Verity
I was alive. That's about all I could be certain of.
Waking up from whatever the Aurum Venari hunters had done to me was like emerging from a cave to find an alien landscape rather than the one I was accustomed to. I didn't know where I was, only that I was no longer on the road where we'd left Alek's car, but instead inside a room with off-white walls, fine cracks in its plaster surface webbing out from an impact crater the size of a fist. I lay on a cot, not cushy enough to be a proper mattress but raised off the ground and held together with a metal frame. A trapezoid shaped light hit the wall next to my bed, indicating the presence of a window, but when I tried to shift to my left to confirm this, A fiery pain struck me like I'd been clubbed with an iron-spiked mace.
Groaning, I tried to remain motionless, hoping the agony would ease.
"It will get better." A woman spoke to me from the opposite corner of the room. The cadence of her voice seemed familiar, but I was too drugged up to place it.
"Who's there?" It must be Flora's mother. The thought came to me slowly but I almost immediately disregarded it as memory caught up with reality. Val's voice was deeper, an alto to this woman's soprano.
I paused these thoughts and listened. A groan of wood against wood, followed by light footsteps.
The woman's face appeared over mine. Long, dark hair framed her oval face. I estimated her to be in her late forties, but when I peered into her hazel eyes, she seemed almost timeless, as though age was only a construct that didn't apply to someone like her.
"That's the drugs talking," she said to me. "I age just like anyone else."
Panic. My breathing shallowed and my limbs felt like someone had stuck a thousand tiny pins into them, which was somehow worse than the mace to the head sensation I was also coping with. "You read my mind."
"Sorry," she said, frowning. "It gets lonely down here. I don't see people often, and rarely are they ones whose minds I can access. That doesn't excuse it—I shouldn't have intruded. You think loudly, though. Frankly, it would be hard not to hear you."
Still looking into her eyes, I wondered if maybe I'd been wrong to assume I was on this side of the dirt, after all. Perhaps this crappy room was the afterlife. That would make sense, seeing as though the woman talking to me had been dead for over fifteen years.
"That's funny," she said, though her expression betrayed no hint of amusement. "I thought the same about you."
I tried to take deep breaths, but my chest constricted instead. "This isn't possible."
She brushed the hair from my forehead, and I remembered long fingers with nailbeds bitten down to stubs. Lullabies and bedtime stories.
"The last time I saw you, you were just a little girl. But I recognized you right away." A tear streaked down her face. "You're all grown up."
Closing my eyes, I leaned into the touch of her hand. That same hand had made this same gesture many times in the distant past.
If I'm dead, then so be it.
"You aren't dead, Verity. And neither am I."
Tears formed like water behind a dam. I opened my eyes and let them cascade down my cheeks. "Mom?"
Cora Hargrave's face crumpled like a balled-up piece of paper. "I hardly deserve that title, but yes. It's me."
Determined to sit up, I struggled to make my arms support me. I let her assist, and once I was leaning against the wall, she sat next to me, an arm draped across my shoulder. "You must have questions, just as I do."
"I was told you were dead. That you'd done..." I couldn't bear to say what she'd been accused of. Locking these thoughts behind my barriers, I focused on the present. "Is this really happening?"
She let out a long sigh. "We were both lied to, Verity. The only truth I can be certain of is that yes: this, right now, is happening."
"You said... you implied you thought I had died. Why?"
"Norvin told me himself and Val confirmed it."
Val.
"Val knew what really happened to you?" I flashed back to a Christmas when Flora and I were ten. We made gingerbread cookies and Val had taught me how to use royal icing to create intricate patterns on them. I'd been awful at it, but Val had hugged me and complicated my work, nonetheless. It was a happy memory—a moment in time when I'd felt what it must be like to have a mother. Now, come to find that whole time, Val had known my actual mother was alive and had never even hinted at it.
The betrayal struck hard. I slumped against Cora.
"I'm afraid you're going to hate what I'm about to say," she told me.
As I listened to her speak, my heart broke again and again.
"Aurum Venari was supposed to help me," she said. "They promised they would enable me to control my powers. I was frantic, believing that I'd eventually transform and unwittingly hurt you." She paused to clear her throat and then continued.
"Val was kind to me. I trusted her. So, I tried the treatment. Infusions. I don't even know what was in them—that's how desperate I was. At first, there was hope. But there was also fear—they told me you could have inherited my affliction."
"Affliction. Is that what you thought if it?"
"It threatened my safety and the safety of others. It made me an unstable mother and wife. Yes. Plus, it helped me to look at it as a disease. Diseases, some of them at least, can be cured."
"But you couldn't be."
"No." She lowered her head and stared at her lap. "Not me. I thought you could be, though. That's what they told me, once we'd learned you carried the gene for werewolfism. The Sinclairs—those were the head scientists—said they couldn't change the fact that you had that gene, but they could modify that gene itself so you would be..."
"So I would be what?"
"Better. I don't know exactly except that I felt such guilt at having handed down to you this terrible trait, one that would surely destroy your life if I didn't do something. So... I let them. It was the biggest mistake of my life."
I wasn't sure I agreed with that. "Why?"
"A few months in, your father found out they'd taken an interest in you and forbade you from going. I was angry at first, but then they told me later that same day that you'd had some sort of medical episode while in his care. The therapies they'd been doing—they'd had 'unintended consequences.' Those were their words exactly." She stopped speaking long enough to let out a sob. "It was all my fault. I'd given them permission to experiment on my young child. How could I have done such a thing?"
"They told you I'd died?"
"Yes. And I had no reason to think they were lying. Even Norvin, with all his faults, was livid. He kept saying how using children to test unproven therapies was a bridge to far, even for him, and now we would all have to deal with the consequences."
The consequences. I could think of a few, but none of them involved me dying as a five-year old guinea pig.
"Mom." I pulled away from her so I could face her when I said this. "This is the last thing I want to bring up, but we were told... well, first dad was told you committed suicide, which obviously didn't happen. Then I found out." I struggled to find a way to say this delicately. "The Sinclairs you spoke of. What happened to them?"
My mom grabbed my hand and squeezed it. "It was awful. So awful how they died."
I swallowed. "Did you... lose control?"
"What?" She took her hand back. "Norvin told you I killed them? That's rich. What a fucking bastard."
I wanted to probe further, but it was clear she'd withdrawn. Her eyes stared blankly at the wall across from us, and she hugged her arms around herself. The youthfulness I'd witnessed earlier seemed to have dried up like a well in a drought.
"It's difficult for me to relive this," she finally said. "Even now seeing you alive and well—it can't totally undo the fact that I spent years believing you were dead because of me, and that I believed myself to be a danger to the world. I thought I deserved my fate until you showed up here."
"And now?"
"Now it's your fate I'm worried about." Her eyes regained a bit of their brilliance. "We have a lot more to discuss. But one thing I know for certain—you can't stay here. You don't belong cooped up in this terrible old house, werewolf or not."
Werewolf... she had no idea then what the nature of my abilities were. We really did have a lot to discuss, but I wanted to tell her everything while we sipped tea back at my apartment, not here in this dank, cheerless prison. Or hell, we had to tell Dad! I'd barely even thought of what impact her return from the dead would have on him.
"You're right," I said. "We both need a way out of here."
Her shoulders slumped. "I don't see how, though."
"I do." I gave her a hug. "Don't worry, Mom. I have someone here who will help us."
___
Author's Note: Verity's mom is ALIVE! Did you see that coming?
It seems she's been held in this space for many years, and now she fears Verity will be imprisoned as well. But Verity has a plan--"I have someone here who will help us." Who is she referring to?
We'll have that answer in Chapter 38!
XOXOXO