“Wings?” Mom asked. “You can fly?”
“Technically, I can, but I haven’t had the nerve to try yet.”
She rolled her eyes and sat back in her chair. “This is ridiculous.”
Riley adjusted herself under the nursing cover, moving Linna to the other breast, it looked like. As she did, her skin sort of shimmered, and scales grew on her exposed arm. Her face turned to the smooth snake-like scales. She was all sorts of shades of green, and absolutely gorgeous.
My mom gasped, mouth dropping.
“You okay, Mom?”
She shook her head no, unable to form words.
“Don’t pass out on me, okay?” I asked.
She nodded.
“Listen, Mom, I’m going to change now, but I’m newer at this than Riley, and I have to meditate to get it to work.”
She moved her gaze over to me and blinked several times, panic and dismay written all over her expression.
“Oh, Mom, don’t be like that. This is amazing. Let me show you.”
I slipped my sweater over my head, ignored my mom’s gasp, and walked over to the piano. I played her favorite Beethoven and very quickly was able to change.
Before I turned around I heard a thump. Jerking my body around, careful of my wings, I saw my mom crumpled on the floor. She’d fainted.
“Well,” I said.
We got her in her bed, and Riley and I back in our human skin.
“What time will your dad be home?” Alexander asked.
“Not for several hours yet.”
“Good, because if we get close to time for him to come home, we’ll have to take her with us until she comes to terms with it, and it’s safe to return her.”
We milled around the house, and I showed Roan and Alexander my bedroom. It was exactly as I’d left it eighteen years before. I didn’t know what to make of that. “I haven’t been back in this part of the house since I left,” I murmured as I looked around at the pink walls and frilly bedspread.
I’d always hated that bedspread.
The vanity still had my grandmother’s silver brush and mirror set sitting on it and a bottle of perfume my dad had given me on my sixteenth birthday. I hadn’t liked the perfume either. I’d been fairly discontent at home, a black sheep in a sea of pink.
I loved my parents as much as I could, but that didn’t mean I wanted to spend a lot of time with them. We’d had dinner two or three times a year since I moved out, and I managed to be pleasant and doting on those nights. But that was all I could seem to muster.
Alexander was quiet as I looked around the room, shaking my head at the posters on the wall. Had I ever been that young?
“This room isn’t you,” he said.
“No, not anymore. Parts of it—the pink, the frills, that never was me. The teenybopper posters and the Goth clothes in the closet, that… yeah. That was me.”
Roan laughed and pulled open the closet door. Sure enough, the clothes were there. Every black, lacey, stretchy stitch of them.
“Oh, geez,” I moaned. “Some people pull off Goth very well. I wasn’t one of them. I looked ridiculous.”
“With your black hair, I think it’d be great.”
“No, I always looked like a little girl dressing up. Maybe I was too young, I don’t know. But I’m more of a jeans and t-shirt, comfy clothes kinda girl.”
