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Carter grinned with happiness for the first time since he had been turned. “Really? You’d do that for me?”
Gideon smiled at the charming young fledgling. “I’d do that.”
13
“She’s out here? In a forest? Mom hated nature.”
Carter was confused, and more than a little skeptical. This did not feel right. There was something about Gideon’s smile, something anticipatory and calculated that made him suspicious. The Maker’s motives were never what they seemed, he knew that. Gideon moved his family around like pieces on a board, putting them to best use to serve his needs. For better or for worse, Carter was now trapped inside that family, the grandson of pure malevolence.
“Oh, she’s out here. Can you not sense her?”
A light wind whipped through the forest undergrowth, playing with pine needles and fallen oak leaves. Here and there, long-legged winged insects danced through moonlit paths of their own discerning. Carter did not sense his mother out here. His mother smelled of washing powder and lasagne. His mother sounded like the vacuum and the vent on the stove. She was reminders to put his towels in the hamper. She was the way his bed was always made even though he never made it. She was love. She was home.
“No,” Carter said, bitterness tainting his tone as his blond hair gleamed with moonlight. “I don’t sense her.”
“Well, she may feel a little different now,” Gideon said. “I am sure she senses you.”
Carter’s hopes had been raised very high by this promise of Gideon’s, and now he was almost certain that they were going to be terribly dashed. He glanced over at Gideon with a malevolent pale gaze, as if trying to discern a way he might bring pain to the Maker.
And then she came, suddenly and without warning, seeming to appear at the very edge of their collective vision. Candy flew through the night like a speeding wild thing, barely recognizable at first. Carter did not see his mother. He saw something like a ghost or a zombie, something with long greenish yellow hair flowing behind a bony head barely more than a skull.
Her hunger drove her, not a need for food, but a need for vengeance.
“I was becoming hungry again…”
“You look hungry,” Gideon said. “Actually, you look like you are absolutely starving. Why don’t you come feed?”
His invitation sparked a rush from the undead thing. She flew at Gideon with an unearthly screech…
“Mom?”
Carter’s soft word stopped her in her tracks.
“Baby?” There was a strange tone to her voice, but it was her voice. He would know it anywhere, even beyond the grave.
“Mom?” Carter’s voice cracked.
She went to him and wrapped him in an embrace, but it was not the warm, tender mom hug he remembered. She did not smell like washing powder and hamburger grease. She was gaunt and angular, and she smelled of decay. He didn’t care. He buried his face in what remained of her neck, her green skin pressed against his all-too-pale visage. Neither one of them were as they had been, but their love remained. The bond between them had existed before his birth, and it continued after.
He could feel Gideon’s eyes on them, not knowing what the Maker was making of all of this, and not caring to know. He wanted it to be over.
“Kill me,” he sobbed in her cold, rotting arms. “I want to be with you. I want this to be over. I need it to end.”
“My baby bear,” she crooned, her voice rattling with the wind through the trees. “I could never hurt you. I could never take your precious life, not the one I gave you, and not the one evil gave you. You must find new happiness. New family.”
Carter’s face ran bloody with tears, wiped across the tattered remnants of his mother’s rancid clothing.
“I will always love you,” his mom promised him. “Never forget that.”
“BOOM!”
Carter thought it was a gunshot at first, but it was a different kind of missile heading their way. A net gun had been fired from somewhere deep in the trees, a spinning spiral of spiderweb silver hurtling toward him and his mother faster than either one of them could escape.
He screamed as it made contact with his skin, some curse, enchantment, or mundane chemistry making it burn like the sun itself. No sooner had he uttered the cry than Candy lashed out with her powers, slashing through the chains and freeing herself and her son.
Ray and Chauvelin emerged from the bushes, looking briefly triumphant and then almost immediately crestfallen as they saw Candy take the chains and dash back into the darkness, completely gone, leaving Carter sobbing on the forest floor, a completely broken boy.
“Idiots!” Gideon raged. “She didn’t even touch me!”
