But she’d left out some seriously vital details.
Sick to his stomach, Nick was quickly learning that Livia had been right. Everyone in his life had lied badly to him. Menyara had kept much, much more from him than just the secret of his father and birth.
She’d hidden her real identity from them. Her real role in both their lives.
His gaze went to his mother and he felt as sick as Caleb had been at school.
How could Menyara do this to her? His mother had no idea she was adopted and had no idea who her real parents were. For that matter, he didn’t really know, other than her father was a Sephiroth. That knowledge would kill her. She’d never, ever believe him if he tried to tell her.
His head reeling, he scowled at Menyara. “Who’s my real grandmother?”
“It doesn’t matter. She died three days after she gave your mother up for adoption, in a car wreck. As did your real grandfather, supposedly in another wreck before the birth. It’s why the Gautiers never told her she was adopted. Why bother? With both birth parents dead, there was no reason to ever let Cherise know the truth. For all intents and purposes, the Gautiers are your grandparents. That’s all you and your mother ever need to know. The truth would only hurt her.”
Maybe, but he was leaning toward Xev with this. His mother had a right to know. And it explained why her parents had been so quick to toss her out when she’d become pregnant as a teenager. The fact that her parents had thrown her away like garbage had played a number on his mother’s head. If she knew they weren’t really her birth parents, that might make this better.
But then again, it might not. If she found out the truth, she’d have two sets of parents who’d given her up. That might be a lot worse in her mind.
Yeah, life was ever complicated. Ambrose had taught him that. And people didn’t always react the way you expected them to. As Acheron so often said, emotions didn’t have brains.
And right now, his emotions were all over the place and were definitely not thinking clearly as he tried to make sense of all this.
Which led him back to one other thing he wanted to clarify while Menyara felt the need to come clean with her lies. “Are you really the goddess Cam?”
She nodded.
Cam had been one of the original six primal gods who’d started the first great war of the immortals. A war that had almost ended the world and mankind. She and her siblings had been the ones who’d called for Nick’s race to be put down like rabid dogs. All except his one ancestor.
One cursed Malachai.
One cursed Sephiroth.
Tied together for eternity and doomed to fight one last battle that would eventually end the world.
Now, if what Xev said was true, Mennie had used that last Sephiroth to impregnate Nick’s grandmother and birth his own mother as a trap for his father, knowing his father wouldn’t be able to resist her. Cherise was the yin to Adarian’s yang. An innocent human with the blood of a Sephiroth. A human who had no knowledge of the inhuman creatures who shared this world with mankind.
Unable to believe it, Nick glanced from Menyara to his mother. “You set my mother up?”
“I’m so sorry, Nicholas.”
Stunned, he struggled to breathe as he again had that feeling of being out of sync with time. Of everything slowing down. “Is that why she’s so pure of heart? So incorruptible and unwilling to believe in anything supernatural?”
Mennie nodded. “For some reason, she can’t see it and has an unreasonable reaction to it whenever we try to explain it to her. I tried to hint about it once when she was a girl and she reacted so violently that I erased it from her memory, and have kept her from anything to do with it ever since. She simply can’t handle it.”
Now he understood why his mother had reacted so badly when Ambrose had tried to tell her the truth about the paranormal world around them. It must have triggered something inside her that had been unable to deal with the fact that she wasn’t completely human. That she’d literally been so ill-conceived.
Ambrose must not have ever experienced this moment where he learned the truth about her birth and his heritage.
And maybe that was why his mother was unconscious now. Because she was part Sephiroth, whatever was infecting Caleb might be infecting her, too.
Menyara sighed before she spoke again. “It’s also why Cherise is incapable of seeing the evil in others. Why she’s like a beacon that calls out to so many who need kindness. Acheron. Caleb. Kyrian. The Peltiers. Like all Sephirii, she’s innately soothing and gentle to be around. A spiritual balm. Unless they’re in battle and are defending what they love, the Sephirii can calm the most restless of souls.”
And that made him furious. Because of what they’d done to her, his mother had been attacked and thrown out of her home. As a teen, she’d been homeless and pregnant. Abandoned.
Yes, Menyara had taken her in, but now that he knew the truth…