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21
MEG
As my mother talks, I wished I’d downed Theo’s whole bottle of booze before he teleported me here.
“So let me see if I’ve got this right…” I begin before trying to sum up everything she said in a couple of sentences. “My dad lives in another realm, guarding the Celtic gods who have slept in sort of a coma for a couple thousand years?”
“‘The eternal slumber,’ his realm calls it, but yes.” Mom pours the tea she made us both. The scent reminds me of when I got hurt as a kid, bullied at school, and dumped by Dirk the Jerk. I’m hoping her fix-it tea isn’t her way of softening the news that I’ll never see Leander again.
“My father’s a god—”
“A demigod.” She hands me the mug that I painted in fifth grade, with a cat riding a unicorn. “But as a guardian, he can’t leave his realm.”
“And you lived there with him?”
“As his match, yes.” She patiently answers like she’s helping me with my homework. I sucked at history—learning dates, wars, and names of people who didn’t matter. Then again, I didn’t know my own history.
“Did Theo match you?”
“No, his mother did. She’s even more powerful.”
“Oh. Then I definitely don’t want to meet her.” While Mom talked about my father and their happiness, she left out most of her life before, or the reason why she left him. “How long did you stay?” I sip the tea, hoping it has cooled enough.
“About two hundred years.”
Tea sprays from my mouth in a rush, and I cough as more goes up my nose. “What?”
“Time works differently in other realms. It has stopped in his.” She smiles, a wistful one that she wore so often in cancer treatment when she somehow just knew that, no matter how bad the chemo got, she would eventually heal. “In your father’s world, there’s no aging, no disease.”
Horror hits me, and I stop mopping the spray from the table. “Then why did you leave? Mom, you could have stayed well and never gotten sick.”
She takes my hand in hers, and the warm softness of her touch—with the calluses on her fingers from drawing and strumming the guitar—soothes me. “I had two wonderful centuries with your father, but without time passing in his realm, there can be no children.”
Nooo. Leander told me about this, how children would be impossible when his full magic returned. “This is my fault. If you hadn’t come here to have me, the cancer—”
“No.” She tightens her grip on my hand. “I wanted you. I chose you. That was my choice, not yours. I knew the risk, and having you in my life far outweighed any struggles I faced. You’re my baby girl, my reason for living.”
I thought I had run out of tears tonight. I was so very wrong. They stream hot from my eyes, and I fumble for a napkin to wipe my cheeks. “You could’ve gone back when you got the diagnosis.”
“And leave my eleven-year-old daughter alone here?” Now, she sounds irritated. Like I’ve opened my big mouth for stupid to fall out. “Not a chance. You’re my everything. If I took you to his realm, you’d be stuck as the middle school version of you forever, and while I loved you through those tween years, when your hormones had you hating me every other hour, I like this version of you much better. I can’t wait to see who you’ll become.”
We sit in silence while I put the pieces of myself back together as best I can. “I don’t know, Mom. I really messed up with Leander. Someone told me that his feelings for me weren’t real, and I rushed to lump him in the same category with Dirk the Jerk. I should’ve gone with my instincts, instead of skipping straight to feeling betrayed. How can I expect any man—or minotaur—to deal with my trust issues?”
She waves a hand dismissively, her beaded bracelets rattling. “You’re his fated mate. He’ll more than deal with any problems you have, so long as you two communicate your troubles. Besides, you’re seeing your so-called issues through the life experience of a twenty-three-year-old. Give yourself a few hundred years before you skip to believing you should have everything figured out. Your Leander won’t mind you jumping to a few wrong conclusions along the way. That is, if you decide to give him another chance.”
“I have to get back to him.” My answer comes without hesitation. I don’t need to think things through when my heart screams to go to him now. “But I have no idea how to do that, and I don’t want to leave you.”
“Don’t worry about getting back to his realm. I’ll take care of that, and I’ll be coming with you.” She pats my hand and stands, gesturing for me to stay put. “Now, tell me about the matching contract while I gather some ingredients.”
“Ingredients for what?” My mom has a ton of great qualities. Cooking isn’t one of them. Besides, what does she plan to whip up at three in the morning?
“For a few spells.” She curves her mouth into a sly, witchy grin that makes me wonder if I’ve ever known my mom at all.
I tell her about Leander, his realm, the labyrinth, everything—well, except I don’t mention sex on the altar in his temple because hello, she’s my mom. By the time I finish, she has drawn a chalk circle on the table with a pentagram inside and salted another circle around us.
“Can I help?” I reach to straighten a squiggly line of herbs she dropped at the pentagram’s center.
She smacks my hand. “Don’t touch the summoning herbs. See the candles from the counter? Put one at each point. The black ones, not the god’s candle.”
