Page 16 of Shadow Seeking

As we gathered our things and headed to our offices, I thought about the call ahead. I’d had to make too many of them, over the years. But when I was fourteen, I was the one on the receiving end of the call, and that memory had never left me.

The year was 1998,and it was January. I had just turned fourteen, and for my birthday my mother had brought home leftover cake from the restaurant she worked at. She had bought me a bracelet—a real splurge, even though it was only a silver bangle with a heart on it.

“You’re my everything,” she said when she gave it to me. “You’re my heart, Kyann. I’d do anything for you.”

I’d put on the bracelet, and I never took it off.

The streets were cold and rainy, and we lived in a rundown apartment over a diner on First Avenue in the Belltown District. It was a three-room apartment—a main living area, a bathroom, and a tiny kitchenette. The wallpaper was peeling, we constantly battled cockroaches and rats, and we didn’t dare leave any food out on the counter. I kept everything in the fridge, scolding mymother every time she forgot to put boxes of crackers and bags of chips away.

I managed to make it to school, though how I got there escaped me—but every afternoon I’d come home to find her at one of the three jobs she held just to pay rent. I’d change clothes, do my homework, then go down to the restaurant where I worked as a dishwasher from 6:00 PM till midnight. I was paid off the books because I wasn’t supposed to work more than three hours a day during the school week, and I was pulling a six-hour shift every day. But we needed the money, and I sucked it up and dealt with it.

My mother worked three jobs—one as a waitress at Jugs, a breast-forward restaurant with a uniform that accentuated every curve the waitresses had. She worked there every afternoon from noon till four. Then she hustled to her second job, tending bar at a dive known as Right Hand Tony’s, and she worked there from six till midnight. At midnight, she went to work at an underground gambling parlor, selling drinks and cigarettes. She worked till two in the morning, then came home and crashed until it was time to wake up and do it all again. Once in awhile, she had a date. She’d meet her boyfriends after work, and come home near morning.

Between the two of us, we managed to pay the rent, pay the bills, and put money into savings for my college education. That is, until she met Jace.

Even though my mother was an independent woman, she had a weakness for bad boys. Her boyfriends were all temporary, and she never let them come home with her. She met them at their place, or she waited for them on the corner and they’d pick her up in their car. I tried to get her to start dating nice men, but all she’d say is, “All men are the same below the surface. I don’t think I could live in suburbs…and I don’t have the education for anything better.”

I’d try to convince her to go back to school, but she always shook her head and said it was too late for her, and we were going to focus on me and my future.

Anyway, when she first mentioned Jace, I got a bad feeling and warned her, but she waved me off. “I know he’s bad news, honey…but there’s something about him that I can’t ignore.”

“Like my father?” Erin—my mother—had told me over and over that my father had mesmerized her, seduced her, and then left the moment he found out she was pregnant.

“He’s not a demon, so no. But…he’s…charming. He treats me like a lady,” she said.

I couldn’t argue her out of it. A few weeks after she started dating him, I woke up one morning to find she hadn’t come home. I waited for her as long as I could—we didn’t have cell phones at that point—and then, when I couldn’t wait any longer, I scribbled a note telling her I was headed to school, and to leave a message when she came in.

By evening, when she still wasn’t home, I called the cops and asked if there had been any accidents. Then I went to her first job, but she’d missed her shift that day, and none of her friends had heard from her. She wasn’t at the bar, either. Finally, I went to the club and asked her boss if she’d called in. He told me no, and then handed me a fifty, as though that would calm me down.

The next morning at six am, the cops were at my door.

I stared at them, still tired, but I knew. “My mother’s dead, isn’t she?”

The older officer—a woman probably in her forties—gave me a sad smile. “You know?”

“I’m guessing. She wasn’t home all day yesterday or last night. She didn’t show up at any of her jobs, either. She went out with this sketchy guy, and I haven’t heard from her since then.”

They found her down by the docks. She’d been brutally murdered, her head bashed in. They tried to soften the details, but I could feel the brutality of the attack in their words. By the time they finished, I was numb.

“Do you have family you want us to contact?” the second officer asked.

I shook my head. “I’ll get in touch with them.” I was lying. We had no family. I had no clue who my grandparents were, who my father was, or anybody else that might be a blood relative. She’d barely ever said anything about her own roots, let alone my father’s.

“We’ll check back to make certain you’re okay,” the older woman said. “I’m so sorry, Kyann. We’ll do everything we can to find out who did this.”

But I knew who it was. I knew it was Jace. As the cops left, I shut the door. I got dressed and I waited until the landlord was awake. I asked him if he’d like to buy the furniture we had, and that I’d be moving at the end of the week. I tried to play on his sympathy to get back a prorated part of the rent for the month, and he caved.

As he paid me the rest of the rent and the cash for the contents of the apartment, I added up how much money I’d have from with what we had in savings. Then, I sorted through everything that we had, taking the few pictures that my mother kept, and the important documents, and I went to a safety deposit company and rented a small box and stored everything important in there, including all the cash I could get my hands on.

The next day I carried all my mother’s clothes, along with a few of my own, to a thrift shop and managed to sell them for another small sum. I went back to my mother’s places where she worked and they gave me her last paychecks, made out to me.

That money went in with the rest.

Finally, I invested in a switchblade, and at the end of the week, I headed out to live on the streets. I had one plan in mind: I’d find Jace myself, and I’d make him pay.

CHAPTER SIX

By the endof the day, I’d made the call I dreaded to Sylvie’s parents, and was ready to take Murdoch home and introduce him to Jangles. I wasn’t sure how she’d take it. Jangles had been an only cat for the three years I had her, and I knew that introducing strange cats to an already established feline household could be tricky. But I hoped for good luck and, when I pulled into my driveway, I turned to Murdoch, who was peeking at me from inside the carrier

---