All at once a wave of sadness flowed through me at what I'd almost done. It was like what little humanity I had left decided to all return at once, overwhelming every sense in my body.
My eyes tingled as they filled with tears, and they slid down my cheeks and pooled on the ID.
"Thanks for stopping me earlier, from killing that farmer."
Draydon just grunted and nodded his head.
"I was never like that, before all of this." I didn't know why I felt the need to explain myself, but I did.
"Yes, you were." The words fell from his lips so effortlessly, like he hadn't even needed to give them a single thought.
I looked at him, shocked that he had the balls to try to tell me about myself after only knowing of my existence for three days. How dare he?
It wasn't his boldness or the words that made me so angry, it was my own doubt on whether he was right or not.
I would have been lying if I said that looking back I didn't see things in a different light. If I didn't notice things that I'd blown off about my childhood.
I took a deep breath and unclenched my fists.
"Everything that's happened has brought out things inside me that I didn't know were there. I never asked for any of this. I never asked to be chosen to fight in the trials, I never asked for my mother to be sick, I never asked for–"
I paused mid-sentence.
The abrupt cease in words finally dragged Draydon's attention to me.
He raised a brow but was committed to his brooding silence. If I wasn't in the middle of a revelation, I would have rolled my eyes.
"My mother, she's sick." I said the words merely so I could digest them myself.
I tried to remember when she'd first gotten sick, but I almost couldn't. It was so far back, locked away in my mind.
"Go on." Draydon said, with a hint of knowingness in his voice.
Going that far back in my memories was a challenge, especially after the trauma of the trials. I was afraid my brain was mush. But in the furthest corner of my mind, the memory lay hidden, dormant, just waiting to be awoken.
Once I found it, it started to trickle back to me.
"I had to be about seven or eight. I started having these vivid nightmares every night, just horrible things. Killing, death, blood and gore every time I closed my eyes. It was so horrible that I refused to go to sleep, but after a day or two without it, I started to hallucinate. I'd see things standing in my room, people who weren't there trying to talk to me. I remember a man who'd stand in the doorway of my room and just watch me."
As the memories trickled back to me so did the feelings that came with them. Fear, exhaustion, hopelessness.
"And then one day my mother said that she'd had enough. She sent me to her bedroom to sleep with my father for the night and she spent the night in my room. The next day it all stopped. I could sleep again, and it felt like I could finally breathe." I paused, lingering on what I was about to say. "But after that my mom started acting weird, it was like every day she was less and less herself, retreating inside her mind. Until eventually she became what she is now, just a shell."
I turned to look at Draydon, and he looked at me with a raised brow. There was a twinkle in his brown eyes, proof that he knew something that I didn’t.
"Is she stuck in a hunter trapper?" I cocked my head to the side and looked at Draydon out of the corner of my eye.
His silence was his answer.
"What the hell! You knew this whole time and you didn't say a word?" I couldn't help but let my anger buck up at that.
"I was observing." He said calmly. "You're a demon. I had to know what kind. I took an oath to protect all hunters, your mother included. I had to know what your intentions were."
"What do you mean what my intentions were? She's my mom!" I fumed.
"You'd be surprised at what some cambions do to their human parents." The look in Draydon's eyes was alarming. He went somewhere in his mind, for a second, plagued by whatever mysterious past he tried to conceal. "I've seen toddlers kill their parents in cold blood."
The words were like ice against my skin. I couldn't imagine hurting a hair on my mom's head.
"So maybe you should give yourself a break. You're not evil." His eyes locked on mine for a split second. There was kindness embedded deep inside them.
"Misguided? Yes. But evil? No."
I huffed.
There went whatever I thought I was feeling for him. But there were greater things at hand.
"How the hell do we get her out of there?"
Chapter 10
My head was still reeling from the finding that it was hard to concentrate on what Draydon was actually saying.
I kicked myself or not knowing that something was awry with my mom. But how could I have known? I was an ignorant kid for most of my life, and I'd only known about my true identity for a few days.
But still, I had a tendency to be too hard on myself and once again it was playing out in front of my eyes.
"Are you listening?" Draydon's annoyed voice jolted me back to reality.
"Yeah, I'm listening. I'm here. One hundred percent here!" I stumbled over my tongue trying to get the words out.
"Only the demon who set the trap can undo it." He reiterated what he had said when I was spacing out.
The words stung, and my heart sank into my stomach. All of these revelations only to find out that there wasn't anything that I could do to help her?
Typical. Sounded like my life to a T.
"But you broke mine." Draydon's lips curled at the edges in what I would almost have dared to say was a smile, but it was there one second and gone just as fast so I couldn't say for sure.
All I knew was that he didn't seem as cold to me as he had been over the days before. It was like he had a new understanding of me. Maybe he even deemed me worthy of not being hated, just a little.
But I still knew nothing about him, and that raised flags. I had a tendency to ignore the things that my gut was telling me, so I listened closely. I wasn't going to make that mistake again. The first sign that something was off with Draydon and we were ditching him somewhere in the middle of the desert.
What he said was true, though. I had freed him from his hunter trapper, but why? And more importantly, how?
Draydon climbed down from the ledge and made his way to the door that led back into the hotel.
"Where are you going?" I followed, just glad to be headed out of the scorching heat and the unforgiving sun.
"To test it."
His words were mysterious and left a lot to the imagination, but something told me to trust him.
It was true that I didn't know anything about him, and that I'd found him in a mysterious cave in the middle of nowhere, but just as I had a tendency to ignore the bad things that my instincts were telling me, I had a tendency to ignore the good things it was telling me too.
I wasn't going to make that mistake anymore.
I followed Draydon back inside and thanked the heavens that the air conditioner had been working the entire time. I knew my mother was probably enjoying staying out of the heat too. The last thing we needed was for her to get dehydrated or overheat. We made our way down the hallway before Draydon stopped dead in his tracks.