The next part was lost to the clang of the teakettle in the sink and the shhhh of running water as she filled it.
“…and they ruin it all! One gets herself sterilized, and the other can’t keep her pants buttoned!” She slammed the kettle down on one of the front burners, then lit the gas beneath it and turned the flames up so high they licked the side of the kettle, baking the peeling paint.
“Worthless!” My mother threw open the cabinet over the toaster, then cursed and slammed it shut. “Where’s the tea?” she demanded, whirling on me. I didn’t think she’d even noticed me there.
“We’re out.” We’d been out of tea for eight months, since she’d stopped drinking it, at least at home. Since she’d stopped eating, talking, and coming out of her room even to yell at us. Over the past year, her angry, resentful tirades had faded into listless neglect as my mother retreated into her own head, into her room, and into nights spent out and days spent sleeping. Or unconscious. Or both.
“Do you have any idea what youth is worth?” she demanded, as if she’d already forgotten the tea.
I shook my head and backed into the living room when she stomped closer, her eyes wild, wisps of pale hair floating around her face as if they were so thin gravity couldn’t touch them.
“Gold, Nina. Youth is the gold setting, and innocence is the glittering diamond in the center. Throwing your own away wasn’t enough, was it? You had to let her do it too. This is your fault.” She wagged one bony finger at me. “All she had to do was keep her skirt down for a few…more…years.” My mother turned back to the kitchen and threw open another cabinet. “She would have been enough to keep me going. To keep us going. But now she’s worth half the listing price. Worth nothing, if we can’t get that thing out of her.”
“What? Mom, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I understood the individual words, but they made no sense together. No sense I wanted to see, anyway. Yet with each word she spoke—each mention of worth, and listing price—the goose bumps on my arms grew taller. Fatter.
“Of course you don’t. Because she’s the smart one. You’re the fighter and she’s the thinker, but none of that matters now. It never mattered, but you never figured that out. Because you’re not the thinker. But that’s okay, because I don’t need you to think.”
She spun again, so fast she should have lost her balance, but she didn’t fall. Somehow, though her thin frame lacked both grace and stability, her balance was flawless and her strength was…terrifying.
What the hell was she on?
“Keys…” She opened drawer after drawer, only to slam them shut again when she couldn’t find what she wanted. “Where the hell are my keys?”
“Mom, you can’t drive. You’re…not well.”
“Not well!” Feverish laughter bubbled out of her mouth and spilled into the room. It seemed to bounce off the walls and strike my skull at exactly the wrong angle. “I’m not well. I haven’t been well in a long time. But that’s about to change.” She closed her eyes, and when she opened them again, her gaze pinned me to the spot where I stood. “Fine. You drive.”
“I can’t.” Because I’d sold the car. “Why?” I demanded through clenched teeth, when the anger and confusion and fear became too much to think through. Too much to breathe through. And I only realized in retrospect that I wasn’t asking about her tantrum, or about what she was trying to make Melanie do. “Why did you have us in the first place? You don’t want us. You don’t even like us. So why the hell are we here?”
My mother turned to me slowly. Her eyes flashed again like they had in the hall, as if they were reflecting some light source I couldn’t see.
“He made you, didn’t he?” I guessed in a horrified half whisper. “My dad. He made you have us, didn’t he?”
In my mind—in the stories I’d made up for Melanie when we were little—that was always how it went. Our father fell in love with our mother a long time ago, when she was still young and beautiful. Long before the drugs ruined her body and fried her brain. She was his weakness—the only flaw in a kind, caring man who’d loved us until the day he’d died, when Mellie was still a baby.
I had no memory of him—nothing to contradict the story the way I told it.
“Your dad?” She laughed again, as if the very concept were ridiculous. “Nina, you never had a dad. I married Oliver to keep the Church out of my uterus, but he wasn’t your father. Your father was a very special man with a very special gift, and it took me almost two years to find him. I danced and touched and flirted, and he made a small genetic donation, and Oliver—Melanie’s father—never suspected a thing.” Her gaze was colder and harder than I’d ever seen it, and then suddenly it was blurred by the tears filling my eyes. “Oliver wanted you to be his. I needed you to be someone else’s. But ultimately, you were mine.” Her eyes narrowed. “You are mine.”
My blood boiled in response to the lies she was spewing. They were lies. They had to be. “You’re crazy. The drugs have finally baked your brain.”
“I’m not an addict, Nina.” The kettle whistled, and she took it off the burner without a pot holder. The handle left an angry red mark on her palm, but she didn’t seem to feel it. “Drugs didn’t do this to me.” Her sweeping gesture took in her entire body. Then she turned and stood on her toes to pull a box from the top cabinet, and her shirt rose to reveal emaciated thighs.
I turned off the burner while she set the box on the countertop, flipped open the torn cardboard lid, then pulled out a white pill bottle. “Vitamin E, for my skin and my immune system.” She set the bottle on the counter, then dug out another one. “Vitamin C, to regenerate antioxidants and firm up collagen. Can’t you see how well it’s working?
“Vitamin K.” She set another bottle on the counter, then dug out a fourth and a fifth and a sixth. “Calcium. Niacin. Vitamin A. The rest of these you’ve probably never heard of.” She tilted the box so I could see another half-dozen bottles inside. “The drugs I take are to slow what’s happening to my body, and I’m paying on credit. Which means that someday I’ll have to make good on my debts. You would have figured it all out by now if you were smarter. Your sister would have figured it out if she were older. But I managed to create the perfect combination of youth and ignorance with the two of you. I probably couldn’t do it again if I tried.”
She looked at me then. Really looked at me, studying my features like she hadn’t in years. Maybe ever. And somehow, her scrutiny was even scarier than her neglect had been. “You were perfect, and you never even knew it. You were my perfect, lovely little shell, just waiting to mature. Beautiful on the outside. Flawless on the inside. Until you weren’t.”
For just a moment, as I tried to puzzle through the indecipherable tangle of sentences that dangled from her tongue, I thought she might cry. Her eyes were damp. Sad.
But then her gaze went hard and her jaw clenched in anger. “I drank half a bottle of vodka the day I got the call. My daughter had been declared unfit for reproduction. They’d already snipped your tubes and tied neat little knots in our future by the time they bothered to tell me. Over a runny nose and flat feet! There was nothing I could do.”
My head spun. I backed away from her until my calves hit the couch, and then I sat, because the alternative was to collapse on the floor.
I’d wanted my mother that day like I’d never wanted her before or since. When I woke up in my infirmary bed, near the end of the line of girls all waking to the same devastating realization, I’d wanted my mother to hold me. To hug me and tell me that everything would be okay. That they could come at me with scalpels and sutures and sever my bloodline along with my fallopian tubes, but they could never cut out my thoughts, and they could only kill my dreams if I let them.
I still had worth. I still had hope. My future was whatever I wanted to make of it.
That was what the other mothers said to their newly sterile fifteen-year-old daughters. I could hear them. But the chair by my bed held only my little sister, her
eyes as wide as saucers and as wet as the ocean. She was as scared as I was angry, and together we could only cry.
“You ruined everything for us that day,” my mother spat. “I planned for you, and I saved for you, and I carried you so carefully. You and your descendants would have been my future—a long line of made-to-order hosts. A genetic gift to myself. My legacy. Instead, you got yourself sterilized, ruining decades of planning, and your sister, whose value depended entirely on youth and purity, got herself knocked up. You’re a perfect pair, the two of you—beautiful and largely worthless. An exquisite catastrophe.”
I couldn’t make any sense of that last bit, because the first part kept playing in my head.
You ruined everything for us that day.
Had I? Had my sterilization been the trigger for our mother’s descent into depression and neglect? And madness, evidently? Was I the reason she’d stopped even trying to be a parent?
My hands were damp with nervous sweat, so I wiped them on my jeans, but I couldn’t do anything about the ache deep in my chest.
“Nina?” Melanie said, and I looked up to find her standing in the middle of the living room in jeans and a dark blue shirt, staring past me at our mother, who now clutched her car keys in her burned right hand. “What is she saying?”
I opened my mouth to tell her that everything would be okay, but the words melted like sugar on my tongue—sweet yet insubstantial.
“I’m explaining the state of things to your sister.” Our mother turned back to the teakettle. “Nina’s a little slow today, but I think she’s finally starting to understand just how badly the two of you have screwed things up for our happy family. But mostly for me.”
Listing price. Made-to-order hosts. Genetic donation.
A picture was forming in my head, but it wouldn’t come into focus.
“Fifteen is young.” Mom was talking to herself now, as if she’d just thought of something new, but I couldn’t even process what she’d already thrown at me, much less whatever screwed-up epiphany she was having. “Maybe youth will balance out a loss of innocence. Some of it, anyway.” She whirled around then and eyed Melanie as she’d eyed me minutes earlier. “Thin but well shaped. Pretty,” she muttered, and her gaze lost focus again. “Of course she’s pretty. Her genes were carefully selected. This one will age well if she’s not overworked.” She blinked, and her gaze focused on Melanie again. “You might still be worth something after all.”
“Nina…?” Mellie was close to panic, and I wanted to help her, but I was confused. Lost and drifting in a sea of words that made no sense. Dots I couldn’t connect.
“I could crunch the numbers,” Mom continued, wandering around the kitchen now as if we weren’t even there. “The profit margin is narrow, and I’ll need a new genetic donor”—she glanced at me, and chills shot through every bone in my body—“but it’s not a total loss. I’ll just have to get a credit extension…” Her gaze fell on Mellie again, and my sister started to tremble. “Assuming I get fair market value.”
And she must have been right about Melanie being the smart one, because my little sister figured it out first. Part of it, anyway. I could tell from the raw horror shining in her eyes and the way she backed away from us slowly, as if she were afraid to move too far, too fast, and trigger some sort of predatory instinct in our mother.
“No…,” Melanie moaned. “Nina, she’s going to sell me.”
“What?” How could you sell a person? Who would buy a fifteen-year-old girl?
Then I remembered Dale-the-dick and his favorite form of currency, and my blood curdled in my veins. No…
“You would sell your own daughter?” Melanie whispered, but her angry gaze was much bolder than her voice. Her eyes demanded answers.
Our mother laughed, and the cruel sound resonated in every cell in my body. “I don’t have daughters. I have very carefully conceived investments. You were born to be sold.” Then she turned to me. “And you to be bred. Strange how sometimes life just laughs in your face, isn’t it?”
“She’s crazy,” I whispered, edging toward Melanie with my arms out, as if I could shield her. Our mother had lost what was left of her mind. And her heart. What kind of parent would sell her own child?
And we were her children. Melanie had her fair hair and skin. I had her eyes, pale blue, and virtually colorless when we got angry.
Mellie only shook her head. “Not crazy, Nina. She’s possessed.”
An ice-cold lump of terror fell into my stomach and lodged there.
It wasn’t possible. Not in New Temperance. Not half a mile from the school and less than two miles from a worship center. Not in my own home.
The news reported the occasional isolated domestic possession, along with footage of black cassock–clad exorcists sent in to deal with the problem, but there hadn’t been a documented possession in New Temperance since Clare Parker, and few people believed she really was possessed. Clare’s execution was a display of power. A threat to all future sinners. And it had worked.
But my mother was…something else.
She smiled at me slowly, and her eyes flashed. I knew in that instant that Melanie was right.
My mom was a demon.
My mother watched me from across the kitchen doorway, and my heart felt like it was going to explode. It was beating too fast, and everything in my living room looked really crisp and clear, as if my eyes were working better than my other senses. As if they could make up for not seeing what had been there all along.
My sister’s feet whispered on the worn carpet behind me as we both retreated slowly. Suddenly my hands felt empty. I felt like I should be holding a weapon now that I knew my mother was a demon, but that didn’t make much sense. She’d been a demon for who knew how long, and I’d never needed a weapon before.
But then, she’d had nothing to fear before we knew her secret.
“Mellie, go next door and use the phone.” I was whispering, but my voice felt like a hammer bludgeoning fragile silence in the wake of our demonic discovery. “Call the Church.”
“Yes, call them.” My mother’s smile was slow and cold, and it was all for Melanie. “They’ll probably set me on fire around the same time they scrape the embryo from your womb. Or maybe they’ll just cut the whole thing out of you. Won’t have to worry about unauthorized breeding if you haven’t got the parts for it, huh?”
“Melanie, go,” I said, but I could feel her behind me, so close I could smell her shampoo, and I could practically taste her fear. “They won’t do that.” They wouldn’t kill the baby. But they would use it against her, trading its life for her service and obedience.
They would make an example of her. Of both of us. They’d say we should have known. They wouldn’t believe that my mother had been possessed right under my nose and I’d had no idea. I could hardly believe that myself.
I’d seen the withdrawal from life, the neglect and disinterest, and the obvious illness, yet demonic possession had never occurred to me. Why? Why did I see drug use instead? Because the changes happened slowly?
Or because there wasn’t really much of a change at all?
And that was when I truly started to understand the scope of the lie we’d been living. My mother hadn’t changed because she was possessed. She’d changed because she was deteriorating. Because her soul was almost completely devoured and her health was starting to decline. Her body was starting to mutate.
To degenerate.
But…it should take years for a possessed host to become a degenerate. Nearly two decades, under optimal circumstances. There was no telling how long our mother had been in the possession of the Unclean.
For a moment, that thought almost made me happy, because it offered relief. The problem wasn’t that we were unlovable; it was that our mother wasn’t capable of love. Because she wasn’t our mother. She wasn’t even human.
Then that thought began to resonate, and I couldn’t let it go, even though interrogating a demon was a really bad idea.
/>
“How long?” I asked as Melanie tugged me backward. Away from the demon.
How long had Leona Kane’s body been possessed by the monster calling itself our mother? Since her descent into drug-fueled withdrawal from life? Since before my sterilization? Since my third-grade recital?
Longer? It had to be longer. Degenerates aren’t built in a day.
“Ask your sister,” the demon in my mother’s skin said. “I think she’s finally figured it out.”
“Mel?” I squeezed her hand. I wanted to look at her—to see for myself if she knew something I didn’t—but I couldn’t afford to take my focus from the demon. “How long, Mellie?”
“Always,” Melanie whispered, and fresh horror washed over me. “Or very close to it.”
Our mother’s head nodded, as if the demon behind her eyes was proud of at least one of its…investments. “I always knew she was the smart one.” Her gaze found me again. “Fortunately, I don’t need you for your brain.”
“We were never supposed to be her children,” Mellie continued in a horrified, haunted voice. “We’re her business. Souls to steal. Bodies to wear. Right?”
“In your case, a body to sell,” the demon corrected, and Melanie shuddered all over. “Nina is my next host, born and bred for that very purpose. But you, dear Melanie, are an investment. My payment plan. You can’t imagine what a young, healthy body is worth to the right people.” And by people, of course, she meant demons. She shrugged, and the gesture looked painful, as if her joints resisted the motion. “You would have been worth more as an eighteen-year-old virgin—of legal age—but at least you’re not a total loss. I’ll just consider this a lesson learned. Next time, staple the investment’s knees together.”
“Next time?” I was cold with shock. My teeth wanted to chatter. “You’re going to do this again?” Stop talking and run. Every survival instinct I had was demanding my retreat. But I had to know. “Have you done this before? Did you breed our mother for this?” Demons could not be born, nor could they age. They could only move from host to host as each body wore out, consuming one irreplaceable soul after another. Had this demon conceived and raised our real mom, only to steal her body and soul when she came of age?