AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The sun was starting to dip as we pulled up to the cemetery.
She didn’t give me an opportunity to question her motives before she was already off the bike, her stride purposeful. I kept a bit of distance as she stopped at her destination—a grandiose headstone in pristine white, directly next to a similar black one.
I didn’t have to get close to know.
Instead, I gave hermorespace, while I looked around, quickly deducing that these werePredatorburial grounds. My eyes scanned the other headstones, stopping with an unexpected hitch in my step when I ran across one identical to the black one Tati was standing near.
The former president of thePredators,Jesse Garrett.
Blue’s father.
There were flowers dying at the base of it, still fresh enough that they had to be recently placed. Most likely, by Blue’s mother, whose grief had been lingering longer, deeper than her son wanted for her.
I’d overheard the phone calls, stood in for meetings so he could tend to her, all that.
She must’ve been a good mother.
I found myself thinking so often in what I could observe of his engagement with her. I’d never met her, had made it a point not to, actually. Even the thought of it now made me shift, uncomfortable.
How fucked up was that?
That the potential nurturing energy of a woman who actually cared for her children was damn near atrigger.
I shook my head, wanting to pull myself away from the grave, but I couldn’t. Blue’s words from weeks ago, that ridiculous ass fist analogy, was playing in my head again.
It’s not ridiculous.
It just made me uneasy.
I didn’t get down with superstitions and the supernatural and all that, so the idea of some kind offateor destiny or whatever, the idea that something beyond my control dictated who I was or where I belonged, who I should be connected to… it fucked with me.
Blame it on the mommy issues, I guess.
Her personal demons had driven her to name me –brand me– as she did, and she made sure the story of it – the meaning she gave it – was imprinted on me, impossible to forget. No matter how hard I’d tried to be what she needed, what she didn’t have,anythingexcept the beast she’d designated me… there was no getting around it.
The darkness was just…in me.
Waiting for any goodness I could devour.
She wasn’t afraid of me because there wasn’t any goodness in her to take, and on that… we didn’t disagree. I’d loved my mother as much as any child could in those circumstances because she was all I had. And despite the privilege surrounding her, because of who she was… I was all she had too.
In her own way… she’d loved me too. But it was never, never a secret that she simultaneously reviled my existence, and knowing what I did about how that came to be… I couldn’t blame her. She named me after a deliverer of nightmares because at the time of my birth, that was all I’d ever provided, from the moment of conception.
And then she laid every bit of groundwork for me to live up to the name.
Whether or not I’d wanted to, I had.
First out of anger, then obligation.
Subjugation.
For a long ass time, I didn’t have a choice in the matter, so I’d leaned into it like a badge of honor. But I didn’t want that anymore.
It didn’thaveto be that way.
Alicia had changed.
Isaiah had changed.
