Tobias clenched his jaw. Giving an abrupt bow he left the room. Damn it to hell. He’d known Deoul had a thing about demons, yet he’d hoped Braithwaite would be a voice of reason. But apparently Braithwaite would be nothing more than the council president’s puppet.
Nix was going to be furious. And he knew she’d blame him. But he believed in the chain of command, not some musketeers mentality. He wouldn’t lie. And she’d be off the case.
Chapter Ten
Early in the afternoon Nix turned into her mother’s neighborhood. House after house with Spanish tile roofs lined the street like soldiers standing at attention. Neat, clean, one looking much like another. Before she reached her mom’s street she pulled over to the curb. She needed to calm her nerves or she’d end up mouthing off and not getting anywhere. Not that she felt like she owed Betty that much respect, but she did need her mother’s cooperation.
As always, whenever she thought of her mom, Nix’s thoughts turned to the father she’d never known. Her mother had fallen in love with Arturo de la Fuente, a Mexican American professor at the University of Phoenix. Betty had moved in to Arturo’s apartment two months after they met, and nine months after that along came baby Nix. They made a happy home for about six months after Nix’s birth. But eventually the trappings of human life and the responsibilities of motherhood had grated on Betty and she’d taken off, leaving her infant daughter behind. Nix’s father moved them in with his mother so she could watch the baby while he was at work. For a time they managed to be a cohesive family unit.
Then Betty blew back into town. Seemed she’d missed her husband. And Arturo was so blindly in love with Betty that he’d taken her back. They’d had an intimate reunion that had caused Betty to lose control and siphon off all of his life energy during sex, killing him. Unable to face what she’d done, she left once again, leaving Nix with a bitter old woman who’d lost her only son and was saddled with demon-spawn.
Nix had tried and tried to please her grandmother. She’d studied hard and received straight As in school. She’d comported herself modestly, as a good girl should. She’d even learned to sew so she could make her grandmother pretty things.
Nix had a lot of memories of the hard times of childhood, but one played over and over in her brain now. One night the then ten-year-old Nix had stayed up until two in the morning putting the finishing touches on a dress for her grandmother’s sixtieth birthday. She’d presented her grandmother with a perfectly wrapped box, proud of her accomplishments. Her grandmother had looked at Nix, stood up and walked to the trash can where she dumped the unopened box.
Things had continued to go downhill from there. Within three years Nix was spending most of her time hanging out on the streets, being a general nuisance and a youthful hooligan. She’d become an expert pickpocket and shoplifter. She stole sometimes out of necessity because her grandmother was on welfare and there wasn’t a lot of money to go around, but sometimes she stole for the thrill of it.
Her grandmother died when Nix was sixteen, and after a short stay with a foster family Nix went back to the streets. Her mother was a stranger who flitted on the outskirts of her life. Puberty had brought out the demon and Nix didn’t want to go live with human families who wouldn’t understand what she was. Besides, her friends were her family. They would take care of her.
And they had. For a while. But one by one they’d left, either off to better lives, prison, or death. Nix had been alone. Until she’d met Tobias. A dark, lonely life became bright and fulfilling. She’d learned to love without fear of being hurt.
Shortly after Nix and Tobias started dating, her mother couldn’t ignore her guilt any longer and had come to Nix, telling her she could help her understand her demon side and what it was capable of. Nix hadn’t been interested. She’d gotten along just fine without her mother all those years.
But something inside her had told her to not give up the chance to get to know the woman who’d given birth to her. So she’d pushed back her stubborn pride and allowed Betty back in her life. The two were slowly getting to know each other as people. Maybe someday they actually would relate as a mother and daughter should.
Life had been good. So good that when she let herself think about it she’d gotten scared, waiting for the other shoe to drop. When it did, it dropped with a thud that smashed her heart.
For now… Nix blew out a breath. After Tobias had left her she’d thrown herself into her work, first as a unit clerk in a hospital and then as a dispatcher at the Scottsdale Police Department. Then after prets had been outed she’d landed the job as a liaison to the preternatural council. She’d worked hard to prove she wasn’t that light-fingered little thief anymore, tried to demonstrate her professional abilities and show she was more than her demon. Yet it seemed that the council wanted to keep her at the bottom of the pile, letting her be nothing more than the DNA her mother had given her. And if she wanted to solve these killings, if she wanted to be able to go to the council with something, she had to talk to Betty.