Downcast (33 page)

"Stop this now, Deborah," Haley called out to my mom, who was slowly walking towards him across the field, each footstep a heavy, earth-shaking boom, her face twisted in a monstrous mask.

"You have no dominion over me!" she screeched, raising her arms and setting the field ablaze in a sudden rush of fire.

Haley flinched at the fire but held his ground. His expression grew taut as he raised his hand and brought death to the fire, winking it out of existence and turning the grass to ash.

"I do not want to hurt you," he answered. "But, that is for Stephanie's sake. She loves you, despite your betrayal, despite your selfish possession of her, all these thousands of centuries. But, you never loved her. You only wanted her power."

"She is my daughter! She is my other half, not you, oh King of the Dead!"

"No, your power comes from her. My power is my own, and I am the balance to her. Together, we are the rhythm and pattern of the universe."

Mom screamed and the soil itself violently heaved up, throwing Haley into the air and sending him crashing down to the ground.

"Haley!" I cried out, anguish fusing with my rage.

Mom turned to me at the sound of my voice, her face becoming a mask of surprise at the sight of me.

"What has he done to you?" she gasped. "You are... you are dangerous! You are undone! You must come with me. I will help you."

"No, Mother," I said coldly. "I will not go with you. Ever again. You are right. I am dangerous, but you are the one who is in the most danger from me. Look around you. Look at what you have done. All this destruction and suffering. And for what? Did you really think I would come back to you, content to be your blind and dumb little girl again?"

"You are a wretched, ungrateful child!" she cried out. "I summon the Furies to witness and to bear my vengeance upon you!"

I swung around, back to Zack, Morris, and Katie Jones. Nothing was happening to them, and the protective dome now sheltered Rob and Helen as well.

Suddenly, invisible hands punched three giant holes in the side of the gym. I looked over at Haley who was getting to his feet, relief rushing through me in a quick wave that he looked relatively unhurt.

But I didn't have time for that. I had to get into that gym and help the people trapped in there with the Furies.

I ran back towards the gym, only to stop hard in my tracks as three women emerged from the back doors of the gym, walking in a grim synchronized step towards me. All the air rushed out of my lungs when I recognized them.

"Mom!" Morris cried out from beneath the dome. He tried to run to her, but Helen and Zack held him back.

Morris' mother didn't bat an eye at his voice. Nor did the other two women respond to the cries of Jordan and Kara, who were running after their mothers.

"Oh, shit," I whispered to no one in particular. "This is really taking the mother guilt thing too far."

"Have you no shame for disobeying me?" Mom yelled at me, closer now, halfway across the football field toward me.

"No!" I yelled, whirling around to face her. "I don't. I did what I needed to do, and I tried to be respectful about it. You're the one who couldn't act like an adult and be rational and reasonable."

Three ear-splitting shrieks filled the air, and my human eardrums throbbed with pain. The three women advanced on me, surrounding me. Haley stood to the side, ready to help me if it came down to the ultimate solution, but there was little he could do otherwise if we didn't want to kill these women.

"Ungrateful child!" Morris' mother screamed at me.

"Loser!" Jordan's mother screamed.

"Pathetic little fake rebel," Kara's mother snarled.

"This woman gave you this body, this life!"

"You are foolish, naive, and ignorant!"

"You'll never be cool, never be accepted, never be anything more than a stupid little girl."

"Your mistakes are going to be terrible without your mother to guide you!"

"You know nothing of the way the world works. It will eat you alive."

"You chose to be a slut for a boy instead of being your mother's true companion."

Their vindictive chants wormed their way past my defiance, hitting those secret buttons that still existed in my mortal heart. I had berated myself a hundred times with their words.

My head throbbed, and my control was slipping. I was growing hot, and I struggled to hold onto my belief in myself, in Haley's love for me, in my right to exist as I was. Tears sprang to my eyes, but I held my jaw firmly clamped shut.

"You're not strong enough for this," Morris' mother said smugly. "You are just a scared child."

"You're weak and dangerous," Jordan's mother said. "Only your mother could truly help you and train you, and she was going to train you, but you threw that option away."

"We are justice and guilt," Kara's mother said with a slow, evil smile. "We will never leave you now."

"Your nightmare is just beginning," Morris' mother said calmly.

Anguish pierced me like a thousand spears, and suddenly, I was horribly afraid they were right.

"STAY AWAY FROM HER,"
Haley commanded, his deep voice rumbling loudly over the screams of Jordan and Kara and the others who had trickled out the back of the gym with them. "You harm one hair on her head, and I will end you!"

"Will you allow that?" Morris' mother turned to me with a gargoyle-like grin. "Will you allow your 'boyfriend'," she sneered the word, "to kill? To take three innocent lives and leave three children motherless?"

"No!" I exclaimed, horrified at the idea, yet also horrified to know that it might be our only chance of ending all of this.

"Are those women still in their bodies?" Helen called out, pushing Zack aside and walking through the dome toward me. "Are their souls still there?"

"Stay back!" I warned her frantically.

"Ma!" Morris cried out, breaking free of Zack's distracted grip and sprinting toward his mother.

"No!" I screamed at the same time as Morris' mother barely turned to look at him before swinging her hand out at him, striking and sending him flying through the air. He landed with an awful crunch on the ground at the feet of my own mother.

Mom looked down at Morris' scarily still body and smiled nastily.

"This was one of your little friends," she snarled. "You would abandon me and disrespect me for the sake of this little miserable creature?"

She kicked Morris, sending him rolling onto his back so I could see his closed eyes and the blood dribbling from his mouth. He didn't move. I couldn't even see the rise and fall of his chest. I swallowed hard as I realized his body lay at an angle that a whole, healthy back shouldn't have been capable of.

Behind me, I heard Helen hiccup through a sob with muffled cries of, "No, no, no!"

The last straw of my patience broke with a crisp little snap.

"Is this justice?" I screamed at my mom, feeling my eyes and the tips of my fingers grow hot. "Is this the way you would treat life? Some goddess of life you are! You suck at protecting and nurturing anything!"

Mom just smiled at me, madness dancing in her electric blue eyes. She stepped in front of Morris, blocking anyone's ability to get near him to help—if help was even possible...

I rounded on the Furies.

"When you pull that kind of shit and kill innocents, you lose all right to lecture me about anything!" I hissed. "I reject your judgment of me! I judge you and find you guilty of murder!"

"What will you do to us, Stephanie?" Jordan's mother laughed. "You can't use your power without losing control. You can't hurt us. You have no authority over us. No one has! We are justice, and even you gods must submit to us!"

"You can kill these mortal bodies," Kara's mother smirked. "But, we will simply be released back to our true forms and continue to torment you!"

Morris' mother remained silent, her face twisting with the pain and confusion of some kind of struggle.

"You are powerless, Stephanie Starr," Jordan's mother taunted. "Just like you always have been and always will be."

There's a funny thing about anger. Usually, it makes you lose control, but in that moment, my pure white rage gave me a precision and focus I never knew I had in me.

Narrowing my eyes with a nasty smile of my own, I slowly sank down to my haunches and deliberately placed my hand on the grass of the football field. In that moment, it wasn't just life that rushed from my fingertips. It was a precise cellular plan and set of genetic instructions that touched every living thing around the Furies.

Grass shot up and wove itself into thick, vicious ropes that bound the three women, tendrils wrapping around their mouths to mute them. A small, prickly dandelion weed exploded into a thicket of thorns encircling them.

"Stephanie!" Mom shrieked, obviously shocked by the use of my power.

"That's right," I said calmly. "I know exactly what I am, and what's more, I know exactly what I'm capable of. You can't take that away from me now. Never again."

Turning back to the Furies, I said, "You're supposed to be justice, right? Then you're going to hear my side of the story."

The wild eyes of the three women signaled their resistance, and a breath from me sent the grass ropes squeezing tighter about them until pain made them relent.

"I never disobeyed my mother," I stated. "I was never disrespectful. I never was ungrateful. When I did challenge her and question her, it was because I had a right to the answers."

Rounding on my mother, I pointed at her. "Do you even know who my father was? Or was he just a one night stand? A biological requirement your body needed in order to have me?"

"The day I turned eighteen human years of age, I became an adult in the eyes of the law and no longer legally required to obey my mother," I continued, turning back and pinning the Furies with my glare. "Even then, I wanted to continue to have a good relationship with her. I..." My voice broke as grief welled up in my heart and spilled over into throat-constricting sadness. "I loved her. I still love her. I did not deliberately disobey her. I began to make choices for myself, simple ones that every mortal begins to make. I wanted to experience the world, live my life, spend time with friends, find love. Is that so unnatural, so against the order of things, especially when she hid my true nature from me for so long!" I was yelling by my final words. Nightmarish words from the night before rushed back, unwelcome, into my head.

"You have been trying to kill me!" I accused Mom through my sobs. "How many times did you kill me over thousands of years? Just because I grew up? Just because I wanted more than just a mother in my life? How could you do that? I'm your child, your daughter! You're supposed to love me, not kill me when I begin to become my own person!"

"This woman has committed so many crimes and has not been held responsible for any of them," I spat out, beginning to feel shattered from dragging my broken world into the light. "She kept me from my natural balance with death, and who knows what that has done to the course of human history? Not to mention the destruction of the town at your hands, the people who've died as a result…and…M-Morris! Well, that was your fault, but you did it because you're carrying out her orders. But you're wrong, and she's wrong, and I demand judgment on HER!"

"Stop!" Mom shouted. "You can't listen to her! You can't believe her! She's a lying, deceitful, willful child!"

"Look into my eyes," I demanded of the Furies. "Find deceit in my eyes, and you can have at me, but if you don't, then you know what I'm saying is true."

"No!" Mom yelled, making an unnaturally fast lunge for me.

I wheeled on my heels, trying to brace myself and figure out how to stop her, but I tripped over my feet and went sailing backward to land hard on my butt.

Two more fast, blurred strides, and Mom would be upon me, and I knew what she would do...because I knew she had done it before. She would rip me apart, only she didn’t know that doing that would end all life everywhere, including hers.

Before I could think of a way to protect myself, I was trampled by twelve little paws, a cacophony of high-pitched barks filling my ears. Cerberus stood around me, defending me. The three Min Pins snapped and growled and barked in unison at Mom, and the sight of it must have surprised her so much that she actually stopped in her tracks and looked down at them with a half-puzzled, half-enraged expression on her face.

Apparently, that gave the Furies just enough time to work free of their bindings, now that my attention wasn't on maintaining them. They rushed to surround me, and I closed my eyes.

This was it. This was the absolute worst case scenario. I was going to die.

Well, not really, since I was immortal, but the thought of losing this mortal body still left me speechless and terrified.

"Step away from her," Haley bellowed, his shadow falling long and dark across us. "This is your last warning!"

"Haley, no!" Zack yelled, starting to run over to us.

"Deborah, wait," Katie Jones called out, weakly crawling on her hands and knees, as Helen rushed over to Morris' body, Rob Furlong not far behind her.

Everything fell silent for a handful of seconds that turned into a small eternity.

"Judgment is rendered," Morris' mother spoke, but her voice sounded odd, like it was split in half with another voice, one with a Chinese accent.

I held my breath and waited for the blow to fall.

"The child is innocent," Jordan's mother proclaimed.

"The mother is guilty," Kara's mother stated.

"Vengeance and justice is ours," Morris' mother hissed.

Suddenly, the three women's bodies jerked violently, then fell to the ground, completely limp. I was too scared to look closer to see if they were alive or dead. I didn't know if I could handle any more death.

My mother stiffened then screeched in agony. She was lifted high into the air and then thrown to the ground by the invisible Furies. She lay there, twitching and silent.

Haley was instantly by my side, his arms around me as he helped me to my feet.