Chapter 5
Chapter
Five
Isat down in the armchair by the window, thumbing at my phone.
Who should I call first? Not my psychiatrist; Dr. Byron was hard to get hold of even when I had an appointment.
All he ever did was prescribe me pills, anyway, and judging by the hallucinations filling my apartment right now, the pills weren’t working.
My therapist? I liked her a whole lot more. I had Bronwyn on speed-dial, but it was eleven at night, and she had a jiu jitsu tournament this weekend; she needed her rest. For a wild moment, I considered calling my parole officer.
No. Maybe I could just ride this out. Maybe it was just an episode brought on by a quick drop in estrogen. Maybe this time I really was going through menopause. That’s what the official diagnosis had been two years ago, even though I continued to get my period like clockwork every month.
The leader loomed over me. The fury vibrating off him was almost visible, like a radioactive corona. “Woman. What are you doing?”
It’s just an episode, I told myself. Just little hallucinations. You can ride it out. At least I hadn’t tried to kill anyone yet.
A cold fear clutched me. Or had I?
I dialed Bart’s number hastily and exhaled with relief when he answered. “Hello, Susan,” he said. “Did you miss me already?”
“I was just making sure you got home okay.”
He chuckled. “Yes, I managed to traverse the twelve steps downstairs safely. Thank you for a wonderful dinner.”
“You’re welcome,” I managed.
“It was much nicer than sitting in a too-dark room eating dehydrated mushroom chips and listening to someone bitch about how hard it is to get a duck fat stain out of his eight-hundred-dollar chinos.”
A voice hissed in the background.
Aha. Bobby was there already. “I won’t keep you, Bart. Just making sure you’re safe and sound.”
“I am, Sue.” His voice softened. “Goodnight.”
“Goodnight.” I hung up and breathed out slowly.
Bart wasn’t just being kind. He’d always told me the truth. He was a loyal friend; I trusted him completely.
Bart’s loyalty was, in part, because I’d stood up for him a few years ago, when his bitchy ex-boyfriend not only outed him to his very old, very conservative rich lobbyist parents, but also plastered near-naked photos of Bart, wearing a leather harness and assless chaps, all over his popular blog.
His mother and father publicly disowned him, which in itself was awful, but Bart was independently wealthy and not very fond of his mean, crusty upper-class parents, anyway.
The thing that had hurt him the most was how delighted some of our friends were about his humiliation.
At the time, I’d been shocked at the vitriol spewed against Bart from his friends.
We were an arty crowd; we were supposed to be progressive, open-minded, and understanding.
The mocking and teasing from our social circle had been relentless, and it had hurt even more since Bart was a very dignified and private person.
He didn’t deserve that kind of torture, so I decided to do something about it. Back then, all I had to do was throw a dinner party in my enormous dining room, invite our wide circle of friends, and make subtle jabs about their cruel behavior until all of them felt quite ashamed of themselves.
Now, I had nothing. None of them would even make eye contact with me in the street.
Not because I was dangerous—even though I obviously was, considering what I'd done to Vincent. They probably could have gotten over the fact I’d gone crazy during early menopause and tried to kill my husband.
But I also had the audacity to let myself go and lose my entire fortune at the same time.
Apparently, being both poor and a little overweight was unforgivable.
Luckily for me, Bart returned my tiny favor by sticking by me. He was the reason I had a job and an apartment in the first place.
“We cannot stay here while we are in this realm. This abode is not acceptable.” The girl—Cress, they called her—was suddenly in front of me. “Chosen… Where is Molinere?”
I stared into her face and made a snap decision to play along with my hallucinations until my hormones stabilized enough—or, until I could get hold of Bronwyn. I could talk it out with her and come up with an action plan.
“Okay. I’ll bite.” I rose to my feet, lifted my chin, and put my shoulders back, facing the girl directly. “Who is Molinere?”
“The one sent to prepare you in case you were needed,” she replied, her tone a shade testy. “The múinteoir. Where is he?”
I shrugged. It was only more evidence that I’d gone nuts. The name Molinere was strange, but I realized I’d heard it before. My scrambled-egg brain was just plucking things out of old memories and repurposing them.
“I honestly couldn’t tell you,” I replied. “I don’t know where he is.”
A man named Molinere had shown up at my house when I was eight years old, as part of a work crew that my mother had hired to landscape the garden one summer when it got too much for her to handle.
I only remembered him because he was tiny and odd-looking—four feet tall with messy gray hair and a big, bulbous nose.
I also remembered because my father happened to breeze back into my life that day.
Dad brought a bottle of whiskey with him to celebrate his return and invited the work crew to join him for a welcome-back drink.
Twelve hours later, my father and the work crew were all naked and dancing around a bonfire in the garden.
I smiled back at the beautiful hallucination glaring at me. “The last time I saw Molinere, I was eight years old, and he was butt-naked, trying to jump over our burning pergola without singeing the hair on his balls.”
It was a good thing my father had taken off again that day. My mother would have skinned him alive. Every time she tried to bring a semblance of order to our life, my dad swanned back in with a bottle of bubbly and a charming wink and left with a trail of soot and destruction behind him.
Cress pinched her brow. “Molinere didn’t stay with you? He didn’t prepare you?”
“No.”
The tall man let out a growl, deep in his chest, and turned towards the other two men. “Nate.”
The dark one with the muscles snapped to attention and nodded. “Yes, my Prince.”
“Go back, and see if you can get to the Under without bargaining anything. Ask for an audience with your aunt, and check the death roll for Molinere’s name.”
“Yes, my Prince.”
“I mean it, Nate. Don’t bargain anything, don’t offer any favors. If Morganna’s hounds won’t let you into the Under without a favor, come straight back to me.”
The dark man bowed. “I will, my Prince.” He took a step back, weaving his hands around in a circle in a very dramatic manner. Silver sparkles flowed from his fingertips, creating a glittery frame in the air.
“Ooh.” I nodded, impressed. I might have gone completely insane, but at least this time my hallucinations were pretty. Not like last time, when my brain vomited up the most horrific thing I could possibly imagine. “Well done,” I told myself. “Very nice.”
Suddenly, the hallucination I’d called Nate stuck his hands in the middle of the glitter circle and pushed out, widening the frame, before he jumped inside it and disappeared.
I clapped. Maybe this episode wouldn’t be so bad after all.
Cress stared at me. “What is wrong with you?”
“You know what? They never really gave me an official diagnosis; they just provided a list of the most likely ones. Would you like the list?”
The beautiful prince grimaced. “I already regret sending Nate to check the death roll. There is no point. Cress, I told you that we do not need her.”
She straightened up. “We do, Donovan. Of course we do. She is the Chosen One.”
The prince—Donovan—grimaced. “She is not Chosen. She fell into the role by quirk of her birth.”
“Then she is the Chosen. She is the only one in all the realms who can help us, Donovan.”
He threw me a look of such blistering contempt, it almost scorched me.
“She has no idea who she is. Molinere did not train her. She does not know what she is capable of. Even if she could help, she has no understanding of what she should do.” He let out a dismissive, manly grunt.
“I told you from the start we should focus on finding the spark stones first and hiding them before he could get to them.”
Cress gave a delicate snort. “Even if we did, the danger remains. The stones need to be closed, or Connor will devour them and absorb their power. And the only person in all the realms that can do that is her.”
“Ooh,” I murmured. “Interesting. I should write this down.”
Cress and Donovan turned to stare at me.
“No,” I said. “Keep going, this is great stuff. Audrina’s always talking about things like this in her crazy fantasy novels. If this episode has a good ending, I might see if I can pitch it to someone. Once I’m sane again, obviously.”
After a long moment of silence, Cress cursed. “You do not know what you are.”
“Nope,” I said cheerfully. “I mean, apart from the fact that I’m the chosen one, obviously. Tell me. This should be good.”
“You are the Chosen One because you are the only One of Every Blood.” I could even hear her put capitals on the letters.
“Great, great,” I nodded. “Now, what do you mean by ‘every blood’?”
“You are the only creature in existence who carries the blood of every species of every realm,” Cress answered. “Your heritage includes everyone from the lower, middle, and upper Worlds. You are a mix of imp, demon, wraith, human, vampire, dragon, shifter, berserker, fae, elf, scribe, elemental…”
I snorted. “Okay. Here I am thinking I’m just a mostly white mixed-race girl, but it’s nice that my brain wants me to feel super-special.” I smiled up at her. “So, what are my powers?”
“You do not know.” Cress looked horrified. “Even if you did not know what you are, you must know what you could do. There is no way you could suppress the power inside of you. To ignore it could lead to catastrophe. ”