Hidden (Hidden Series Book One) (31 page)

“Sophia,” she said. A moment later, our maid
popped into the room. Her eyes were red and frightened. I didn’t
know whether to hug her or punch her in the face. “Conjure my
mother. Now.”

Why the hell would we need to talk to
her
mother right now?

Without hesitation, Sophia made a circle on
the floor with red candles as they appeared in her hand. She crept
around her circle, whispering something that wasn’t even close to
English or any other language I’d ever heard.

Sophia’s candles flickered then died out
completely. From the smoke, a figure formed. A woman with shoulder
length blonde hair, older than forty, hovered inside the circle of
candles. I could see through her to the other side, to Lydia Shaw.
The ghost had on heels and ankle length white pants. Her jacket was
pink and blue, paisley pattern.

“This is a nice house. It
could
use a
little color on the walls,” the ghost said. She looked over her
shoulder to me and smiled. “Christine, dear, I’m sorry about the
shifter. I’m not one to say I told you so.” She looked around the
room, scrunched her face up at Sophia, then relaxed it when she
faced Lydia, who was weeping now. “Liddy! What a nice dress. It
would look better in a brighter color. Black is for funerals, you
know?”

Lydia came closer and held my face in her
hands. She pressed her forehead against mine. I was frozen.
Confused. Not breathing at all.

“She’s not
your
mother,” she
whispered. “CC is short for Cecilia. Her name is Cecilia Shaw.” She
stared at me, looking like she wanted me to put something together.
But my brain was disconnected. Offline. Completely missing from
whatever was happening around me. Even my body was confused. I felt
both hot and cold. My heart was both pounding and had stopped all
together.

Sophia wrapped an arm around my waist,
joining our huddle. I turned my face to her. She mouthed,
Just
breathe
.

I looked at Lydia, then back to Sophia, then
at Lydia’s hands on my face. The ghost was Cecilia Shaw. Cecilia,
like my middle name, like my fake name – Cecilia Neal. Sophia had
said it was my mother’s family’s name. My mother’s family. My
mother. I gasped and looked at her.

My legs gave out.

I wasn’t listening to Sophia’s advice. I
wasn’t breathing. This couldn’t be real. Lydia Shaw couldn’t be the
girl from the diary. The girl from Sophia’s story.

She met me on the floor and pulled me to her
chest. “I’m sorry, baby. Breathe.” I tried to speak, but before I
opened my mouth, I smelled her. We were in her home because that
was her shampoo, and that scent on her was perfection. Like I’d
been sniffing oranges, hoping it would smell like her. She watched
me as I brought strands of her hair to my nose. “You remember me,
baby?”

I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t. Fight
her, but I couldn’t. What pissed me off the most was that I wanted
to crawl to her lap and sleep. I wanted her to hold me. Like I’d
wanted it forever.

But I hadn’t. Had I? I didn’t know Lydia
Shaw outside of being the scary woman from my history books. She
couldn’t have a child. A copy.

“Where was the diary?” Lydia asked
her
mother.

“You stashed it with some of my things that
you’ve never cared enough to go through. I bet you would’ve found
it if it were in your dad’s things,” CC said, in her snooty
voice.

Shattering in Lydia’s arms, I remembered
everything CC had told me. She’d said Julian killed my
grandparents. She never said she was my mother, she was actually
very adamant that I didn’t call her that.

“I’m sorry, baby. I never meant to hurt you
like this,” Lydia said. She pulled me tighter, and I started to
give in, to let her rock me to sleep and make this better, but she
kissed my forehead and yanked me back to Earth.

Lydia Shaw was my mother. She wasn’t dead.
She threw me away. And when I almost got into trouble, she sent her
maid to fetch me. She had Sophia stash me in a house and occupy me
with people.
She
was controlling this unbelievable
situation. Not God. Nothing in my life hurt more than knowing my
mother didn’t want me. Not bullying. Not Nate hating me.

She’d thrown me in hell, St. Catalina,
because she wanted to be a hero and have chapters in history books
and be bowed to like a saint.

My heart picked up and drowned out every
sound in the room. I pushed her as hard as I could and crawled out
of her arms. I stood and stumbled in my stupid high heels.

Where could I go? Back to school, the
dumpster she left her copy in? New Orleans? Florida? It didn’t
matter. I wouldn’t fit in anywhere. I wouldn’t be wanted anywhere.
By anyone.

I closed my eyes and opened them in my
closet.

I unzipped the suitcase Sophia had left for
me. I threw my clothes inside, the clothes with tags I should’ve
questioned more, from the maid I should’ve questioned more.

The cracks in my heart made me cough and
choke on tears as I fell to my knees. My breaths lingered in the
frosty air, and the other ghost touched my hand.

“You’re Cecilia’s husband. Lydia’s father,”
I whispered. My teeth chattered as he wrapped his arms around me.
“Is my father alive too?” Faintly, his head ruffled the top of
mine. It was a nod. I fell back on my butt, completely destroyed,
and he rocked me – as good as a ghost could rock. “Why does no one
want me?” I asked, because it was obvious that no one did. Not
friends, not boyfriends, not parents.

He grazed my palm, and I held it open for
him. Slowly, his icy finger wrote
My fault
in my hand.

I turned to where I thought his face would
be. I didn’t really know what to say or ask. I just sat there in
his arms, freezing and confused. I felt low, like the nothing I
always was and would always be.

“Christine,” Lydia whispered at the door of
my closet. “Is … is there someone in here with you?”

I pushed up to my knees and threw the rest
of my clothes in the suitcase. “Your father.”

She kneeled next to me, looking around the
closet. I rolled my eyes and pointed to where he was. I thought I’d
use this distraction to get away from her. Slip out of here while
she wept for her father.

“Don’t pack. Please let me explain,” she
said.

“Explain what? Why I don’t have parents?”
She didn’t say anything. What could she say? “Why you two didn’t
want me?”

“He has no idea,” she said. “I left him
before you were born.” Her voice was a hoarse whisper, like someone
was strangling her. “Let’s sit and talk. There’s so much you don’t
know.” Her father rubbed my back, and I shivered, from cold and
from anger.

I opened the secret door in the closet and
pulled out her diary. She gasped, and I flung it at her. “I know
more than enough about you. You’re rude. A good liar. Obscene, to
put it mildly.
Completely
psychotic. And I know more than
that about you. I’ve had to study you for years. Congratulations on
ending the war, by the way. I assume you had me sometime before
that. Was I a bad copy? Wasn’t perfect enough for you? Should I
thank you for not drowning me?”

“You are
not
a copy, and I would
never hurt you,” she said. I rolled my eyes at Sophia when she
walked in.

“Whatever. I … just want to go away. You
don’t have to talk to me. You can still pretend I don’t exist.”

“Lydia, we need to let her see the truth,”
Sophia said.

“No, it’s too much for her. She can’t handle
that.”

Sophia pulled the suitcase out of my reach.
“She’s stronger than you think.”

After a moment, Lydia nodded to her, and I
stood, ready to run again, away from whatever they were about to do
to me.

“Relax, sweetheart,” Sophia said. She cupped
her hands and brought them to her mouth. “It will not hurt. Trust
me.” She smiled and blew into her hands, sending a gust of powder
into my face.

It tickled my nose, made my head spin, and I
collapsed into her arms.

I opened my eyes in a heavily decorated
kitchen. Pink roses were everywhere – the wallpaper, the curtains,
in a vase on the table.

“Hi, love,” Sophia said. I spun around. She
was leaning against the counter with her hands clasped in front of
her.

“Where are we?”

“In your mother’s head.” She held her hand
out, and I clicked across the kitchen to meet her, still in high
heels. “If we’re going to go through her memories, we have to start
with the first day she remembers.”

I crossed my arms over my chest and sighed.
“I don’t want to see her life. I don’t care.”

Sophia grabbed my hand and kissed the back
of it. “It will help you understand what led her to hide you at
your school.” I rolled my eyes. I wouldn’t call abandoning a child
to become famous, hiding. “You won’t have to see every day. Just
highlights. Okay?” I shrugged. It wasn’t like I had a choice. I
didn’t exactly know how to get out of her brain.

A little girl with blonde hair, maybe four
years old, ran into the kitchen with us, leaving a mud trail behind
her.

“Lydia, slow down,” a woman yelled, Cecilia,
I guessed. She ran in after her in a white dress and pink heels.
“Little girls do
not
play in mud!” A man who had to be her
father appeared in the room, out of nowhere. She got her height
from him and her looks from her mother.

He picked up his daughter and let her smear
mud all over his face.

“Teach me that, Daddy.”

“Vincent, absolutely not! No daughter of
mine will dabble in that powers foolishness. She will paint and
cook and be normal. I mean it,” Cecilia said.

He winked at his daughter and whispered,
“Later,” in her ear.

Sophia pulled me to their laundry room and
shut the sliding doors behind us.

They swung open a second later. A bigger
Lydia stormed in with a laundry basket in her hands. “I did it, so
leave me the hell alone!”

“How old is she?” I asked Sophia. She
sounded like an adult already.

“Ten.”

“You did not. I don’t hear the machine,”
Cecilia said from somewhere else.

The detergent flew over my head and dumped
itself in the wash. “Did the damn maid die?” she asked.

“Watch your mouth,” Vincent said, poking his
head through the doors. “She’s alive, but your mother fired her.
She almost walked in on you practicing teleporting. She got
worried.”

Lydia rolled her eyes. “She’s always
worried. You married a twit,” she said. “Are you aware of that?”
Vincent pointed a finger at her, and she shrugged her shoulders.
“Dad, you’re nuts. You could actually be something right now.”

He laughed. “Most people would think being
an FBI agent
is
something.”

“You carry a gun, Dad. There are things in
this world who’d laugh at your gun.” He came into the laundry room
and picked her up. “I hate that you quit,” she said.

“But then I wouldn’t have you,
princess.”

Sophia snapped, startling me. As we watched,
Lydia’s hair stretched longer down her back and her legs grew.

“Promise me you’ll mind your manners,
Lydia,” Vincent said. He chuckled. “Well try to develop some
manners first. Then mind them. When I trained, we couldn’t talk to
people like you’re accustomed to.”

If the diary wasn’t a lie, Lydia was twelve
and headed to live and train with Julian.

“Okay. Don’t tell her I cried,” she
said.

“I won’t. You’ll be an agent in no time, and
we’ll be there to visit every weekend,” Vincent said. “There’s
nothing else I can teach you. I quit at this point. Promise me you
won’t.”

She nodded and rested her head on his
shoulder. She wiped her face and they went out into the kitchen.
Cecilia was in hysterics, fixing a bow on a nicely decorated
basket.

“Here, I made you cookies to take with you,”
she cried. Vincent and Lydia looked like they were trying not to
laugh. “Make sure you wash your hair. It gets all stringy and
that’s not attractive, and you better not cut it.”

“Okay, Mom.” She hugged her mother, then she
and Vincent disappeared.

Sophia snapped and we landed in an open
field. Lydia ran by in black tights and a black tank top. She was
leading the pack of boys behind her.

“Kamon,” a man said. He had neatly groomed,
silver hair, but his skin wasn’t wrinkled. Julian, I guessed. He
was dressed in a black suit. “You’d better catch up to her, or
you’ll spend the night in a cell.”

“Yes, Master,” a handsome boy said. He broke
from the pack, but he never caught Lydia. He shoved her when he
crossed the finish line, and she jammed her right fist into his
jaw.

“Good job, pet,” Julian said. Lydia turned
and bowed to him. “She’s earned her dinner tonight. Will she be
eating alone?”

The pack said, “No, sir.”

“Then go again. Ten miles this time, cut
through the forest.” They took off running again, with Lydia still
in front.

Sophia snapped, and we moved to a huge, cold
home. Stern gray, like a medieval castle. “She lived here-”

“I know. From twelve to fifteen.” She nodded
and Lydia passed us, dressed in the skimpy clothes she’d written
about. We followed her into a small room. She was crying and
started stuffing her clothes in a suitcase.

“They have just come from an auction.
Everyone was sold except her and the boy she punched,” Sophia said.
A door slammed and startled Lydia. Footsteps grew louder in the
hall, coming closer to her door. She packed faster, in a teary
panic, and closed her eyes.

Sophia and I moved with her. She was in her
house again. We followed her up the stairs. She closed the door of
her parents’ room behind her. We walked through it.

“Dad, wake up,” she said. She touched him on
the shoulder. “Dad.”

“Honey? What are you doing here? And in
underwear?!”