'What do you want?' I ask harshly.
'I figured you'd be pleased to speak with me,' Dr Simone says flippantly. I place her voice as a thirty-something year old woman, with a young, sharp mind.
'Why would I? All this happened because of you,' I blame.
'Did it, Claire?' Dr Simone replies in a shocked, false, high voice. 'The only thing I have ever done is help Dean and Vanessa—true, I have also pursued my own interests: no scientist in the whole planet knows werewolves or interacts with them like I do, but I have ever only helped Dean and Vanessa.'
'Then why didn't you help them have a baby of their own?' I blurt. Where did that come from? I ask myself in astonishment.
Dr Simone seems shocked herself for a breath, for she doesn't quip quickly like I imagined she would. She sighs first, perhaps truly serious for the first time, 'I suggested it countless times, Claire. In fact, I wanted it. Dean is powerful and all that; but Vanessa, she is one in a kind, the last of her kind matter-of-fact, a rare gem even among werewolves. I also studied Olligrander a little based on the venom and blood samples Dean brought me, but Vanessa held my fascination.
'She didn't want to bring another White into this world who would just die after a few centuries or a couple of millennia,' Dr Simone reveals.
'That makes no sense,' I respond, agitated and teary. 'Wilhelm Wade, the vampire of vanishing—' Dr Simone gasps at that, thrilled at the mention of a vampire—she has dreamed of studying one—but I move on quickly, '—you don't know him, told me that Dean's Elderwood lifeline balances out Vanessa's White curse.'
'Yeah, it does,' Dr Simone admits. 'But you are missing an integral part of the puzzle, Claire: Olligrander. Why did we have to craft a stable, homogenous super venom with Olligrander's venom included, Claire? Think! We had no choice. Olligrander's uncanny bond traits, through his venom acted as a catalyst and a binding agent; else the Elderwood venom and White venom would have destroyed each other. Dean and Vanessa would have created a perfectly fine biological baby, but the likelihood of the Curse killing it after a few centuries was high, and Vanessa had had enough.'
The message is clear: Dean and Vanessa could have a baby together, but they couldn't combine their venoms to create a werewolf; to create me. A stabilizing component had been required. I can also understand the doctor's other implication: Vanessa is a pure White, from a long line of intermarriages between different branches of the telepathic White family, while some other members, at the time, were born of a diluted bloodline. The curse was pure in her. It would affect any child she biologically had with Dean, since the child's genes would have been set without a stabilizing component like Olligrander's venom. Hence, me. And I have a feeling I exceeded expectations.
'I guess we are back where we started: what do you want?'
'To help you, alpha, like I helped Dean before you.'
'That is what Dean is on the run for, doctor,' I point out caustically. 'I am not supposed to ally with you or anyone: neither Dean nor Vanessa mentioned it.'
'Yeah, they think we are done and I got what I wanted. But maybe I want more,' she chuckles.
'Greed, in the end, fails even the greedy. It is the end of all great beings,' I quote, to which the doctor laughs.
'That's the problem: I'm not great yet,' she goes on laughing.
Then something freakish happens, something I don't figure out until later:
'Mom?' Avoice says softly to Dr Simone.
'What was that!' I gasp.
'We'll talk sometime, Claire.' Dr Simone says brusquely, and punctuates the call, just like that.
I feel bewildered: the voice was very familiar. But even as my Olligrander hearing had picked up the faint, toddler voice over the phone talking to the doctor, the child had spoken by telepathy too.
At the child's telepathy, my instincts had told me, That kid is a part of you!
I dialled Dr Simone back and went straight to voicemail. By some mistake of the doctor's, I had heard in more ways than one something she desired that I don't know about.
My motherly instincts, heretofore premature, which I also didn't know I had, stir up like a hurricane. Gritting my teeth, I unleash a huge, reckless, town-wide telepathic call; psychically scanning for any sign of reception. Anyone telepathic in the town, or is a White like I am or like my child could be, will have their powers activated at my telepathic signal. They'll know my location, and I'll know theirs.
I keep the bubble up, even though it hurts to maintain that level of deep telepathic scrutiny of the whole town. If I tried at this point, I could slip into four hundred minds at once and hear all their thoughts.
But no one responds to my telepathic signal.
Doesn't mean no one noticed.
To a telepathist outside the bubble, the whole town would appear to have been nuked, except by psychic energy: shrouded in a dense fog of telepathy as if by radiation.
And this is exactly what happens.
***
Mom's car stops at the edge of the driveway leading up to the garage. She steps out in a pair of heels, which she promptly remove. Barefoot, she walks to the front porch, giving a pleasured sigh of relief every few steps.
She crashes into the other cane chair beside the door. 'You look like hell,' she observes.
'Gee, thanks,' I say.
'Have you been crying?' She probes.
I take a dip into her mind to see for myself how I look through her eyes; like using a mirror. Lines of brown makeup run down my face, looking like streaks of caked mud. My hair looks electrified and messy, not to mention that mom had needed to step over my discarded heels to get into her chair.
'Boy trouble?' She asks with an upraised eyebrow. She had never taken me for the lovelorn type. The loony type, maybe.
Childtrouble I almost spit, but she wouldn't understand; because neither do I.
'How does it feel to have a child?' I ask out of thin air.
What did I expect? Mom's eyes go as wide as a bushbaby's. 'You are going to have a baby!' It sounds like a query but her temper flares like a solar event.
I crumple my face to emphasize the absurdity of her question, 'Goodness sake, no!' I reply. 'Not that that would be an altogether bad thing.'
Lips pursed, mom studies me. To detect if I am joking or showing telltale signs of guiltiness. But I am too emotionally drained to show all the wrong signs and make her blow her fuse. I just look exhausted.
'You are confusing me, Claire. Why do you ask that question? Did anything happen today?' She decides on asking.
I shrug. 'I saw a kid today. Looked like mine.' I wasn't about to tell her, 'I sensed a kid by telepathy today. It seemed like mine.' I might find myself sensing the psychiatrist's next.
'Looked like mine?' Mom echoes.
I struggle to explain: 'It looked like me. Like I am—could be the mother.'
'It?' Mom frowns.
'I couldn't decide what sex the baby was,' I say.
'Is that all?' Mom searches, wondering if she is looking at a lost stranger.
'Pretty much.'
Mom, reflecting on the conversation: 'Are you doing drugs, Claire?'
'Do I look stoned, like I'm on drugs, mom? I saw a child today, and it aroused something within me. And I don't think her mother would be good to her.'
'Her mother?'
'Maybe it's female. I am revising my earlier statement.'
Mom's thoughts unspool in different directions. She even considers if I am being metaphorical about the relationship between the two of us, but she discards that idea. Eventually, she decides to just go with my words.
'Did you see anything to suggest the mother would be abusive?' She asks.
I shake my head with its mane of hair. 'But let's say I doubt the woman's capacity to be a good mother, busy and all that.'
Mom just nods slowly. 'Motherhood is the power of creation itself, Claire. And maybe you understand a little of what it means to be a parent through that kid today.
'Being a mother means acting on your instincts—protecting your child by any means necessary; even if it means from herself.' Mom has a vague look as she stares at me, but I chuck her words up as a mere reference to my accident at the age of nine, when I ran her car off a ridgeline.
Thoughts of Dr Simone's 'daughter' gnaw at my insides for the rest of the evening, the rest of the week, and even afterwards. I have this sick feeling in the pit of my belly that, though the child had called Dr Simone mom by voice, she had called me mom by telepathy.