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Slowly, Pamela crossed her shaking arms.
“Well?” Max said.
Pamela stared. “Well what?”
“Aren’t you going to invite me in?”
“You look like shit,” Max said.
He sat across from his mother at the shabby kitchen table, Dallas at his right. The room was filthy and stank of mold. Dishes were stacked by the sink, the overflowing garbage was oozing onto the tile, and the counters were cluttered with illicit ingredients for Blood Potions and other drugs. As for food, what little he could see was rotting, including the spotted bananas and withering grapes in the fruit bowl. Yet another habit of his mother’s that hadn’t changed.
Pamela took another drag on that rancid cigarette—laced with a hallucinogenic called Black Crystal. Its acidic tang burned his airways whenever he inhaled.
She tapped the ash into a glass tray. “What do you want, Maximus?”
“Maya is still alive.”
Silence. Pam’s aging face shifted with a heavy frown. Max watched her, holding her stare. After a minute, she clucked her tongue and turned her head, looking toward the door, as if searching for help and not finding any.
“Don’t you dare look away from me or I’m going to flay that barefoot asshole right before your eyes,” Max snarled. That barefoot asshole was standing outside; he could see him through the tiny kitchen window. Max waited for Pamela to look at him again before he spoke. “Maya is still alive,” he said again, speaking in a carefully measured tone.
“So what?”
“So what?” he repeated, grinding his teeth. “So what? So you lied to me for seven fucking years. You made me believe that Maya was dead.”
“I never made you believe anything.” Her voice was as cold and detached as Max remembered it. “You were just a teenager, Max. You wouldn’t have understood. Besides—” She took another drag with chapped lips and blew a stream of smoke in his direction. “I didn’t want to bother my child with my problems.” She said it with pride, the bitch.
“Oh yeah?” Max scoffed. “Is that why you didn’t do shit when your ex boyfriends took me out back to beat the daylights out of me? Is that why you always spent your money on drugs instead of making sure Maya and I had enough to eat? Is that why you sold my fucking bed that one time, forcing me to sleep on the floor, so you could pay for your drugs? Because I didn’t need to be bothered with your problems?” He drew a breath, filling up his lungs that had shrunk too small, the pungent bite of Black Crystal reminding him of his tainted childhood. “It was never about us—that was the problem. It was always about you.”
Pamela said nothing. With a trembling hand, the skin speckled with unsightly sores, she ground the cigarette butt into the ashtray.
“I want you tell me the truth,” Max said, as calmly as he could. “What really happened that night?”
“There was a fire.”
“But it wasn’t an accident.”
She looked at him with hard, watering eyes, her pupils pinpoints.
“You pretended it was an accident so the cops wouldn’t look into her death. You faked it. You sold Maya.” Even saying the words made him sick to his stomach, bile burning his throat. “Didn’t you?”
Nothing.
Max banged a fist on the table, making Pamela jump. “Didn’t you?” he bellowed.
“Yes,” she whispered.
“To who?”
“I don’t know.”
“What the fuck for?”
“Her magic.”
“What bloody magic?” He wanted answers, and he was going to damn-well get them—no more guessing. “What. Bloody. Magic?” he repeated through clenched teeth.
“She had fire magic.” There it was. “They told me they would keep her safe, that she would have everything she needed—”
