Chapter 7 #3
A frown crosses Jane’s face. Before I can say anything else, she’s on her feet, her hand on my shoulder. “Come on,” she hisses. “We gotta go somewhere more private.”
“Private?” I ask, but I’m already being marched out the door.
The dining hall is about as private as you can get. Everyone is having their own conversations, talking over one another, laughing and gesturing. Almost nobody is eating alone, and if they are, they aren’t siting nearby.
But Jane looks nervous and she’s a lot more experienced with the fae than I am, so I let her lead me out of the dining hall. I sense eyes on the back of my head, but I’m afraid to find out who they belong to.
It’s fine, I tell myself. Nobody cares.
But my blood is electric, because somebody cares. I feel it in a way that I never have before. There’s no way I can explain this to Jane, let alone myself, so I let it drop.
We wander across campus, hands shoved in our pockets, hoods raised to combat the drizzling rain. In the distance, fir trees drip and shudder.
I glare down at a puddle, willing it to disperse, to bend to the power I supposedly have.
Nothing happens.
“So,” says Jane, when we’re near the gardens, all alone except for the occasional passing student. “What was going on with your mom?”
I wipe water from my nose and shrug. “I think she was just neurotic,” I explain. “She really, really didn’t want me near water. Ever. I used to think maybe I was allergic, but I could, you know, shower and stuff.”
Jane wrinkles her nose. “That’s good. You weren’t a smelly little kid.”
“I probably should have bathed more than I did,” I admit.
“I… She really scared me. When I got older, I thought that maybe she knew someone who drowned, but she wouldn’t admit it.
” I groan, rub my temples. “I… I don’t know.
I thought a lot of things over the years.
Like maybe she had OCD or something. Or just, like, trauma.
But she wouldn’t… She just refused to tell me anything.
” A little laugh escapes me. “It, uh, got so bad that she tried to stop me from drinking water at one point. She sent me to school with a bunch of Pedialyte. We weren’t allowed to have anything but water in class, so it was kind of a big deal. The teacher was furious.”
Jane’s expression is somewhere between confused and alarmed. “You weren’t allowed to have water?”
“Well, it was only for a few days until the school nurse threatened to call CPS when Mom couldn’t prove that I was, you know, medically required to drink stuff other than water, so she dropped it.” My face heats. “It was like a full-blown phobia.”
“Did you have any other adults in your life?”
Shit. I don’t usually tell people about this. When I do, I try to make it all a big joke, something to prove that my mom’s quirky, maybe a little nuts, but not, like, abusive, exactly. Just kind of… weird? “I mean, I had aunts and uncles and teachers and stuff.”
“Did they know about this?”
“Yeah,” I admit, a little ashamed now. Maybe I should shut up. Mom’s dead. None of this matters anymore. I can jump straight into the sea if I want to and nobody can stop me.
(But that gnawing hunger that freaks me out, and I already know I’m not getting any closer to the ocean than I have to.)
Jane glares at me, exasperated. “OK, what did they think?”
“They went along with it?” At her expression, I add, “It was her thing, OK? Nobody ever disputed it because they knew she wouldn’t let up.”
“Any other weird rules?”
I wrack my brain. “Uh, no swimming pools, no oceans. I was specifically instructed to never, ever go on vacation near the sea.” A flash of anger.
Even now, the control still gets to me. If it mattered so much, she should’ve told me why.
Now she’s dead and her rules are haunting me, and I don’t even know why they existed in the first place. “No baths, either.”
“What about your dad?”
I kick a rock down the path in front of me. “No idea,” I grumble. “She said she didn’t know who he was.”
“Oh,” says Jane, her mouth puckering, like she realizes she’s made a mistake in asking, and also like she can’t keep her surprise (and probably judgment) hidden. “I… Um, OK. Do you believe her?”
“No,” I admit after a moment’s hesitation.
I adjust the hood of my jacket, grateful for the rain and the encroaching darkness.
Jane can’t see my expression. “But—Well, she was pregnant with me when she graduated Halea. Which tells me absolutely nothing about my dad, except that he might’ve been a student. ”
Jane perks up at this. “Yeah,” she muses. “Or someone from the town.”
“Or a professor.” I shrug. “Anybody, really.”
“Doesn’t exactly narrow it down.”
“Why do you care?”
“Because,” hisses Jane, glancing around again, like we’re making a drug deal instead of pondering my dad’s identity. “The whole thing is just...” She winces. “Really weird.”
I try not to take offense, and fail. “Yeah, I know. I lived it. Hard not to notice.”
“Dominic,” she groans, pressing a hand to her forehead like she’s checking for a fever. “OK. One more question: Did anything… weird ever happen to you when you were a kid? Like, did you ever fall in any water?”
I shake my head. “Not that I’m aware of.” If I had, Mom’s freakout would’ve been epic. Of Biblical proportions.
Her next question catches me of-guard. “Do you want to go to the beach?”
I purse my lips, consider this. My stomach is suddenly hollow. “No,” I say, miserably. “I really don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Why not? You could just step into the water and put all this behind you. Never wonder again.”
This is fucking blasphemy.
“Because,” I hiss. “I can’t just—”
“But you can,” says Jane, stuffing her hands into her pockets, frustrated. “You wouldn’t have to worry. You’d just know.”
“Know what? If I’m going to turn into a tentacle monster or something?” I cross my arms, shake my head.
Jane lets out an irate groan. “Listen, what if you are a shifter?”
That stops in my tracks. The kraken thing was a joke (mostly). Those don’t actually exist, right? “Um,” I say, because my brain has frozen. I’m alone except for the sound of the rain, the whistling wind, the splashing of puddles beneath my feet, Jane’s voice. “I don’t follow.”
“What if you’re a shifter?” Jane repeats, voice firm and low.
“I… Have no idea how that works.”
Her shoulders sag. “Neither do I.”
“I—Do people just… turn into things? Is there, like, a process, or does it just happen?” Fuck, I’m so naive. I should probably know more about this. Shouldn’t have fallen into the human trap of keeping my head down and ignoring the world around me.
I mean, OK, so I never expected much contact with the magical world. As far as I knew, shifters mostly lived in rural areas on the western coast, and the fae were so uncommon that I figured I’d never even work with one.
And if I’m honest, my childhood was one stressor after another.
Mom was neurotic, Mom was broke, Mom was inconsistent.
I spent most of my youth trying to keep things as stable as I could.
I was a good student. I kept the house clean.
I got my first job at fourteen, working under the table cleaning old peoples’ houses for an organization desperate enough to overlook my age.
Then I was in college, finally able to live my own life. I graduated, got a job, a live-in boyfriend. And then Mom got sick.
I’d been in survival mode for so long that I sometimes feel like I didn’t know who I was, what I was meant to do, where I was meant to go.
I drifted into relationships with guys who made me feel good, who gave me money and power, and then I ran from them whenever they got too serious, because at the end of the day, I was only comfortable as arm candy.
I want to cut myself some slack, but I’m ashamed of my exhaustion. Ashamed of my ignorance. Ashamed that I know absolutely nothing about my heritage, that I hadn’t even realized my grandfather was fae, let alone my own mother.
“I think that’s the case, sometimes,” says Jane, pulling me from my thoughts. I feel like a fish caught on a hook, reeling through the water, propelled by some unnatural force. “I don’t know any shifters.”
“And shifters are banned,” I add, sullen. It would be so much easier if I could just find one and ask, even if it makes me feel like an idiot and an asshole.
“Good thing there’s a library,” says Jane, her lips quirking up.
“Can’t keep you out of there,” I complain good-naturedly. But I’m tired. My bones feel water-logged and heavy. A pulse builds at my temples, steady and insistent. “I need to lay down.”
“Lie down,” she says automatically.
I roll my eyes. “Yeah, that.”
“And what else? Drink tequila?”
That’s not a bad plan, but I don’t want to disappoint her. “I think I need to poke through Mom’s notebooks again.”