Chapter 2
"Oh, I swear to Gods, if this is another prayer circle invitation, I'm seriously gonna..." Bo growled as she opened the door. She stopped talking as she stared at the person standing outside the door.
"Kenzi…?" She murmured, gaping at the Russian girl's immaculate hair curls, nails and her shiny accessories hanging on her purse.
"Hola, bitches," Kenzi took off her sunglasses and clicked her tongue at both women. She tucked her sunglasses into her purse and opened her arms at them. "Get your asses over here and give Momma a hug."
Dagny threw herself into the petite woman's embrace, while Bo squeezed into the narrow space between one of Kenzi's arms and the blonde girl to hug her bestie.
"I thought you were in Spain," Dagny singsonged. "Why didn't you tell me that you were coming? I could have picked you up at the airport, you know. I just got my Fae driver license!"
Kenzi didn't answer her question. She pulled back and smiled at the blonde girl. "Look at you, girl," she said, cupping her face. "I haven't seen you for two months, and you are like 5 inches taller already!"
Dagny gave her a casual shrug, though she couldn't hold her proud chuckles. "I'm 5'6" now," she announced as she held Kenzi's hand tightly.
Kenzi smiled again and gave her a gentle kiss on her cheek. Then she quickly ruffled her blonde locks and laughed. Dagny faked an angry face as she combed her hair with her fingers.
"Should I be worried about you casually dropping by, or should I go pop a bottle of champagne?" Bo teased.
"We may need some booze, just probably not champagne," Kenzi said, walking into the kitchen. "We need to talk."
"Okay, listening," Bo replied, watching her bestie searching for a clean glass in the cabinet. "Oh and...we are out of clean glasses."
Kenzi threw her hands into the air in defeat. "Really? I thought since you guys rebuilt the shack, you and you-" she pointed at Bo, the Dagny, "-would at least try to spend a lil' more time cleaning everyday to make it look better."
"We used all of them in our drinking games last night. You should see Dyson's face when they carried him out from here," Bo chuckled.
Kenzi mumbled something in Russian and eventually decided to use a teacup as her drinkware for her liquor. She poured herself some whiskey, and frowned at the cup. Then she rolled her eyes, shook her head and downed it.
Knowing that the other two women were staring at her intently, waiting to hear her story, she started, "I've been having this dream for the past few days."
"Dream like...being-chased-by-a-monster dream, or I-want-to-open-a-flower-shop dream?" Bo asked, her eyebrows furrowed.
Kenzi glanced at her behind the tilted cup. "Being-chased-by-you dream," she slurred, downing her second one. She raised her cup again, but paused when she had finally noticed that Dagny's eyes were a little red and swollen. "You okay?" She asked, concerned.
Dagny tried to nod but was unable to lie to Kenzi. She quickly looked at Bo, and the Succubus gave her a comforting smile.
"Umm...what's going on?" Kenzi asked, frowning.
"Well, we have something to tell you too," Bo explained to Kenzi, "but since you've already started, let's just finish yours first. What do you mean by being chased by me?"
"Literally, being chased by you in my dreams," Kenzi murmured. "Ya know, dark fog, crazy eyes, evil voice, all that kinda shit. The exact same dream, three nights in a row."
"Well...it's just a dream, right?" Bo commented hesitantly. She wanted to give Kenzi a smile, but somehow couldn't because the things Kenzi had just said reminded her of her own dream.
Kenzi shrugged. She looked down at her cup-holding, quivering hand. "Maybe, but I just.." she trailed off, pondering, before she suddenly jolted her head and looked at the other two women again. "You know when some serious shitstorm is about to come, you sometimes get this chill? Like...whoever that is in charge of your fate is giving you a sneer behind your back? I'm hearing that sneer loud and clear right now."
She tilted her head back and drank her liquor. The sound of the liquid rolling her throat filled the quiet air. She put down her cup and murmured, "anyway, just thought I'd drop by and check on your two and...so what's up with you two? You said there was something that you wanted to tell me?"
Bo took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "Dagny's handprint glowed," she said. "Mine too."
"Ugh! I knew it! I knew something's not right!" Kenzi exclaimed after the initial shock. She dashed to Dagny and checked the hand-shaped mark on her chest. "It glowed? Why-I mean, does this mean that...he's back?"
"I don't know yet," Bo said, shaking her head, "but it certainly...means something."
"Ummm..." Dagny hummed hesitantly. "Can either one of you tell me what this is about?" She pointed at the handprint to Kenzi. "Like...I mean when this first appeared, you told me to come find Bo and the gang. You never said it would glow and it would hurt this much."
"I...I didn't know it would. I mean, I sorta did but thought I might be wrong, ya know," Kenzi stuttered, "cuz why would it glow?"
"So...what does it mean when it glows?" Dagny looked back and forth at the other two women. Then she fixed her eyes on Bo. "You said it has something to do with my father, Hades? I don't think you have told me anything about him yet, other than he's bad and you've killed them."
"I haven't," Bo said, "because I didn't think you were ready when you showed up a few days ago."
"Well, I'm ready now," Dagny argued. "I mean, it glowed."
Bo and Kenzi exchanged a quick look, before they guided the blonde girl to sit down on the couch.
"Daggs," Bo said softly as she held her little sister's hand in hers. "Your father, I mean, our father, Hades, is the King of the underworld. The handprint is like...his mark. He left them on us to mark us."
Dagny frowned, finding Bo's words ridiculous. She took another look at the handprint, which now had dimmed to a pale white color. "Why would he want to mark us?"
"So whenever he wants you for his evil agenda, he can easily find you," Kenzi explained, doing a snatch with her index finger and her thumb in the air.
"But...didn't Bo-" the girl turned to Bo, beyond confused. "Didn't you killed him already like ten years ago?"
"I did," Bo confirmed. "I mean, I thought I did. I watched him die, but...it just felt-I mean, there can only be one explanation for our glowy glows. That is, he's back and he's coming for us. I guess an evil like that never truly dies."
Dagny nodded, her eyebrows furrowed. She pondered for a while, before she pursed her lips at Bo. "So he's really evil? Like...really, really evil?"
"Yeah," Bo said, nodding. "In order to break me, he killed my grandfather, and my mother. He also-"
She stopped abruptly, clenching her lips as if she was forcing the rest of her sentence back.
Dagny, however, dived too deep into her own thoughts to demand Bo to finish. She hesitated for a long time, before she eventually gathered enough courage to ask, "was my mother evil too?"
"No, honey, of course not," Kenzi told her, stroking her hair. "Your mama is the cinnamon roll of all cinnamon rolls in the entire world. Trust me on this, okay?"
Dagny nodded. "So if my mother wasn't evil at all, why did she...why did she have a baby with Hades?" She pursued.
Both Kenzi and Bo swallowed hard at the same time.
"You, or me?" Kenzi looked at Bo, her head tilting at the confused young girl.
"Let me," Bo replied. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, before she started, "your mother...she didn't, I mean, she wasn't...she didn't know. It wasn't her intention to...have his baby."
"What do you mean?" Dagny frowned.
"At the time, she didn't know that it was Hades," Bo explained, finding it extremely hard for her to continue right now. She recalled the moment when Tamsin had found out about the truth. The Valkyrie's tears had shattered her heart into a million pieces.
"I...I don't understand," Dagny muttered. "How could she not know?"
Bo sigh, feeling heartbroken again. "Hades took my form as his disguise and she thought it was me," Bo said, squeezing Dagny's hands hard unconsciously till the blonde girl groaned. She quickly withdrew her hands and fisted them on her knees."She didn't know that it was Hades, and he got her pregnant."
A look of shock appeared on Dagny's face. After she had realized that Bo wasn't joking or lying at all, abhor and anger burnt in her eyes. She clenched her hands until her knuckles turned white. "He did what?" She gritted her teeth, forcing her words out one by one through her quivering lips.
Bo didn't say anything, because it was painful enough already for her to retell the whole thing. She couldn't bear the agony of repeating it.
"That was how she got pregnant? She was raped? She was raped by my birth father?" Dagny fired her words out, each soaked in fury and pain.
Bo closed her eyes and gave her a nod. All of them went quiet. The only sound they could hear was the sobs stuck in Dagny's throat.
The young girl eventually bit her tears back and asked, "how did she die? Did he kill her too?" Her last few words came out, coated in so much rage.
"She..." Bo stuttered, "you know that she was a Valkyrie, right?"
"Yeah, momma Kenzi told me," Dagny nodded. "She was a Valkyrie, who would fight battles and choose the slains to bring them to Valhalla."
"Valkyries...they die after childbirth," Bo eventually got those words out, feeling herself drained by doing so.
The blonde girl stared at her, with a crushed look on her face. "What?" She murmured with a broken voice. "She died because of me? She died because of giving birth to a rape child?"
"No, no, no, Dagnija, don't you say that. Don't you think like that," Kenzi stopped her. She kneeled on the floor and took the girl's hands in hers. "It wasn't your fault," she told her, looking up at her. "Please."
Dagny jolted her arms and jerked her hands away from Kenzi's. "Yes, it was! She died because of me! Why? Why would she do this? Why did she keep me? Why couldn't she just kill me when she had the chance?!"
"Please, Daggs," Bo pleaded. "Don't say that. You can't blame yourself like that. You did nothing wrong."
"It's easy for you to say," Dagny wiped her pouring tears with the back of her hand, trying to muffled her sobs by swallowing them but unable to do so because of the huge lump in her throat.
She wanted to say that Bo wouldn't understand her, but immediately remembered that they shared the same birth father, and that Bo's mother was killed by him.
Anger and agony twisted in her chest, squeezing her heart ruthlessly. They swirled inside her, screaming for an exit, but there's none, so they ravished inside her, tormenting her, tearing her apart.
She eventually let out a loud whimper and buried herself into Kenzi's embrace, turning into a sobbing mess.
"Hey, it's okay. It's okay..." Kenzi soothed her. "We'll get him and we'll make him pay. I promise."
"But, she died!" Dagny argued, her voice gagged. "I'm gonna kill that son of bitch. I'm gonna kill him and bring him back and kill him again until the last bit of his pathetic soul dies and rot in hell."
Kenzi sighed and held her tighter. "Shhh…" she stroke the girl's hair. "it's gonna be okay. It's gonna be okay."
The girl sobbed for a long time. When she had finally stopped trembling, Kenzi asked softly, "hey didn't you just get your cool Fae license? Do you want to drive me to the grocery stores? We need some groceries cuz I'm gonna be here for a while, ya know."
It took Dagny forever to nod with some muffled slurs. Kenzi threw her head slightly at the door as she looked at Bo, and the Succubus tossed her the keys to her car.
Kenzi made sure that Dagny stopped crying before she leave. On their way out, she wiped her face clean and whispered something to the young girl, and finally got a few gagged giggles from the blonde.
They closed the door, and Bo sighed. Sprawling on the couch, she closed her eye in frustration.
How the hell am I gonna tell her that Hades got Tamsin pregnant because he wanted to create an evil child whom he could control? How the hell am I gonna tell her that the greatest evil runs in her blood too? She thought to herself, feeling every bit of energy getting sucked out from her.
She gritted her teeth when she felt herself being torn apart. The excruciating pain, and the fear of not knowing what was going on made her tremble hard.
She felt like her bones were being crushed and smashed piece by piece, her skin was being peeled and flayed off her inch by inch, and her flesh was being torn and ripped off ruthlessly.
The burn, the tear, the shooting pain, there were impossible for her to bear. She opened her mouth, wanting to wail, to cry and to scream, but couldn't get a single sound out.
She couldn't hear anything either, like all sounds had been absorbed by this emptiness where pain was the only thing that remained.
She had remembered the labor pain. She had remembered the feeling of the baby being pushed through her body, forcing her bones to separate and her muscles to stretch. She had thought that it would be the most painful thing she would ever experience. Now she knew she was wrong. Giving birth was nothing comparing to this. It was merely a mosquito sting, or a pinch from a pair of tweezers, something that shouldn't even be called as a pain.
She wondered why she hadn't blacked out yet, when she was being broken into pieces, cells, and eventually into atoms and particles that couldn't be broken down any further.
One minute she felt like she was being torched and burnt with the flames from hell. The next she felt like someone had filled her body with ice and frost and buried her under the bottom of an ancient glacier.
She felt so empty, like something or someone had ripped everything out of her, leaving nothing inside her skin. She felt helpless, hopeless and drained, like she was Sisyphus doing the endless shift of rolling a boulder uphill only to watch it roll back down.
The torture continued for a long, long time, and she had already given up any hope she might have had. She thought this was it. This was the ultimate punishment she had been feared for in all her lifetimes. She thought she'd suffer till the last piece of her soul was completely destroyed.
However, after a certain point, she felt the pain fading away. At first she figure that it was her mind tricking her body to believe that she wasn't feeling any pain, but as the time went by, she became more and more certain that it was really fading away.
She felt something inside her. A pulse, a throb, a flutter, a slight squeeze.
It got stronger and stronger each time it throbbed. She started to hear it in her ears, and feel it on her fingertips.
She opened her lips and inhaled. Her lungs expanded desperately, trying to hold all the air that was forced in. She inhaled again, and again, until her throat had gone dry and sore.
She tried to raise her arm, failing repeatedly before she succeeded. She lifted it, and placed her hand on her chest. It took her a while to realize that it didn't really land on her chest, but on her lower abdomen.
As the numbness went away, she dragged her hand towards her chest, and put it right above her heart.
There she felt her own heartbeat, strong, steady, just like it had always been before.
She opened her eyes. Light poured in and stung her eyes. For a moment she had a very hard time deciding whether to turn away from it so she wouldn't become blind or embrace it because it was the best thing ever.
She jolted her body and clumsily got up. She looked down, and saw her bare chest, her own hands, and her legs. Her skin looked pale, but real, so very real.
She stood on her feet and stumbled around, looking for a mirror, or anything that would work as one. After knocking the lamp off the nightstand and tripping over a pair of jeans that had been carelessly tossed on the floor, she banged into the dresser. She groaned, and turned her torso, heading to the floor mirror standing right next to the dresser.
She stared at her own reflection in it, breathless, confused and thrilled. Hesitantly grabbing a few locks of her own hair, she pulled them while watching her reflection do the exact same thing.
She tapped her face afterwards. She tapped them rapidly until her cheeks became red. She tried to find anything abnormal from her reflection, but found none.
She heard something behind her, and she wanted to turn around, but her lax muscles wouldn't allow her.
The next thing she knew, was she got grabbed from behind, thrown down to the floor and pinned down violently. Someone had straddled her and pressed a blade against her neck.
She gasped and struggled, but immediately stopped when she saw the person's face. "Bo…?" She slurred, almost didn't recognize her own voice.
The brunette's eyes opened wide all of a sudden as she saw her face too.
For a moment, neither of them had moved, talked or even breathed. They stared at each other as if they had just been petrified by a Gorgon's gaze.
"What the..." Bo murmured as she examined the blonde woman underneath her. She stared at her pale skin, her rosy lips and her long, messy hair. She stared at those quivering lips, her tear-filled eyes and her heaving chest. She couldn't get another word out, nor could she turn her eyes away.
"Bo...is that...really you...?" The blonde breathed out, her voice so soft that it almost got drowned by the ambient noise coming from outside. She looked into Bo's brown eyes, and thought, how is this even possible? I should be dead.
Bo replied with a scoff and thrust her blade forward, almost shoving it into the blonde's throat. "You may think you look exactly like her, but don't you dare to think for a second that you could fool me. You are not Tamsin. You can't be her, so I'm gonna give you one chance. Either you tell me who you are, or I peel that face off you inch by inch, till your true face shows."
A/N: Thanks for all the kind reviews. I hope everyone enjoys this story so far. And yay, Tamsin's back! How she came back, would be explained in some future chapters. It's gonna be a big thing for this story, so have a little patience. :)