Page 75 of Banshee
“Irene?”
“The goddess of peace.”
“I like Aspen better,” she said as she bumped her shoulder against mine.
“Me too.”
“So, who was Diana?” Brandy asked.
“The goddess of the hunt.”
“Wow. I noticed the tattoo on her arm, but I guess I didn’t think anything of it.”
“Asclepius.”
“That’s a mouthful.”
I liked Brandy. She had a way of making me laugh without even trying. “The God of medicine. It’s my uncle’s road name. He’s a doctor.”
We sat in silence for a few minutes before Brandy asked me a question I had never considered.
“Will you go back home once your family knows you’re here?”
“No. I don’t know that I could ever go back home again. At least not to live. Maybe to visit one day.”
“What about your sister?”
“I don’t know.”
I wondered what Diana would do. Her husband was a doctor in New York. A member of a club in New York, but her children were here. Mimic was a member of the Silver Shadows, and Kytten was the VP’s old lady. I knew neither of them would leave.
Diana would have to make a choice: Stay and risk losing her husband or leave and never have a relationship with the children she lost.
Sure, children moved away when they grew up. But that was after twenty years of living with their parents. Losing ten years with them and then leaving them again would be a hard choice to make.
I wondered if Bane loved my sister enough to give up his life in New York. Would he give up everything he’d built over the last twenty years and live in a little map-dot town?
Did he love her enough to give up everything for her?
Then again, Mimic and Kytten were his kids too. He’d never had a chance to know them at all. Would he be the kind of dad who would burn the world down to keep his kids safe?
According to Diana, he never gave up looking for her. Never moved on. Maybe he was that kind of man. Maybe Diana found a love like my parents had.
“You sure you don’t want to go down there and give your family hell?”
“What?”
“Maybe what you need is to blindside them. Catch them unaware so they don’t have a chance to make up lame excuses for what they did. Take back your control.”
Take back my control? I’d never had any control. I’d never had any say in my own life. My own choices.
Except Banshee.
Him I chose.
Maybe Brandy was right. Maybe I should march downstairs into church and tell my father to fuck off. That would get his attention. Oh, how I wanted to walk up to him and smack him in the face. Hurt him the way I was hurt.
“That’s not who I am.”
