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Chapter Ten

What do you do when you meet your mother for the first time? I’ve been talking to her indirectly for most of my life, but now I’m going to see her, and that image of Sefira hanging over my crib will be replaced with her actual face. Tina allowed us to meet in her dining room, neutral territory, I suppose. I couldn’t bear to tell Anna because even though she acts fine I know how fragile she is. I had to warn Byron too. I’m shaking as I sit, waiting for her to walk in, and then I hear a car pull up in the driveway, but I have to hold myself from running out after it, so I nervously grab at the edge of the table. She walks in the room and I’m awestruck. She looks nothing like the mother I had remembered in my head. Her hair is short cut and black and as she walks over I take a look at her face, and she seems just as surprised as me. Her nose is pointy, just like her chin and her grey-blue eyes are covered in smoky eye shadow. There is not one part of her that resembles me.

“Lauren,” she speaks, her voice cautious and frail. I don’t want to listen to her, but I’m not ready to speak yet, “You have to understand that I wouldn’t have left you if I didn’t have to.”

She looks at me, her eyes trying to plead with me, but I keep a straight face. I’m not ready to forgive her now, especially after I’d heard that line every time I asked Tina why my mother left me.

“I got this note,” I say, pulling out the photo and sliding it over to her as she sits down at the opposite end of the table. She fingers over the writing before asking who gave it to me, so I tell her about how Anna found it in her pocket in an envelope for me. She asks to see the envelope so I try to straighten up the crumpled ball of paper from my pocket and slide that across to her too. She continues to stare at the paper for moments, her eyes widening as she traces her fingers over it.

“Do you remember when I warned you about being in danger?” she asks and I nod. “I think this may be the first sign. You summoned Sefira, didn’t you?” I nod again. “You have to be very careful,” she says, something I’ve heard time and time again from Tina. “If this is who I think it is, he’s going to be looking for you. He knows that you’re out there.”

“Who’s he?”

“That book I gave you wouldn’t have told you about him. He normally doesn’t bother sirens.”

“Who is he?” I repeat, growing angrier at her lofty answer.

“Dheonas,” she answers, and I wait for an elaboration. “He’s an angel, a corrupted angel.”

“What would he want with me?”

“Who knows,” she answers, shrugging her shoulders. She tucks the photo back into the envelope and slides it over to me. “Anything else you want to ask me?”

“Did you ever have blonde hair?” I ask, and she looks at me funnily, like I had asked her if the grass was red.

“Never in my life have I had blonde hair,” she begins, “you are your father’s daughter.”

I wanted to ask her more questions, but after that they all blacked out and I let her leave. The nightmare of that blonde woman above my crib becomes an even clearer image of Sefira, and she reaches down to pick me up but I can’t run, I can’t escape. After all these years of trying to imagine what my mother looked like, I had been thinking of Sefira, and I can’t help but wonder when I ever saw her as a child. Was it right after my father died? Did she come over to congratulate me on summoning her for the first time or was she planning on killing me too? I can at least disregard that last thing as being impossible because if she wanted to kill me she would have killed me then and saved me all this trouble now.

I didn’t ask my mother for her name because I don’t want to be tempted to look her up in the phone book or in Tina’s contacts if I ever get the chance. I definitely don’t want to ask Anna, considering her state, but now that I’ve seen her, I want nothing more than to put a name to her face. I try watching TV to take my mind off it, but all they’re talking about on the news is the new mayor, which makes me think back to Mayor Barton, Hoppy the poorly named rabbit and Claire. I start to wonder if Claire is going to be okay with all that’s going on, or if Dheonas is after her too. My mother mentioned something about summoning Sefira, but Claire can’t even see her, and I hope that Dheonas knows that too. I don’t know much about him specifically, but I know that Claire doesn’t stand a chance against an angel, corrupted or not.

On Tuesday I feel guilty because I’ve forgotten about tutoring again until the teacher organising, Miss Hayfield, comes up to me with her caffeine induced smile and reminds me in the period before lunch that I have to go tutor Brendan. He’s still as timid as ever, frightened to even ask what my name is, then he starts regretfully hitting himself on the forehead when he feels like an idiot for forgetting. “Hey,” I interrupt, shouting a little louder than I should for someone as terrified as him, “why do you let yourself down like that?” He looks up at me, his crystal blue eyes looking like he’d never heard anyone talk to him like a human before. “You’re not stupid,” I reassure him, but then he turns and he speaks slowly.

“You’re a siren, aren’t you?” he asks, and I’m frozen for a moment, before nodding my head and asking how he knew, then he furrows his brow and asks another question. “Are you here to kill me?”

“Why would you ask that?”

“It’s your job, isn’t it?”

“I’m not here to kill you,” I affirm, but I’m still curious. “How did you know I was a siren?”

“I can see it. You sang and she came.” I don’t have to ask what he’s talking about, because I know, but I want to make sure we’re talking about the same thing.

“What do you mean?” I ask, and he starts singing back to me, his eyes gazing off out the window as he sings.

''“Half a pound of tuppenny rice, Half a pound of treacle, Mix it up and make it nice Pop! Goes the weasel”''

I shudder when I think back to the man seizing on the ground, and Claire screaming and then that note. Claire’s scream echoes over in my ears so much that whenever I don’t think about it, my ears become deafeningly silent and I’m driven even more mad. “I know you don’t want to hurt me Lauren,” he says, “but when you have to kill me, can you sing the verse with the monkey?”

“I’m not going to kill you,” I reiterate, but he looks at me with an all-knowing frown and he solemnly tells me that I have to, just not yet.

There are plenty of psychics available, I’ve learned from the siren book. There are those who practice it, and then there are those who are born with it, cursed from birth to see everyone die and know exactly when and how it will happen. Brendan is obviously the former, because those who practice it can’t tell you a thing about how or when they, themselves, are going to die. We get back to work on his tutoring and when he rubs out the correct answer I ask him why he doesn’t just leave it with the right answer, then looks back up at me like it’s glaringly obvious.

“If I’m smart, I’ll be noticed,” he explains, “if I’m noticed, people will miss me when I die. I don’t want to hurt anyone.”

“Me neither,” I add, but he looks at me, confused again.

“You say that now,” he says, “but it’s in your nature. It’s part of who you are.”

I’m both hesitant and afraid to ask Brendan any more questions until we’re cut off by the bell and he rushes out of the room at the end. I walk off to my final period for the day, which is chemistry. Normally I’d be celebrating finishing the day on chemistry, but instead I keep thinking over and over what Brendan said to me. Hurting people is in my nature. It’s a part of who I am. In my side tracked state, I manage to spill sulfuric acid all over Blake Lambton’s shirt, and he starts freaking out even though it’s only a dilute concentration. The green in his shirt starts to fade away by the end of the period where the acid was, but other than that he’s fine. At least when he told me that I nearly killed him, I didn’t have to believe he was serious.