orenda [leo valdez]

xxii. The Dead Mom's Club Takes on Nymph Fan Club

She was having a great day until she was met with the face of her dead mother.

Kira wished she had sewed her mouth shut before she blurted without thinking.

Leo and Hazel both glanced back to her, Leo with a concerned face, and Hazel bewildered.

Kira certainly didn't seem like the girl to hate her mother. She wore her necklace, she had her picture up in her room, she never talked bad about her, but she also never talked about her at all.

Her relationship with her mother was not the best. Her mom was a successful businesswoman to the city of Seattle, and to Kira, she was a drunk.

Kira had tried for years to forgive her mother, especially after her mysterious death. She was supposed to forgive and forget, like she did everything else.

Her mother had messed up her life pretty bad. She flinched whenever someone she didn't know tried to touch her, she didn't like when people raised her voice, etc. In fact, the reason she was so calm all the time was because she didn't want to be like her mother. She didn't want to lose control.

When the woman appeared to her as her mom, she almost broke down then and there.

Forcing herself to look away from her and Leo, she tried to compose herself.

"Is that what you see?" the woman asked. "Interesting. And you, Hazel, dear?"

"How did you—?" Hazel stepped back in alarm. "You—you look like Mrs. Leer. My third grade teacher. I hated you."

The woman cackled. "Excellent. You resented her, eh? She judged you unfairly?"

"You—she taped my hands to the desk for misbehaving," Hazel said. "She called my mother a witch. She blamed me for everything I didn't do and— No. She has to be dead. Who are you?"

"Oh, Leo knows," the woman said. "How do you feel about Aunt Rosa, mijo?"

The words seemed to effect Leo, so she moved on.

"And you, dear Kira?" her mom asked. Her blood ran cold. "How do you feel about your mother?"

Kira stared at the white sand.

"Nemesis," Leo said. "You're the goddess of revenge."

"You see?" The goddess smiled at Hazel. "He recognizes me."

Nemesis cracked another cookie and wrinkled her nose. "You will have great fortune when you least expect it," she read. "That's exactly the sort of nonsense I hate. Someone opens a cookie, and suddenly they have a prophecy that they'll be rich! I blame that tramp Tyche. Always dispensing good luck to people who don't deserve it!"

Leo looked at the mound of broken cookies. "Uh...you know those aren't real prophecies, right? They're just stuffed in the cookies at some factory—"

"Don't try to excuse it!" Nemesis snapped. "It's just like Tyche to get people's hopes up. No, no. I must counter her." Nemesis flicked a finger over the slip of paper, and the letters changed to red. "You will die painfully when you most expect it. There! Much better."

"That's horrible!" Hazel said. "You'd let someone read that in their fortune cookie, and it would come true?"

"My dear Hazel, haven't you ever wished horrible things on Mrs. Leer for the way she treated you?"

"That doesn't mean I'd want them to come true!"

"Bah." The goddess resealed the cookie and tossed it in her basket. "Tyche would be Fortuna for you, I suppose, being Roman. Like the others, she's in a horrible way right now. Me? I'm not affected. I am called Nemesis in both Greek and Roman. I do not change, because revenge is universal."