I dreamed of the puppy that I’d watched drown when I was seven. There had been nights that I felt like him, floundering in the current, trying not to get dragged beneath the surface. I never could remember who had given him to me.
The dream turned to Brock’s anger-filled cry as he’d ripped the knife out of his back. The rage in his face made me scream until someone shook me awake. Coming out of the nightmare was almost as bad as being in it. My heart pounded and mind raced. I sucked in air like I’d run a marathon. It took a few minutes to reorient myself. And for several terrifying seconds, I thought I’d somehow ended up back in my mother’s white prison.
I was still in a hospital bed, though the room looked different now. The big tree room with its lush earth garden was gone and this one was bland walls with no décor and just the bed for furniture.
Jamie sat beside me. The dark circles around his eyes made him appear more tired than usual. His presence meant it was after sunrise and Gabe couldn’t be here. Or he’d gotten tired of me. I hoped it was the former rather than the latter.
I tried to push my hair out of my face but found my wrists strapped down in padded leather cuffs. The heavy wrappings over my hands made my skin ache and throb with stiffness from the added weight, and they pulsed like a really bad sunburn.
“The doctors won’t let us take off the cuffs until your hands heal a little,” Jamie whispered. He stared into the distance.
“How long do you plan on keeping me here? I’m not sick. The hospital needs its beds for sick people.” I couldn’t keep the angry bite out of my words.
“You are sick, Seiran. Just a different kind of sick.” He blinked away tears. “This is a different kind of hospital. They help people with your kind of sickness.”
The meaning took a while to sink through the fog of meds they’d injected into me. A mental hospital? “I’m not crazy.”
“Nobody thinks you are.”
I yanked at the cuffs. “Then why am I strapped down?”
“Seiran, stop please. You’ve already hurt yourself.”
“So I was a little overzealous with my cleaning. Big deal.”
Jamie sat back in the chair, rubbing his eyes. “I don’t hate you. Gabe told me you think that. But I could never hate you. I’m worried about you. Worried sick. But I don’t hate you.”
“Let me go. Please.” The plea reminded me of a similar one I’d begged of Brock. I couldn’t get him out of my head.
“Once we know the meds are working and you’re properly hydrated, you’ll get to go. Your psychiatrist was here. She mentioned that you’d made an appointment for today. I told her you’d reschedule.”
“I don’t remember where the dog came from anyway,” I said.
Jamie frowned, recognition flashing across his face like the slow realization that he was in a horror movie. “What dog?”
“The dog my mom killed when I was seven.”
He let out a heavy breath and sat quietly for a while. “What makes you think your mom killed that dog?”
“She held me. Kept me from going after it. I watched him drown.”
“Oh, Seiran, if I had realized you only remembered that much, I would have brought it up sooner. I gave you that dog, and your mom didn’t kill it. What happened that day was an accident.”
“But she wouldn’t let me go.”
“You would have died too. We were picnicking on the shore of the Mississippi at a pretty little wooded park. The snow had just melted, and the ground was still soft. But I thought it’d be fun. My mom and your mom were trying to get along for our sakes. I’d begged a thousand times to have a chance to play with you, to be your big brother. Your mother always refused. That day we agreed to meet, and I brought the puppy, thinking if I couldn’t be around, then maybe you’d have another friend to make you smile.”
“I don’t remember a picnic.” I didn’t remember Jamie at all from my youth.
“You and I were running around the park with the dog when a levee broke upriver. The water only rose a few feet. I picked you up and handed you to your mom, planning to rescue the dog. But he’d gotten too close to the water’s edge and got pulled under. You don’t remember me at all?”
“No. Just the dog struggling. I have nightmares.”
“I’m so sorry. I never meant—” He couldn’t finish his sentence. Jamie sucked in a deep breath and blinked back tears. “This is all my fault…”
Well, that solved one mystery. I’d never liked dogs much after that. The memory of his pitiful whine right before he’d been sucked beneath the current replayed sometimes when I lay awake in the dark. “Will you tell me about our dad?”
Again another flash of pain crossed his face. Apparently all I could do was hurt him. “He died before you were born.”
“The Dominion killed him. Why?”
“He was a key member of Ascendance. The accusation at the time had been misuse of earth magic. The rumor was that he’d laid some sort of spell on Tanaka while she was pregnant with you.”
A spell? For what? “Didn’t he want me either?”
Jamie shook his head. “That’s not it at all. I spoke to him before his execution. He had cast a spell. One of protection. He told me you were going to be the most powerful earth witch born in centuries. His spell was to shield you from those who might seek to harm you—like the Ascendance.” My brother sighed and slouched down in the chair. “I yelled at him. Thought he didn’t love me since he was getting himself killed for you. You weren’t even born yet and I was so jealous of you. The way he looked when he talked about you, how much he loved you though you’d never meet. I was so angry with him. I wanted him to love me that much. If he hadn’t been caught by another member of the Dominion, your mother wouldn’t have said a word. She knew what she carried.”
“A monster,” I whispered.
“An angel.”
I snorted at him.
He smiled. “My dad gave me his power upon his death. Told me to protect you. He loved me just as much as he loved you. But he feared for you because of what you would become. I think he knew that you were supposed to become Pillar. That’s why he wanted me to protect you.”
So I was a burden. Damn. Some poor kid’s dad’s last request.
“My mom brought me to the hospital when you were born. I hadn’t even been allowed in when she’d had Hanna. But Tanaka had called for me. Let me hold you that first day. You were so tiny! Little fists squeezed tight and slanted eyes squinting at me. I wanted to keep you. Even begged my mom to take you home with us. We couldn’t, of course. You were Tanaka’s.”
“She didn’t want me either.”
“Seemed that way when you got older. When you were little, she never let you out of her sight. After that incident with the puppy, I tried to get custody of you. Pleading to the courts that you were undernourished and too small for your age, signs of abuse. They denied my claim. Said she took care of you just fine. You were just a scrawny kid. I think it was after she found out that she couldn’t arrange a marriage for you that she finally gave in to all the peer pressure to oust you from the community. There was so much talk, so many families, not even all earth, but all witches. I told her I wouldn’t let you marry someone who treated you like less than a person. She said she couldn’t find anyone who was willing to marry you at all. Then she sent you to military school.”
And we all knew how that turned out. “I want to go home. Does Gabe still want me?”
“Of course he wants you. You don’t stop loving someone just because they are having a hard time with things. It’s light out. He’d be here if he could.” Jamie sat stiff in his chair. How long would they wait?
“I can’t have sex with him. Did he tell you that?”
“No. But it doesn’t surprise me. You were raped.” Jamie sounded so calm, like he’d been through this sort of thing before. At least he didn’t appear to be hurting anymore.
“I asked Brock to do it. It’s not really rape if you ask for it.”
“Bullshit. You consented so you’d have a chance to survive. We all know what happened, Seiran. It was rape. You didn’t want it. You did it because you didn’t want to die.”
Tears stung my eyes. I swallowed them back and looked away. “Can you call Dr. Tynsen? We can have our session here. Doesn’t matter where I am to talk, right?” Maybe she could just hypnotize me to forget everything.
I’d begun to suspect that all the talking in the world wasn’t going to fix whatever as wrong with me. The nightmares were getting worse, not better. Every time someone glanced in my direction, it felt like a sneer. Matthew’s old comments kept echoing through my mind. Seeing a psychiatrist was supposed to help my paranoia, not add to it.
“What was in the package?” I asked, suddenly remembering it. Gabe had been gone a long time when that had arrived.
A look of indecision crossed Jamie’s face. Finally he said, “It was just a piece of hate mail. Letters and angry words. Nothing you needed to see. Gabe reported it to the police, which is why it took so long for him to get back to you. If he had known what you were doing—”
“I was cleaning.”
“Seiran, Gabe’s place is immaculate. He keeps it clean because he knows how your OCD works. I’ve gotten in the habit, too, but this time you threw us both for a loop.”
“It makes my head hurt less sometimes.”
“Cleaning?”
“Keeping busy.”
He paused, seeming to think for a while, then said, “Your doctor told me to ask you about Matthew.”
“No.”
“No, what?”
“I don’t want to talk to you about Matthew.”
“Why?”
I closed my eyes. The truth was I didn’t want him to hate me. Jamie would think I was tainted, dirty, unlovable, if he knew. Anyone who was halfway intelligent would. Why Gabe still loved me when he knew was a mystery. I guess telling Jamie now would give me more time to get over his rejection.
“He was my first lover. And he treated me like a whore. Brought other men to my bed because without them I bored him. I was eleven when it started, fourteen when it ended. Do you need to hear more?”
Jamie brushed the hair out of my face, looking sad but, surprisingly, not disgusted. “Sounds like he was a real bastard. I will listen to whatever you need to tell me.”
“I loved him. Or at least thought I did. It was so long ago now.”
“Do you feel the same way toward Gabe?”
Did I? Not really. Gabe had really become the other half of me. The better half. His laugh made me happy. His smile usually made me hard. I missed feeling him inside me, holding me in those strong arms. “No. Gabe is everything. If he leaves me, I will die. I need him like I need air.”
Jamie chuckled and leaned forward to hug me. “Then focus on that and get better. Nobody can take him away from you.”