Vampire in Los Angeles - Supernatural City Book 3

3 Maya

October 2007

A cold black wall separated their thoughts. Always in her mind, Vyr was a constant soft white light Maya could draw on for comfort when she needed security. Except for one night a month. Tonight. She asked him once why he placed the barrier there. He told her he had adult responsibilities he needed to attend to and they needed his full concentration.

Vyr always had a section of his mind blocked off from her when they were together. He said they were memories and thoughts she would not understand. After seeing into the minds of so many other adults, she didn't doubt his words.

Over the past year, Vyr met with her twice a month to give her lessons on how to control the thoughts of those around her. Now he was teaching her how to block out the thoughts when she didn't want to hear them.

Sometimes her mother looked at her and had thoughts Maya didn't want to know. She tried, once, to tell her about her power, but she did not receive the reaction she hoped for. Her mother became paranoid thinking everyone could hear her thoughts. For the next week every time she saw Maya, she would shy away and refuse to be in the same room with her.

Maya would have felt offended or even sad, but she knew her mother's thoughts and the effects of the substances she used. After long consideration, Maya used one of the new skills Vyr was teaching her and erased the memory from her mother's mind. A switch flipped in her behavior, and her mother acted as if nothing happened. She later confessed what she did to Vyr who warned her to be careful not to tamper with the minds of others, not that he wouldn't know what she did since he could see her thoughts as clearly as she could see his. He agreed with her actions but warned her again about tampering with memories.

She asked Vyr to teach her how to block out thoughts because she didn't want to keep hearing the chaotic rambling of her mother's mind when she was in the same room as her. With practice, she and Vyr found she could read the minds of people she could see, no matter the distance. Otherwise, she could only hear the person as a dull hum, knowing they were there and where they were located, but not able to understand what they were thinking.

Sometimes Maya asked her mother questions she knew she wouldn't answer. Memories would flash through her mind even as her mouth told Maya to go to her room and stop asking. This was the only way her mother would give her information on her father, though she didn't know it. Every time she asked, visions of a dark-skinned man would appear.

In some of the visions, he was happy, dancing around and cradling a baby in his arms. Maya assumed the baby was her. Other memories would show the man yelling, face scrunched and hands clenched tight before storming out of the house. She always saw the snips through the eyes of her mother.

The last time Maya asked about her father was on a day her mother seemed more depressed than others. She drank heavily and kept coming in and out of a lucid state. During one of these spells, when Maya helped to clean the vomit off the floor and get her mother into bed, she requested the information she queried so many times before. Tell me about my father, she said to her mother.

Her mother started crying like she never had before. A memory floated to the surface, and Maya watched it, her heart pounding as hard as it had when she watched the horror movie her mother told her not to stay up for.

A hazy hallway appeared, her mother shuffling down it as another woman held her hand. The other woman wore all white, and Maya recognized her as a nurse like the ones from the TV shows. They reached a cold metal encased room with several tables in the center. The far wall contained rows of small metal doors.

The memory blurred as water flowed around the outside of the viewport. A man wearing a white coat came from a small room and selected one of the doors on the far wall, opening the latch and pulling a bed from the dark maw. With little ceremony, he flung back a white cloth covering the tray to reveal the man Maya saw so many times before. Several holes dotted his chest. Darkness took over, and Maya was pushed from her mother's mind as the woman passed out on the bed in front of her. It was the last time Maya ever asked about her father.