Greywalker - Kat Richardson [83]
“Can you do it while she’s touching you?” I asked, half curious, half hoping to prove something to Cameron’s mother.
“I can try.” He shimmered away again as Colleen held on for dearest life.
She let out a wail and plopped onto her backside. “Cameron!”
He came back. “I’m still here, Mom.”
“Oh, my God,” she gasped and put her hands up to her face. Oblivious of her makeup, she rubbed her cheeks and temples and smeared her hands up into her hair. “My God, my God.” She crumpled into a ball and began sobbing.
“Mom! Mom, it’s OK. It’s all right. I’m not going to hurt you or anything.” He crouched down on the rug beside his mother and put his arms around her. “Mom? Are you OK?”
She wailed and pressed the top of her head against her son’s chest. He rocked her and babbled soothing words. I stood up and looked around.
“Kitchen?” I asked.
“Out the other door and through the dining room,” Cameron whispered, jerking his head toward a door we had not used before.
I nodded and went out.
Somehow, Colleen Shadley didn’t strike me as the sort to resort to hard liquor for shock. I made tea. While it was brewing, though, I hunted up a bottle of cognac and put a good dose of the stuff into one of the cups. I juggled three full cups back out to the sitting room.
Cameron had gotten his mother back on the sofa, though she was still clinging to him a bit and sniffling.
I handed her the cup with the potent brew. “This’ll help. Better drink it.”
Cameron found her a box of tissues as she snuck up on her first sip. She shuddered and made a face, but took a scalding gulp and then another. Then she took a tissue and dabbed at her smeared eyes and blew her nose in a delicate, ladylike fashion.
“I—I—that wasn’t good of me,” she said.
Cameron patted her arm. “Mom. It’s OK. You were . . . shocked. It’s OK.”
She nodded her head and drank some more tea. She set the cup down on the glass-covered table beside the sofa. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t take any more of that muck. I need a drink.”
So much for my assessment of character.
Cameron got up and went looking for liquor. Colleen, face streaked with mascara and lipstick, looked at me and raised her eyebrows.
“What am I going to do?” she asked.
TWENTY
Improvise.” Her eyes were chasms of confusion. She started shaking her head. “No, no. I don’t ‘improvise.’ I plan things, I prepare for contingencies. This is—this is not something I have any plan for.”
I started thinking out loud. “I suppose you could think of it as if Cameron had an exotic medical condition that requires a change of lifestyle. He’s still your son. He’s still a decent, intelligent young man. He’s just . . . different.”
Her mouth turned down in distaste. “You sound like a counselor.”
Cameron came back with the cognac bottle and some glasses. He poured generous measures for all of us. I gave him a sharp look.
He returned a “what?” look and a shrug. “It’s alcohol. I can practically absorb it through my skin. It’s not going to hurt me.” He sat down next to his mother.
We sipped. Colleen Shadley gulped. She shuddered and finished off her drink.
“All right, Cam,” she gasped, setting the glass down, “tell me how this happened. Help me understand it.”
He refilled her glass, avoiding meeting her eyes. “Well, Mom, the details are kind of unpleasant. I did something I felt was necessary, but I did it badly. Can’t we just say that it happened because I thought I knew more than I did?”
“All right. Someday I expect to get the whole story out of you, but I can let that go for now. Go on with the rest.”
“I met someone who wasn’t very pleasant and he took advantage of me, because I wasn’t as clever as I thought.”
Colleen stiffened and began to cough on alcohol fumes. She waved Cameron away as he tried to help and caught her breath on her own. “Go on,” she repeated. Her eyes watered. She dabbed at them as her son talked.
“I got sick.”
“I remember you were ill for a while after Christmas.”
“More like February, Mom, but it doesn’t matter. Anyhow, I was megasick and I didn’t know why. And when I found out, I didn