Chapter 11
She was brimming with excitement—so much so that she’d gotten in early enough to beat both Mason and Ward to the office, so she’d set up their coffee maker and made the pot of coffee herself, enough for all three of them.
She had excellent news—Lost Lineage and Beyond the Veil were going to be featured as part of a PBS series on genealogy and history in the American South.
She was looking forward to what this would do for the company in a business sense, but she was also looking forward to how many more people they would be able to help once their name got out there.
The sound of shattering crockery snapped me out of the vision.
“Shit!”
The coffee was hot against my shins where it had splashed and soaked through the fabric of my pants. I was more upset about the fact that I’d just dropped my mug than I was about the stains on my light-colored khakis. I had another at home, but that meant I was down to only one mug in my life.
I was also annoyed that Ms. Lefavre had used my mug. She probably hadn’t even thought about it—it probably hadn’t occurred to her that she shouldn’t just use a mug in the kitchen of the building she helped rent, especially since she’d washed it and put it back.
But now it was broken.
It was also, if truth be told, my fault the mug had shattered, because I still didn’t have the ability to control my psychic abilities. I couldn’t stop the memories from pushing their way into my consciousness, taking over, and causing me to lose time and control.
I’d tried rebuilding my brick walls, tearing them down, then building them up again as quickly as possible. Every time I did it, the problem only got worse.
So a few days ago, I’d given up on building brick walls.
I tried imagining a giant door. Except that didn’t work because it was just a door, so there were no walls attached to it, and a door with no walls keeps nothing out.
Or in. And I didn’t have time to imagine building an entire house any more than I did a brick wall, so that put me back at the beginning.
With a sigh, I bent and carefully picked up the dripping shards of crockery, tossing them in the trash after about half a second of contemplating whether or not I could reasonably glue the mug together.
Not only was it unlikely that I’d get enough of it to put back together, but it probably wouldn’t end up being watertight.
And even if it did, I’d put coffee in it and the heat would just melt the glue. So there wasn’t much point in trying.
“Rayn, you okay?” Mason asked from the doorway.
“Yes, I’m fine,” I replied, bending down to pick up more shards. “Just dropped my mug.”
He was silent for a moment. “Did someone use it?” he asked.
I nodded. “Ms. Lefavre,” I replied.
“Shit. I’m sorry, Rayn.”
“It’s fine,” I replied, grabbing paper towels to mop up the rest.
“No, it’s not,” Mason replied, although his voice was gentle. “I’ll talk to her.”
I shrugged. “I don’t have another mug,” I replied. “So it doesn’t matter.”
Mason made a soft grunting sound. “It’s still not fair to you,” he argued.
I looked up at him from where I crouched on the floor. “A lot of things aren’t fair to me,” I replied. “They are still true.”
Mason sighed. “Sadly, you’re not wrong,” he remarked. “At least let us pay for another class.”
I shook my head. “It’s my fault for not having this under control,” I told him.
“Rayn.” He sounded exasperated.
I threw out the wet towel with its shards of crockery, then turned. “A month ago, it wouldn’t have been a problem,” I told him. “But I let it control me, instead.”
“You shouldn’t have to choose between learning to control your abilities and being able to exist in the world in a reasonable way,” the orc argued back, although his voice remained gentle and low.
I shrugged again. “Except I do,” I replied. “I appreciate the offer, but I’ll figure something else out.”
No longer having a mug to put coffee in, I slipped past him and went back to my desk, wishing I had a hot drink to warm both my hands and my insides. But, as I’d said to Mason, a lot of things aren’t fair. This was just one more in a long line of them.
When I got home, I turned my thoughts to the problem of wanting to get my abilities under control. I tried to think back to the early days at St. Cyprian’s, to what the psychologist there had said—because it had taken us a while to settle on brick walls.
But it hadn’t come back to me.
Not until last night, when I remembered something.
During those early sessions, they’d given me something to hold on to. Something to help me feel grounded.
A toy.
A teddy bear.
We’d all gotten one, that first day, when we’d been brought in. Different color bears, some white, some brown, some black, some in unnatural colors like pink or blue or green. Some bears had bows. Some had little stitched-on paw prints.
Mine had been white, its paw prints a dark brown like its heart-shaped nose and stitched mouth, its glassy plastic eyes black.
I’d stopped taking it with me after a while, but I’d kept the bear when I left Cyprian’s, packed away in a box with some of the other things I’d accumulated while in the hospital. A few books, some fidget toys, a fleece blanket Ward had brought me only a week after I’d left Tranquil Brook.
My apartment was tiny, a little kitchen, a small bedroom, a main room that held a cheap desk and office chair and a giant beanbag. There was a closet by the door with a small cabinet above it.
I dragged a kitchen chair over and stood on it to get at the cabinet, opening it to find a couple boxes, one of which was the one I was looking for. At the bottom was the bear.
I couldn’t see my own memories. But I hadn’t been the only person who’d touched the bear—in the early days, Melissa had struggled with controlling her magic, and her bear often ended up soaking wet. So I’d share mine with her, letting her hold its back paw.
Which meant that if I were careful and deliberate, and if I could go deep enough, I might be able to revisit those conversations as they’d happened, rehear the advice we’d been given through Melissa’s eyes.
Except I didn’t want to be alone when I did that.
The memories would be too close to my own—memories of things that I had been present for, things I’d experienced. Things that were linked to fear and anger and trauma.
We all had PTSD as a result of what we’d been through at Tranquil Brook—some of us more strongly than others.
Sam’s was pretty bad, but I’d somehow managed to escape with only the occasional bout of night terrors and a rare flashback here and there.
It had been almost a year since my last one, triggered by accidentally making contact with the sleeve of Sam’s sweatshirt and getting a mind full of one of his episodes.
He’d apologized for weeks, even though I kept insisting that it hadn’t been his fault.
I was pretty sure that touching the bear would cause the same thing.
It had been good that Melissa had been here when I’d triggered the flashback last year. I don’t know what would have happened if Melissa hadn’t been able to pull me back out—and then calm Sam down, because he felt so awful about it. That meant that I needed supervision.
Part of me wanted to ask Violette if she’d sit with me…
but I barely knew her. She might be my sister, but we’d met literally once, three days ago.
Offloading a massive amount of psychic weight—in both the very literal, magical sense and the mental health sense—on her this soon seemed like it was a bad idea for our still-new sibling relationship.
I could ask Melissa, but I felt guilty about putting either her or Sam in that position—yes, we’d all been through it together, but we were all still struggling to fully grapple with what had happened to us.
And, honestly, I didn’t want to force either of them to have to deal with my potentially very bad choices, because those choices might trigger flashbacks or nightmares for them, too.
I knew I could ask Ward—and that he would agree to it without thinking. But I’d already asked so much of both him and Mason. My even being at Beyond the Veil was an imposition, an act of charity, and to ask them to do even more felt like theft.
That left Hart or Raj, and I didn’t want to ask them, either.
I was pretty sure they’d both agree to it—either together or separately—if I explained that the point was to help me go deeper and have more control over my psychic reads on the objects they brought to me.
But they had their own jobs to do, and I wasn’t quite comfortable enough with either of them to risk a complete breakdown in front of them.
I also wasn’t foolish enough to do it alone, which left me stuck with an idea, but no safe way to follow it through.
Maybe I’d get that desperate, but I hoped I wouldn’t have to.
I tried to come up with an alternative.
Any alternative.
She wanted this job more than anything. Wanted to prove to herself and every single person—mostly men, honestly—that she could pass the tests with flying colors. That she deserved to be a federal agent, no matter what anyone else thought.
She would prove them all wrong.
I pushed away Cass’s memory from when she’d worried the stone, waiting to begin the sequence of tests she’d had to pass to become an FBI field agent. I wanted to go a step deeper. I picked up the worry stone again.
Her parents and Alex would support her no matter what she did.
Whether or not she passed these tests. But Christine…
Christine hadn’t believed in her. Christine had called her a narc and a traitor to the queer community for wanting to join the FBI.
Christine had argued that she couldn’t do good work, just work, from within the government.
They’d broken up last night. When Christine had left to go burn off steam at some club or other, she’d packed up her stuff, shoved it all in her car, and found a cheap motel where she hadn’t really slept.
She’d ended her relationship over this, and it had better fucking be worth it.