Jenna Black - Dark Descendant

We’d been walking for what felt like miles, after having spent a day and a night riding on a stinky, crowded bus. I was hungry. I was soaked through. My feet hurt. And I wanted to curl up to sleep in my cozy, comfortable bed at home.

“Momma! Pick me up!” I whined, at the end of what little patience I had at the age of four. “My feet hurt.”

“Hush, sweetheart,” she said, absently reaching down to brush a dripping lock of hair out of my eyes. The stupid baby cried even louder once Momma wasn’t holding him with both hands. I hated him for it even though I knew I was supposed to love him. “We’re almost there.”

I didn’t know where “there” was, but I didn’t see anything familiar on this run-down city street, so I knew “there” wasn’t home, and home was the only “there” I wanted.

“Wanna go home!” I yelled, stamping my foot. Then I decided to see if I could out-wail my brother. If I was loud enough, maybe Momma would give me what I wanted. It always seemed to work for stupid Billy.

Momma closed her eyes in pain and weariness when I started to cry, but she didn’t take me home. Instead, we continued to trudge through the rain. I tried going on a sit-down strike, but Momma grabbed my hand and dragged me along. I was too old to be carried, she informed me, so I was just going to have to walk.

Finally, when I was sure I couldn’t walk another step even with Momma pulling on me, we climbed a set of weathered stone steps. Momma pushed open a door, and I followed her into a cool, dark entryway. It seemed we were finally “there.”

I wiped my dripping hair away from my face as my eyes adjusted to the low light, which seemed to come almost entirely from candles. Ahead of us, a pair of doors were propped open to reveal a long aisle with rows of pews on either side. The rain had darkened the afternoon skies so that only the faintest glow of light shone through the stained glass windows, but a discreet spotlight illuminated a gruesome statue of Christ on the cross.

I shivered in the air-conditioned breeze. Seconds ago, I’d have done anything to get inside out of the rain, and to sit down, but I didn’t like this church. Maybe it was a premonition. Or maybe it was just that I was reliving the memory/dream from my adult perspective, knowing what was going to happen.

Momma led me down the aisle, to a pew in the middle of the church. There were a couple of old ladies sitting at the very front, but other than them we were the only people in the place. Our footsteps echoed, despite the strip of carpet down the center of the aisle. It was then that I realized the baby had finally stopped crying.

Momma nudged me into the pew, and I sat down gratefully, no matter how uneasy the church made me. I thought she’d sit next to me, but she didn’t. She knelt in the aisle, still cradling Billy in her arms. He made a little sound of protest, like he was about to start screaming again, but then stuck his thumb firmly in his mouth instead. The quiet made the patter of the rain on the windows seem loud.

Momma let go of Billy with one hand, and he was too busy sucking his thumb to complain. She brushed my cheek with the back of her hand, and the light glinted off the moisture in her eyes.

“I want you to sit here and be a good girl, Nikki,” she said in a low whisper, the sound barely loud enough to hear over the patter of the rain. “I have to go change Billy’s diaper,” she continued, and her eyes shone even brighter. “I’ll be right back, okay?”

A tear escaped her eye and trickled down her cheek. I didn’t know why she was crying now that both Billy and I had stopped. I knew it was a bad sign, but I didn’t know what to do about it. Momma was supposed to comfort me when I cried, not the other way around. The confusion was more than I could deal with, so I just nodded and didn’t ask why she was so sad.

“I love you so much, baby,” she said, leaning forward so she could plant a soft kiss on my forehead. “Never doubt that. Never.”

When she pulled away from me, tears were streaming down her cheeks. And there was an iridescent glyph on her forehead.

She stroked my wet, tangled hair one last time and stood up. Then she wrapped both arms around Billy, and hurried down the aisle.

I never saw her again.

I awoke with a start and a gasp. I’d dreamed of my abandonment about a zillion times. The details varied here and there, which was what made me wonder how much was really memory, but never before had the dream included a glyph on my mother’s forehead.

I sat up slowly, my head foggy and confused. The bright sunlight of the afternoon had faded to blue twilight while I’d slept, leaving the room in shadows. Still groggy, I reached over and switched on the bedside lamp, squinting in the sudden brightness.

Of course, it made sense for me to dream about my mom having a glyph on her forehead after all I’d gone through in the last twenty-four hours or so. Surely it was nothing more than the power of suggestion.

But what if it wasn’t? Anderson said the Olympians hunted down Descendant families and killed them. What if I’d gotten my divine heritage through my mother’s side of the family? And what if she’d found out the Olympians were after her? Could that explain why she’d abandoned me?

We’d been on that bus a day and a night—if my memory was accurate—which meant she’d traveled hundreds of miles away from our home, before she left me sitting on that church pew. When I’d finally realized she wasn’t coming back and the old ladies at the front of the church had called the police, I was so hysterical I couldn’t even tell them my own name, much less my mother’s. Nor could I tell them where I lived. My mom had made me memorize our address and phone number once, but I didn’t remember it.

Eventually, I calmed down enough to remember the address, but it was just the street address—no city or state. The street name was common enough—Main, or Broad, or something like that—that the police were able to take me to the address, but since it was the wrong city, it didn’t help.

My mother had not only abandoned me, she’d severed all ties to me. I was found so far from where I’d grown up that no one could possibly recognize me, and I was young enough to think my mother’s name was “Momma.” There was no way anyone could identify me, or associate me with my mother in any way. And if anyone was hunting her, if anyone found her, they’d still never have found me .

Most likely, it was just wishful thinking that built this scenario in my mind. After all, my mother hadn’t left Billy at the church. Maybe she didn’t think the old women at the front would have let her leave a crying baby and a four-year-old alone in the pews. Or maybe she’d left Billy somewhere else, hiding her tracks even more.

“Or maybe she just abandoned you because you were too much damn trouble,” I muttered, disgusted with myself for the stupid fantasy. Odds were, my mom had known nothing whatsoever about the Olympians. I couldn’t fathom why she was so desperate to get rid of me—I didn’t become a hellion until I started living in foster care—but there is, sadly, no shortage of women who abandon their children, one way or another. There was no reason to believe my own mother wasn’t just one more.

I felt even moretired now than I had before I’d taken my unintentional nap. I brewed a pot of the terrible in-room coffee, made even more terrible by non-dairy creamer. Then I took another shower, hoping it would clear my head.

It didn’t.

Afterward, I reluctantly turned my phone back on and checked messages. As I’d expected, Anderson had tried calling back a couple of times, though he hadn’t left any voice mails. Also as expected, I had a couple of messages from Steph, wondering where the hell I was and why I wasn’t calling her back. Her third message revealed that her slight concern was well on its way to becoming full-out worry.