She was joking, but I couldn’t manage a smile. It did, however, get me thinking. “Do you think this hypnosis might help me?”
“What do you mean?”
I tried to keep my voice steady, but my hope trembled out in the words. “I mean, would you be able to draw out more of the Light in me? Bring it more to the forefront? Make it stronger than the…other side?”
She picked up her glasses from the small table at the head of the love seat, putting them on as if to examine me closely. “You’re concerned about the balance of Light and Shadow inside of you?”
And she was watching me so expectantly that I found myself telling her; about the construction workers, and how I used my senses to plow through their lives. What it had cost them. And how it made me feel.
“Powerful. Superior. Untouchable.” I swallowed hard, not wanting to go on, but afraid if I didn’t things would remain the same between Warren and me. Between us all. “I couldn’t predict what would happen, and, believe me, if I had I wouldn’t have done it, but I did do it, Greta. I did it on purpose.”
I paused for her reaction—revulsion? disgust?—but got only silence. Then a slow, rising interest that grew as Greta tapped her finger against her thigh and considered me over the rim of her glasses. “And you want me to rid you of the impulse to play God, is that it? So that if this ever happens again you won’t feel the need to stand in judgment?”
“It’s not my job to put anyone in his place. I know that now, and I…I don’t want to be like him.” And I didn’t. I didn’t want lashing out at others to be my first instinct anymore. It was a defense that’d served me well after my attack, and in the years I’d had to live under Xavier’s disapproving stare, but it was different now. Because I was different.
“I can’t plant anything in your psyche that isn’t already there, Olivia,” Greta said as I rose to pace the floor in front of us, my boot steps muffled beneath her Persian rug. “I also can’t remove Shadow impulses. It’s part of who you are.”
I stopped before her. “But can you teach me to control it?”
Greta pressed her lips together in a look so scrutinizing I was afraid the answer would be an immediate no. But after what felt like forever, she nodded, and motioned for me to recline where I was. A sigh rocketed from my body as tension uncoiled in my belly, and gratitude for this small kindness, when kindnesses had been so hard to come by of late, teared up in my eyes.
Drawing a chenille blanket over my lower body, Greta loomed over me like a benevolent angel, and the last thing I saw were her earnest gray eyes, cloudy with intent. Then she slid a cool palm over my face and began to count. The numbers formed beneath my lids—cloudy and ephemeral and ghostly—and I began the backward spiral into the recesses of my own mind.
I’d never been put under before, and therefore wasn’t sure that I could, but I listened to the soft lilt and direction of Greta’s musical voice and let her words settle into me, bone deep. My arms grew heavy at my side and my heartbeat slowed like an insect being caught and trapped under the sap of a weeping elm. My skull was light in contrast, thoughts floating there like feathers, as disconnected and random as if they belonged entirely to someone else.
Warren’s baffling treatment of me was forgotten, as were Chandra’s cruel remarks and Hunter’s probing ones. All of these thoughts were like papers cluttering a desk, quickly swept aside as light and insignificant, the real work etched more permanently on the surface beneath.
Greta’s words were fingers pushing against the shadows in my mind, into soft, pulpy places I had never known existed. Or at least, never acknowledged. A few words floated in these deep morasses of thought—raped, vengeance, Tulpa—alligator heads lifting above the brackish surface before sinking again beneath my subconscious, and no matter how hard Greta tried she could not raise them again.
She had better luck sweeping aside the thinly veiled curtains of my Light side; where, from behind the safety of my lids, I could stare directly into the blaze of an imagined sun. Golden light singed the edge of brain tissue, and the neon of the city I was born in set my blood buzzing, heating the crimson liquid to a lively pulsing glow.
While Greta probed, I lived in the center of this glowing womb; warm and cleansed, safe and guarded. Peace bloomed in my heart, and I sank, deeper still, into a state of contented relaxation. The secrets living inside me began to whisper to her. Whisper, as they’d been whispered to me long ago. Greta whispered back.
“I’m going to ask you some questions and you’ll answer me with the first thing that comes to mind, all right?” At my sleepy sound of assent, she continued. “We’ll start out easy. Do you know your name?”
“They call me Olivia.”
There was such a prolonged silence after that, the nascent heat began to ebb.
“It’s not your true name?”
“No.”
“Who are you, then?”
“Secret. Can’t tell.” A sigh heaved out of my body, hollowing it. “I no longer know.”
“And…who’s Olivia?”
“Dead. She’s dead. It’s a dead girl’s name.” A whimper escaped me, inhuman, but for the sorrow that laced it. “I’m so sorry, Olivia.”
“It’s okay. Just stay with me now, listen to my voice.” She kept talking until my breathing had returned to normal. “What would you like to be called?” she finally asked. “What should I call you?”
“I have to be Olivia in order to survive. No one can know differently.”
“Does Warren know?”
“Of course. He made me. So did Micah.”
A tapping, like a considering click, fingernails against wood. “All right. Olivia. You have a duty to do. Do you know what that is?”
“Return balance to the Zodiac.”
“Return it? Or…” She left the question open.
“Not return it. Unbalance it. Hunt them down. Obliterate the enemy, destroy them all. Use my gifts to do it, but I don’t know how.”
She ignored the rising question in my last remark. “And who is the enemy?”
“Ajax. A man named Joaquin. The Tulpa. There are others. I’ve smelled them, but I don’t know them. And…”
“And?”
“The enemy is inside of me also.”
“No, Olivia, it doesn’t—”
“Yes, Greta. It does.” My voice deepened, like an instrument someone else was strumming. I stirred, jerking my head side to side. “I must destroy the Shadow within and without.”
“Shh. Let’s take a step back now. Listen to my voice, and follow the words. Are you with me?” She paused for my sleepy nod. “Good. Now, think. What experience will most help you in unbalancing the Shadow? What will allow you the vengeance you spoke to me about? What will help you restore the agents of Light to the Zodiac?”
“Krav Maga,” I answered without hesitation. “The skills I learned after Joaquin destroyed me the first time.”
Again, that press of questioning silence, before she went on. “And what was that like?”
I shivered, the memory sweeping through me. “Cold. So cold after, when the scorpions crawled over me, but didn’t sting. They knew I was dead. They scuttled away, legs mired in my blood.” I shivered again, then stilled. “But she found me and warmed me. She gave her own power and gifts over to me. So I would survive it. And avenge it.”
“Who, Olivia?”
“My mother.” I smiled. And I remembered. One day, when the time comes, you’ll understand I didn’t leave. I fled. “Ah, I see now. I understand.”
“Focus, Olivia. Listen to my voice,” Greta commanded. “What gifts did she give you? What will allow you to battle the Shadow side?”
I didn’t answer. Instead, I saw my mother’s face floating directly above me, her hair falling like golden-red curtains over her cheeks, eyes burning with hot, furious tears.