Slayer(13)

The first: dream mother.

In my memory, she smells like snickerdoodles.

She sang to us. Read books with pictures of happy things instead of scaly demons. Laughed. I think she laughed, anyway. Whenever I try to picture it, I can’t quite manage to match up sound with image. It’s like watching a silent movie. And the end of the movie is my dad, with his graying mustache and his kind eyes, kneeling to give each of us a hug.

Mom says something to him—what does she say?—then kisses him. We wave as he walks out the door. Mom looks proud and sad all at once and shoos us into the kitchen for cookies.

My dad never came back, and that mom—snickerdoodle mom—was gone too. In a way, Buffy took both of them from me. I never met the Slayer. I don’t even know if she knew we existed. But when my dad died for her, dream mother died too.

The second: ghost mother.

After that night we were attacked in the cemetery, Mom was always there, but . . . she wasn’t. We moved constantly. I can’t remember her working or doing anything.

There were no cookies. There was only the two of us and our mother, hovering. Haunting and haunted. Standing by the window with the curtains drawn, peering out the crack where they didn’t quite meet. We had lost our father, and we lost our mother too. She was a shell of herself. We looked to her for comfort and found only fear. So Artemis and I whispered, played quieter. Hid our stakes in less obvious places so she’d stop taking them away. Figured out how to care for each other so we wouldn’t disrupt her vigil. It wasn’t ideal, but it was okay.

And then everything burned down.

The third: not mother.

After the fire, she stopped being our mother and started being a Watcher. I didn’t realize how odd it was that we had been raised apart from them until we rejoined them in London and I saw how Watcher society functioned. We didn’t even live together as a family anymore. Artemis and I went to the dorms, and my mother had her own apartment in the Council’s wing.

It felt like she was rejecting me again. But maybe part of her decision to switch from being a mother to being a Watcher was so that she didn’t have to face me. We never once talked about why she picked Artemis first. I sometimes thought about forcing it, but in the end, I preferred not knowing. It couldn’t be any worse than what her actual explanation would be for why she left me behind.

I hadn’t died that night, but sometimes, when I was with my mother, it felt like I had. Like I was as missing from her world as my dad was.

? ? ?

With our mother standing in the doorway, illuminated with rage, I feel very, very seen.

“Mom,” Artemis starts, but our mother raises a hand like a sword, cutting off her words.

“Nina is not a Slayer.” She isn’t confused or even worried. Why did she move straight to anger? It doesn’t make any sense.

I want to agree with her—I don’t even want to be a Slayer!—but the way she dismisses it triggers my latent teen rebelliousness. Like me, it hasn’t had any opportunity to flex its muscles, but its reflexes are superb.

“How do you know?” My voice raises an octave. “You haven’t even been here.” We haven’t seen her in two months. This entire time I’ve felt different, afraid I was infected by demon or worse. Slayer counts as worse.

Would she have noticed? I doubt it. But now she’s back, and she’s telling me how I feel instead of asking me. Just like she told me I wasn’t right for full Watcher training. Just like she told Artemis that she was. How much of our life has been controlled and determined by her?

She doesn’t even ask about the hellhound. It’s like she doesn’t care. And maybe she doesn’t, since I’m the one at the center of it. She likes me to be invisible.

Artemis faces our mother. Her back is to me, blocking me out of the conversation. “She killed a hellhound! If you’re so sure she’s not a Slayer, then there’s something else, and we need to take care of it.”

“I’m disappointed in you, Artemis. Nina never should have been put in this position. She never should have come in contact with a demon in the first place.”

“I was twenty feet from the castle!” I throw my hands up in the air. They’re talking about me like I’m not even here. “What, should Artemis walk me around on a leash? She can’t protect me all the time! And apparently she doesn’t need to.”

Artemis flinches. I didn’t mean to hurt her. I know how much she defines herself as my protector. And I’ve let her take that role without question. Maybe that was a mistake for both of us. I reach out to place a hand on her arm, but she crosses her arms tightly instead. “Regardless,” she says. “Slayer or something else. We have to figure it out.”

Our mother stares at the space above my head. Her face is tight and pinched with anger. Her own soft, auburn hair is pulled back into a severe ponytail, her gray eyes beginning to wrinkle in hard lines. What right does she have to be angry with us? None of this is my fault. Or is she mad that this means she has to actually interact with us? Then I realize she has . . . tears pooling in the bottoms of her eyes?

Oh gods. Buffy. The Slayer. My mom lost everything because of a Slayer. If it’s hard for me to think about Buffy, how much harder is it for my mother?

“Mom,” I choke out.

She turns away on one sharp heel, cutting me off. “I have to go speak with the Council. There’s no need for you to come. We’re still on lockdown, so don’t leave.”