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What I most certainly did
not
expect to see was am familiar face. One more dear to me than any other perhaps Scott’s.

That of my long-lost, presumed-to-be-dead mother.

LOOKING INTO HER FACE WAS LIKE STARING
into a mirror. More than two decades had passed since I’d lust seen her, decades in which my features had aged while hers gained the smooth agelessness of an Elder Fury. We could have passed for sisters, if not twins.

“M-Mom?” My voice trembled even more than my

shaking hands, which I now realized were held out toward her beseechingly.

She closed her eyes briefly, stepping forward and shutting the door behind her before opening them and meeting my own. “Marissa.” Rather than reassuring me, the calm acknowledgment edged me toward hurt and anger. She hadn’t seen me since I’d hit puberty, and all she could say was my name?

“Wh-what’s going on? We thought—we thought you were dead?’

I left the rest unspoken for the moment. That Dad drunk himself into an early grave, leaving David the do~ task of raising his teenaged sister. How
he’d
become fearful of losing me that he’d nearly succeeded in turn me away from my path as a Fury. All because of her.

“Your knee pains you, does it not?”

Her cool tone of voice and noncommittal expression drove me further toward the edge. I managed to fight Ra, back only by promising to unleash it later. Hopefully have a proper target for it then, because I didn’t want celebrate my mother’s miraculous emergence from death by sending her there myself.

It was a struggle, but I kept my voice as calm as hen “Yeah.”

She crossed the room, removing something from a bag dangling at her elbow. Trinity pressed me more tightly, keeping me pinioned in place, and—for the moment—I 1et her. The sight of the missing bandage in my mother’s hand was a welcome one. She wrapped it swiftly around my aching knee, reminding me of the dozens if not hundreds times she had patched up lesser wounds with the certain magic of Scooby-Doo Band-Aids. Physical pain dissipate but emotional agony welled up to take its place.

“What. The.
Hell.
Is going on?”

Her eyes fluttered closed and open like a butterfly’s wings. I’d known all her expressions well as a child, but the chasm of two decades made me more uncertain than I’d ever been. Was that regret? Guilt?

Frustration? Or all of the above?

“Marissa, I know what a shock this must be for you.”

I broke free of Trinity’s grasp, leaping from the bed and stalking to the half-open window. The scent of freshly mown grass and wildflowers in bloom helped ground me, providing enough physical distraction that I managed to keep a leash on the Rage throbbing deep inside. Anger helped me ignore the slight twinges of pain pulsing through my knee. The bandage just needed time to reach potency again.

That was all.

“I very seriously doubt you know anything about how I feel right now. Mother.”

She blanched at the icy contempt in my voice. I’d never
once
spoken to her in that tone, or called her
Mother
for that matter. Always Mommy or Mom.

“Please, Marissa. Allow me to explain.”

I whirled, my eyes spitting fire and my hands clenched to
each side. “How the hell does anyone
explain
allowing their children to believe they were dead for twenty years? You can’t just drop back in and say,

‘Oh, hello there, darling. Kiss kiss.’ Why should I listen to anything you say?”

“Because.” She held a hand out to me, mirroring my earlier gesture, her fingers and voice trembling and tears threatening to spill. The same tears I wouldn’t let appear in my own eyes. “Vanessa wasn’t the first Fury those bastards snatched, Marissa. I was.”

Wind seemed to whoosh in my ears with the violence oh a jet plane. It took a moment for me to realize it was just blood rushing to my ears. My mother had been the fist Fury taken captive for genetic experimentation? That changed everything.

And suddenly I realized why Mac had always seemed NO damned familiar to me. His accent was straight from the shores of Scotland, true enough, but his patterns of speech, mannerisms, and bone structure were all hers. Which made Mac...

“But that’s impossible!”

“Believe me, baby. It’s the only thing that would have kept me away from you.”

She made to stand, but I waved her back. “That’s not what I meant. I was talking about Mac.”

Her eyes grew wary. “What do you mean?”

“He’s yours, isn’t he?”

Trinity made an odd noise. I glanced at her wide, frozen eyes and knew she was as shocked as I was.

She hadn’t been party to this, as I’d momentarily feared.

Mom nodded. “He is.”

“But the age isn’t right. He’s my age, or at least not mu younger. You’ve only been gone twenty years.

He can’t possibly be that—unless you cheated on Dad?”

This time she
did
jump up, lips pressed into a tight line and eyes narrowed. “I most certainly did no such thing, Marissa Eurydice Holloway. I gave birth to Mac just over eighteen years ago.”

“Impossible!” I repeated.”

“Perhaps not for mortals—which includes potential Furies—but for Sidhe, that’s another matter entirely. You know how fast they mature, until they ‘freeze’ at their adult age. Think, too, how fast someone with Sidhe blood who been genetically and magically manipulated would age.”

My fingernails dug into my palms, drawing blood, I ignored the pain. I’d known that, somewhere inside, b wanted to ignore it. Somehow it seemed a hundred times more disgusting to think of those things being done to m mother.

“I think you’d better tell me everything. From square one.

She nodded. “Of course. You deserve nothing but truth.” Her eyes moved from me to Trinity, and I read the hesitation in her body language.

“Anything you can say to me, you can say to Trin. She’s my partner as well as my friend.”

Trinity sent me a reassuring smile, scooting forward on the bed and turning an interested ear my mother’s way. perched beside her, not yet ready to sit beside my mother, but no longer so angry I might kill her accidentally. Or not so accidentally.

Mom took a deep breath, twisted her hands in her lap, and then launched into her story. “Twenty years ago I was called before the Conclave to accept what I believed to be a routine scouting mission. Rumors had come to us of a group of mortal scientists who seemed to know more about arcane physiology than they had any right to. More than most arcanes themselves knew.” Her lips curved into a humorless smile.

“Ironically, I was actually the second sister
considered for the job. Too damned bad she suffered a serious injury and they had to send me in to replace her.”

Unease stirred, and I shifted forward. “Who was the first candidate?”

She made a sour face. “That fox-faced bitch, Ekaterina.”

The amusement at hearing her use my exact words to describe the current Moerae quickly gave way to the first stirring of Rage. Wasn’t it an amazing coincidence that Ekaterina just
happened
to get injured on that particular mission, and the Fury she hated the most just
happened
to get chosen to serve in her place?

Too bad I didn’t believe in mere coincidences.

Mom didn’t notice the tension tightening my body and continued with her story. “I was supposed to get in, find out what they knew, and get out> But there was one problem with that little plan. They knew I was coming.”

I pressed my feet tightly into the carpet, watching the pale beige strands of fiber giving way beneath me. “They were ready for someone to break in?”

“No, darling. They knew that a Fury—they knew that
this specific
Fury—was coming. They let me get halfway to my target—the bunker where their main laboratory was hidden—before springing their trap. I didn’t even have time to shift before their Sidheborn watchdogs were on me.”

She crossed her legs, sighing at the memory. “Gods, I belt so stupid and pathetic when I woke, chained to a wall with spell-worked steel and unable to shift enough to my Amphisbaena for help. And all I could think about whole time was how the three of you would never knew
,
what happened to me, or how I died.”

Gods, I was going to take great pleasure in tearing fox-faced bitch apart limb from limb once I got my Ii on her. After I found the proof that would justify her execution. “But you didn’t die.”

“No. Though over the next eighteen months I wished I had, many times over. It would have been better by far to cleanly than go through what they did to me.” She shudder skin growing pale. “Rape after rape while they try unsuccessfully to impregnate you naturally. Then they try artificial insemination.

After several miscarriages, they finally admit defeat and move on to artificial insemination crossed with both genetic and magical manipulation of the fetus. finally, finally they succeed. This time you don’t miscarry the first month, and you know you’re screwed.”

I don’t think she noticed the tears that spilled down her cheeks or the hollowness of her voice as she began speaking of herself in the second person. Rage stirred inside again, this time on her behalf. Those pieces of shit.. been pissed enough when hearing what they were doing to other arcanes, but even thinking that they were experimenting on Vanessa hadn’t cut me to the bone quite badly. This was my
mother
those bastards had repeatedly violated; Oh yeah, they were going to pay.

I threw myself to my knees and crawled to her, wrapping my arms around her legs and placing my head in her lap as I’d done so many times growing up. She clutched my shoulders, fingernails cutting into my skin even more painfully than my own had, but I didn’t protest. She needed this as much as I did. Maybe even more.

“But I suppose I should thank them for that,” she said, bitterness tinged with wonder coloring her tone.

“After all, it was the knowledge I had more than my own life to worry about
that gave me the courage and motivation to stop wallowing in self-pity and start thinking about survival for both of us.”

“You—and Mac?”

She nodded, accepting the tissue that Trinity thoughtfully provided from the bathroom. “Yes. Though when I lust realized that this latest pregnancy was actually going Io stick, of course I assumed
he
was going to be a
she.
I knew they were trying to breed their own”—her lip curled—”pet Fury.”

I tried to lighten the moment slightly. “Bet you got one hell of a surprise when your new bundle of joy actually arrived.”

“Never in a million years did I suspect they’d successfully created what had never been born in millennia of the Sisterhood.”

Trinity hazarded the guess that we two Furies knew for fact. “The first male Fury?”

“Exactly. Perhaps the babe was forced upon me, perhaps he was conceived in unnatural ways, but that didn’t change the fact that he
was
my child, every bit as much as the two I’d chosen to carry. Of course, that’s what the bastards used against me. My love for him. They threatened to kill him if I didn’t comply with their wishes. Later, by the time I realized he was far too valuable for them to kill, they changed their threats to include David and your father, instead.”

Suddenly it made perfect sense why she’d never managed to escape, why she’d left Dad to muddle along on his own, eventually giving in to the addiction that only Mom had been able to keep him away from. She’d had no other choice. The weight of bitterness borne of twenty long years lifted from my shoulders as I was finally able to defeat my deepest, darkest fear. My mother hadn’t abandoned us willingly.

My brow furrowed. “But—how
did
you escape? A why did Mac go through all the subterfuge? Why couldn’t he just tell me who and what he was when we first met I’ve been going crazy trying to figure out why the hell h always seemed so damned familiar.”

She hesitated until the sound of a car door slamming echoed through the open window. “Why don’t we finish this story outside? It’s not only mine to tell, and there’s someone down there who has been waiting a very long time to meet you, brother to sister.”

Hearing her say that brought a warmth to my heart that I hadn’t expected. I was used to being the baby of the family, but I’d often wished my parents had given me a younger sibling. Generally, I’d imagined that sibling to be a girl. A sister Fury in both blood and magic. But, in one way, that wish had been granted. Mac was, at least partly, a Fury.

My
brother
Fury.

MAC’S LONG, LEAN FRAME DRAPED AGAINST
the hood of a nondescript SUV. The screen door slammed behind me. I stumbled slightly, having expected Mom and Trinity to come out. Guess they were giving us a little heart-to-heart time. I covered up the misstep by crossing my arms and asserting my usual

‘tude. “So you couldn’t just drag me onto
Jerry Springer
like any other self-respecting, genetically created long-lost brother would do. You had to knock me out and kidnap me instead.”

He pushed away from the car, taking the dozen steps that separated driveway from front porch in ground-eating strides. “Sorry, love. You all were hell-bent on catching a traitor, and I wasn’t really in the mood to die trying to convince you it wasn’t me.” I noticed that despite his use of the endearment
love,
be had completely lost the whole Scottish-brogue routine. Close up, I also had the surprise of realizing his green eyes were now the exact same of blue as Mom’s. And mine. Guess he’d decided to the entire charade.

My left foot tapped a staccato on the uneven floorboards “Excuses, excuses. How like a man.”

He quirked his lips. “So you see me as a man, despite knowing the truth?”

“That you’re actually my eighteen-year-old brother the body of a thirty-year-old? Don’t suppose you’ve seen that Tom Hanks movie?”

“Please.
Big
was a road map for my childhood. Along with
Jack.”

The grin teasing my lips faded. “You’re not—”

He shook his head emphatically. “No, no. The mad scientists wanted to breed their own Miracle-Gro army, not bunch of decrepit old men.”