Fathom (Mermaids of Montana #3) - Elsa Jade Page 0,39
in her seat. “Well, I’m not as big as you, not now, not then. And I didn’t know what to do, so I ran all the way home. Still in my dancing shoes. I waited the rest of the night, but Mom never came back.” She let her hands fall limp into her lap, staring down. “The next morning, someone knocked. From my bedroom window, I saw the police cruiser. I snuck out the back and kept running. I didn’t know who to go to or where. I bought a one-way bus ticket to get as far as I could go. Didn’t sleep for three nights, but that’s when I realized that she’d been protecting me the whole time, moving whenever things got too strange, taking me to doctors and naturopaths and shamans, burning through the savings we had trying to figure out why her little girl was burning. I wanted to leave messages at places where she worked, the few friends we had, but I didn’t know what to say so the cops couldn’t track me down, and I didn’t know how else to find her. I thought maybe she died in the fire. Was in jail because of me. Finally, when I couldn’t take anymore, I turned myself in. It had been almost a year, and the detective I talked to said that the case had been closed. When I tried to tell him it was me who sometimes ignited, he called for a psychiatric hold.” She rubbed her palm her thighs, as if she might kindle another zap. “At least that taught me to keep my worries to myself. I also learned that Jason had gotten out of the fire unhurt. He was too drunk to remember what happened.” She glanced away. “And he never mentioned me at all.”
Sting was silent for so long, she realized that while she’d been venting she hadn’t explained any of the concepts that probably weren’t being fully translated by his tech or his training.
Finally he reached into one of the many pockets of his battle skin and withdrew an object no bigger than her thumbnail. It looked like a seashell, but shiny like metal. He rolled it between his fingers. “On one of my deepest dives, when my trainers in the weapons conclave sought to test my bones against the greatest pressures of the dark, I found this.” He held it out to her in the flat of his hand.
She just looked at it, but when he didn’t move, she finally plucked it from his palm. “It’s…small. I suppose most things are at that depth.”
“But unbroken.” Again he waited.
Oh, she got what he was implying, she just wasn’t sure she believed it. She might not be broken, exactly, but neither was a raging wildfire. It was only following its own nature—but it could still kill.
Rather than answer, she held the shell out to him. He didn’t reach to take it, and though she wasn’t as strong as him, she could be as stubborn. When she twitched her fingers as if about to drop the tiny shell, he flinched first and extended his hand. Though the shell looked very crushable against his big hand, the webbing halfway up his knuckles formed a wide nest to hold it.
“I didn’t know what I was back then, and yeah, maybe it was bad. But I know now, and it’s only made things worse.”
“Then maybe if you go back to the source.” He started the car. “So how do I get to this Motel Eleven?”
She gritted her teeth. Maybe he was stronger and more stubborn. More to the point, maybe he was right. Whether the woman who had contacted Evens regarding the Wavercrest syndrome was her mother or not, she deserved to have whatever answers were available. She gestured ahead of them. “Take a left up there. But seriously, this time you have to stay in the car.”
He didn’t answer—she was going to lose this one again, wasn’t she?—and followed her directions to the motel. It was nothing like the fancy hotel where she’d last seen her mother. The Motel Eleven was just a classic single-story, small-town, short-stay motel catering to an itinerant clientele of long-haul truckers exceeding their hours, RVers in temporary need of a bathroom that didn’t move, and the kind of people who paid cash and listed a license plate too shiny for the amount of wear and tear on the vehicle in question.
For a long moment, she sat frozen in her seat—chilled