Chapter 27 #2
Wallace looked at her like she’d just grown three heads. She remembered how terrified she felt confessing that to him—not only because she knew he’d be skeptical, but also because what if he felt betrayed, terrified, alienated?
What if he saw his own mother as an irredeemable monster?
What if he went to school the next day, and the police were at her door that afternoon?
She could make a lot of problems go away with money. But you can’t buy your way into your child’s heart.
“Is this a joke?” was all he had said in response.
She gave him a tight smile. “No, it’s not a joke.”
She knew any son of hers would require empirical proof. So, she had been prepared for this line of questioning. She absolutely avoided using her powers around him at all costs, but she had prepared an illustration of them that wouldn’t be too dangerous.
While her powers were primarily mental, they had a physical manifestation. They typically didn’t injure living creatures, but the reverberations they caused while summoned could impact surroundings—walls, chairs, buildings. It was hard to explain.
So, in the spirit of demonstrating, she snatched a newspaper from the foyer, put it on the floor a few feet away, and then told Wallace to get behind her.
Then she swallowed, and thought back in time. She didn’t pick out an exact memory. She just yanked at something that felt vaguely painful, like taking a thumbtack out of her foot, and then directed that brief fury at the newspaper.
Black wisps of smoke erupted around it, and then tore it to pieces.
Naturally, Wallace had a thousand questions after that. She’d only answered half of them.
From then on, he was introduced to the world of vampires—albeit in a deeply sheltered sort of way. No one was allowed to know about her special boy.
And the most important way to ensure that? Not revealing mommy’s identity to anyone. Because if one human knew, then another human knew. And then eventually it would make its way to a vampire, and Wallace would become, at best, bait.
At worst, dead.
All of this lived in Yasmine’s mind as she sipped Earl Grey, and gazed at the locked bedroom door.
She could hear the loud music that Jason was playing inside, as she’d asked him to do.
Wallace had been upset with her over her shutting him away for the time being, but then she’d told him it was about Rebecca, and he’d finally complied.
"What do you mean someone has Rebecca?" Wallace said. “Like, they just took her? She’s not the most easily takeable person. I can’t imagine her not putting up a fight.”
Yasmine involuntarily glanced in Bella's direction.
Where she had been spritely before, obviously excited to meet Yasmine's son, she was now completely dejected, sinking into her seat like she wanted to be invisible.
Yasmine could tell she felt guilty for what happened, but it wasn't her fault.
"You don't need all the details," Yasmine said, looking back at Wallace. "It's a vampire clan. One that wasn't really on my radar until now. They took her because they're trying to get to the contract. Do you remember what contract I’m talking about?"
Wallace’s eyebrows rose. That was thankfully enough to get him off the topic.
"Of course I do. It's only the most terrifying thing Catrina Maroven ever created,” he muttered. “Aside from Sylvia, of course.”
Yasmine nodded in agreement.
“And do you still have those… CDs I gave you? Or did you toss them too?"
Yasmine tried and failed to keep the hurt out of her voice.
It was stupid. He was a young man discovering his tastes. Even if they were questionable, he'd only had twenty-something years to develop them.
She'd had a thousand years to become this discerning.
But it still hurt. She’d felt excited to give him things for his apartment. To think that they might have been thrown in a landfill, or donated to a thrift shop…
"Of course I still have them," he said quietly, looking at her with gentle eyes. "Do you think I would ever throw your things out?"
Yasmine's heart clenched. He rose from his seat, beckoning them toward one of the doors on the far side of the kitchen. She’d never been in that room before. She thought it was some kind of broom closet, or a laundry space.
But it was a small office. It had a simple desk, a laptop, an ergonomic chair. And on the walls—every painting Yasmine had lent him. Every book he'd taken from Albany. Even the ones she'd read to him as a kid, all sorted alphabetically.
Yasmine immediately melted.
He leaned down to reach for something on his bookshelf, and pulled out a rack of CDs. There were about seven of them. Titles were inked in sharpie on top of each. Some of them were school plays Wallace had been in, others were home films.
"I don't have a computer that can play these anymore," he said. "But you can have them."
Bella, leaning on the doorway, narrowed her eyes as Wallace held out the disc to Yasmine.
"I’m sorry to intrude, but I can’t help myself—these are relevant how, exactly?"
Wallace and Yasmine shared a small smile.
"I don't know,” he said.
Yasmine said, "And neither do I."
There was one facet of Yasmine’s powers that she used very sparingly.
Which was, when she wanted to, she could make people forget things.
It didn't work quite the same way as Sylvia's powers. She couldn't Suggest fake information into people's minds, but she could warp the fences around certain memories, close them off, re-open them.
It was how she allowed Aster to access the repressed, gated off sections of her mind back at Richard’s funeral. Anything that had a fear attached to it, or a strong emotion, she could repress and manipulate. Both in herself, and in other people.
She had suspected that was the strategy she'd taken here. Although she couldn't remember where the contract was stored, or why Wallace’s CDs were relevant to it, she knew they were. It was a strategy to make torture or mind-tampering techniques less useful. If someone wanted to know about the contract, even the best of the best like Dr. Vey wouldn’t be able to see much more than a picture of a CD in her head.
It wasn't a foolproof strategy, but it had held up so far.
"Bella and I can watch through these and figure out what's relevant,” Yasmine said, taking the CD stack. "Meanwhile, I'm going to send a car up to retrieve you later this afternoon. Don’t worry, I know you get carsick, so it’s the closest bunker in the area. The one in Allentown. It’ll only take an hour or two to get there. ”
Wallace froze, his smile dropping.
"...What?" he said quietly. "What are you talking about?"
"Well, you're going to have to go underground for a bit, darling," she said, taking a step closer to him so she could squeeze his hand. "Your life is in danger."
He let out a humorless laugh, snapping his arm to his chest.
“Mom, I have a job now. A real one, not some nepotism bullshit where I have to clean up Tommy’s messes,” he said.
“And the deadline for our next project is in two weeks. I can't just up and leave. What would my boss think? My coworkers? I care about their opinion of me. And I don’t want to pretend to be sick again.”
Yasmine’s mouth fell open in disbelief. His frustration stabbed her straight in the chest, and it scared her.
Because he knew she wouldn’t ask this lightly. Every time in the past that she'd told him to go dark for a while, he complied. He understood the danger and he'd gone along with it. But there was a new defiant fire in his eyes that she didn't recognize.
It made her realize just how little time they'd spent together in the last few months. When had he changed so drastically? When had he grown such a backbone?
She found herself feeling as proud as she was terrified.