Underworld Queen (4 page)

Nobody was smiling, but they looked at the car.

Slowly, Audray pulled up to a concrete parking pad near the trailer with a torn front door screen. The door was open.

Is she home?

At that moment, a thin older woman with graying blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail stepped onto the front stoop and dumped an ashtray full of cigarette butts onto the ground. Tapping the plastic bowl on the metal railing twice, she turned and just as she reached for the door handle, saw Audray’s car. She stopped, frozen in place.

Audray turned off the motor, opened the driver’s side door and stepped out into the dusty air. She removed her sunglasses and stared into the lined and tormented face of her mother.

“It’s me,” Audray said, just loud enough to carry above the noises of the freeway nearby.

Her mother set down the ashtray as if it were a piece of crystal and shuffled with a limp across the metal porch to the top of the steps. Her cheeks were sunken and her face had a definite green pallor to it. When she smiled, Audray could see half her teeth were missing.

She could have been beautiful at one time.
Audray glimpsed a flicker of recognition, but suspected it was through an alcohol-induced haze. Her mother’s eyes appeared to have trouble catching up to her head movements.

“Auddie? That you?” The woman hesitated as if confused what to do, but all of a sudden, her legs seemed to propel her on their own, as the older woman hobbled down the stairs. She stopped at the bottom, hanging on to the railing for balance, breathing with difficulty.

Audray crossed the yard and stood in front of the woman who gave birth to her. As much as she had tried over the years to tear her own heart out, she could not find it in herself to hate the disheveled sack of bones before her. The unhealthy woman was obviously close to the end of her human life. For her mother’s sake, as well as for her own, Audray hoped this would silence the pain forever. Audray was surprised to find that she didn’t want her mother to suffer.

“You came back. I always thought you’d come back.” The woman weaved. Her right hand clutched the handrail, but her left arm shot out, fingers splayed.

“Yes, Mama.” Audrey grabbed the woman and hugged her carefully, as if too much pressure would shatter her brittle bones. The woman began to shake, and Audray thought she was crying, but soon realized they were tremors. She looked at the grey-green closed eyelids and wondered if her mother was dead.

Audray picked her up easily and carried her into the trailer. She figured her mother weighed less than ninety pounds. She walked down the clothes-strewn promenade of liquor bottles to the rear of the trailer, where she knew her mother slept.

She nested her in a pile of dirty clothes and sheets, propping a pillow under her head and kneeled at her side, rubbing her hand until the woman came to. Her first breath of raspy air came with difficulty, as if her mother hadn’t expected to still be alive. But soon she opened her eyes, recognized her daughter, and exhaled the foulest breath Audray had ever smelled.

She was mumbling something to her. When Audray leaned her ear in, she heard, “My cigarettes. Where are my cigarettes?”

“Not now, Mama. You don’t need them.”

The woman righted herself and with amazing strength, sat up and hoarsely barked, “I want my goddamned cigarettes now!”

Audray dropped her hand and searched the countertop in the kitchen, finding them atop a pile of plates with spoiled food and empty pill bottles. She walked out through the screen door to retrieve the ashtray and heard her mother yell out to her.

“Hey! Don’t go stealin’ my cigarettes. You can afford some of your own.”

Now this made Audray smile. She hadn’t smoked since she was sixteen. Removing one from the package, she held it up to her nose and confirmed how she loathed the practice. With the smirk still fresh on her face, she held the white stick out front at arm’s length and lit the end with a red ray of fire from her index finger.

Pleased with herself, she put it to her lips and took a long hard drag, filling her lungs with the awful smoke.

“When in Rome,” she whispered as she exhaled and coughed. She surveyed the park as she leaned on the railing and took another drag. Rarely did it happen, but the scene was worse than she had remembered.

The fit of coughing and spitting up something otherworldly reminded her that her mother was calling her again.

“Coming.”

Audray bent down to hand over the lit cigarette, but it got ripped from her fingers. Seeming to get strength from a couple of deep puffs, her mother addressed her with a scowl, “Thanks.”

Yes, Mother. You were right. There are things that are worse than death.

“How’d you like to live like this forever, Mom?” Audray raised her eyebrows and gave her a sultry smile.

Her mother looked back at her with squinting eyes, holding the cigarette in the lower right quadrant of her purple lips, and responded, “You nuts?”

Audray took a seat on the corner of the bed, careful to avoid getting punctured by an empty needle. Her mother noticed.

“Vitamins.”

“I didn’t figure you for the health nut type.”
Why can’t you just will yourself to die? Or do you hate yourself so much you want to linger on and make everyone else miserable too?
She looked at her mother’s shriveled breastbone and blotchy yellowed skin and wondered how she could have suckled from this woman as a baby.
What kind of poison did you feed my soul?

As if her mother could read her thoughts. “Well, missy. Look at you, all growed up and ‘sophisticated’ like. Here you are, driving around in that beast and lettin’ your ol’ mother waste away in this shithole.”

“I’ve paid my dues.” Audray gave her a steely stare, tinged in red, hoping to scare the woman.

Her mother didn’t notice. She was trying to whisk away ashes that had fallen from the cigarette onto the blue and yellow daisy quilt. “You weren’t the only one. I had to put up with that man’s beatings nearly every day, even when I was pregnant with you.”

“You should have left.”

“I did, moved here, moved a hundred miles away and thought maybe he’d leave me alone. But he found me.

“You took the scumbag back? What were you thinking?”

“Audray, your father had been killed in the war and I was all alone. I was pregnant and I was a mess. He took care of me at first. He seemed so nice. But then he changed.”

“He nearly ruined my life,” Audray whispered as she stared out the small porthole window to the dump of the trailer park.

“Well be grateful. He did ruin your sister’s life.”

“My sister?” Flashes of a recurring dream about being in danger, and someone, some blonde angel protecting her. Her mother had always told her she was crazy.

She’d blocked out so much about the rape, despite her best efforts, she began experiencing the nightmare of that day again. She saw Burt’s body looming over her, taunting her.

“Go ahead, I’ll do to you what I did to her,” he’d growled. Audray had always thought he was talking about her mother. Did he mean her sister?

Her mother turned her head to the side and wept, her chest caving deep as her painful gasps punctuated the stale air inside the trailer. Audray used her fingers, digging into the woman’s cheekbones under her jaw and righted her face so they could look into each other’s eyes. “Tell me about my sister.”

Her mother looked like a little girl. Her lower lip quivered as her eyebrows tented. Silently, she nodded. She stared at Audray as if in fear, as if she expected to be struck. “Burt—Burt strangled her and ran off.”

Audray was filled with rage. She wanted to snap the woman’s neck. “So he came back, and you let that man back into our house? Why didn’t you have him arrested?”

“They arrested someone else for it at first. I couldn’t believe he’d done it. So when they arrested someone else, I just figured Burt had taken off on a bender.”

“I want to know about my sister.”

Her mother reached across the bed, opening a drawer in the built in cabinet, pulling out a fistful of yellowed photographs. She clutched them to her chest in her gnarled and reddened fingers.

“She protected you. Protected you with her life. They found you wandering the park site, looking for me. She was babysitting you while we were at work.”

“How old was she?”

“Twenty-two. She lived up north, but was here for a few days, helping us out. We were in a real bind. She never liked Burt, just so you know.”

She looked down at the curled photographs, tucked and cradled in her breast and drew a smile. Audray could see the beauty of her face at one time, at a glimpse of a woman who was happy before she’d succumbed to her addictions. “She was a sweet girl, and the apple of your father’s eye. She’d taken your father’s death hard, but had started a new life. I asked too much of her.” Large tears streaked down her mother’s cheeks.

Audray wanted to see what her mother was hesitant to share with her. She wanted her hands on the photographs.

“They could never prove anything, you see,” her mother began again. “Burt came back all healthy. Stopped drinking. Was helping me clean up too, but then we just—we just couldn’t stay that way.”

Audray’s anger was tempered by the understanding her mother was just basically a weak person incapable of handling the double tragedy, let alone life itself. Her mother’s wounds were self-inflicted. Knowing what she did about the dark angel population, Audray realized she could become prey to some cunning dark angel looking for another convert. She vowed not to allow this to happen, though the taste of it was a bitter pill.

“Let me see the picture. You have a picture of her?” Audray asked.

Her mother handed her a faded photograph of her much younger and happier self, standing next to a handsome man in uniform, with a blonde young woman between them whose face she recognized.

Claire.

Her friend Daniel’s Claire, the Guardian angel that Joshua Brandon, Audray’s mentor, had fought with—
that
Claire stared back at her through space and time. Stunned, Audray realized Claire had become a Guardian angel by dying to save her.

The Director of the Underworld’s own sister was a Guardian—a sworn enemy.

C
arl set the
large book down on the dark wooden table at his favorite Irish pub. He sighed, pulling back a lock of hair that had fallen over his forehead, anxious to begin his research for the mysterious dark lady who paid him handsomely. Straightening his bowtie, he noticed a shadow fall across the table.

The perfume cloyed his senses, and for a moment he thought of luscious Molly and her breasts offered him so shamelessly this afternoon.

The barmaid’s name was Caitlyn, he noted as he looked up at her nametag. Probably not her real name, since the girl was Asian.

“You’re new here, Caitlyn,” Carl said as he flashed her a quick smile she seemed to warm to.

“Actually, I’m Caitlyn’s roommate, filling in for her tonight.” She smiled and shook her head.

“Did I miss something?”

“No, you didn’t miss a thing. You’re the first one who noticed.” She repositioned the brown serving tray under her arm and extended her right hand. “I’m Uma.”

He took hold of her delicate fingers and a part of him wanted to kiss them, decorated with purple nail polish. But he shook her hand instead. “That’s a beautiful name for a lovely lady.”

“Yes, and you’ll get me fired if you don’t order soon.”

“I’ll have a Newcastle draft,” he said, adjusting his collar again and repositioning his lap.

“Coming right up.”

Carl thought perhaps he imagined she was intentionally exaggerating her tail feathers—until she looked over her shoulder and nodded to him demurely.

He quickly got back to examining the book.

“If I let you take it overnight, you must bring it back first thing in the morning,” Molly had said.

Of course he could do that.

“And you’ll owe me, Professor Carrington.” At first Carl wondered if she meant he had to pay a fee, but then when he caught on to her implication, he straightened his bowtie and felt his cheeks flame.

He reached into his tweed jacket pocket and pulled out the index card with Molly’s phone number on it.

“Call me if you want to turn it in tonight. I’ll take very good care of it until morning, I promise.”

He felt his cheeks blush again. He had just been able to accept that he had dirty thoughts about the young redheaded library science student. But now that his attraction was being returned, he wasn’t sure how he felt about it.

Conquering new territory here.

The soft purr of a female voice jolted him back.

“One frosty Newcastle. Anything else I can get you, Professor?” She finished it off with a wink.

Carl winced and glanced around the room to see if he had attracted anyone else’s attention. He was sure his voice would sound like a ten-year-old, so he just shook his head and gulped his beer, holding it with both hands.

The ice-cold liquid settled his nerves. His throat had been parched. The stuffy smoke-filled pub was noisy and hot. He removed his bowtie, put it in his pocket and attempted to undo his collar. It was like unbuttoning two pieces of cardboard, but at last the tiny button yielded and his neck was free.