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The next morning, after she’s finished her morning rituals, Rachel heads downstairs, toward the kitchen where Mercia is feeding her mother grits. She studies the two at the table, surprised to see her mother’s hair brushed and her clothing changed.
“You took care of her?” Rachel is unable to keep the emotions from her voice.
Mercia shrugs.
“Thank you,” she says.
“I figured out how to handle her after you went to bed,” Mercia says. She makes choo-choo noises as she brings the spoon of grits closer to Jenny’s mouth. Her mother laughs and parts her lips wide. “There’s breakfast for you on the stove.”
Rachel moves to the stove, opens the pot of grits, and finds a bowl on the drying rack. She spoons enough breakfast in for herself, before adding some butter, sugar, and milk, and draws up a chair.
“My mom called this morning,” Mercia says, still feeding Jenny. “Hawthorne is still under lockdown. Apparently the patients, and even some of the staff, have lost their minds. The handful who haven’t been affected are holed up in some office. That’s not important, though.”
Rachel looks up, bracing for bad news.
“They found ten different little bone sculptures in one of the rooms at Hawthorne, each one more heinous than the other, and they all depict a patient,” Mercia says. “Two of those—I guess, one would call them omens—came true, according to my mom.”
“That’s not good,” Rachel says.
“I told my mom the same thing.”
“Phalanges,” Jenny says. She raises her hands and wiggles her fingers, giggling. “Ten phalanges.”
“Jenny, here comes the plane.” Mercia whooshes as she makes the spoon fly.
Rachel takes another bite of her grits.
“Rachel, are ye home?” Dougal’s voice comes from the front door. “By the Wee Man—What happened here? Rachel?”
“We’re in the kitchen,” Mercia calls.
Dougal rushes in, wearing the previous day’s clothes. His hair is disheveled, bags are visible under his eyes, and his skin tone is paler than usual.
“Ye look like hell,” he says to Rachel. His gaze moves across the scene before he fixes his stare on Jenny. “Yer ma looks worse.”
Rachel shakes her head, shoulders already curving forward in defeat. The day hasn’t even begun properly and she can easily go back to bed.
“You don’t know the half of it,” Mercia mumbles. “Food’s on the stove. Help yourself.”
“I don’t know where ye come off actin’ like it’s yer house, but don’t mind if I do.” Dougal walks to the stove. “Nan said I should come check on ye. Good thin’ I did.”
“How is she?” Rachel asks.
“Better. The doc said she’s recoverin’ fine. He doesn’t care for the way they handled her at the hospital here.”
“Ten phalanges,” Jenny barks out, her eyes darkening. “Ten metacarpalssss.”
“What’s yer ma on about?” Dougal asks.
“Bones,” Rachel says in a weak voice. “She probably knows there are more accidents about to occur.”
Jenny bursts out laughing.
Mercia sighs loudly. “Why can’t this Fae take a break?”
Dougal walks over and takes the last seat at the table. He glances at the wound on Mercia’s head, which is already scabbed over, and asks, “What happened to yer head?”
“Greg,” she says.
Dougal raises an eyebrow as he takes a bite. “I hope ye kicked him in the baws.”
“The what?” Mercia asks.
“Ye know. He’s family jewels.”
“Balls,” Rachel offers.
“Oh. Um, no, but I got a few good kicks in,” Mercia says, shrugging.
Mercia’s voice grows distant until it’s non-existent. Rachel glances up, sees her mouth moving, watches as Dougal responds. Her mother meets her eyes, a crease forming on her brow. Meanwhile, the birds quieten outside, the world becomes voiceless.
“I need to find Orion,” Rachel says the words, but can’t hear herself speak. “I need ... to—” She stands, blinking rapidly as the world spins. She moves a hand to her neck, but the pendant she’s so used to sitting there is gone. She exhales through her nose, feeling something rummaging around in her head. Searching. Searching. Wanting to know everything she knows, but there’s a specific something it wants—no, needs.
The world shatters like a mirror being smashed. The shards drop around her, every tinkle a reminder that she is no longer in control of her own body. And then she’s floating somewhere within herself. Hovering. It almost feels like she’s outside of her body, but not quite.
There’s someone inside her mind, an evil lurking just outside her reach. Drilling into her thoughts, deeper and deeper, the wanting growing desperate, the needing becoming unbearable.
Get out!
There’s no response.
The unworldly violation continues as it sorts through her memories. She sees herself meeting Orion for the first time, remembers his apprehension to let her into his apartment. Rachel is transported back to her sophomore year, when Mrs. Crenshaw was the one cheering her on at a track meet and not her mother. Another memory comes out, this one of Rachel standing by her father’s grave a few years after his death.
Liam Donovan Cleary
Beloved husband and father
August 20, 1979 – February 10, 2011
The memory shifts as the regression picks up speed. Emotions resurface. There’s the immense heartache as she watches her mother’s despondence turn to apathy. Before that, though, her father is alive, but still sickly. Then, the illness reverses, showing Liam Cleary as he looked before anyone even suspected he was sick. The memories stop at an unfamiliar scene. She remembers the pure joy of spending the Fourth of July with her parents, watching the fireworks brighten up the sky, but parts are obscured. How old was she? Younger than eight, sure, but when was this? The image shifts before she can figure out when and where they were, playing back Christmases, birthdays, anniversaries, and less significant memories. All the while, Rachel is overcome with a myriad of emotions—happiness, sadness, anger. Everything flits through her mind, consumes every part of her being, until—
You want to play? Fine. Let’s play.
Something inside her mind clicks, like rusty cogs being forced to turn after years of immobility, and then gives way. Too fast to fathom, she clashes into another, wholly different mind. How she’s done it, she can’t explain, but she grabs onto a sliver of darkness that doesn’t belong and the intruder jerks back. She digs into the black tendril and doesn’t let go, afraid of missing an opportunity to teach this Fae a lesson in boundaries.
A murky blur surrounds Rachel as she burrows deeper, assessing random thoughts that make zero sense, before finding what she supposes are its memories. Discerning faces is near impossible and the landmarks are completely distorted. At times, even the snippets of conversations are unintelligible, the language utterly alien.
Rachel finds a pinprick of light shining from an otherwise impenetrable wall of information, where a filthy little boy, no older than six, sits on a stony outcrop behind a quaint cottage in a picturesque valley. His eyes are on his constantly moving hands. He whittles away at a stick with a sharp knife.
Before she can see anything else, the invading mind seems to buck, tossing her consciousness into the wind, before Rachel’s ethereal self falls first through nothingness and then past memories. She travels at lightning speed back through time, until she plummets into the here and now. The sole resident in her mind again, Rachel shoots her eyes open as residual tremors make their way through her limbs.
Her heart wildly pounds to an irregular beat as she looks around, finding herself still seated at the kitchen chair. Dougal and Mercia, oblivious to the battle she’s just fought—and won—are conversing about Greg’s intrusion the previous night.
Jenny, however, is looking directly at her.
Her mother’s mouth pulls into an ugly, unrecognizable sneer while knowing eyes narrow into slits. Pupils dilate before a hint of red flashes.
Jenny moves faster than Rachel thought possible. By the time the kitchen chair actually hits the linoleum floor, her mother is already on the other side of the kitchen. Cutlery clatters across the countertops and spills into the sink. Grits splatter onto the table. Jenny spins around to face her mystified audience, holding a serrated steak knife against her own throat. She presses down hard, but luckily doesn’t break the skin.
A chorus of flabbergasted, “Mrs. Cleary,” adds to the horrified, “Mom,” echoing through the kitchen.
“You’re hiding something and I want to know what it is,” Jenny says in a voice that isn’t her own.
“I don’t—”
Jenny presses the knife down, allowing a bead of blood to escape the tiny cut.
Rachel raises her hands, palms-up in surrender. “Okay, okay, what do you want to know?”
“Who are you really?”
“I’m Rachel Cleary?” The statement comes out as a question as her confusion grows.
“Are you? You don’t sound too sure—”
“I’ve known Rachel my entire life,” Mercia chimes in. “I swear on my life, the person in front of you is Rachel Cleary.”
Slowly, Jenny turns back to Rachel. “You have a witch vouching for you while your own mother isn’t certain? Curious.”
“My mom’s been through a lot,” Rachel snaps at the intruder in her mother’s body.
Jenny guffaws, or rather the thing inside her does. “Tell you what, Rachel Cleary. Either you figure out who or what you are or I’ll take my displeasure out on your dearest mother.”
“Give me five seconds and I’ll go find my driving permit.”
“Really, Rachel?” Mercia hisses. “Jokes?”
“I wasn’t joking,” Rachel growls back under her breath.
Jenny, or rather the thing inside her, slides the knife away from her neck and reaches back with her arm. With a simple flick of her wrist, Jenny releases the weapon. Hilt over blade, the knife cuts through the air and passes a hairsbreadth away from Rachel’s face. The tip pins into a cupboard door behind Mercia and Dougal, before the serrated blade snaps in half and falls onto the counter.
Glass shatters next, pulling Rachel’s attention away from the knife.
Shards crush beneath the soles of Rachel’s shoes as she walks to the kitchen sink and stares through the broken window. Unable to do anything useful, she simply watches in horror as her mother sprints across the backyard, wearing little more than a shift and a robe.
“Where’s Orion, Rach?” Dougal asks, placing a hand on her shoulder.
Rachel gulps heavily before shaking her head.
“Yer ma needs him. We all do.”
Thanks for stating the obvious.
Rachel turns on her heel and marches out of the kitchen, ready to turn her mother’s room upside down if she has to. An answer should be somewhere in there—why else would this Fae be targeting her?
“Leave her,” she hears Mercia say in the kitchen.
She stomps to the second floor, heads straight for her mother’s bedroom, and finds all the destroyed photos on the floor where they’d been left the previous night. One by one, Rachel picks up the pieces and dumps them all onto the bed.
“What were you trying to tell me, Mom?” Rachel begins putting the pieces back together, her mind working overtime as she searches for answers.
An hour passes, but Rachel remains in the dark as to her mother’s true intentions.
Mercia checks in on her, takes a seat on the edge of the bed.
Who am I?
Two weeks ago, Rachel had known the answer, but it isn’t as forthcoming anymore. The SATs had thrown her off her game. Her journey into the Fae Realm left her reeling, confused, and uncertain. The situation with her mother, though ...
As Rachel sits in her mother’s bedroom, staring at the destroyed photographs, she can’t bring herself to answer the simple question: Who am I? Jenny had subtly hinted at something, at an answer to this question, but those little nudges had formed a doubt in Rachel’s beliefs. She grips the umbrella pendant, which she had found in the bathroom, where she had forgotten it that same morning after her shower.
“I don’t look like either of my parents.” She swallows down her emotions.
“Neither do I,” Mercia says, waving as if it means nothing.
“Really?”
“Oh, yeah. My mom jokes and says I’m the UPS guy’s kid. Truthfully, though, I may not necessarily look like them, but I inherited a lot of their traits.” Mercia picks up two parts of a photo and holds them together before she magically bonds them into one piece again.
“My mom didn’t seem too convinced about me being hers, though.”
Mercia glances up at Rachel, sympathy in her eyes. “It’s not necessarily about blood, Rach. Your mom—” She exhales through her nose and shifts around on the bed to get comfortable. “Okay, so, while I was in your mom’s head, trying to break your mom from the Fae’s clutches, I saw things I probably shouldn’t have. When your mom was our age, she was the Holland Keith at Ridge Crest, except, she wasn’t.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Your mom wasn’t just the captain of the cheerleading squad. Jenny was literally a beauty queen who got offered a big modeling contract by an international agency. She turned it down because Jason White told her he was going to marry her after they graduated,” Mercia explains. “When he dropped her before their prom, it was too late, though. The agency had already moved on to sign another girl.”
“Fine, but what does this have to do with me?” Rachel asks.
Mercia rolls her eyes. “Like your mom, you’re not small town hot. You’re the cover girl of French fashion magazines, the actress gracing our screen, the songbird on the stage, whatever. Here’s the thing, though, Jenny knows she’s gorgeous, whereas you probably don’t care what you look like.”
“I’m not sure if that’s an insult or a compliment, but—”
“It’s an observation,” Mercia interrupts before Rachel can say more. “To people like Holland and your mother, you don’t make any sense. You prefer books to people, making lists to wearing makeup, running track to cheerleading. The most ordinary thing anyone’s ever seen you do is when you went out with Greg.”
“In other words, my mom wanted a carbon copy of herself in order to live her life vicariously through me.”
“Essentially, yes.”
“No wonder we don’t get along,” Rachel murmurs.
“You get straight As—how did you not pick up on this earlier?” Mercia asks.
“I’m socially awkward, hello?”
A few beats of silence fill the space between them, before Rachel titters. Hesitant at first, Mercia only smiles, but releases an unexpected giggle. Spurred on by each other’s giggles, the two girls soon rumble with laughter.
Their mirth eventually dies down, leaving Rachel hollow once more.
Rachel couldn’t be who her mother wants her to be. No matter how hard she tries, she won’t ever fit into the Jenny Cleary mold. So where does that leave them?
Will she and her mom forever be at odds or will they maybe someday find common ground? Jenny is a librarian, sure, but their taste in reading material doesn’t match up whatsoever. Where Rachel loves genre fiction, her mom gravitates toward romance and literature. Jenny doesn’t enjoy cooking whereas Rachel does. They are simply too different, too at odds.
Who am I?
The question, still frustratingly unanswerable, pops into her head again. The fact is she doesn’t know who she is—does anyone?—but she knows who she wants to be. Rachel wants to be kind and courageous, compassionate and humble. Popularity isn’t something she has ever desired, but she would very much like it if she could someday be the person other people wanted to confide in. The question remains, though.
Who am I?
“What is this Fae actually looking for?” Rachel stares at the sonar picture her mother hadn’t torn up. “Better question: What does it want from me?”
“I have no idea,” Mercia says. “Are we even certain this is that Golvath guy?”
Rachel shrugs. “My instincts tell me it is, but I can’t be sure.” She picks up the sonar scan and studies the grainy image, searching for a clue. There’s a reason why her mother didn’t rip up this picture—there’s a memory she needed to share. But what could it possibly mean?
“Rach?” Dougal’s voice intrudes on her thoughts. “It’s almost visitin’ hours at th’ hospital. Ye wanna come with me?”
“Mrs. Crenshaw doesn’t want me seeing her like that,” Rachel says.
Dougal grimaces then nods. “Ye know why, yeah?”
“Yeah, it’s because she loves me more than she loves you.”
“Oi!”
Rachel grins. “I’m kidding.”
“It is ’cause she loves ye, but also ’cause of pride.”
“I know.”
“Had to make sure ye know,” he says. “I’ll tell her ye said hi.”
“Tell her I love her, too.”
“Nan’ll think ye’re tryin’ to be funny,” he says, but smiles anyway. “I’ll give her yer best.” He pushes away from the door, but says, “Are ye two lasses gonna be all right by yerself?”
“I’m recharged and ready to go,” Mercia says as she snaps her fingers and a bright flame dances on the tip of her thumbnail. “Don’t worry about us.”
“Don’t get into trouble without me,” Dougal says as he retreats.
“Don’t get into trouble without me.” Mercia nails his brogue with ease. Rachel snickers in response, earning a smile. “It’s like he expects us to do something irresponsible.”
“Speaking of being irresponsible, are you up for a recon mission?”
“Yeah, sure, why not,” Mercia says. There’s mischief twinkling in her storm-gray eyes and a grin playing at the corners of her lips. “Where are we heading?”
“To where this all began.”
“Oh?”
Rachel stands and says, “Ever since the Fae’s come out of hiding, I’ve been wondering what is new, what doesn’t belong, and maybe we’ll get lucky and find some answers there.”
“I’m not going into the boiler room,” Mercia says, standing.
“Would you believe me if I said that’s not where the answers lie?”
