“I’m sorry.” Haka definitely sounded anything but sorry and Brent rolled his brown eyes at his daughter. He knew what this was. It was a teen, thinking that they were grown. Well, she wasn’t and he knew better. “Mom was married and had a daughter by the time she was my age. How can I possibly be too young to have a boyfriend.”
Brent’s brain wanted to fry the words with lightning – something he, as a human, had no ability to do – even as he heard them coming out of his daughter’s mouth. And, he’d expected to have this conversation with her at some point. He’d always known that if…no, when, she decided she was old enough to date, it wasn’t going to be after she was what he considered a proper age for it.
“Your mother was married and had a daughter before she turned fourteen because she was being mind-controlled by an alien parasite.” He shouted back. “The only reason Allura bodies and minds mature at an accelerated rate historically speaking, is because the parasite kills adult hosts by forcing them to procreate and produce offspring for it to jump to as it murders its current host.”
“The Allura is not a parasite, Dad.” Angel was aghast. She’d never known her father held this belief about an aspect of their alien nature and culture. And she was suddenly impassioned to speak up in the defense of countless generations before her. “It’s a symbiote.”
“It kills its host through reproduction, Angel.” He shouted back at her. “THAT’S THE VERY DEFINITION OF A PARASITE!” Both girls drew back in stunned silence.
They’d heard adults shouting before. Of course, they had. Their mother. Her first husband, Angel’s father. Their paternal grandfather, Mitchell shouted at and about Angel’s father all the time. You couldn’t visit Pappy Wadsworth without him having at least one angry rant about the man who’d father a child on his daughter before she turned sixteen.
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Hell, they’d even heard Generals shouting at their mother. Arguing with her about how things should be. And that was scary the first few dozen times. Especially when their mom was on the verge of losing her temper back, with her anger barely controlled and power gathering around the officers who were oblivious to the growing danger they were in.
Until Brent Kane calmly interrupted and explained why things were going to happen the way the lady wanted. Brent was always calm. Funny. Happy. The goofy protective dad who didn’t have the slightest malice toward anyone.
Generals were always shocked by how calmly Brent Kane explained their impending doom to them if they continued on their stupid course of action. Shouting, screaming, raging Generals, Presidents, and Prime Ministers who thought they could manipulate the current Allura the way they had manipulated the generations that had died before her, slaves to the compulsive reproductive natures of their symbiotes…
But neither sister had ever heard Brent shout. They’d never seen Brent angry. He’d never…ever…hated anything the way they realized he hated the symbiote that lived within their mother. The thing that made her power among the Alluran people greater than any other. The thing that allowed her to lead unchallenged by any.
The thing that would someday reside in one of them.
“Is that why you don’t love Mom anymore?” It was Haka that broke the silence. Bitter with the depressing realization that it was a matter of her mother’s very nature that had driven her parents apart and might, someday, drive her father to no longer have affection for her either.
Brown eyes stared at his daughter with disbelieving shock. His face drooping with helpless sorrow.
“Is…is that what you think?” The sandy-blonde head lowered as his hands covered his face. “Of course, that’s what you think.” And then he did something that terrified both girls.
He started crying.