Chapter Twenty-Two
Harlow
The New Normal
I wake from my latest slumber with a start, my heart pounding as fitful images I can’t make sense of fly through my mind. They’re not clear, and they’re eerily soundless, but somehow I know these images are connected to Mateo.
My eyes dart around the room that’s already become so familiar. It’s still dark. The laptop is still resting—closed—on the simple wood desk against the far wall, and no movement stirs near the deeper darkness of the closet. He’s not here. Of course, he isn’t.
He went with Aziel and whoever else was rallied to ‘take Noah off the board.’
I scoot up in the bed until my back is pressed to the carved headboard and pull my knees to my chest. Now that I’m awake, emotions are flooding me that make no sense for my situation.
And I remember thinking I could feel Mateo in my soul earlier, so I tell myself not to worry.
I’ve gained a new brand of crazy for wanting to believe these unpleasant feelings are his.
I could feel him in a way I’ve never felt anything before—his relief, his happiness, even his reluctance.
I press a hand to my chest as the flashing images coalesce into a blur that looks like a forest, and the feelings inside concentrate on a terrible combination. Pain, confusion, fear, and anger in nearly equal measure, and beneath them all—but building—is a sadness.
None of it is good. None of it is tolerable.
Something’s gone wrong.
I wish I could see him. I wish I could stand beside him, even if only to lace my fingers with his so he knows I’m all right. If I were there, I could whisper to him not to listen to whatever vile lies Noah is surely spewing. The uncertainty in him now ... it worries me.
A gasp escapes me when the dizzying blur of trees under streaks of moonlight fades, and suddenly I see not Mateo—not Noah—but a cemetery. An old, long-abandoned graveyard. The exact kind of place I avoid like the plague.
There’s a shape, dark and almost three-dimensional, near the center. Stationary. I can’t see it clearly at all. It’s just a shadow. But around it? Beneath and behind it? I can see all of that, no matter how I wish I couldn’t.
Souls are stretching up from their graves, crawling out from their crypts, and even swinging down from above as if they have all been summoned by the dark figure.
It’s the worst sight I’ve ever beheld, and I cannot stop the tears from springing to my eyes. So many souls. So many dead. So much pain gathered in one place that, in many ways, it is also dead.
A sob chokes from me, and I clap a hand to my mouth. I don’t know how many are left on the hunt or how many stayed. The truth is, I haven’t become great friends with most of my new housemates. This is the very last state I want to be in in front of strangers.
But the souls keep coming, climbing in even from behind my field of vision. And for the first time, I realize it’s as though I’m watching this oddness through another’s eyes. Except my senses are still wrong.
I still cannot hear a thing. I can’t smell or feel anything. I am merely borrowing their eyes, and even then, it seems only my unwanted ability is working right.
I have no idea what to make of any of it.
One of the wispy figures rises directly between my angle of perspective and the figure of darkness.
The silvery film is emphasized with this ...
shared, extended vision, but I can tell this one is female.
Or was. She reaches toward the dark figure and rests a hand on its chest. The motion doesn’t appear violent but almost sentimental.
I suck in a wet breath, attempting to gather myself and pay half-decent attention to the movie in my mind at the same time.
The figure seems to come closer to me. Or my perspective. Which, thinking about it, really has to be Mateo.
My breathing falters all over again. If I’m seeing through Mateo’s eyes, perhaps seeing the layer of landscape he cannot, does that mean the figure is Noah? Why would he be standing still for that?
The ghostly female still between them rotates, and her vacant, half-translucent eyes are suddenly staring right into mine as if I’m the one standing there. And though all else has been silent, I hear the words as her torn lips move to form them.
“Noah’s mind is broken. Don’t let him break your soul. You were always stronger...”
She fades, vanishing as Mateo changes position without warning. I lose sight of the dark figure I presume to be Noah, my head spinning with the ghost-girl’s message. Nausea rolls inside me. It’s all too much.
Mateo is chasing down a crazed, murdering lunatic. My ghost-sight apparently extends to my new soul-bonded lover. Who’s a vampire? The aforementioned murdering lunatic. Now also a ghost, not even in front of me, talking with Joan’s voice?
Everything stills.
Joan? Who is—
I don’t have time to think about the question before my consciousness falls violently away from Mateo, and I’m thrown backward through time to the last place I ever want to be.
I stand, as if a ghost myself, at the edge of a room that wouldn’t fit a queen-sized mattress.
Which, at the tender age of twelve, I had already forgotten existed.
And twelve is precisely the age of the child version of me sitting cross-legged on the floor, slightly left of center, lips upturned in silent giggles as I walked my fingers around on the old, stained, Berber carpet.
About a foot across from me, in a nearly identical but somehow dirtier rag of a gown, sits a girl I’d forgotten existed. But I recognize her the instant I see her face.
Guilt slams into my chest as I tilt my head to take in the gaunt figure, the sunken eyes, the stringy hair, and the strained smile.
I had always only seen her as my single ray of light.
Until she’d slipped from my mind, she’d been like an angel, too blindingly bright and warm to be touched by a smudge of grime.
I don’t know or understand how I could have forgotten the one generous, friendly soul I knew in this hellhole.
It makes me wonder what else those monsters have taken from me, if they even managed to take my memories.
I can’t dwell on it yet, though, because I know what memory this is.
I know what day this is. It’s Joan’s eighteenth birthday, and though twelve-year-old-me doesn’t know it yet, Joan was informed she’ll be released at sundown.
She’s to be given a chance to wash herself and put on a single clean dress after supper, and if she agrees to go peaceably with the man who is coming to pick her up, she will be granted one other request. So long as it could be granted before her departure.
She chose this. An hour of social time with me, the little girl she had taken under her wing, as much as she could.
She chose to sit on the uncomfortable floor and play pretend for sixty minutes in a monitored room rather than to ask for one single day with no blood draws or to be allowed to skip even one medication.
I knew none of that until I was finally able to read the hastily scribbled note she slipped me before our social time was done. In this moment I’m reliving, I only knew I had been taken here and told to enjoy it while it lasted. The tests will resume in one hour.
How did I forget Joan?
And why, if I forgot her so thoroughly, am I recalling her now?
I watch her, searching her face as if for clues, hardly caring about the senseless game being played. And Joan’s eyes slant up, her gaze angled at me from beneath her hair. For a moment, her face flickers, overlaid by that of the female ghost that spoke to me. And I see it.
My throat swells. I remember the way nearly half her lips had been shredded, as if an animal had swiped at her with vicious intent.
I remember the signs of other gashes, dried blood, and torn clothes that might once have been decent.
Suddenly, I remember a tear at her throat ... as if she’d been violently bitten.
Joan’s gaze drops back to the game, and the ghostly overlay vanishes, but I understand. They are one and the same, past and present.
The scream rips from me before I even register it, building.
It has the merciful effect of tearing me from that place, that lost and bittersweet memory, and I come back to myself much the same way as when I wake from any nightmare. Shaking, gasping, and choking on a sob. Except this time I remember why, and I so desperately wish I didn’t.
The door bursts open, and seconds later, Scarlet is dragging me to the edge of the bed and running her hands over me like a worried mother. Or the way I presume a decent mother would worry. “Shit, Harlow, even I heard that. What happened? Are you okay?”
“There’s no one else here.” The calmer voice is Kyson’s. Of course.
I open my mouth to speak, to answer Scarlet’s concerns or to thank them or to at least comment on them being in Mateo’s room, but all I can do is whimper and cry. The tears won’t stop.
I assume—I hope—that’s the reason for Mateo’s escalating sense of urgency and panic.
On cue, Kyson says, “You’re going to worry him if you can’t calm down.”
I try to nod, but my fingers dig into Scarlet’s nearest arm, betraying me.
“Why don’t we go downstairs and sit with everyone?” Scarlet suggests. “If you and I sit together, Elfde will join us. That might help you settle for now.” She gently strokes a hand down my hair and softens her voice. “Is it Mateo? Is he in trouble?”
“I can send some more men to back them up.”
This time, I manage a smile, however weak, for Kyson’s offer.
He’s being weirdly nice, and that has me more embarrassed than anything else.
I shake my head and drag in a hard breath.
“D—downstairs,” I stammer, “would be nice.” I shift my gaze to Scarlet.
“Do you mind?” I generally hate being so weak or dependent on others after everything, but whatever’s going on in my mind ... I can’t fight it alone.
Mateo needs to get his ass home.
I need to calm down so he doesn’t get himself killed in the attempt.