Chapter 16
My neck protested with a twinge of pain as I lulled back up in the driver’s seat of my car. I rubbed my dry eyes and the salty trails that itched on my cheeks. Another vehicle pulled in beside my own. An old brown truck.
Diana Hunter. My mom had come. I was torn in two by the hope and dread of seeing her face. I shoved myself out of the car to meet her on cramped legs.
“Mom.”
“Fallon.” Diana was a Hunter, but I never associated her with the family home, and so it took my brain a few moments to overlap the two ideas.
She leaned against the hood of my car to look over the house, and my curiosity was drawn to the thick, worn book tucked under her arm.
A bribe, no doubt, so I politely ignored it. “Should I guess?”
“I’d give you one, but I think you’ve already got the idea.”
“Mmm.”
The screen door opened, and in unison, Diana and I pushed off our resting points and approached, meeting Josephine and Cora at the steps where they looked down at us from the porch.
“Diana,” Cora spoke carefully, like she was dealing with an animal that might snap.
“Come to vouch for your daughter?” Jo had no such reservations. “Get inside. We’ll discuss.”
“Away from Fallon, you mean? She has a right to hear what you think.” Diana was the smallest in stature, but even from the bottom of the stairs, she had power. Jo and Cora communicated silently.
“The girls begin their training after breakfast. We have until then, and we’ll speak out here so as not to distract the Hunters. I’ll fetch Sarah Jane and Imogen.” Josephine went back inside.
“Imogen?” Diana muttered to me. “Isn’t she barely older than you?”
We’d grown up together as a batch of three, me, Jerica, and Imogen, all close in age. After Derrick’s death, after I’d given up, everything had changed between us. Jerica may have come to understand me, but Imogen was a distant stranger to me now.
“Thank you for coming,” I told Diana while I had the chance.
Her smile said it all — this was going to be fun for her.
She hopped up the steps to the porch and went inside holding up the book like a bribe to Cora, who followed after her with quiet squawks.
The door closed again, and I admired my mom’s bravery.
I wished I knew how to take what I wanted the way she did.
I kicked my boot against an overgrown chunk of grass and wished I’d had water to wash away the bitterness in my mouth. Another discussion of my worth was to come. I couldn’t afford to linger on thoughts of being always a shadow of Diana.
A procession of Hunters poured from the house. Jo opened the door for Diana, Cora, Imogen, and Sarah Jane, who were joined now by Carolina and Sandra. Every active mother was here to judge my fate.
“We have one hour to decide,” Jo said. We situated ourselves on the same empty swathe of grass as the previous night, only no chair for me this time. I stood in the circle with them, though not as an equal. “We’ll put it to a vote in the end, and that will be the final decision.”
“Diana’s no mother,” Sandra complained. “Why should she get a say?”
Diana cackled and jammed a finger Imogen’s way. “Why should a girl with no Blessing get a say?”
“I train the girls just as much as any mother!”
Sarah Jane held out a calming palm towards Imogen. “She’s worked hard here. She’ll receive her Blessing in time.”
“Time’s wasting out there in the real world,” Diana said. “Vamps aren’t so picky about sharing power.”
“And we’re nothing like them,” Cora said. “Mary the Mother understood what power is. Not a gift, but a responsibility. The Blessing must be given to Hunters who understand that.”
“Well, my girl understands it. Better than any of us. Trust me.”
“We can’t decide this on trust,” Cora said. “Fallon. There are concerns. You know this. You’ve given up before once it became hard.”
“I did. I lost the man I loved to vampires, and I’d never felt so powerless. But I’m back to fighting again.” I barely recognized my own voice. It hadn’t sounded this way since I was twelve. The world was growing bigger around me, and I was so small under the eyes of all the mothers on the Land.
“She gives up again, she can just give up her powers and pass them along,” Diana said. “I’ll watch over her. Make sure she does what’s right.”
“That’s not how Hunters have ever functioned,” said Sandra, and I was beginning to suspect she wasn’t a fan of Diana. “This is why…” She cut herself off with a frustrated huff.
“Yeah, yeah,” Diana groaned. “It all goes back to me. I did things wrong and had a child of my own. Not sure I ever believed in four hundred years that it had never happened before, but I get it. You can’t blame Fallon for me getting knocked up.”
Diana’s protests didn’t stop that argument from spiraling.
I stood in silence as the mothers argued events of two or three decades ago, delving even into the history of Mary the Mother.
I could feel time passing me by like wind blustering across my skin, and so I clenched my fists and dug my toe into the dirt below.
“None of this has anything to do with me facing the trials.” Silence snapped over the group.
“We can discuss hundreds of years of history for days, but we can’t discuss the future.
I was sixteen years old when I saw my older sister Alayah receive her Blessing.
I wasn’t even seventeen when Carolina brought her body back home to be buried.
Maybe I’ll give up. Maybe I’ll die. Maybe I’ll fail the trials.
Maybe I’ll hunt vampires until it’s time for me to turn in and train the next generation.
I’m here now, though, and there’s nothing more I want than to fight.
I want to help the balance of the world. ”
I shook by the end of my little speech, with fear, with desire, with stubborn tenacity. Whether it had any impact or not, I couldn’t tell. Not even enough time for a breath passed before Imogen was leaping to another point against me.
“What about her fraternizing with vampires?”
“Fraternizing?” Diana scoffed, then laughed in disbelief. “What’s that mean? You think she’s fucking vamps?”
“Diana,” several of the mothers chided.
“What? You think the Hunters that are out there haven’t been drawn in that way by a vampire or two?
We spend our lives learning about them, obsessing over them, hunting them.
Like it or not, they’re not all blind, raging killers.
You go out there, you actively hunt, and you see those lines aren’t as clear as this place would have you believe.
So she talks to the reasonable ones? Big deal. ”
“It wouldn’t be a big deal if she was…” Imogen’s mouth twisted around the objectionable words, “having relations with vampires? That’s just asking to die!”
My hand itched to go to my punctured shoulder, but I held it in place.
I’d never expected the conversation to veer this way, and part of me was just as scandalized as Imogen.
Shame colored my cheeks. I’d had sex with a vampire just yesterday, right before coming here. I couldn’t defend that bizarre choice.
“This is why we shouldn’t have an inexperienced girl who’s never hunted in the real world having a decision in Fallon’s future,” Diana said.
“Hunters have vampire friends. Hunters fuck vampires. Ooh, dirty little secret, out there in the open. Deny it all you want, but don’t hold it against Fallon for having a harmless little vamp friend. ”
“Harmless,” Imogen mumbled. I wasn’t the only one sweeping a guilty gaze at the faces around me. Huh. Could that have been the truth? Had some of these mothers that I’d looked up to as pillars of righteousness slept with vampires?
“Have we heard all the concerns?” Diana clapped once for attention.
“We get it. Fallon got knocked down when she lost her boyfriend. She’s back up now, and she’s been training and hunting enough to prove her commitment.
She’s got enough real-world smarts to keep a few vamps in her pocket.
She’ll make a magnificent Hunter with the power that comes from Mary’s Blessing.
In the end, it’s up to the old lady, isn’t it?
Put Fallon to the test and see what happens. Ready to vote?”
“There’s still the concern of all concerns,” said Sarah Jane, with the air of being the oldest and wisest. “You have friends. Connections. A home. The time will come — and yes, it will come, it always comes — when you have to sacrifice one of them. All of them, even. Be it by stake or by the necessity of distance. So the question is, are you willing to sacrifice it all, after years of comfort living a normal life?”
For the first time, I glanced at Diana to actively seek help, but her eyes revealed the same question as every other woman around me. This was what it meant. In the end, I was on my own.
“I understand.” That little girl voice came out of me again.
“I do…have people I love. People who aren’t Hunters.
” I looked to the damp, green ground and closed my eyes, picturing in all the detail I could muster what it might be like to have to kill one of the Hopes if they turned.
If all of Gabriel Hope’s kindness turned to selfish demand, if Nico’s warm concern became ice, if Amanda’s funny sass transformed to cruelty, if those I loved were stolen and replaced by evil.
I nodded. I could do it. And if I had to leave them behind for their own safety? I’d done so already this year. I could do it again, likely would do it again once I could go back to Cibola. It was time for me to leave the ranch anyway.
I looked up at the circle of mothers, and I was calm enough now to see concern and love for me instead of solely the cold judgment.
“I know the true answer of my grit won’t ever come until it’s put to the test. I can tell you that I’d stake someone I love who has turned into a killer, and I really like to think I would.
For them. I know that out there in the world to be a Hunter is to be on my own.
Alone as part of a magnificent group of warriors.
Part of the light. I’ll do it. And when the time comes, I’ll come back here as a mother to guide young Hunters. ”
“If you want to live long enough to return to the family,” Sarah Jane spoke, “you must be ready and willing to pay the hardest of prices. Every mother here and every Hunter who has passed on understands that truth.”
I bowed my head in thanks to Sarah Jane.
She’d always been an intimidating figure, so perfect in her role as mother it was like she was born with a sliver of Mary’s soul herself, the way I’d been born with a small shard of Diana’s gift.
Sarah Jane was human like all the Hunters, and it had taken me coming back home as an adult for my own illusions to fall away.
“Anything else you want to say, Fallon?” Josephine asked.
There wasn’t time. I wasn’t a woman of words, and I knew it. I preferred action. “Just… thank you. For your time. For raising me to be who I am. That’s all that’s left to say, really.”
“She’s a good girl. Smart, cunning, strong, and she knows what’s right,” Diana said. “She won’t disappoint you. She’s a fighter.”
Her bold words didn’t have the effect on me she’d likely intended.
Diana was so much to live up to. All I’d done since meeting her was disappoint the Hunters.
It seemed to be my fate to fall short of the expectations placed on me as Diana’s daughter.
But the loose circle broke apart, and I stayed behind while Jo led them away for a private discussion.
I could barely keep myself still any longer.
Doubt crawled beneath my skin. I’d given up so much for this already.
I’d bet my job and relationships on this distant chance.
And if it were to work out, it wasn’t even going to be through my own efforts alone.
I would be able to confront the trials only because of Diana fighting for me.
That bitter doubt would eat away at my strength and resolve if I let it.
I tongued the inside of my cheek where I’d chewed it raw without even realizing. I set my teeth together to stop myself.
I was a Hunter. No matter what, whether I was Blessed or not, in the end I was a Hunter, and I would survive.
The mothers broke apart less than five minutes later, and a protest jumped from my lungs, luckily to be stopped by my lips.
How had that been long enough to decide my fate?
I forced my arms to my sides and fell into a strong stance, legs braced far enough apart for balance, my spine straight.
Even if my dreams were dashed again, I was still proud of how far I’d come.
I searched the faces for answers, but Josephine was the only one who approached.
“We’ve come to a decision.”