Chapter 2 Heidi
HEIDI
I brake a little too hard in my circular driveway.
Jessica is right. My ex, Mr. Ryan Douchenozzle himself, is parked in front of my house. The second he sees my light blue sedan, he stumbles out of his big white truck toward me.
"Elise!" he calls, hiccuping.
"Gods help me," I pray, double-checking to make sure all my doors are locked.
I can tell from his voice and the stumbling that he's hammered.
The last time I saw Ryan like this was right before the Upheaval, shortly after I broke up with him for cheating on me.
He'd shown up drunk as a skunk, peed all over my front porch, screamed at me through my home security camera, and then broke down in tears begging me to at least let him inside so we could talk.
I'd ignored him completely, waiting for him just to leave.
Jess had returned from her work shift, saw him half-passed-out on the porch steps, and dumped a planter full of sunflowers on his head before chewing him out in Spanish. She's always had an impressive temper and scared him off badly enough that he stayed away after that.
Well, at least until sometime during the Upheaval, when he broke back into my house while I was gone.
Jessica boos Ryan. "Not this cheater again! How many times do we have to tell him to get lost?"
Before I can hit the gas and leave as quickly as I came, Ryan flops across the hood of my car. Gripping the side view mirror, he knocks hard on my window.
"Hey! What the hell, Elise? Are you seriously going to keep ignoring me?" he demands.
"Yes!" Jessica shouts back at him for only me to hear. "Because you're a fucking asshole!"
Ryan's irritated, inebriated, spurned emotions creep into my car from outside, pressing on my chest. I really, really miss that charm Everett gifted me years ago.
The one he told me the Garnet Wizard made.
It was destroyed by the liches in the Nether, and thanks to whatever they did to me there to magnify my already extreme levels of empathy, no other charms I've tried wearing have worked for long.
It's tempting to drive off and hit Ryan on the way out of here…but if I did hit him with my car, I'd have to feel all his pain.
With a sigh to brace myself, I crack my window the tiniest bit possible, shuffling uncomfortably when his familiar and now very unwelcome scent curls around me along with the smell of booze.
"I hope you didn't pee somewhere like an angry toddler this time," I grumble. "What are you doing here, Ryan?"
He scowls. "I'm here to talk, since you went and fucking changed your number and—" Hiccup. "—and now I can't get a hold of you. How the hell are we going to fix this if you won't even talk to me?"
Ryan raps loudly against my window again, mad that I won't roll it further down. My inner animal has been silent all day, like usual, but the threatening tone and anger of my ex makes her go on alert.
Already, she wants to run. Flee the car and take off into the woods.
"We broke up. There's nothing to fix," I tell Ryan firmly, trying not to wince when that earns a wave of suffocating anger from him. "And you shouldn't be driving drunk or anywhere near my house. I don't want to see you anymore, so just—"
"Do you know how fucking insane that is? You cutting me out of your life, just like that? We've cared about each other for years, El. I treated you so good, and now you're acting like this? Insane."
"Ryan," I begin, trying to reason through his drunk haze. "You weren't good to me. You—"
"The hell I wasn't! I mean, look at me, and look at you.
" He slaps the glass again to gesture at me.
"I'm fighting for a girl who's so fucking insecure, you can't even let anyone see you without makeup.
And don't even act like you have options, but you're just so happy being single.
I know you've been holed up for months all alone—" Hiccup.
"And no shit, because it's not like most guys would even notice someone like you, anyway.
So why the hell am I the one trying so hard here? "
"How delusional is this guy?" Jessica growls. "Has he seen you? He's lucky you even gave him a second glance, let alone wasted your time dating him! This is why guys should never be allowed to date someone way out of their league. It makes them forget what league they're actually in."
She's trying to help, but Ryan's words and his temper are scraping against my skin, pooling in my stomach, and heating my cheeks until I'm fighting tears.
My body always thinks that being angry is the perfect time to cry.
I call it rage lube.
"Trying? Give me a break. You cheated on me before the Upheaval, so I ended things, and then I found you holed up in my house, fucking around in my bed with yet another woman when I came back eight months ago," I remind him, mad enough to swear for once.
A thin wave of guilt drifts off of Ryan, but the disgust and resentment that comes with it are solely directed at me. I flinch when his fisted hand slams into the glass directly beside my head this time, making my inner animal panic.
Jessica gasps in open-mouthed outrage like she can't believe he just did that.
"I thought you were dead!" Ryan hisses through the crack in my window. "What else was I supposed to think? And I told you already, I was just staying at your place after mine got wrecked by some legacy shits. We were going to move in together anyway."
"No, we absolutely weren't. We broke up way before—"
"And why the fuck are you bringing that chick up?
She was no one. She was just taking cover here.
Everything was a mess, everyone was only doing whatever they had to do to survive—and where the hell were you anyway, huh?
You've never answered that little mystery.
You showed up after the Upheaval, all slimmed down and touch-phobic.
What's that about? Were you out there cheating on me with some other guy for a whole month? Huh?"
Oh my gods.
Slimmed down? I was literally starving in a Nether dungeon, and it's taken months for my body to get back to its normal, healthy weight.
And cheating? Where on the gods' green earth does he get the audacity to accuse me of that after everything he put me through?
Not to mention, we were broken up.
"Cheating? Get the fuck out of here with that! You're the cheater here, Douchenozzle!" Jessica fumes, throwing her hands in the air.
There's a lot I could say to Ryan, but in the end, there's no point arguing with a hammered, emotionally stunted jerk like him.
Besides… he's right about one thing.
Although it was dubious and I was locked up in a haze of painful need, I was with someone else when I was imprisoned in the Nether.
A half-demon.
And despite our circumstances, that half-demon treated me better than any past boyfriends ever did.
Thanks to my begging him, he helped me get through that horribly debilitating heat—the first one I've ever had to go through without suppressants. I never even saw his face, thanks to the blindfold the liches kept on me pretty much the entire time, but Jessica swears he was gorgeous.
His English was broken and difficult to understand, but I got his emotions toward me loud and clear. I've never met someone so completely fascinated by me before.
And that fascination quickly became…fixation.
After that heat, the half-demon was beaten for bringing me clean water and any food he possibly could whenever he could sneak out of the arena.
He's a big reason I survived that nightmare, but I know from an offhand comment Felix once made that most of the Entity's arena fighters died while being forced to fight on his side during the Battle of the Citadel.
My golden-hearted half-demon was probably one of them.
That thought alone makes my heart clench. I look away from my drunk ex, trying to ignore my inner animal's mounting restlessness while I drown in his feelings and my own haunted past.
"We're not together anymore, Ryan. We'll never be together again. I don't owe you anything, and you don't owe me anything, so for the last time, please just leave me al—"
I don't get to finish as Ryan swears angrily, bends down, grabs one of the rocks lining my driveway, and slams it into the bottom corner of the driver's side window.
I cry out as glass shatters into tiny pieces, skating across my skin and creating small cuts.
They begin healing immediately, but my pulse deafens my ears, and my inner animal goes berserk.
Not safe. Run.
"This jackass!” Jessica shouts, trying helplessly to shove Ryan away as he reaches through the shattered window for me. "Damn it, why do I have to be a stupid disembodied ghost right now? Get this jackass off of you, El! Slam your door into his nutsack!"
But Ryan's gripping my sleeved shoulder hard, shaking me roughly as he screams into my left ear until it's ringing.
"Shut the fuck up about us not together! What even is that? We're still together! I decide when we're done, got it?"
Just like when I was a child, my immediate instinct is to shut down when someone starts screaming at me. Ryan's fury has turned violent. He's not thinking clearly, and I'm far too close to shifting or passing out from his emotions flooding my airways and crushing my lungs.
My inner animal scrambles in terror.
Run, run, run, run—
"Let me go," I finally manage in a shaky voice as more hot moisture blurs my eyes, rolling down my cheeks.
His hot, alcohol-laced breath fans my face, his head now through the shattered window, too. "You don't get to fucking end this, Elise! You think your fat ass gets to be the one to call it? I could be with anyone, but I decided I want you! I can't believe you're just giving up on—"
I'm going to shift.
I'm going to puke.
Oh my gods, I can't breathe.
I do the first thing I manage to think of and grab his arm with my bare hand.
"I said, let me go!"
The instant his skin meets mine, all of my pain, fear, and anxiety combine with his out-of-control emotions.
It all crashes into Ryan, multiplying and fragmenting into a symphony of perfect agony.
He yelps in surprise and stumbles away from my car, falling on his butt next to the thick trees surrounding my house.
Run. Hide. Get away, the gentle creature inside me begs.
I still can't make myself move, though.
"Yes! Good. Now drive. El, drive," Jessica urges.
She finally gets through the electrifying haze that's turning my brain into mush. I hit the gas and peel out of my circular driveway, taking off down the rural back road.