17 - Echo
How much do you know about mirrors?
I duck my head under the pillow and wrap it around my ears, but it’s no use. I can still hear them. I sit up, pissed off and hungover, and scream at the top of my lungs. “Will you two shut the fuck up! Get a divorce already!”
If they even hear me, which is doubtful, they don’t respond. They just keep fighting.
“Parents,” I mumble.
I’m still kinda fucked up from last night and need at least a whole day of sleep before I can function properly, so I lean over my bed, fish underneath it with a grabby hand, and search for the bottle of pills.
It’s not oxy—I kicked that shit, I really did. It’s something else. Something this woman was selling at the club a couple weeks ago. They don’t get you high, not the way I’m used to anyway. They take you places in your sleep.
It’s like acid, but you’re not awake. She called it the dreamwalk. Says it’s spiritual and shit.
It’s an OK trip, I guess, but not something I’d do more than once or twice a year. No one wants to sleep while they’re partying.
But I’m not partying right now and sleep is the only thing I want.
So I shake two out into my palm, grab a stale can of soda, and down them.
Downstairs, my mother is crying now, which means the fight is almost over. They fight like this so much, there’s a pattern to it. They don’t even realize that fighting is a part of them now.
I side-eye my bedroom door. I will never be like them. I will do anything—whatever it takes—to stay free. Because if they weren’t married, they wouldn’t stay together. And they’re not here for me. That’s a joke. They stopped paying attention to me when I was thirteen. My mother made me get a job cleaning houses with her so I could buy my own school clothes and food.
It’s not me that keeps them stuck in this rut.
It’s the pattern . And the familiarity of it.
I’m not gonna get stuck. I won’t fall into this trap.
I will never…
My eyes open and all I see is the ceiling of a cave. It’s not one of those moments where one has to try and remember where they are. I fully understand where I am. It’s just one of those moments where one needs to pause and reflect on how they got here.
It was my parents.
I’m the one who took Lucia’s dreamwalk pills, that’s a fact. But I wouldn’t have done that if someone had cared about me. If someone was looking out for me, I wouldn’t be in this situation to begin with.
I know Josep is gone, I feel his absence. And smell it too, which is weird. I hadn’t realized that deficiency had a smell.
My internal monologue makes me chuckle out loud. Deficiency? Internal monologue? Did the blood make me smart? Because I’ve never used those words in a sentence in my life.
I think about this for a moment. Intelligence, and the lack thereof.
Before Lucia, I was not a smart girl. Which, now that I think about it, was why she chose me. I mean, really she chose my boyfriend, Boyd. But he was dumb too.
I was malleable. She could shape me.
And look—I chuckle again—she did.
I’m here. The concubine of evil. The Darkness itself has taken me as its partner.
“Oh, come on, Echo. You don’t really believe that, do you? Please tell me you’re not that stupid.”
I sit up, then get to my feet and face Lucia. “This is my cave now.”
She shakes her head as she studies her fingernails. “No, sweetie, it’s not.” She looks up at me with that penetrating glare she has. “He’s using you.”
“He’s using me for what? I don’t have anything to offer.”
Her head lolls to the side, like she cannot believe I just said that. “You really are stupid. In my next go-around as an evil, conniving witch I will do an IQ test first.”
“You know what? I don’t have to take your shit anymore. I’m not your bitch.”
“No, you’re his bitch now.”
I nod. “Yeah. I am.” This is when I realize I’m naked, so I fold my arms across my chest. “And I like it, OK? He’s… good to me.”
Lucia bellows out a laugh that echoes off the ceiling. It’s such a hearty laugh, it takes several seconds for the air to still after she’s done. “Good to you? He carved evil into your skin, served you up as food to the halfbreeds, used you to kill them, let them destroy your body until it was nothing but tatters, and then”—she flips a hand in my direction—“brought you back to life so you can be his sex slave. This, my dear, is not what salvation looks like.” Her gaze is trained and focused on me again as she stares into my eyes. “This is damnation, girl. You just don’t have the good sense to understand that yet.”
“Well…” I’m not sure how to respond to that, so this is all I have. But Lucia waits, allowing me to gather my wits. “If this is damnation, you’re the one who put me here.”
It cuts, but only a little. Lucia, from my perspective anyway, isn’t the kind of woman who lets herself dwell on past mistakes.
As I’m thinking this, she smiles. It’s a very small Mona Lisa smile. “You are not, and have never been, a mistake. Do you really think I was after Boyd , Echo?”
I blink. “What?”
“Boyd?” she says again. “Come on. Give me some credit. I wasn’t after Boyd. Is Boyd here?” She pans her arms wide and pretends to look around the cave. “Do you see him anywhere?”
“What are you saying?”
“I was never after Boyd, Echo. It was you.” She gives me a real smile now. “Poor, forgotten, used and abused Echo from Spokane. Do you know where Boyd is now?”
I lift up one shoulder, feigning indifference. Boyd and I were brought to the compound together, but everything up here was so… well, confusing, but exciting as well, that I just lost track of him. And there were so many other men to be distracted by. And Paul, of course.
Paul never took any notice of me until he came back up from the ground last New Year’s Eve, but I sure as hell saw him.
I give Lucia my best guess. “Dead?”
“No.” She purses her lips and shakes her head. “He was stupid, but he wasn’t discarded. He had a family who cared about him, Echo. I can’t turn people into halfbreeds if they’ve got family who will miss them. He left the very first day he got here.”
My eyes narrow down. “No, he didn’t.”
“Name one time, after you came up here to the lodge, that you saw Boyd.”
“Well, I can’t remember right now?—”
“You can’t remember because I sent him home. He’s married now, you know. Two kids. Both boys. He married into a large ranching family. He lives a simple, but good life, in Boise. Wears a cowboy hat and everything.”
“Married with kids?” I scoff. “What the hell are you talking about? I haven’t even been up here long enough—” But as soon as this sentence starts spilling out of my mouth, I know it’s a lie. When Paul came back on New Year’s Eve, he had been gone for two years. And I’ve been through several Paul disappearances. I blink at Lucia. “How long have I been up here?”
“Twenty-one years.”
“Twenty-one…” But I can’t finish. I look down at myself. Naked now, but I look the same. Better, actually, after bathing in that magical hot spring after my death. I look back up at Lucia. “ What ?”
She nods. “Time slips when you’re not really alive. I killed you, Echo. Decades back. I gave you the blood, and you drank it, and time just… slipped.”
Of course I knew I was dead. I mean, I remember the way Josep carved me up. I remember the halfbreeds feeding on me and tearing me to shreds. I even remember the part where Josep brought me back down here and walked into the pool, holding me in his arms until I was healed.
I remember all of that.
But for some reason, it is the knowledge that I already died decades ago that shakes me to my core.
“That’s what a halfbreed is, Echo. Something in between. Not in between human and vampire—you’re nothing like a vampire. Something in between Heaven and Hell, for lack of a better example. But this stage, like all stages, will end.”
“And then what?” I’m afraid to ask, but feel compelled to at the same time.
“Then?” She shrugs up her shoulders. “That’s up to you.”
“Up to me, how?”
Her small smile is sad now. “You’re doomed, just like I am. But we don’t have to accept it. We’re powerful, Echo. In our own way.” She looks down at her fingernails, studying them. “I’m going to dreamwalk my way into the past.” Her gaze once again finds mine. “To the beginning of time. Well, for witches, at least. I’m going to live in the ice castle and find the purple and… I dunno. Just soak it all in, I guess.”
“I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
“Of course not. I haven’t explained it yet.”
“So why don’t you get to the fucking point?” I’m angry now. I feel… not betrayed, exactly, just… used .
“Evil things like us have two choices in the end. We can accept our fate and join the Darkness for all eternity”—she pans a hand at the cave around us, indicating Josep, I guess—“or we can leave it behind and travel.”
“Oh.” Things are starting to make sense. “The way Josep travels? In the earth?”
“No. That’s a purely vampire thing. But our way is just as good. We travel in the purple, and sometimes the gold too. In the mist, Echo. It’s…” She hesitates. “Well, it’s not real. You need to understand that. But it will get you out of the infinite eternity of Darkness. Not your soul, of course—that’s doomed—but you can save your consciousness. What’s left of it, anyway.”
I think about all these words. Everything she has just told me. Boyd, my death, the time, the halfbreeds. And I come to the conclusion that I am… fucked.
“No, Echo, you’re not fucked. I just told you there’s a way out.”
“Way out how ? You didn’t tell me anything useful. I don’t even know what the purple mist is.”
“It’s Paul’s magic.”
“So? What’s that got to do with me? Obviously, Paul hasn’t shared this magic with me because this is the first I’ve heard of it.”
“He never shared it with me, either.” And then she laughs. “Power, Echo, is something you steal. If you want the magic of the purple, you need to steal it .”
I point to myself. “You want me to steal from Paul?”
“I don’t care what you do. I’m just here to give you your options. Stay in the cave with Josep, your own personal incarnation of evil and everything that entails. Or find a way to harness the magic you have access to so while your soul rots in the Darkness of Josep’s infinite emptiness, your consciousness can create whatever life you want.”
The dream world. Josep already offered it to me and I said no. To be loved is a good thing. Even if it’s a demon’s love. I’ve never been loved, not once in my life, so I’m attracted to what Josep has to offer.
But he’s not human. Never has been human. He doesn’t have feelings . I think he wants to be loved, but he can’t comprehend the actual concept. And if I stay with him, I will be part of this misunderstanding. I will have his demon baby, whatever that means, and we will be a family.
But is this what a family looks like?
And now I know why I’ve been thinking about my parents.
Josep is a pattern.
Josep is a trap.
And if I stay here with him, I’ll be teenage me, stuck in that house, hiding in that bedroom, taking pills I don’t understand to escape my reality while my parents manifest their roles as enemies, forced to play a game together that no one wins.
“How do I steal this magic?”
Lucia’s grin is wild and wide. “I thought you’d never ask. How much do you know about mirrors?” And then she takes my hand and leads me over to the pool of lavender water.