Chapter 7 #2
Staring at her for the longest time, her expression even, calm, cool, I finally gathered the nerve to ask, “Where- Where is this coming from? Why are you doing this? What’s in it for you?”
Grimacing, Sunny took my hand in hers, her other hand coming over mine to pat the top. “Sweetie, I know it’s a lot to take in. It’s not easy to be hit with it like this but you have a right to know.”
“You really believe this,” I breathed as I tore my hand from hers and stood.
“Is it really that hard to believe?” With a shrug, she smiled.
“You didn’t honestly believe my nonsense about the boys and my Forest having the worst case of hypertrichosis in existence to date, did you?
I mean, look at them! They’re milder forms of a full bred Lo denaii.
My Forest, his mother part Zhubarbeast, his father half human, and our boys are half Lepyr, Coniculepyr, from their mother, from me, and part Lo denaii, human, and Zhubarbeast from my Forest.”
“Right. So… now I’m expected to believe you’re part of the alien Easter bunny weirdness too, I’m assuming?
Your vegetables are made gargantuan from what, advanced alien knowledge or something, is that the trick?
Where are you hiding the fur and ears? Do you shave head to toe every day?
Had plastic surgeries to make your appearance more humanlike?
Huh? And what, you traded in your long ears for human ones?
“Well, actually, see that’s what I was getting at,” she calmly went on. “It’s what happened to you that we decided not to go through with the procedure for the boys.” With a small smile, she added, “My Forest has a nose for gardening, you could say, on the veggie front.”
“Procedure?”
At the look on my face, she hurried on. “It was supposed to be a simple procedure but, uh, well, there was an unfortunate circumstance and it left you, uh, well, you sorta, kinda, lost any memories leading up to the, uh, accident and that’s when your hair started falling out.
” Sunny nodded like she thought the stunned stupid look on my face had anything to do with me actually buying any of that.
“Alopecia. That’s why my hair started falling out,” I muttered quietly, firmly.
“Do you remember anything before that?” she asked, curious. Large blue eyes with shots of green at the centers studied me intently.
“I remember Cy, Elm, Birch, us all playing together, my parents,” I blurted. That was, admittedly, about all I really recalled of anything before I started losing my hair, now that I thought about it. It’s pretty normal to forget very young memories. I never thought anything of it.
“You remembered the boys?” she chirped happily, like this pleased her immensely. “She never told us you remembered the boys. She made it sound like a total blank out but for your parents. Hm.”
“And then you turned the rest of my life shortly after the terrible teens a massive block of bullshit, total bullshit thereafter, when you banned the guys from ever seeing or speaking to me,” I huffed out.
“Do you have any idea what that was like? You took my best friends in the entire world from me. I was devastated.”
Sunny blinked, her mouth dropped open, then she shut her trap with an audible snap. “I- Is that what you think?” She truly looked taken aback.
Was she seriously just going to lie about forbidding them from seeing me? Brow furrowing in a scowl, she murmured softly, “Sweetie, is that what your parents told you?”
“It’s the truth, isn’t it?” I refrained from throwing Elm under the bus, god knows why.
Her frown was a full blown scowl now. “May I see those papers with the symbols on them?” It was a weird ask but I gamely handed them over. If it would get her to leave sooner, then all the better.
Scouring over them, she started to mumble under her breath and then glanced up and asked for a pen and paper.
“Now, I’m not an expert in Lo denaii but I believe this should about cover it, and this is for those.
” Her hand lifted and she pointed to the first stack of papers, scribbled on from front to back.
“They’re correspondence,” she told me. “Between Forest and your father, and your father and mother and myself.”
Standing, she wiped invisible dust off her pants and adjusted her purse over her shoulder.
“Obviously, you have thoughts on all of this, reservations, naturally, and I don’t blame you, honey, but those,” reaching out, she tapped the papers, “those are a good start at setting everything to rights. I’m just so darn sorry it all had to come out this way. ”
“And how, exactly, did this little accident of mine cause hair loss and amnesia? What were they trying to do to me and how were they trying to do it?” That should poke holes in her nonsense.
Her smile was small, not quite reaching her eyes. “They’d have given you the stars if they could. They loved you very much.”
Folding my arms over my chest, hugging my middle, I stood there, stared, waited.
“There is a procedure, the Grays are familiar with it, our understanding of it is rudimentary at best, in its infancy for Lepyrs. They had no way of knowing you would be one of the rare few who couldn’t go through with the procedure.
They’d never tried it with a being of Creeson Nine before.
Needless to say, it didn’t work, and that’s exactly why we decided not to try it for the boys.
It could mean all of Creeson Nine are sensitive to it and would have a similar outcome. ”
“I think you should leave,” I muttered softly.
She wasn’t drunk or high, she was certifiable, is what she was.
“Oh, but, honey-”
“I said leave!” I shouted. My hand was shaking as it shot up and pointed to the door.
She looked as teary eyed as I was but she nodded her understanding and quickly made herself scarce.
Dumping my dish into the sink, I grabbed a soda and trudged my way into the living room.
Slumping down into the couch, I shoved my face into my hands and groaned.
Letting out a deep breath, my hands dropped limply to my sides and my gaze strayed about the room.
Staring down into the fire in disbelief, I listened as Sunny walked down the back steps, then listened for the sound of her SUV starting up and leaving.
This was nuts. Absolutely cuckoo.
My gaze darted back towards the office.
Fuck me. The seed was planted.
With a growl, I hopped up and marched off to Dad’s office. Snatching up the keys she’s written, I grabbed the first stack of papers and got to work.
Driven by anger, I did my best work, apparently. It was dark by the time I’d deciphered the last letter, but I’d done it.
I had to read through them all twice just to be sure.
Turned out, if those papers in Dad’s handwriting were to be believed, Sunny and Forest were not the ones who kept me and the Tree boys apart, separating me from my best friend and his kin. It was my parents.
The revelation stunned me and pained me in equal measure. It was an awful betrayal.
Mom thought I needed a chance at a normal life, possibly with a human after all that had happened to me.
Sunny’s letters, from the similar style to her human writings as her and Forest’s handwriting was determined, was her begging them not to separate us, that it could be disastrous, that there were signs my mates might be amongst her three boys.
My parents thought I might be better off with a single life mate, and that they didn’t want me ostracized even more for being even more different in this world than I already was. Wow. Just… ow and wow, thanks a lot Mom and Dad.
This was nuts. None of this is real! My dad wasn’t a- a Yeti person! Mom was anything but alien-bunny-like! She didn’t even run— she had bad knees!
It became my obsession then, completely emptying out Dad’s office, searching for more letters. I wasn’t disappointed.
Once more I fell asleep at Dad’s desk, working through the very last stack of alien to alien correspondence. These letters were from before I was born, so old some of the writing had faded.
Sunny had triplets? The boys weren’t triplets, they were a yearish apart each. So where were these triplets, or am I to believe Elm, Cy, and Birch were all born from the same bunch and pretended to be different ages?
Weird dreams followed me over, of alien Easter bunny people, charging Yetis, and Gray aliens making people’s hair fall out. My dreams were even stranger than the day I’d had. I was too dead tired to realize they were dreams, slipping from one nightmare scenario to another.