Page 3 of Zodiac Demons

“My mom would love that, Miss Rodanthe. I’ll get you her number before you go.” The familiarity was disturbing. I just stared as they continued to exchange some weird pleasantries. I could have butted in and asked why she knew my mom, but of all the growing up I’d done in the last six months, boldly making the right move in the moment was still a distant dream for my social skills. So instead, I stuttered over an order for a matcha latte and a club sandwich, then waited until she walked away.

As soon as we were back to our privacy, Mom returned her attention to me.

“So how was your first semester at—”

“Why does she know you?” I interrupted. I may not be good at interrogating strangers, but my Mom wasn’t allowed to be put-off by my bluntness. “I thought you just went to college here. You literally never mentioned that you know Emily and Lottie and, seriously what the fuck, Mom?”

“Language, Lila.” She corrected me, because that fucking mattered right now.

I sighed in exasperation. “Please just tell me what’s going on.”

Mom’s sigh was equally defeated, as she placed her elbows on the table and rested her chin in her hands. “I did go to college here. That was true.” She chewed her lip, like this was some kind of secret she couldn’t tell, when it seemed like the most uninteresting thing she could admit to me on this day of days. “I went to college here about five hundred years ago.”

“You went to college here about five hundred years ago.” I repeated in stunned confusion. “I thought you were in your fifties? How were you old enough to go to college five hundred years ago?” I’m not shrieking, you’re shrieking. How much of our entire relationship has been a lie? Though now that I thought about it with a bit less crazy, Mom didn’t actually look any older than the waitress. Because like everyone else here, she was immortal. But unlike everyone else here, I had no idea how long she’d existed. “Did… did you lie to me about your age my whole life just so I wouldn’t know I wasn’t human?”

“I’m so sorry, Lila.” She frowned, and she was really good at saying anything but a straight answer. “The reason Emily knows me and I know her parents is because I used to be her teacher in elementary school. But I gave up that career about twenty-five years ago, and decided to try something new somewhere new, which was when I had the good fortune to meet your father.”

“How old are you, exactly?” I pressed, not ready to let any of this go. I’d address the whole ‘she was a teacher at Graves Elementary’ thing later.

She laughed nervously. “Older than time.”

“And how old is time?”

“I’m… “ She stopped for a moment like she needed to do the math in her head, “4627 years old, I guess. Humans didn’t start telling tales of me in their mythology for another hundred years or so, but I was born long before then.”

“You’re four-thousand-six-hundred-twenty-seven…” I repeated her words yet again, like that was the only way to write them into my mental database. “four-thousand…”

The waitress returned with our drinks and our sandwiches, and I waited through a few more contrived pleasantries while I soaked it all in. Once she left us alone again, Mom finally opted to speak. “It’s a long story, and I won’t go into all of the specifics right now, because the lineage is rather complicated, but I bounced around Egypt, Libya, and Italy for millennia before a number of our kind decided to migrate to a new continent—”

“Meaning monsters, demons, gods, pikachus, whatever you are.” I figured if I didn’t make her clarify things, she definitely wouldn’t.

“Right, magic-kind,” she corrected, so politically correct. “I arrived here with a few trusted friends back around the year 1500, and we all liked it enough to stay.”

“Is this before Christ or after Christ,” I said with a raise of my eyebrows. “You have to be more specific, apparently.”

Mom laughed at that, and I was glad at least one of us was having fun. “After the fall of Rome, so Current Era.” She shook her head with a soft smile, like she was recalling the entire fall of the Roman Empire with nostalgic fondness, as one often does. “We lived in our own communities for a long time, but we were much more open in our existence then, and that caused a lot of problems for humans. Eventually, with the help of the warlocks and witches who made enchanted masking rings, we all went into hiding and founded the city of Graves, where you now stand, hoping to turn it into our safe utopia. You may have noticed by now that humans aren’t terribly fond of our kind, so this was a refuge when the rest of the world felt too harsh. In hindsight, I sometimes wish I’d raised you here instead.”

“Really? Why? Was it because of the twenty-two years of bullying I endured because you enrolled me in a human school?” I flattened my expression, and Mom apologized again. “Was that not enough of a hint that I wasn’t like everyone else? That I might, I don’t know, share my parent’s bloodline?”

“To be honest, I thought you were just shy and unpopular.” So comforting… “This is all new to me, Sweetie. In all of those years, I never had any children, and I hadn’t been in a human school in the modern era to know what was normal for them.” She chewed her lip. “It wasn’t supposed to be possible for me to ever have children, so I was learning to be a parent after over four-thousand-years of living only for myself, and I’m sure I made a lot of mistakes. I’m so sorry.”

Mom sobbed softly into her cappuccino.

“Don’t say that. You were a great mom.” Was she though? Okay, that wasn’t fair. She was my best friend growing up, so outside of the monumental, earth shattering lies she told me, she was probably above average. Which was why I, for some reason, determined that she was now the one who needed comfort, while I was still spiraling.

“Thank you for saying that.” She sniffled then blew her nose into her napkin.

“You still haven’t told me what you are or why I shouldn’t have been able to exist though. I appreciate the story time, and I’d love to hear more firsthand accounts of the fall of Egypt and Rome or whatever,” Now that I thought about it, all of those weirdly cryptic bed time stories she used to tell me were suddenly making a lot more sense, “but can we get back to me for a minute?”

“Right, that’s why I’m here.” She took a large bite of her sandwich, giving herself a solid thirty seconds of chewing before she continued. “I’m Lamia.” She finally said, keeping it to a hushed tone despite the fact that she’d told me only monsters were allowed to eat here.

“Lamia…” I repeated the name slowly. My mother is Lamia? Like the... DEMON Lamia? The evil monster of lore? The one she told me about as a kid that literally gave me nightmares?!

“I assume I don’t have to explain the part about being of the serpent family of beasts, or the vampiric blood lust, or the natural seductive aura,” I definitely didn’t inherit any of that, “but I can at least tell you about the part where I’d crossed the wrong goddess, and I was cursed to never be able to bear children, so you shouldn’t have been possible.” She continued, completely casual. I just stared at her, no words were forming in my mind. “But when I met your father, he was just a simple Omega Zodiac Shifter. A man in his late forties, raised with normal American values, who wanted to raise a child, but had never met the right woman.”

Cool, good for dad, whatever— How about we focus on the fact that… “You’re the monster I used to think was hiding under my bed? Literally the one you told me snatched and devoured children?” I gasped aloud, and my jaw was on the floor. “I used to make you check every night to make sure she wasn’t going to come out and eat me.”

She rubbed her neck and laughed sheepishly. “I’ll admit I thought it was a bit hilarious that you were so scared of her after I told you that bed time story. I kind of played into it.”