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He shook his head. “No, she’s not the same girl we raised. He’s taken her over and turned her into someone I don’t know.”
Our appetizers came and saved us all from having to reply. Though call it a hunch, my dad wouldn’t forget the thread of the conversation.
13
“He has alreadybespelled you, Anita, don’t you see that?” Dad said over his appetizer, which he hadn’t bothered to taste yet.
Andria came to the rescue, saying, “That is not at all what I meant, Dad. I do not believe, nor have I ever believed, that Jean-Claude bespelled Anita into loving him.”
“You said she’s like a different person; what other explanation is there?” he demanded.
“If I had tried any vampire wiles on Anita, she would have known. Her necromancy meant I had to approach her honestly or not at all,” Jean-Claude said.
“Fredrick, I showed you the videos from Colorado where Anita raised a zombie army. She is powerful in her own right,” Judith said.
He shook his head like he was shaking the thought away, then glared at Jean-Claude for a second, looked down, then glared at me. “Those videos didn’t prove to me that you were too powerful for him to possess you. They confirmed that he had corrupted you with his undead powers.”
“Fredrick, please.”
“I cannot raise the dead, Dr. Blake. It has never been a power granted to me either living or dead,” Jean-Claude said.
“You would say that, wouldn’t you?”
“I emptied the graveyards around Boulder, Colorado, Dad. I raised an army of every zombie that our bad guy hadn’t already raised to be on his side. I sent them out to defend the people in the area. I may be the only necromancer alive today that could have done it.”
Dad shook his head again like an adult version of putting your fingers in your ears and goingla, la, la. “If he hasn’t corrupted you, then I failed you, Anita.”
“Failed me how?”
“I sent you to your Grandmother Flores’s that summer to learn to control your powers, but maybe my mother was right. We should have exorcised this evil out of you instead of sending you to a voodoo priestess to learn more of it.”
“Fredrick, stop this,” Judith said.
“Anita uses her gifts to help people, not harm them,” Jean-Claude said.
“Her zombies fought, you mean,” Dad said.
Nicky came over to put a hand on my shoulder. “No, Anita doesn’t stay behind the lines with her magic, she puts on her body armor, grabs her guns, and charges into the worst of it.”
“Anita leads from the front like the generals of old,” Jean-Claude said.
“She’s a U.S. Marshal, Dad.”
I touched Jean-Claude and Nicky and looked at my dad. He was a stranger to me; I hadn’t seen him any clearer than he’d seen me. He was my dad, and I was his daughter; we weren’t people to each other, we were family roles.
“You want to know why I changed, Dad?” I looked at Andria. “You want to know why I’m softer and more comfortable with the cuter stuff and willing to dress like a girl more?”
“I didn’t mean to start all this,” Andria said.
“I know, but here’s what I learned in therapy. I found people who loved me and made me feel comfortable enough to be more feminine and softer, because I didn’t have to spend all my time defending whoI was. They accepted me all dark and cranky and morose, so I could be softer with them because they didn’t tell me there was something wrong with me constantly. They didn’t see me not being all girly and pastel as a fucking crime. It freed me up to explore the parts of being a woman that I actually liked or was willing to try.”
Nicky said, “You’ll never be a fucking girl, all pastel and pink, that’s not you. That’s not someone I could ever love.” I think he was glaring at my family, or maybe it was the words. Whatever, dinner was over.
“I’m sorry you didn’t get to taste everything, but…”
“I will settle the bill,ma petite, go.”
“Anita, please don’t go,” Judith said.
