The god complex (Book one of The Devil's Daughter trilogy)

Chapter thirty-six.

 We wait for my mother on the couch we sat on yesterday, where Night nearly died and I cried over him, where not even my voice brought him back to me, but my love did. He sits there dozing back to sleep but I nudge him to stay awake, he has every right to hear what my mother has to say as I do.

 "What is she doing that could be taking this long?" Night is impatient and I should be but I know that I've waited this long I can wait some more.

 "Don't know but she said she was getting something first." What it could be, I don't know? We sit together with a small distance between us but enough to please my mother, I do not want to anger her with me being so close to the truth.

 "Do you think she has anything to eat, I'm starving?" His stomach growls making mine but I shove my hunger aside, nothing is going to stop me from getting these answers. I shrug my shoulders and he huffs defeated, it wasn't the answer he wanted. He probably wanted me to give him a nod and allow him to snoop through her cupboards in search of food, but she is a stranger to me.

 "After this we can get something to eat Night." He nods at me and kisses the tip of my nose, I smile more to myself but he catches it and chuckles.

 "There is no need to wait. I can make something if you hunger that bad, apparently your father didn't train them to push the need for food out of their mind." She speaks with such distaste at Night that I have to bite my tongue from speaking out at her. I swallow my pride and so does Night, he takes her hurtful words with ease and smiles. She clicks her tongue out of no response from him, my father has taught him well, only act when needed, the time is not now.

 "No, its fine. I can wait until Fire has everything she needs from you, I just hope she can get all the answers she wants."

 "Do not worry mortal, she will and more. Are you ready Fotia?" She hurls my birth name at him, cutting him where he knows nothing about me and where I came from. I sense his discomfort but he seethes next to me in silence, keeping his eyes on her. 

 "I'm ready, mom." She smiles at what she told me to call her, thinking that we're connecting and bonding but it couldn't be further from the truth. After this I want nothing to do with her, the way she treats Night and me, as if we were beneath her and not worth her even speaking to us. I thought I had a God complex but now I know where I get it from, it must run in the family.

 "I'll start with the beginning. My mother is Demeter, the goddess of harvest, and her story goes she made the crops lush and when I was abducted by your father the land became barren, because she grieved at my absence."

 "I know this story, what does it have to do with anything?"

 "Hush, listen. There is more to this story as there is to all stories Fotia. The myth is that she plagued the land out of loss of me, but that could not be further from the truth. Your father did abduct me from the fields of my mother but I rejoiced in it. She was a terrible mother and cared more about the mortals than she did me. Food for the precious children of the Earth, the people for her mother, and her mother. I was supposed to continue this legacy but I wanted nothing to do with it, I despise the mortals and everything that they do." Her eyes cut to Night and I feel the tension in the room on top of me, I can nearly taste the discomfort.

 "So you wanted to be kidnapped?"

 "Oh goddess no. I wanted to be free and in some way your father gave that to me, but I still had to obey his rules as I had to obey my mother's. I ate those four seeds out of spite and hunger, I was finally free from my mother but only for those four months of the year. Until I struck up a deal with your father. If I could have a child with him then he must promise that we could stay with him there, away from my mother and her family. If I gave him a child he would protect us, from anything and everything. He agreed, and you were born."