“Your mother,” he scoffed, bitterness oozing like venom to coat the walls around us. “Zoe’s gone, Joanna. She’s so gone she’s never coming back. Perhaps she lived with the Shadow side so long that she began to enjoy it. Who knows? She could be there now, living a life of ease, because it is so much easier, you know…” I did know. “Shit, for all we know she could be the one feeding the Tulpa information about our star signs—”
“No.” I shook my head hard. “She wouldn’t.”
“And how do you know what she would or wouldn’t do? You never knew her at all.”
My mouth trembled closed. He had me there.
“We’ll forget Zoe ever existed, and soon we’ll do the same with you. Then we can all just go back to living in our separate realities.”
My heart cracked at that, and I knew Warren sensed it. He could feel and smell and hear the echo of it in his blood…if only he wanted to. “So…just like that?”
He looked me over, his face softening momentarily, and he blinked. Then it hardened again, his emotions petrified, and it turned him into something other than a crazed bum and a leader of the underworld. It nullified him. “I have to go.”
“Just like that, Warren?” I repeated, raising my voice after him. “You’re going to turn your back on me like I didn’t lose my entire life, my identity, my sister? Like nobody’s trying to kill me too?” He kept walking and I raised my voice. “Like my eyes didn’t bleed from their own fucking sockets?”
No response, just the silly little slap and slide of his gait. Suddenly, though, it didn’t look so silly. It looked resolute. Defeated. Final.
“What about this special connection we’re supposed to have, huh? What about that?” He rounded the corner without looking back, hearing me but not listening. “Don’t turn your fucking back on me!” I slammed my fist against the wall. “Warren!”
My voice echoed emptily down the hall, then trailed away in a choked whisper. “Don’t…don’t leave…”
Slumping against the wall, I tried to catch my breath. How could he? He knew me, who I was and why. Hadn’t he held me while I lay sobbing on the floor, watching my own funeral play out on the local news like some sick reality show? He knows me, I thought, the real me. He knows…
“That I don’t even know myself.”
Shaking, I pushed away from the wall. I didn’t want to break down here in the hallway where anyone could see me. Where Warren’s mistrust lingered like a virus.
So I lunged for the closest escape, Greta’s door, and it swung open so quickly I was two steps inside before I realized I’d forgotten to knock. Half blind with shock and self-pity, I barely registered Greta’s surprise or the way she jolted before she could control it. Her hands disappeared behind her back and she backed into her dressing table, my reflected face pale and ink-eyed behind her.
I seemed to be having that effect on people these days.
She put a hand to her chest. “Olivia!”
“I’m sorry. I just…I’m not—” I’m not Olivia. I’m not a superhero. I’m not anyone. I’m not going to cry, I thought, even as the first tear fell. “I just needed someone to talk to.”
“Oh, dear. Of course you do.” She rushed to my side, though I saw her hesitate before wrapping her arms around me, and that made me cry even harder. She urged me toward her flowered settee. “Come, sit.”
“I’m sorry,” I repeated, accepting the tissue she pressed into my palm. I made a tentative dab at my eyes, then gave up and let my face crumble upon itself. “I didn’t know who else to come to and I needed to talk and I saw Warren and he won’t…he just…and he…”
“Shh,” she said, pulling my head to her chest. I rested it there. Rested, it seemed, for the first time since my mother had left me a decade ago. I closed my eyes, slumped against her soft chest, and inhaled deeply. I knew her now, I realized. The twin bouquets of roses and the herbs she brewed for her own teas were fused upon her breath and skin, her signature scent stamped like a star on the surface of my temporal lobe.
Gradually, the distress and misery left my body, sliding away through my tears, and I relaxed. My sobs were replaced by blessed nothingness, my body went limp against hers and, after one final sniffle, I lay silent. Greta continued to rock me, and though I knew she still feared what’d happened that morning, still feared me, I was so grateful for the momentary kindness that I didn’t care.
“Thank you,” I said, swiping the back of my hand over my face. “Again.”
“One of those days?” she asked quietly.
“One of those lives,” I muttered, a bitter laugh hiccuping out of me.
“You’re overwhelmed, dear. You’ve toured the sanctuary. Met the others—”
I held up a hand and cut her off. I shot her an apologetic glance before lowering my palm and sighing. “What I am is tired of people either treating me like some chosen deliverer or an evil pariah. Mostly, though, I’m tired of pretending to be someone I’m not.”
“What do you mean?”
I mean that I am so fucked up you wouldn’t be talking to me now if you knew who I really was. You’d run and hide and cower in the corner. You’d scream for help, you’d flee for your life. I met my gaze in the mirror. Isn’t that right, Joanna? Olivia? Whoever you think you are.
Greta was watching me through the reflection too, but her face slid out of focus like in the movies, dissolving into the background as my own grew sharper. It was like my skin was thinning out, the bones beneath beginning to jut through the meticulously sculpted image reflected there. I swallowed hard.
“Everyone I’ve ever been close to in my life is either dead because of me or I pushed them away long ago. Even my mother ultimately left because of me.”
“That’s not true. That wasn’t your fault.”
“And I like violence,” I went on, ignoring her, hands clasped tightly around my knees. “I’ve never admitted that before, but I do. I like to inflict it, I like the power of having inflicted it. I go into dark places searching for people to harm me, just so I can mete out justice in my own twisted way. With my fists, Greta. With the hatred that fills my heart.”
She smiled, deflecting the seriousness of my words. “So, what you’re saying is you’re not perfect?”
“You don’t understand,” I said, whirling on her. “I can’t do this! I can’t be the person you all expect me to be!”
“But you’re Zoe Archer’s daughter.”
“I’m the Tulpa’s daughter too.”
She tilted her head. “Is that what’s bothering you?”
“It’s what’s bothering everyone else,” I said, and told her about my run-in with Warren in the hall.
Greta let out a weary sigh. “We had just finished a session. I hypnotized him, and he lived out his greatest fear in his mind. Your fates are deeply intertwined.”
That brought my head up. “What do you mean?” I asked. “What fear?”
Her eyes grew sad, the edges tightening as she shook her head. “That you, the woman he’s pinned all his hopes on, may betray him.”
I could only gape at that. Warren’s actions made sense in the light of her words, but the words themselves didn’t quite compute. Me? Betray him?
Greta tried for a reassuring smile. The tightness in her jaw kind of ruined it. “When your mind is that vulnerable, every sense is amplified. Seeing you so soon after he felt, watched, heard, and scented your betrayal—”
“But I didn’t betray him!”
“But his mind believed you had.” She leaned back on the settee and waited for my eventual nod. “Think of an athlete visualizing success for himself on the playing field. The mind can’t tell the difference between what’s imagined and what really happened. Warren lived out your betrayal, or the possibility of it, up here.” She pointed one delicate finger at her own head. “Don’t worry. He’ll be back to normal soon. As normal as Warren can be.”