Branded Read Free Page A

Which was fine. I wasn’t hurting, but I had spent a lot of my bounties trying to solve one thing.
    The mystery behind what had killed my father and left my mother nearly catatonic for the last three years.

Chapter Three
    With traffic it took me about forty minutes to get out of Detroit and into Sterling Heights where the nursing home my mom lived was located. I approached the front counter and asked the nurse stationed there where I could find my mother. She directed me to the activities room, which I found amusing since my mother hadn’t done anything you could call an “activity” since three years ago when she was found mumbling nonsense over my father’s dead body in a crack house in East Detroit.
    There’s a fond memory.
    I entered the activities room and scanned the place for Mom. A large screen TV played a golf game and two gray-topped men sat on the couch watching some dude putt his ball into the hole. They were mesmerized by it. I couldn’t imagine.
    A trio of women sat at a table by the window playing cards.
    My mother sat in her wheelchair toward the back of the room, facing the sunlight coming through the window. She stared into space with a vague smile over her face.
    A good day. Sometimes when I visit she has this intense scowl that deepens all the lines in her face. When she’s like that she looks like she’s plotting to destroy the world.
    A water cooler sat just inside the door to the room. I took one of the paper cups in the attached dispenser, then crossed the room to Mom.
    I scooted a chair over from an empty table that had a half-finished jigsaw puzzle of a giraffe on it. The remaining pieces sat in the cardboard box the puzzle came in. I sat down next to mom and looked her over. The nurses must have recently done her hair. It looked clean and the salt and pepper strands hung about the sides of her face in soft wisps.
    She had her hands folded in her lap. I took one of them and sandwiched it between both of mine.
    “Hey, Mom.”
    She continued to stare in the distance beyond the windows. The sunlight coming through the window warmed the air. But it didn’t seem to bother her. At least there was none of the humidity in the nursing home. And they didn’t have it down to subfreezing temperatures either.
    “I’ve been working a lot lately,” I said to her. “Sly says Dad would have been proud of me. I’ve kept up my studies. Practicing. Honing my craft. Have to admit, I’ve gotten pretty good in the arts. Better than the last time we talked about it.”
    Which had been four years ago, when she complained that I wasn’t taking my gifts seriously. Mom was old school about the magical arts.
    “Anyway, I’m here today because I have a present for you.”
    She continued to smile. I could have been talking to a statue. Except that I could feel her presence inside her shell of a body. She was in there somewhere, the mother I used to know, the vibrant, talkative, sometimes cocky woman who had raised me.
    The mom I loved more than life itself.
    I glanced over my shoulder. No one was paying any attention to us. So I pulled out the vial of Sly’s potion from my pocket, uncorked it, and poured it into the paper cup.
    I rested a hand on Mom’s shoulder.
    “I have your pink lemonade,” I said. She used to love pink lemonade. And it had to be pink, damn it. None of that plain old yellow stuff.
    Despite my tempting her with an old favorite, she didn’t respond.
    I gave her shoulder a gentle squeeze. “Mom? You want your lemonade now?”
    She sighed, like someone remembering something missed from long ago.
    I held the cup to her lips. “Take a sip, Mom.”
    She sat still. Didn’t even register the cup’s edge pressed gently against mouth.
    I knew she could drink. She could eat, too, though the nurses had to feed her. But she could respond well enough to simple commands a lot of the time. She couldn’t—or wouldn’t—speak, but she could sip and chew and swallow.
    The trick was getting her to