Chapter 21
Chapter
Twenty-One
Susan. Susan…
A familiar voice tugged at me, pulling me out of the straitjacket I’d been desperately struggling around in for all eternity.
“Susan. Can you hear me?”
I wasn’t imagining it. There was someone here with me in the serenity room. It wasn’t one of the patients; they didn’t speak softly. They always screamed. Or laughed maniacally.
It wasn’t one of the wardens, either. Their voices grated on me like sandpaper scraped over sensitive skin. I flinched when I heard them coming, brandishing needles and little pills in paper cups.
“Susan…”
This voice was kind, soft, and familiar. It was someone I liked, someone I trusted.
“You’re safe, Susan. You’re in a safe space. I know you can hear me.”
I could hear her. My reality shifted. The straitjacket binding me dissolved, and I flexed my fingers. Relief pierced the endless despair—I could move. I wasn’t restrained.
Wait. Yes, I was. I was in the serenity room, lying on my back—cold, helpless. Everything hurt. My skin itched, but my arms were pinned around my waist, and I couldn’t move them. The nightmare clawed me back into the darkness.
Locked up. Helpless, hopeless, crazy. Never getting out.
A million years passed.
Another voice drifted over in the darkness, this one also familiar, but deeper, the tone strained. “Perhaps she is just sleeping.”
“Her brain waves suggest she’s conscious, and extremely stressed,” the first voice—the calm one—replied. “The admitting doctor said she’s in shock and unresponsive. They’re just waiting to see if something changes.”
Somebody touched my hand and pulled it, entwining fingers in between mine. That, too, felt familiar… but also vaguely irritating. What was that?
Wait, my hand was free? I wasn't wrapped up in a straitjacket?
The first woman spoke again in that calm, measured tone. “I’m here with you, Susan. I’m here to hold space for you, for whenever you're ready to come back to us. You’re safe.”
I knew that voice. The words she was using… she’d said that to me before. Who was that?
I found my eyes and opened them, squinting against the brightness.
Bronwyn’s face came into focus. I blinked and saw relief flood her expression. “There you are.”
“Bronwyn?” I croaked.
“I’m here.” She smiled. “Thank you for coming back to us, Susan. I appreciate the effort you’ve made today.”
I felt my heart thud hard in my chest. Bronwyn was real. She wasn’t a nightmare or a hallucination. She was a damn good therapist, and if she was here, I was safe.
Someone squeezed my left hand. “I am here, too.”
I turned my head. “Cress?”
“Yes, Chosen. I am here for you.”
She was lying in bed next to me, her fingers entwined in mine.
I blinked at her, confused. She wasn’t wearing her usual sexy black battle leathers, or any of the other chic outfits Cecil produced when we had to go out and she had to blend into the human world.
Instead, she was wearing what looked like denim dungarees, with a rainbow-striped long sleeve shirt underneath.
I’d seen that outfit before. On Bronwyn. Why was Cress wearing it?
“What…” I swallowed. “What is going on?”
“We are here to rescue you, Chosen.”
My heart sank and despair rushed back in.
This wasn’t real.
“Well.” Cress untangled her fingers from mine, a little awkwardly. “Of course, I am not here for you in the ways that I offered before, but I am here, nevertheless. Platonically. In a friendly kind of way.”
I frowned. Her words didn’t make any sense. But then again, she wasn’t really here.
She wasn’t real. Cress, like all the others, was just a hallucination. Everything that happened after my breakdown, after the day I tried to kill my husband… all those fantastical things… they were all hallucinations.
I turned back towards Bronwyn. If Bronwyn was here with Cress, the fae princess, that obviously meant she wasn’t real either.
They looked real. But now they were holding hands. My sanity had obviously deserted me completely. Tears welled up in my eyes, and I choked back a sob.
“It’s okay. Susan. You’re safe. Here.” Bronwyn held out a paper cup. “Drink this. They haven’t put you on an IV yet, so you’ll be thirsty. Drink some water,” she said, her tone so gentle it made me want to wail. “It will make you feel better.”
I took the cup and sipped tentatively, expecting it to turn to ash in my mouth, waiting for it to choke me.
It didn’t. It was just water. Filtered, cool water, too, and it was so delicious I gulped it down. Some spilled over my chin, and the cold splashes cleared a little more of the fog from my head.
“Let me get you some more.”
“Th–thank you.”
I watched as Bronwyn took a pitcher from beside my bed and poured a little more water into the cup. Her movements were so sure and deliberate. So confident.
Bronwyn had always made me feel better. I watched her and waited for her to turn into a skeleton monster or a fanged creature and attack me or chase me with a needle across a swampy marsh during an ice storm.
But she didn’t. She just poured water into a paper cup and held it out to me, a gentle, caring smile on her face.
Bronwyn often told me in our sessions that there was no such thing as the past or the future.
They didn’t exist, and time wasn’t linear.
The only thing that was real was the present moment.
It was supposed to be a mindfulness exercise, a way to reduce anxiety by forcing yourself to acknowledge that there was no point worrying about things that had already happened and no point worrying about things that hadn’t happened, yet. Because only now mattered.
And right now, that was a comforting thought.
I wasn’t handcuffed, lying on concrete with my cheek ground into the dirt like I had been for the last thousand years.
I wasn’t listening to my heart thud in the silence of a padded room, contemplating eternity in the torturous hell of sensory deprivation.
Right now, I was lying on a soft mattress, drinking a cup of cold filtered water that soothed my parched throat.
It felt almost divine. I didn’t care if it wasn’t real. This, right now, this present moment… it was good, so I was going to stay in this reality for as long as I possibly could.
I cleared my throat. “Where am I?”
“At the hospital,” Bronwyn said, her voice soft.
“They transferred you here a couple of hours ago. You were found unconscious and unresponsive in your cell at the station, and an ambulance brought you here. We came as soon as we could.” Her gaze flicked towards the door.
“Because I’m registered and you’re my patient, they let me in to check on you, but I’m not really supposed to be here. ”
“Neither am I,” Cress added. “But if the guards attempt to remove me, I will remove their heads.”
“No, darling,” Bronwyn said gently. “What did we talk about?”
She pouted. “No murder.”
“No, Cress. No murder. Not today. Instead, we will use our words to fight our battles.”
Cress grumbled under her breath.
Something inside of me cracked. It had happened. “I’m back in the psych ward.” My lips felt numb.
“No.” Bronwyn shook her head.
“No?”
“This is just the regular hospital, Sue. We’re in St. Francis Memorial.”
“Are you sure?” My eyes flicked around the room, looking for the evidence. It looked like a normal hospital room. The door had a handle. There was a curtain around my bed. There were at least five things in here that I could use to strangle myself.
A trickle of relief rushed through me. I really was in the normal hospital.
Although, there was a psych unit right next door; I knew that for a fact.
I’d been held there for two months before I was transferred to the dedicated psychiatric facility upstate.
“Are they taking me to the psych unit?” My voice cracked with strain.
The voices in my head taunted me. Locked up, locked up, never getting out…
“No. You’re here in general admission because you had a medical emergency, Sue. You’re not going back to the facility. Listen to me,” Bronwyn said firmly, giving me that hard stare she always gave me when she wanted me to pay attention. “We know?—”
I interrupted her. “Why are you here?”
“We’re here to help you.”
“I mean…” I wriggled a little, stretching, trying to convince myself that I wasn’t restrained, that I was awake and not seeing things.
But I was seeing things. Cress was here. “Why are you here with her?”
She grimaced. It was an odd expression and sat a little weirdly on her face. Bronwyn was usually so calm. “Well, that’s actually what I wanted to talk to you about, before everything went to hell.”
“You’re human,” I emphasized. I waited for her to tell me that she was, she was real, she was my therapist, and Cress wasn’t actually there beside me. “Aren’t you?”
She sighed. “Technically, no. I’m not magical, if that’s what you want to know. My mom is a witch, though.”
Bada bing, bada boom. Bronwyn was another hallucination.
I suppose that was understandable. I’d met Bronwyn after my breakdown, so it stood to reason that she wasn’t real, either.
Nothing good in my life was real.
“I did join Mom’s coven briefly,” Bronwyn explained.
“But the wiccan path wasn’t for me. I like helping people through psychoanalysis, not through cord-cutting and curses.
” She took a deep breath. “Please forgive me, Susan. I had no idea that you were the One of Every Blood. Even when you showed up with Donovan, a high fae, I still didn’t realize what was going on.
I keep all my focus firmly in the human realm, and it never occurred to me that you might have had a magical explosion that night when you confronted your husband.
” She shrugged. “And honestly, I wouldn’t have judged you even if you did try to kill him. ”