Chosen (House of Night 3)

The Starbucks at Utica Square, the cool outdoors shopping center that was right down the street from the House of Night, was a lot busier than I'd thought it would be. I mean, sure, it was an unusually warm winter night, but it was also December 24, and almost nine o'clock. You'd think people would be home getting ready for visions of sugarplums and whatnot, and not out looking for a caffeine buzz. No, I told myself sternly, I am not going to be in a bad mood for Grandma. I hardly ever get to see her, and I'm not going to spoil the little time we have together. Plus, Grandma was totally hip to the fact that birthmas presents were lame. She always got me something as unique and wonderful as she is.

"Zoey! I'm over here!"

At the far edge of the Starbucks sidewalk area I could see Grandma's arms waving at me. This time I didn't have to plant a fake smile on my face. The rush of happiness seeing her always brought me was authentic and had me dodging through the crowd as I hurried to her.

"Oh, Zoeybird! I've missed you so, U-we-tsi-a-ge-ya!" The Cherokee word for daughter wrapped around me, along with my grandma's warm, familiar arms that held the sweet, soothing scent of lavender and home. I clung to her, absorbing love and security and acceptance.

"I've missed you, too, Grandma."

She squeezed me one more time and then held me back at arm's length. "Let me look at you. Yes, I can tell that you're seventeen. You look so much more mature, and I think a little taller than you did when you were merely sixteen."

I grinned. "Oh, Grandma, you know I don't look any different."

"Of course you do. Years always add beauty and strength to a certain type of woman-and you're that type."

"So are you, Grandma. You look great!" I wasn't just saying that. Grandma was a zillion years old-at least somewhere in her fifties-but she looked ageless to me. Okay, not ageless like vamp women who looked twenty-something at fifty-something (or one hundred and fifty something). Grandma was an adorable human ageless with her thick silver hair and her kind brown eyes.

"I do wish you didn't have to cover your lovely tattoos to meet me here." Grandma's fingers rested briefly on my cheek where I'd hastily patted the thick concealing makeup fledglings were required to wear when they left the House of Night campus. Yes, humans knew vampyres existed-adult vamps didn't conceal themselves. But the rules for fledglings were different. I guess it made sense-teenagers didn't always handle conflict well-and the human world did tend to conflict with vampyres.

"That's just the way it is. Rules are rules, Grandma," I shrugged it off.

"You didn't cover the beautiful Marks on your neck and shoulder, did you?"

"No, that's why I'm wearing this jacket." I glanced around to make sure no one was watching us, then I brushed back my hair and flipped down the shoulder of the jacket so that the sapphire lacework on the back of my neck and shoulder was visible.

"Oh, Zoeybird, it's just so magical," Grandma said softly. "I'm so proud that the goddess has Chosen you as special and Marked you so uniquely."

She hugged me again, and I clung to her, incredibly glad that I had her in my life. She accepted me for me. It didn't matter to her that I was turning into a vampyre. It didn't matter to her that I was already experiencing bloodlust and that I had the power to manifest all five of the elements: air, fire, water, earth, and spirit. To Grandma I was her true u-we-tsi-a-ge-ya, the daughter of her heart, and everything else that came along with me was just secondary stuff. It was weird and wonderful that she and I could be so close and so much alike when her real daughter, my mom, was so completely different.

"There you are. The traffic was just awful. I hate leaving Broken Arrow and fighting my way to Tulsa during the holiday rush."

As if my thoughts had somehow tragically conjured her, my mother's voice threw cold water on my happiness. Grandma and I let go of each other to see my mom standing beside our table, holding a rectangular bakery box and a wrapped present.

"Mom?"

"Linda?"

Grandma and I spoke together. It was no surprise that Grandma looked as shocked as me by my mother's sudden appearance. Grandma would never have invited my mother without letting me know. Both of us saw totally eye to eye about my mother. One, she made us sad. Two, we wished she would change. Three, we knew she probably wouldn't.

"Don't look so surprised. Like I wouldn't show up at my own daughter's birthday celebration?"

"But, Linda, when I talked with you last week you said you were going to send Zoey's birthday present to her through the mail," Grandma said, looking as annoyed as I felt.

"That was before you said you were meeting her here." Mom told Grandma, then she frowned at me. "It's not like Zoey invited me to come herself, but then I'm used to having an inconsiderate daughter."

"Mom, you haven't talked to me in a month. How was I supposed to invite you anywhere?" I tried to keep my tone neutral. I really didn't want Grandma's visit to deteriorate into a big drama scene, but my mom hadn't said ten sentences and she was already totally pissing me off. Except for the stupid Christmas-birthday card she'd sent me, the only communication I'd had with my mom had been when she and her awful husband, the step-loser, had come to parent visitation at the House of Night a month ago. It had been a complete nightmare. The step-loser, who was an Elder for the People of Faith Church, had been his usual narrow-minded, judgmental, bigoted self and had ended up basically being thrown out and told never to come back. As usual, my mom had scampered along after him like a good little submissive wife.

"Didn't you get my card?" Mom's brittle tone started to crumble under my steady look.

"Yes, Mom. I did."

"See, I've been thinking about you."

"Okay, Mom."

"You know, you could call your mother once in a while," she said a little tearfully.

I sighed. "Sorry, Mom. School's just been crazy with semester finals and all."

"I hope you're getting good grades at that school."

"I am, Mom." She made me feel sad and lonely and angry at the same time.

"Well, good." Mom wiped her eyes and started bustling around with the packages she'd brought. In an obviously forced cheerful voice she added, "Come on, let's all sit down. Zoey, you can go into Starbucks and get us something to drink in a minute. It's a good thing your grandma invited me. As usual, no one else thought to bring a cake."

We sat down and Mom wrestled with the tape on the bakery box. While she was busy, Grandma and I shared a look of complete understanding. I knew she hadn't invited Mom, and she knew I absolutely hated birthday cake. Especially the cheap, overly sweet cake my mom always ordered from the bakery. With the kind of horrible fascination usually reserved for gawking at car wrecks I watched Mom open the bakery box and reveal a small square one-layer white cake. The generic Happy Birthday was written in red, which matched the red poinsettias blobbed at each corner. Green icing trimmed the whole thing.

"Doesn't it look good? Nice and Christmassy," Mom said as she tried to pick off the half-price sticker from the lid of the box. Then she froze and looked at me with overly wide eyes. "But you don't celebrate Christmas anymore, do you?"

I found the fake smile I'd been using earlier and replanted it on my face. "We celebrate Yule, or Winter Solstice, which was two days ago."

"I'll bet the campus is beautiful right now." Grandma smiled at me and patted my hand.

"Why would the campus be beautiful?" Mom's brittle tone was back. "If they don't celebrate Christmas, why should they decorate Christmas trees?"

Grandma beat me to the explanation. "Linda, Yule was celebrated a long time before Christmas. Ancient peoples have been decorating Christmas trees," she said the words with a slightly sarcastic intonation, "for thousands of years. It was Christians who adopted that tradition from Pagans, not the other way around. Actually, the church chose December twenty-fifth as the date of Jesus' birth to coincide with Yule celebrations. If you'll remember, the whole time you were growing up we rolled pinecones in peanut butter, strung apples and popcorn and cranberries together, and decorated an outside tree that I always called our Yule tree, along with our inside Christmas tree." Grandma smiled a kinda sad, kinda confused smile at her daughter before turning back to me. "So did you decorate the trees on campus?" I nodded. "Yeah, they look amazing, and the birds and squirrels are going totally nuts, too."

"Well, why don't you open your presents, then we can have cake and coffee?" My mom said, acting like Grandma and I had never spoken.

Grandma brightened. "Yes, I've been looking forward to giving you these for a month now." She bent and withdrew two presents from under her side of the table. One was big and tented with brightly colored (and definitely not Christmas) wrapping paper. The other was book-sized and covered in cream-colored tissue paper like you'd get from a chic boutique. "Open this one first." Grandma pushed the tented present to me and I eagerly unwrapped it to find the magic of my childhood underneath.

"Oh, Grandma! Thank you so much!" I pressed my face into the brightly blooming lavender plant she'd potted in a purple clay pot and inhaled. The aroma of the wonderful herb brought visions of lazy summer days and picnics with Grandma. "It's perfect," I said.

"I had to rush grow it in the hothouse so that it would be blooming for you. Oh, and you'll need this." Grandma handed me a paper bag. "There's a grow light inside there and a mounting for it so that you can be sure it gets enough light without having to open your bedroom curtains and hurt your eyes." I grinned at her. "You think of everything." I glanced at my mom, and saw that she had the blank look on her face that I knew meant she wished she was someplace else. I wanted to ask her why she had bothered to come at all, but pain closed my throat, which surprised me. I had thought that I had grown up beyond her ability to hurt me. Seems the actual truth of being seventeen wasn't as old as I'd imagined.

"Here, Zoeybird, I got you one other thing," Grandma said, handing me the tissue-paper-wrapped present. I could tell that she'd noticed Mom's stony silence and, as usual, she was trying to make up for her daughter's crappy parenting.

I swallowed down the clog in my throat and unwrapped the present to reveal a leather-bound book that was obviously old as dirt. Then I noticed the title and I gasped. "Dracula! You got me an old copy of Dracula!"

"Look at the copyright page, honey," Grandma said, eyes shining with delight. I turned to the publisher's page and could not believe what I saw. "Ohmygod! It's a first edition!" Grandma was laughing happily. "Turn a couple of pages."

I did, and found Stoker's signature scrawled across the bottom of the title page and dated January, 1899.

"It's a signed first edition! It must have cost a zillion dollars!" I threw my arms around Grandma and hugged her.

"Actually, I found it in a very junky used book store that was going out of business. It was a steal. After all, it's only a first edition of Stoker's American release."

"It's cool beyond belief, Grandma! Thank you so much."

"Well, I know how much you love that spooky old story, and in light of recent events I thought it would be ironically funny for you to have a signed edition," Grandma said.

"Did you know Bram Stoker was Imprinted by a vampyre, and that's why he wrote the book?" I gushed as I oh-so-carefully turned the thick pages, checking out the old illustrations, which were, indeed, spooky.

"I had no idea Stoker had a relationship with a vampyre," Grandma said.

"I wouldn't call being bitten by a vampyre and then put under his spell a relationship," my mother said. Grandma and I looked at her. I sighed. "Mom, it's way possible for a human and a vampyre to have a relationship. That's what Imprinting is about." Well, it was also about bloodlust and some serious desire, along with a psychic link that could be pretty disconcerting, all of which I knew from my experience with Heath. But I wasn't going to mention that to Mom.

My mother shivered like something nasty had just run its finger up her spine. "It sounds disgusting to me."

"Mother. Do you not get that there are two very specific choices for my future? One would be that I become the thing that you're saying is disgusting. The other would be that sometime in the next four years I die." I hadn't wanted to get into it with her, but her attitude was seriously pissing me off. "So would you rather see me dead or see me an adult vampyre?"

"Neither, of course," she said.

"Linda," Grandma put her hand on my leg under the table and squeezed. "What Zoey is saying is that you need to accept her and her new future, and that your attitude is hurting her feelings."

"My attitude!" I thought Mom was going to launch into one of her tirades about "why are you always picking on me," but instead she surprised me by taking a deep breath and then looking me straight in the eyes. "I don't mean to hurt your feelings, Zoey."

For a moment she looked like her old self, like the mom she'd been before she'd married John Heffer and turned into the Perfect Stepford Church Wife, and I felt my heart squeeze. "You do hurt my feelings, though, Mom." I heard myself say.

"I'm sorry," she said. Then she held her hand out to me. "How about we try this birthday thing again?" I put my hand in hers, feeling cautiously hopeful. Maybe there was part of my old mom left inside her. I mean, she'd come alone, without the step-loser, which was pretty darn close to a miracle. I squeezed her hand and smiled. "Sounds good to me."

"Well, then, you should open your present and then we can eat cake," Mom said, sliding over the box that sat next to the as yet untouched cake.

"Okay!" I tried to keep the enthusiasm in my voice, even though the present was wrapped in paper covered with a grim nativity scene. My smile held until I recognized the white leather cover and gold-tipped pages. With my heart sinking down into my stomach, I turned the book over to read: The Holy Word, People of Faith Edition printed in expensive gold leaf cursive across the cover. Another glittering of excess gold caught my eye. Across the bottom of the cover it read, The Heffer Family. There was a red velvet bookmark with a gold tassel stuck inside the front pages of the book and, trying to buy time so I could think of something to say other than "this is a truly awful present," I let the pages fall open there. Then I blinked, hoping what I was reading was just a trick of my eyes. No. It was really there. The book had opened to the family-tree page. In the weird back-slanted left-handed writing that I easily recognized as belonging to the step-loser, my mom's name linda heffer had been penned in. A line had been drawn attaching it to john heffer, with the date of their marriage off to the side. Underneath their names, written in as if we had been born to them, were the names of my brother, my sister, and me.

Okay, my bio dad, Paul Montgomery, had left us when I was just a kid and had promptly disappeared from the face of the earth. Once in a while a pathetically small child-support check would arrive from him with no return address, but other than those rare instances, he hadn't been part of our lives in upward of ten years. Yes, he was a crappy dad. But he was my dad, and John Heffer, who seriously hated my guts, was not. I looked up from the bogus family tree and into my mom's eyes. My voice sounded surprisingly steady, calm even, but inside I was a big mess of emotions. "What were you thinking when you decided on this for my birthday present?"

Mom seemed annoyed at my question. "We were thinking that you'd like to know that you're still part of this family."

"But I'm not. I haven't been for a long time before I was Marked. You know that and I know that and John knows that."

"Your father most certainly does not-"

I held up my hand to cut her off. "No! John Heffer is not my father. He's your husband, and that's all he is. Your choice-not mine. That's all he's ever been." The wound that had been bleeding inside me from the time my mother had walked up broke open and hemorrhaged anger throughout my body. "Here's the deal, Mom. When you bought my present you were supposed to be picking something you thought I might actually like, not something your husband wanted crammed down my throat."

"You don't know what you're talking about, young lady," my mother said. Then she glared at Grandma. "She gets this attitude from you."

My grandma raised one silver brow at her daughter and said, "Thank you, Linda, that might be the nicest thing you've ever said to me."

"Where is he?" I asked my mom.

"Who?"

"John. Where is he? You didn't come here for me. You came here because he wanted you to make me feel bad, and that's not something he'd miss. So where is he?"

"I don't know what you mean." Her eyes flicked around guiltily, and I knew I'd guessed right. I stood up and called down the sidewalk, "John! Come out, come out, wherever you are!" Sure enough, a man detached himself from one of the stand-up tables that were situated at the opposite end of the sidewalk near the Starbucks entrance. I studied him as he walked up to us, trying to understand what my mother had ever seen in him. He was a totally unspectacular guy. Average height-dark, graying hair-weak chin-narrow shoulders-skinny legs. It wasn't till you looked in his eyes that you saw anything unusual, and then what was reveled was an unusual absence of warmth. I'd always thought it was weird that such a cold, soulless guy would constantly spout religion.

He reached our table and started to open his mouth, but before he could speak I tossed my "gift" at him.

"Keep it. It's not my family and it's not my beliefs," I said, looking him squarely in the eyes.

"So you're choosing evil and darkness," he said.

"No. I'm choosing a loving goddess who has Marked me as her own and gifted me with special powers. I choose a different way than you. That's all there is to it."

"As I said, you choose evil." He rested his hand on my mom's shoulder, like she needed his support to be able to sit there. Mom covered his hand with hers and made sniffling sounds. I ignored him and focused on her.

"Mom, please don't do this again. If you can accept me, and if you really want to see me, then call and we'll meet. But pretending you want to see me because John tells you what to do hurts my feelings and isn't good for either of us."

"It is good for a wife to submit unto her husband," John said. I thought about mentioning how chauvinistic and patronizing and just plain wrong that sounded, but instead I decided not to waste my breath and said, "John, go to hell."

"I wanted you to turn away from the evil," Mom said, crying softly. My grandma spoke up. Her voice was sad but stern. "Linda, it is unfortunate that you found and then bought completely into a belief system that insists as one of its basic tenants that different means evil."

"What your daughter has found is God, no thanks to you," John snapped.

"No. My daughter has found you, and it is sad but true that she never liked to think for herself. Now you're doing her thinking for her. But here's a little independent thought that Zoey and I would like to leave with you," Grandma continued speaking as she handed me my lavender plant and first edition of Dracula, and then grabbed my elbow and pulled me to my feet. "This is America, and that means you don't have the right to think for the rest of us. Linda, I agree with Zoey. If you can find some sense in that head of yours and want to see us because you love us as we are, then give me a call. If not, I don't want to hear from you again." Grandma paused and shook her head in disgust at John. "And you, I don't ever want to hear from again, no matter what."

As we walked away, John's voice whipped out at us, sharp and cutting with anger and hatred. "Oh, you'll hear from me again. Both of you will. There are many good, decent, God-fearing people who are tired of tolerating your evil, who believe enough is enough. We won't live side by side with worshippers of darkness for much longer. Mark my words ... wait and see ... it is time you repented ..." Thankfully, we were soon beyond hearing his rant. I felt like I was going to cry until I realized what my sweet old grandma was muttering to herself.

"That man is such a damn turd monkey."

"Grandma!" I said.

"Oh, Zoeybird, did I call your mother's husband a damn turd monkey out loud?"

"Yes, Grandma, you did."

She looked at me, her dark eyes sparkling. "Good."