We haven't talked much cause I've been away so we've been out of touch Who: Adelle and her mother Ryndana(NPC) Where: Phonelines When: 11:45PM
After watching the news that morning and another round of hiding from demons that night, Adelle had spent the majority of the following day mulling over all that could happen. Miranda was dead. It wasn’t even like she’d known the other siren that long, but there had been a sense of sisterhood that she’d shared with the other siren for those few precious moments. She was alone again now, left to ponder what her existence meant to the world. Miranda had seemed like a very kind soul despite all the killing. Could Adelle do that? Was she capable of being the same smiling person during the day while she ruined human lives at night? She was curled up into a corner of her bedroom with a blanket wrapped so tightly around her body that she couldn’t move. A few moments of wriggling about allowed her to free herself, and she began the search for her phone. The iPhone had been strewn somewhere with most of the bedclothes, and it Adelle wanted to find it. She had a call to make.
With her tail in the air, she found it under the queen-sized bed and pulled it out with a hanger when she found that she couldn’t reach it normally. She woke the phone with a push of its single button on the face, and then slid her finger across the bar when it lit up. The tiny girl was into the contacts and hitting her mother’s cell before she had a chance to turn around and properly assess the damage to her room. The feeling of losing that knowledge that there was a structure to her life felt devastating. She felt just as lost as ever amidst confusion and downright stupidity.
“Hello?” There was a yawn following the word. Her mother was chasing a couple of late nights with coffee to stay in a zone for her next book most likely. She could imagine the fourty-something-year-old that looked much like a taller, more mature version of her sitting back and staring at her laptop. Since Adelle had entered her twenties, they were constantly likened to be sisters in public. It helped immensely when your immortal mother looked like she was also in her twenties.
“Mom, it’s Adi.” She sighed involuntarily, and immediately wished she could take it back. She didn’t want her mother to immediately get angry with her.
“I’m not old enough to stop recognizing voices, hon. You,” she paused for emphasis, much like her daughter loved to. “Sound like something’s bothering you. So is it too late to call Roxy and Serafina? Or Fred, you know how much that girl misses you.”
“You know there are some things that I can’t discuss with anybody but you.” Adelle was pacing her bedroom now, stepping over crumpled clothing and pillows. She padded lightly with her dancer’s grace, making the pacing more of an exercise as she twisted into each placement of her feet.
“Is your period really bad this month?”
“Mom.”
“I’m serious.”
“Mom. Seriously. You need to like, close the laptop and pay attention. Some kinda serious stuff happened today.” At least she hoped it was serious. She didn’t want her mother telling her that the death was nothing and that it happened to all sirens. That would probably make her break down and cry again. She seriously didn’t want that right now.
Adelle could her hear mother close the notebook, and she assumed that she was ready for a serious conversation. “So how bad is it?”
“It’s fine. I have some questions. I want to know more. No, you know what? I kinda need to know more. I’m on my own out here and there’s really nobody to guide me unless I tag along at that other siren’s heels all day.” She wanted to play with a strand of her hair, but she thought against it. She didn’t need one curling strand facing off against her in the shower. “And she’s dead.”
“I told you pretty much everything I know. I tried to prepare you as best I could, Adi.” Ryndana began to shuffle through some folders, keeping the information in her head at the forefront. The book was almost done, and she was on the homestretch now. “She’s dead?”
“Why don’t I have grandparents?” Adelle’s eyes wandered the room, surveying the complete damage she’d caused. There wasn’t too much mess, but she would be ironing a lot of clothes to return them to their wrinkle free presentation. The line sounded dead, but she could still hear the papers shuffling around. She couldn’t even get five minutes worth of attention from her own mother. “Mom?”
“One second, Adi.”
“God! Mom!” The small siren’s voice was thick with irritation, but if she couldn’t get her mother to care about what she had to say, who else was going to do it? She could only pray that her mother would focus on something that wasn’t her novel for a few minutes. “Roxy has tons of extended family, Fina has some even. I just feel like the odd person out when I can’t say we visit Nana and PopPop or whoever I’m missing out on. No grandparents, no aunts and uncles, and not even from just your side of the family. What about Daddy?”
“We haven’t gone to see anybody because they’re all dead, Adelle. If not from hunters, then it was humans who learned our secrets, both families.” An exasperated sigh made a botched noise through the line, and Ryndana didn’t say anything else. Did she really need to? “My mother. My mother was over three hundred years old. She believed that a siren makes their own path, takes her own routes, and lives the way she wants. Nobody can stop her.”
“I-“
“I’m not done yet. You have such strong instincts running around all that regular information you keep. You have a knack for it, it’s unpolished, rough, and a bit nasty to look at, but I know in time you’ll be a force to be reckoned with. I don’t know much because my own mother never taught me a lot, I was just supposed to lead a regular life and kill when I felt the need. That’s why I have nothing to tell you.” The shuffling of papers was to remind her daughter that there was still work to be done. She didn’t want to rush her off the phone, but after an entire week of calls because she was in constant fear of demon attacks, there was only so much parenting to be done. “I’m sorry, Adelle.”
Adelle was looking at herself in the mirror, but really staring through herself more than anything else. With her mother’s words had come a rousing, deep silence that left her quite calm. Though she didn’t say anything, her mother didn’t hang up, didn’t ask if she was still there. She made a tiny noise that sounded like she was clearing her throat, and her daughter for once in her entire life, didn’t speak.
“Your father’s going to be turned soon. I mean, it wasn’t going to last forever. He came into the house in a huff after the first time the demons came, asking if I knew anything about it, asking if we were demons. I told him the truth.” Adelle could hear the old chair her mother loved to curl up in being pushed back. She was about to pace, just like her daughter. The little siren almost wanted to laugh at their similarities. For all the things she wanted to complain about, and all the times she felt that her mother wasn’t listening, they were so alike. “And I love him. I love him so much. You know? He made the decision that if I’m going to be around forever, then he wanted to be with me. And when the time comes that I don’t—“
“Mom. Don’t talk like that.” The look Adelle gave herself in the mirror, the furrowed brows and look of disbelief made her feel like she wasn’t herself. She placed her hand onto the mirror, half-expecting to fall through into some twisted dreamworld. She asked for the truth and now despite whether she wanted to accept it or not, her mother was giving her the truth. “You and Daddy… please don’t cry, Mom.”
“I’m not crying.” The sniffling said otherwise, but Ryndana composed herself fairly quickly. “He’s either going to turn me, or we both burn, when that time comes. But he—we, only want the best for you. The choice is up to.” Adelle was such an innocent girl, and Ryndana sometimes wished that she hadn’t brought her into the world. She would always love her little girl, no matter how silly she was and what she did, but she would always be sad that such a nice girl was a siren. The author had given up her own life to ensure that her daughter had grown up without influence, free to make the choice. Ryndana was fighting it, but the grasp was slipping, slowly. What was to say that her daughter didn’t end up slaughtered by a hunter or locked up in some government facility? She had to let her daughter know about her recent decisions. “I don’t look like I used to when you were here. Thirty-something now. It’s so hard to finish this book because I’m going kinda crazy.”
Ryndana exhaled, “What did you mean by, ‘she’s dead’?”
“Miranda, the siren I met. Her name was on the news today, well I thought it was her name, so I looked it up on Google and she was the art teacher at the local high school here. She got her guts ripped out by a demon. I just don’t know what the fuck it means. Sorry. What the fudge.” Miranda was—had been, something, whatever. In life, the siren was old enough to be a legend. She was almost five hundred years old, had lived through enough to know how to easily patch Adelle’s back after the crash, and some demon had reached out and snuffed her flame. For all that the siren was, she was just as small, soft, and vulnerable as a regular human girl. No wonder she’d been raised that way.
The silence on the other end of the line said it all. Her mother was at a loss for what to do. Why couldn’t she just tell her daughter everything she thought being a siren was? Why was that so hard? Why do I have to be left to drift in the wind?
“Adi. Just let me think about things. Okay? We just need some time.”