women in suits. For the next several hours I worked on my column. Maxine interrupted me when the gravel trucks showed up, when the electric company arrived to put in poles, and again when men came to measure the back of the house. Since a noisy backhoe was about to commence digging up the area destined to be Nana’s room addition, I decided my work for the day was done, saved the document, and went to watch out the window.
The prefab walls of the first barn were going up, and gravel was being dumped into the footer spaces around the second. I noticed some of the odd concrete chunks had been deposited near the house. “Any idea what those are?” I asked Maxine.
“Mountain said they were precast panels for the footers. You can build on them right away, don’t have to wait for the concrete to cure. He said it was a miracle the right sizes were in stock, but we lucked out.” She handed me a paper with a rough drawing of the layout for the addition. “Mountain brought that earlier, while you were upstairs.”
“Wow. This is bigger and much sooner than we’d anticipated,” I said.
“Might as well get it done while the equipment is already here,” she replied.