Page 30 of Veradel
“Never.” My mother lifts a finger and wipes at my cheek. “If anything, it’s I who failedyou. By omitting the truth, thinking that you’d be better off not knowing.” She sighs. “Thinking that as long as you weren’t Chosen, you’d stay safe and live a normal life.”
I rear my head back, confusion tugging my lips together. “What do you mean? You thought I’d be better off not knowing what?”
She doesn’t sigh again, but she does peer at me with a frown, the wrinkles around her eyes pulling tight as she appears to contemplate. Then, with a swift nod of her head, she gestures toward the kitchen table, where a kettle and two steaming mugs have suddenly popped into existence. “Come. Have some tea with me.”
As soon as we take a seat across from each other, the housing unit dissolves into startling blues and whites that immediately make me squint. When my eyes adjust, my mouth falls open at the scenery spreading all around us—the kitchen table, chairs, tea, and my mother all perched quaintly on the snow-capped top of the mountain from earlier, the sky wrapped all around us.
The first prickles of uneasiness tug at the back of my mind, reminding me of something pertinent I still have to do. But then—
“Drink up,” my mother says, smiling at me as if teatime at the top of the world is a perfectly normal Sunday occurrence. “It’s your favorite. Remember?”
I glance down at the steaming liquid in my cup, some kind of red-tinted tea that smells like the woods outside the Wall. As soon as I lift the mug to my lips and take a sip, that need in my throat seems to melt. Just a little bit.
“Saskia,” my mother says, gazing off into the depths of the sky now that she’s satisfied I’m nourishing myself. “Do you remember why you wanted to become a healer?”
“Because you were sick—”
“No.” She shakes her head, attention lost somewhere among wisps of clouds. “Because your father was sick first, but you seem to have blocked him out.” When I startle, she lays a comforting hand overtop mine. “I don’t blame you, my girl. If anything, I aided you in forgetting him. I never answered your question the one time you gave me one, and you never asked again. It was against the Cardinal Rules, of course, to pry. But I saw that event spark an interest in you for the first time in your life, and I remember thinking it was the only good thing to come of it.”
Her smile droops like a withering flower, and I shake my head.
“I still don’t understand.”
“Let me show you, then.”
The mountaintop around us dissolves, reforming into walls that rise up on either side of the kitchen table in uniform lines: the alleyways between complexes.
My mug shakes in my hand as I see my father walking toward us from the end of it.
“Dad,” I whisper, but my mother shakes her head.
“Just watch. He can’t hear you from there.”
I do as she says, assessing every detail of my father that I’ve forgotten over the years. His straightened posture. His long, sharp nose. His dark, auburn hair a stark contrast to his pale complexion. He’s merely ten strides away from walking right into my mother when a shadowy blur barrels into him, knocking him into the alleyway wall with a resoundingcrack.
A scream of warning tears out of my mouth, but I’m too late, and my mother’s right—he can’t seem to hear me, anyway. He tries to shout as his attacker pins him to the ground, but a pale, marble hand clamps over his mouth, and then a pair of fangs sinks into the flesh of his neck in a flash.
The Eleventh Guardian. I’d notice that stupidly prominent Adam’s apple in his throat anywhere at this point. The same one who attacked Odette, attacking my father right in front of me.
My father gasps for help, and my mug of tea nearly cracks in my grip. Just as I stand to try to help him, though—not caring whether he can sense me or not—the alleyway dissolves, reforming into our housing unit once more. Silence settles over the kitchen as if my father’s shouts never left his mouth at all.
“He was bitten. That’s why he got sick,” I say to my mother, who lifts her mug to her own mouth and takes a sip. “Just like you. Only, he was never Chosen. But the Guardians have been taking more than they promised they would take for a while now, using the catacombs to drink from people in the dead of night.”
“Yes,” my mother says. “And no.”
“What?”
“The Guardians definitely take more than they promise—or need—but your father didn’t get sick because he was bitten. The vampire venom didn’t work the same way for him. It… activated a different side of him, a gene he never even knew he had until weeks later, when he…”
Here, my mother cuts herself off, that faraway look stealing her focus as she gazes into the corner of the room.
“When he what, Mom?” I press, my voice rising as agitation nips at my chest. “What did Dad to do you?”
In response, she sets her mug of tea on the table with a clink, then scoots her chair back and stands abruptly, just as my father stumbles into the room and casts her a dazed look.
“You have to,” she says, her voice shaking and scared.
“I can’t keep doing this to you, Maribel.” My father’s own voice takes on a harsher tone despite the way he’s clutching his own chest. His eyes roam over my mother’s figure, and for the first time, I realize how wan she looks again, just like how she used to. “You’re sick.”
