Reaper II: Neophyte by Amanda Holt Read Free Book Online Page B

don’t just leave them behind!”
    Sometimes I do think about my birth father. The rambling man my mother claims left her after their last intimate encounter together.  This, I had learned from the tale she had told me as a young teen about how my birth father had loved her and left her, all in one night.
    Sometimes, I wondered if I had inherited the Dark Thing by way of genetics, of birthright.
    I wondered if my biological father was the one that had given me this gift.
    I had never seen such supernatural phenomenon from my mother. 
    Although, I did keep the Dark Thing a secret from her, so perhaps it was possible that she kept it a secret from me as well.  I had dropped a lot of hints around her though.  Subtle hints that anyone who shared my predicament would have picked up on and responded to.
    I wondered which it was – a gift from my mother, who didn’t seem the type, or my birth father, who I had never known?
    I used to wonder a lot about my father, when I was a child. 
    What was he like? 
    Who was he? 
    Why did he leave my mother, pregnant with me, to raise his child alone? 
    What was he running from? 
    Why was he hiding from us? 
    What was he hiding from us?
    Where the Hell was he?
    Now I wondered if maybe he was the one who had left me the Dark Thing as a legacy and if that was the case, why hadn’t he warned my mother that his child might have shared his supernatural traits?
    Again, if that was the case , how many people were there out there like me and why wasn’t it common knowledge? 
    With a head full of questions and no answers presenting themselves of their own volition, I moved out of my parents’ home and into a small apartment over Charlie Friday’s, the bar where I worked. 
    For three hundred dollars a month, heat and water included in the price, I occupied the bachelorette suite and was free of my mother’s fears – unless she called me on my cell, or I went home to visit, of course.
    She didn’t like that I lived downtown and she liked my mode of transportation even less.
    The first big purchase I made with my bartending tips was a used motorcycle – a six year old Buel Blast 500. The horrified look on her face had somehow made me more satisfied with buying it.
    You’d think my mother would at least have been relieved that I wasn’t riding the bus anymore with the freaks and weirdos as she would say. 
    If only she had known what a weird freak her daughter had turned out to be...
    Mother didn’t like my job either. 
    She was afraid that I was going to waste my life away working as a bartender. 
    She worried constantly that I was going to starve on my low wages, even though I made great tips. With a fit but curvy body like mine, dressing like a ho bag pretty much guaranteed a full tip jar, night after night.
    Mother worried that because I liked my job, I was going to be a bartender forever, even though I reminded her, time and again, that the job was just my pit stop while I waited to get into the police academy.
    Which in her eyes was the worse of the two fates, of course.
    I liked working as a bartender – there were times, in fact, that I loved it. 
    The quick-paced social atmosphere, the good natured regulars, the anthropological and sociological quirks, Charlie Friday himself – there were many things to like. 
    However, there were also some things that I did not like, such as the long thankless shifts on my feet.  There were also the drunken idiots to consider, with their heckling when they outdrank their welcome. The occasional bar brawl.
    Then there were the young customers who would get in with their fake identity cards and spend a good portion of the evening testing their limits – and ours.
    Thanks to the college crowd, I was well-versed in how to remove vomit from stainless steel, tile and porcelain.
    We’d cut those kids off and kick them out and even then, we’d still end up having to call an ambulance every once in a while, because one of them would get