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Nightbred(50)

By:Lynn Viehl


Chris stared up at the ghostly reflection of her face in the mirror-polished wood ceiling. So why do I feel so miserable?

Like father, like daughter.

What her conscience suggested made her roll over and bury her face in the pillow. She was not like Frankie Lang; she wasn’t running away from a marriage or a kid. Sam and Lucan and Burke would be fine without her. They had a stronghold filled with devoted humans and immortal warriors, allies in Orlando and Atlanta, and more money than God. Once they got over the name-calling thing, they’d have each other.

No, she wasn’t like Frankie at all.

Chris had just turned thirteen a few days before her constantly battling parents had had a huge fight over money. The next morning Adele left to go shopping, and Frankie had picked up his board, kissed Chris on the top of her head, and took off.

“See you later, baby,” he called as he walked out to his Jeep.

Chris never saw him again.

Once Frankie had abandoned them, he’d stopped long enough to clean out what was left in the bank account, leaving Adele with nothing. Despite this, Adele refused to get a job, a divorce, or otherwise deal with reality. She repeatedly told her daughter that they would simply wait until Frankie came to his senses and returned home to take care of her and their daughter.

When her checks had begun bouncing and the credit cards stopped working, Adele had been furious. She had spent weeks on the phone demanding more time, more credit, and getting neither. Adele’s Chrysler disappeared in the middle of the night; in the process of filing a police report she learned it had been repossessed. As their food dwindled and the collection notices mounted, she remained in denial, sending Chris off to school each day with the promise that everything would be fine.

The bank began calling about the imminent foreclosure proceedings; Adele refused to speak to the loan officer up until the morning two sheriff’s deputies arrived to evict them from the property.

Some neighbors had first stared through their windows at them, and then closed their blinds so they wouldn’t have to watch.

One of the deputies had been kind enough to offer them a ride to a local shelter for homeless families, where Adele sat in a dead silence as Chris filled out the intake forms. The shelter manager told them they could stay for a week to give Adele time to find a job or someone who could take them in. Adele had said nothing, and moved like a sleepwalker until the manager took them to the dining room to have a meal.

The sight of the tray Chris had fixed for her seemed to rouse Adele from her stupor. “What is this?”

“I don’t know.” Chris, who’d been living on canned food for weeks, sat down beside her and started eating. “It’s not bad. Some kind of stew, I think.”

“This is garbage.” Adele had slapped the fork out of her hand. “We don’t eat garbage.” When the shelter manager came over to speak to her, Adele threw the tray of food at her before dragging Chris up by her arm. “We are going home, Christi. Right now.”

Her arm throbbed as her mother’s thin fingers dug into her skin.

“Mom, please, calm down.” Chris saw flashing red and blue lights coming down the road, knew instinctively the police were coming for them, and tried to dig in her heels. “Let’s go back inside. You don’t have to eat anything. We could just rest for a while.”

“We don’t belong here,” Adele said, her voice as hard as her grip. “We’re going home.”

The cops reached the end of the driveway before they did, and blocked it with their squad car.

“Ma’am?” One of the cops got out and directed his flashlight at Adele’s face. “We got a call from the shelter that there was some trouble inside. You and your girl okay?”

Adele looked down her nose at him. “Those people tried to feed my daughter garbage. You should go and arrest them at once.”

“Calm down, ma’am.” The cop gave Chris an assessing look. “Everything’s going to be fine now, honey. Don’t be scared.”

Her mother yanked on Chris’s arm and hauled her around the cop car. When the officer followed and called for her to stop, Adele broke into a run, dragging Chris alongside her. She tried to keep up, but something caught her foot and sent her sprawling.

“Easy, sweetheart.” One of the cops helped her up.

“Please don’t hurt my mom,” she begged him as Adele began screaming and pummeling the other officer. “She’s just really upset.”

“It’s okay,” the cop told Chris as his partner handcuffed her mother and hustled her into the back of the squad car. “Your mom needs some help, so we’re going to take her to a hospital.”