Her voice trailed off. Her fingers traced the edge of the paper.
“What?”This is tedious. Why can’t she just say what she has to say so we can get back to the school—
“My sister Jessica ran away from home. Our father was… a monster.” She squeezed her eyes shut. “A pedophile, if you want the technical term for it. He mistreated me for years, until I got old enough to fight him off. I tried to protect Jess as much as I could, but I was only a girl myself, and you can’t understand what a master manipulator that man was. We always talked about leaving together, but we were dirt poor and we had no other family to turn to. He kept us quiet through intimidation and pain. I counted down the days until I turned eighteen. I planned to take Jess with me to another state. I’d fight for custody if I had to. But Jess couldn’t wait anymore. One day, I came home and she’d left. She’d taken her clothes and some photographs of the two of us and food and money and… she ran.” Deborah’s shoulders shuddered as she suppressed a sob. “She was sixteen years old.”
That sucks, but I don’t see what this has to do with anything.I wanted to tell Deborah to get on with it, but Trey held up a hand to silence me. “Please, Deborah. Take your time.”
No, don’t fucking take any more time.
After a few deep breaths, Deborah continued. “I tried to find Jess for many years, but she’d hidden too well. After a while, I stopped wanting to find her. It was a selfish decision. I needed to focus on getting through college, on securing scholarships and working two jobs so I didn’t have to go to my father for anything. I wanted to believe Jess was safe somewhere and she made a better life for herself, because it made me feel good to think so. I imagined picking up the search once I finished my degree. But then came my doctorate and a demanding job and these three dogs and I… I was so secretly happy to be free of my father I wasn’t in any hurry to dive into my past, and the years ticked by and now I’m too late.”
“What does this have to do with me?” I demanded. “Does this Jessica have the same power or something?”
Deborah flashed a sad smile. “Yes, and also no. Hazel, your mother is my sister. She must have changed her name when she fled. I’m your aunt and you… you are a descendant of Rebecca Nurse.”
Chapter Seventeen
Her words were too strange to register. Sister. Aunt. Descendant. I’d never had a context for those words before. It had always just been me and Mom. No one else. Until Dante. And then I had no one.
Tears sprung in Deborah’s eyes. She watched me, expectant, hoping to see recognition or hear something profound from me. But I had nothing. I felt nothing. It was just too… too much.
“I’ve mourned Jess a hundred times since. A thousand times. Every time they wheeled in a new cadaver for me to study, a part of me expected to see her face. And now that I know you’re alive and that you have no one else, I want to give you the love and protection I was never able to give her.” Deborah opened her arms. “I’d like to hug you, Hazel. My niece. Would that be okay?”
I shook my head. I couldn’t… I needed to think about this. “I don’t need protecting. And you won’t want to love me when you find out what I did.”
“Hazel—” Trey warned.
“What’s happened? Tell me,” Deborah insisted. “Nothing you do could change how I feel about you. We’re family.”
“Hazel believes she’s responsible for her mother’s death. She caught her mother having sex with her best friend, aminor. She was angry, and we know what happens when she gets angry.” Trey mimed flames burning.
Deborah’s hands flew to her mouth. Her wide eyes studied me, hoping I’d deny it and put back the shattered pieces of her vision of me.
Too fucking bad. This is what I am. This is what your genes made me.
“Jessica,” she whispered. “What have you done?”
“It’s notherfault,” I growled.
“No, Hazel. We do no good passing blame. What my father did to her left its scars on her. Trust me – I’ve had ten years of therapy to uncover mine. Those scars thread through every future relationship, every encounter with another human. Jessica craved attention – she’d do anything for a kind word or a sign of affection. Even at a young age, she chased after the wrong kinds of men, wanting someone to treat her like a princess, to rescue her. This friend of yours, he was a good guy – protective and kind?”
“He was.” Dante’s face flashed in front of my eyes. Guilt tugged at me. I hadn’t thought of him as much since I got involved with the Kings. If I was honest with myself, I pushed Dante out of my mind because being with them felt like a betrayal to his memory. He was my first love, even if he fancied my mother instead. I remembered how he’d drop everything to walk me home from Mom’s club, or how we’d curl up together in bed and tell each other stories to distract us from the gang fight on the street outside.
Deborah continued. “That makes sense. She saw a person who could be her knight in shining armor – who could protect her and you better than she ever could. And she was terrified that she’d lose him, so she did the only thing she knew how to do to keep a man. Perhaps she didn’t even see it as a betrayal, because to her he was just part of the family, and she’d been taught what family did to each other and what adults you trust make you do. Violence and horror beget the same, and that heritage is passed on through generations, like your powers.”
“My mother never burned anything. I’m the only one with that curse. That’s why we moved around so much, why she couldn’t go to college and get a real job, because of me.” Heat prickled against my skin at the memory. “She was afraid of me, sometimes.”
“I never had the power, either. Like many genes carried on the X chromosome, the power will often skip a generation.” Deborah took another paper from her bag and rested it on the table. It was a newspaper article about a car that spontaneously caught fire. “My mother – your grandmother – set her car on fire while she was still inside. It could have been a mistake – she was always lighting fires accidentally. I thought it was just normal. In my darkest days, I think she did it on purpose to escape that man.”
Beside the car was a photograph of a woman in an old-fashioned hairstyle. My finger traced her face.She has my mother’s eyes.
My palm grew so hot it stung. The edge of the paper caught fire. Swearing, I dropped it on the floor and stamped out the flame.
Deborah placed a shoebox on the table. I peered inside at a bunch of random junk – some old cosmetics, candy wrappers, hair ties, and some battered books covered in floral paper.
“I wanted to give you this,” she said. “It’s some of your mother’s things, all I was able to save when I left home. The books in there are her diaries. Don’t rush to read them. There’s a lot of pain inside.”
I stared at the stack of books and shook my head. It was all too much. Confronted with my mother’s past – a past I’d never known about and couldn’t even imagine – brought it all back to me, all the things she’d done to keep me safe and oblivious, all the dumb decisions she made.
