Dirty Little Misery (Miss Misery) (15 page)

“You can’t blame yourself.” Andre sighed. “For all we know, that compulsion was put on her before the drug took effect. You remember what I told you about how F dealers operate. The compulsion spell might even have been in the drug itself. There’s a hundred ways it could have happened.”

“But what if I could have stopped it?”

“If you could have stopped it, then the only person we can be certain didn’t put it on her was Devon. But since we can’t be sure you could have stopped it, then we know nothing. You can’t beat yourself up over could haves, Jess. That’s one of the hardest things to learn about this job.”

I dug my nails into my palms. My life was like the world’s most pathetic collection of could haves, but I tried to put on a resigned face for Andre.

He gave my arm a friendly shake, although he felt as defeated as I did. “Come on, let’s go interview this sleazy Jake and the rest of the Scooby gang.”

Not surprisingly, Jake couldn’t tell us any more than Natalie could. Neither could their friends. The one thing we did learn wasn’t good news—Jake had bought enough F just for the four of them. We’d been hoping for a larger sample that Anna could analyze, but there was nothing left over to send to the lab.

Which meant, in one week we’d had two attacks, and we were no closer to uncovering the culprit. On that happy note, I left Boston and the case behind for a weekend guaranteed to be almost as painful.

It was time—the first time since my name had been linked to Victor Aubrey—to come face-to-face with my mother.

Chapter Fifteen

Don’t get me wrong. I loved my mother. I even liked my mother. In fact, I was convinced I’d won the parental lottery. She’d always been fair and generous, and she’d passed down to me not only her dark hair and green eyes, but also her love for mysteries and thrillers.

But there were some areas of my life that had to be shut off from the woman who’d once changed my diapers and literally knew my dirtiest secrets.

My father had been a Gryphon who’d died in the line of duty. The day the Gryphons had told me my gift wasn’t going to develop and I’d had to fight back my tears in public, my mother had probably let out the world’s biggest sigh of relief. She’d had the sense not to do it in front of me, but I’d heard it anyway.

Thus, starting at age eighteen, I’d been denied the ability to talk to her about large pieces of my life. From the truth about my gift, to befriending a satyr, to discovering I wasn’t entirely human, my mother had to remain in the dark.

As such, every visit became the same. My mother didn’t understand how someone as smart as I was could be satisfied with a waitressing job, or why someone as nice and pretty as me didn’t date more. And there was no way to explain because she couldn’t know about my vigilante side work or how awkward it was to have a relationship with someone whose suffering made you feel good.

It was bad enough she knew I’d been instrumental in helping the Gryphons catch Victor Aubrey. While the worst of the details were a carefully guarded secret, or would be until they’d undoubtedly be spilled during Victor’s trial, she nonetheless knew she could have lost her only child. That was enough.

As I eased my bike down the long, winding driveway, I once again had to shake my head at whatever had possessed my mother to move so far away from the city after my father died. I supposed people needed a change after a dramatic event like that, but I’d hoped it would be a temporary one.

No such luck. When she’d married Nick several years later, she and my new stepfather had picked out an even more secluded house than the first. Victor could have buried bodies in the woods around my parents’ house and no one would have known because you could barely see the neighbors. Plus, there was an overabundance of mosquitoes and ticks hanging around all those trees. At least with preds, the creatures that wanted to feed off me could verbalize their intent.

The driveway was crowded with the cars of everyone who’d come over for my stepbrothers’ birthday party. I squeezed my bike between Nick’s truck and a towering birch, and checked the front door. Country security remained the same. The door swung open, and I tucked the key I had for emergencies back in my pocket, unused.

Everyone was already in the backyard, the party well underway. Adding my gift to the pile in the dining room, I adjusted my best everything-is-awesome smile. Then I stepped onto the back patio and flashed the grin in my mom’s direction.

She set her drink down and pulled me into a rib-crushing hug. “Jess, my baby, you look…” She cupped my chin and tilted my head side to side as she examined my face.

“Healed?” I suggested as I winced. “Go gentle on the squishing, okay? I’m still a bit sore around the midsection sometimes.”

“Healed, mostly. Hmm.” Never mind that my mother was a physician’s assistant for a neurologist, not an ER doc. She was going to be hypercritical of my wound treatment since she hadn’t been there to supervise.

I opened my arms wide. “Babe, I’m fine.”

“Did you call your mother ‘babe’?” Nick asked from where he tended the grill.

“She started it.” I grabbed a beer from the cooler, thinking coffee might have been a better choice. I was beat.

Last night, I’d managed to avoid Lucen’s questions by feigning exhaustion, and as such had gotten into bed with less hassle than I’d expected. Unfortunately, being in bed didn’t mean I’d slept. All night, I kept reliving what I’d witnessed at Purgatory, guilt for being unable to do anything about it eating away at me.

Beer was a poor substitute for coffee, but it worked far more efficiently to keep me pleasant as I answered—or dodged as necessary—everyone’s questions. My stepbrothers had no interest in anything but the food, the cake and eventually the new video game console my parents had gotten them for their birthday. But my mother and Nick had invited over a few of their friends, and along with my extended stepfamily, I had plenty of adults pestering me for information on what happened with Victor.

Thank dragons there wasn’t only beer but strong sangria to go with the cake.

Nick shook his graying head sadly as I passed him a plastic fork to replace the one he’d dropped. “Ever consider leaving the city? After everything you went through, do you really want to stay?”

We were sitting around a loose collection of tiny patio tables, and a couple of step-aunts chimed in with their agreement.

I swallowed my bite of cake, conscious of being the center of attention while my teeth were coated in blue icing. “I like the city. You have all this green stuff here. It makes me sneeze.”

“The city has preds,” one of the aunts said.

“Preds don’t make me sneeze.”

They stared at me. Okay, jokes about preds did not go over well with this crowd. Noted.

While I talked, I mixed different colors of icing around on my plate to see what hideous combination they’d make. “Actually, I have a new job, indirectly thanks to preds and Victor Aubrey, so I need to stay where I am.”

My mother glanced up sharply, and the plate she’d balanced on her lap almost toppled over. “You never told me you got a new job.”

Yeah, there’d been a reason. Damn beer and sangria loosening my tongue.

“What kind of job has to do indirectly with preds?” Nick asked.

I could taste my mother’s minty anxiety, and it went awful with chocolate cake and fruity sangria. For ten years, she’d thought she’d gotten a reprieve, but she’d always feared the worst for my safety. And with good reason. I was about to confirm her nightmares. “I, uh, am consulting for the Gryphons.”

That spurred a round of congratulations mixed with another round of twenty questions, although these questions I could answer more truthfully. Eventually, though, even with the booze, I had too much of the third degree and excused myself to go make coffee.

My mother and Nick stored the coffee in the fridge, a terrible habit I’d tried to cure them of to no avail. After some digging through bowls of leftover potato salad and the wrapped plate of extra burgers, I found the bag. I opted for a full pot, figuring if no one else wanted it, I could probably down the whole thing over the rest of the afternoon and evening.

When I put the bag back, I discovered a photo of myself attached to the freezer with a magnet. Curious where it had come from, I pulled it off and moved closer to the window for better light. I must have been about twelve or thirteen in it, and I was standing on a rock on some mountain. Behind me, the ground fell away into a valley.

I recognized the gray bandana I wore because I still had it, but otherwise the photo jarred precious few memories. Yes, I’d gone camping several times in the White Mountains with my mother, and if I thought hard about it, I could remember the scent of the white pines in the forest, and the aches in my feet from climbing, and the beautiful vistas that could have been found on any number of mountaintops.

But specifics? I had nothing, and that seemed odd. For that matter, I didn’t even remember wearing glasses when I was younger, and yet I was clearly wearing glasses in this photo. How could I forget a detail like that?

Goose pimples rose on my arms as I thought of the way Natalie’s memories had flown last night. But this was different. I had a feeling my memory had vanished longer ago than that. I simply had never noticed before.

The coffee maker gurgled as it neared the end of the brew, and I stuck the photo back on the fridge.

My mother entered the kitchen, carrying a pile of dirty plates. “Too many questions out there?”

“No. I mean, yeah, but it’s not that exactly.” I poured a mug and stuck the carafe back on the burner. “I get that people are curious and concerned about me, but it’s all so removed up here. Everybody has the luxury of distance. After a while, it starts to feel sensationalistic explaining it, and numbing too. I don’t want to be numb to it. That’s a luxury I shouldn’t have.”

There was more to it that I couldn’t tell her, such as how the normality around here was getting under my skin like imp stings. My mother, my extended stepfamily, their friends—they were all normal people who went to normal jobs. Had normal lives. Me and my life, just the few pieces they knew, had to be very weird to them.

In Boston, I was insulated from that. My most normal friend, Steph, didn’t even have a normal life, in part thanks to me, and in part because of the crap she had to deal with on a daily basis because she was transgender.

What it all meant was that weird had become my normal. No matter how crazy I thought my life was, I had no idea just how crazy it truly was until I came to quiet, peaceful, normal New Hampshire.

It bugged me, and I wasn’t sure why.

My mother brushed hair out of my face. “My poor baby, you’ve been through a lot lately, and you’re putting yourself in a position to go through more.”

“Because I’m working with the Gryphons?”

She nodded, filling a mug of her own. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m happy for you, really. I know it’s what you always wanted to do. But you have to understand why I worry.”

“I do understand, and honestly, this wasn’t exactly what I wanted anymore. It was just something I had to do.” Because I was being blackmailed. Piece number seventy-eight of Jess’s life that my mother couldn’t know about.

“It’s a calling.” She poured a splash of milk into her coffee. “I get it. That’s what your father said.”

So it was. One I’d been cured of due to recent events, but she could go on believing it.

“Just be careful,” my mother continued. “But on a happier note, now that you have a good thing going career-wise, perhaps you could expend some energy in other areas.”

I narrowed my eyes at her. “Other areas?”

She made an innocent face. “Seeing anyone?”

Yes, and he was tall, blond and horny—in every sense. I buried my face in my mug. “I’ve been kind of busy lately.”

“That excuse is getting old.”

“And so are my ovaries?”

“That’s not what I was suggesting. I want you to be happy.”

Plenty of people were happy single, but I didn’t go there because that wasn’t the issue. What my mother wanted—more so than the possibility of grandchildren, which I suspected my freakish biology rendered impossible—was for me to be normal.

Relationships were normal. I didn’t think she cared about a house in the suburbs, a dog, and a 401(k) plan. Merely showing up at a family gathering one day with a date would probably make her ecstatic.

A human date. Like Andre. What would that be like—having a normal boyfriend? Maybe I’d feel less like a freak at these shindigs. Much as all this normality weirded me out, there was something appealing about it too. “There’s a certain Gryphon who might be on my radar. Let’s leave it there.”

“Oh, yeah?” She smiled.

It made me happy to see her happy. Take that, my misery-loving satyr half.

I pointed to the photo. “Where did that come from?”

My mother plucked it off the fridge for closer inspection. “This? I found it a few weeks ago. I was going through some stuff in the basement. This was from one of our camping trips.”

“I figured. This is going to sound like a strange question, but when did I stop wearing glasses?”

She gave me a funny look of surprise. “You don’t remember?”

“Not entirely, no.” I hazarded a guess to make my question appear less odd. “It was when I was a teenager.”

“Yes, you were about sixteen, I think.” She sipped her coffee, pondering. “I can’t recall your precise age, but I’m surprised you don’t remember. Your eyesight changed so rapidly. Puberty can do that, although it usually changes your vision for the worse. But I remember because it happened that one summer you went to the Gryphon camp.”

I almost dropped my mug. “That summer? You’re sure?”

“Positive. Why?”

“My memory is kind of hazy. I’d forgotten I used to wear glasses.” Carefully, I set my mug on the counter. My hands shook. So did my insides.

“Oh, that’s probably because you hardly wore them. You hated them, so you preferred to walk around blind.”

“Yeah, probably.”

Yet wearing glasses didn’t seem like the kind of thing normal people forgot. And that my eyesight changed around the summer I’d gone to the Gryphon institute—could it be a coincidence? Sure, my mother was right. It could have been puberty, but I doubted it very much.

Ben, the hacker extraordinaire, had better be able to get into those stolen files. I wondered what other memories I might be missing, and whether they were contained within.

And Victor—what else did he know? It would be risky going back to the prison for a second interview, but there was no way I could leave this alone.

I let my mother believe I was feeling nostalgic, and we spent the evening going through my belongings that she’d stored for when I “move to a grownup place”. I didn’t bother to point out that in Boston, living with roommates was a grownup thing to do because of the rents.

Some of my anxiety dissipated as we poked through photo albums, old books and elementary school art projects that proved there had never been a time during which I’d been a budding Michelangelo. Most of my memories were there. They simply required a bit of jarring to shake loose.

Yet odd gaps remained that I had to cover up, and eventually I discovered a pattern to them. Everything I couldn’t recall had to do with personal details—the glasses, how I’d played viola in the Academy’s orchestra in fifth through eighth grades, that I used to be allergic to all forms of tree nuts.

It made no sense.

Sunday morning my mother prepared an elaborate breakfast feast in honor of my presence. The scent of real maple syrup, coffee and bacon filled the house, and my stomach rumbled as I got dressed.