Dad entered his office with a perplexed and wary expression. One hand rattled a few loose coins in his pocket. My newly marred hand was tucked away in the sleeve of my hoodie. Mari and Janelle stood in the doorway with expectant, inquisitive looks on their faces.
"I need to talk privately with my dad. Can you give us a minute?" I said with more grit than I knew I had. The double doors shut us in the office together. I registered the sound of a fly beating itself senseless against the window to get to something he could see but not reach.
Truth could be like that.
"Dad..." Tears gathered in the back of my throat. "You spoke to Mami Tulke."
The statement versus question tactic worked. I could see from his shocked expression that it was true.
"Have you been eavesdropping?" His face contorted from alarm to stern reproach.
"If I had been, how would I also know what she said?" His office had a separate line. No other phones in the house connected to it.
He stood in shocked silence. His aura flared erratically, changing from a greenish-yellow to a mustard one that I'd come to associate with fear. "There is no sane way to explain this, so I'm just going to say it. I came in here to call Dun, and when I picked up the phone, I heard the whole conversation. Like a replay. I felt what you were feeling. I know what Mami Tulke said to you!" My voice rose successively higher, my own disbelief still coursing through me.
"I don't know what you're going on about, Cora. What you're telling me is impossible."
"I don't care how impossible it sounds! I am my mother's daughter. So, tell me what that means! Tell me what you meant when you said, 'if people find out what she is.' Tell me what it is that you can't save me from, because freaky things are happening to me, Dad, and I don't know how to save myself. You're supposed to protect me."
His mouth hung open, his face drawn. He spoke slowly and softly, as if I were mentally challenged. "I never said that, sweetheart. You must have imagined it."
His words came out in a puff of black smoke. The gray-black hovered over his mouth a moment, curled around his lips and throat, then slowly dissipated.
His lie was a cannon shot in the mist.
It struck me in the gut. A condensed ball of yellow rolled from him—like I'd seen in Finn's aura in the forest, only much larger—floating like a polyp, an enormous cystic secret. He was lying to protect that secret.
I pulled my hand out and shoved the marking in his face. "Am I imagining this?"
He gasped. "You got a tattoo of your mother's wedding ring? How did you know what it looked like?" Even if I hadn't been able to see his aura, I could read the conflict in his eyes and the threat of tears in their rims.
My own eyes filled with tears. My mother's wedding ring? Fresh pain of missing her stabbed at my heart. I'd gone twelve years without knowing the touch of my mother, and now I had to wear an image of her wedding ring on my finger?
"This conversation is over. We will not speak of it again." My father turned and left me standing alone in the office, beating myself against the glass between us.
YOU ARE READING
SCINTILLATE - Book #1 of The Light Key Trilogy
Teen FictionA mighty flame follows a tiny spark Cora Sandoval lives an insulated, unexciting life. Mostly, she blames her dad. Her mother disappeared from Ireland when she was five and he's been a human handcuff ever since. Cora's life suddenly propels into the...
