The Lamb and the Gray Battle

October 29, 2022

Jo touched her shoulder. "Are you all right?"

"Yeah," Evie said, putting the photo in the box.

Jo said, "You can talk to me. I know how you feel."

The tone of Evie's laughter was both caustic and airy. "No one knows how I feel."

"When my husband died, I couldn't talk to anyone. Brantley was too young. I was pregnant, emotional. I was completely alone. Now you're feeling alone. You've lost a wonderful, loving person, who took care of you."

Evie sprayed laughter through the room. "Well, you're not talking about Gran."

"Of course I am. She took you in. You were all alone before she came along."

Evie coughed, collected a whole stack of photos from the shelf, clutched them to her chest. "No, I wasn't."

"You didn't have anyone before she came along."

"Yes, I did. My grandmother kidnapped me. She was deranged. She poisoned my mind against everyone who loved me all over this notion that my soul could be saved."

With Evie's vivid demon red hair, soul-saving certainly would have been a motive.

But Jo said, "You're being melodramatic."

"I spent centuries confused and heartbroken."

Jo closed her eyes, but she had a better sense of humor about Evie's tendency to talk about centuries than Brantley did.

"You were adopted."

"No, I wasn't."

"Your mother was adopted."

"No," Evie said. "She wasn't." Evie gathered up another stack of photographs, shoved them into a box. "Brantley is crazy. You're crazy. Everyone in PC is crazy." Evie muttered, "Crazy pack of murderers."

Jo pressed her hands down as if the action pressed down her emotions. "Your grandmother was Irish."

"Yeah," Evie said, her brow twisted inhumanly.

Jo eased and stepped to Evie, took her arm. "You're not Irish. You're not some demon blood monster."

Evie puckered her lips, made them into a barricade so she wouldn't burst into laughter. Evie made a very Irish noise, reverted to her accent.

"You're a crazy lot of humans. It's easier to sound like the rest of ya. Gran cursed the humans around us, refused to fake an accent." She reverted back to her middle American tone, "Like it matters so much."

Jo's lip quivered. She touched her own stubborn auburn locks that refused to hide under the gray. "You dye your hair. You're one of those rebellious kids."

"I. Am. Not. A. Kid."