The Sovereign Era (Book 2): Pilgrimage Read Online Free

studio lot until we were well down the 405 freeway, I could tell she had a different view.
    Just inside Long Beach, she said, “I don’t know if that did us any good or made things worse.”
    I took my third Tiger Milk bar out of the glove compartment. “I thought we did okay.” I unwrapped it. “I mean, I never want to do that again, but at least Byron’s dad ended up looking like a crazy man, all told.”
    “Marc Teslowski would have done that regardless,” my mother said. “We could have done without your theatrics, though.”
    “He…pushed me.” I tore off a mouthful of the bar and chewed it down. Fuel. “You heard what he said.”
    She nodded. “That was uncalled for. But…really, Nathan. Growling? When did you start that?”
    I smiled and chewed, remembering Lina and me making out a few days before. We still hadn’t gone all the way, but we pretty much did everything else. She was playing with me, and she surprised me by using her fingernails. The growl came when I did.
    We laughed about it, and I’d practiced it—without the extra…stimuli—a few times since then.
    I told my mother the G-rated, abridged version, of course.
    “Tried it out a few days ago. It just sort of…came to me.”
    “You can see why it’s better not to mess around like that, I trust.”
    “I was just giving him what he deserved.” I didn’t bother mentioning that I was only half-aware of what I was doing at the time. “I thought…I thought it was funny.”
    My mother sighed quickly. “No. It really wasn’t.” She focused on changing lanes of a couple of seconds. “Listen to me. They would like nothing more than to show that you, and so, even more so, your father, are somehow less than human. Capable of violence.” She glanced at me. “Give them any rope at all, they’ll make a noose. You get it?”
    Little speeches like that from my mother made me feel cornered. I stared out the window and focused on the last bite of my bar.
    “Nathan?”
    “Yeah. Sure.”
    “What is it.”
    I swallowed. “Nothing.”
    “Try again.”
    There was a time when her firm but sympathetic tone would have been enough to get me to spill it all. Since the battle of Kirby Lake, I was far less interested in sharing anything with the woman who had kept so much from me my whole life.
    On the other hand, I knew my grudge hurt her. Sometimes I felt like she deserved a little hurt.
    “Look, Mom. I’m tired of worrying how to act, trying to figure out how this side or that will take my every move. I’m…I’m not human, I’m not Sovereign; I can’t just pick one or the other or something in between to make things all pretty for the lawyers, or the reporters, or whoever. They just need to deal with me.”
    “You’re sixteen years old,” she said. “You don’t even know who ‘me’ is yet.”
    “That’s my freakin’ point!”
    We didn’t say anything as a couple of off-ramps slipped by.
    “Nathan, sometimes I don’t think you understand just how—"
    “Oh, come on, Mom! I get it! I know how important it is! I know what’s at stake! Jesus Christ! Maybe I’d be better off if I just disappeared! ‘Brave men run in my family,’ right, Mom?”
    I shook my head. The seatbelt felt like a clamp across my chest. The inside of the car was way too small.
    “What a load of shit.”
    “Nathan…”
    I remembered bawling like a baby in front of Lina when I read the stupid note my father had given Spencer Croy to deliver to me, a few days after the one and only time I’d seen Andrew Charters in my entire life.
    “Do you know where he got that little bit of wisdom, by the way?”
    A kid knows their own mother. Add my hypersenses, which make her scent and body language as clear as a road map, and my mother didn’t have a chance in hell of masking her emotions from me. I barked a bitter laugh.
    “You do,” I said. “You did.”
    She kept her eyes on the road and nodded, frowning.
    “Yeah? Tell me.”
    “Nathan.”
    “ Paleface