Magic After Dark: A Collection of Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance Novels

by Margo Bond Collins

  The love they shared for each other was easy to see and to feel—extra senses weren’t necessary to see their obvious love and affection. Other couples tended to look at them with envy. I completely understood and felt blessed and honored to be allowed into their private world.

  The evening of the party I wore a tea-length powder-blue dress with a white satin sash tied at my back, white anklet socks that had a matching blue bow and black patent Mary Jane shoes. My hair was adorned with a white ribbon and left down to curl below my waist.

  Typically, I was brought downstairs by the nanny at the beginning of the evening to play the piano for the guests. My parents loved to show me off. I was a bit of a protégé and their perfect little Snow White, as they liked to call me.

  I had crystal blue eyes and black hair, a nod to my blended Gypsy heritage—or so I’d been told. My parents were open about the fact that they had adopted me from Scotland. They’d always wanted a house full of children, but hadn’t been able to conceive, and so they had given up hope of ever having a child to raise.

  While vacationing in Scotland with their friend, Dr. Darren Hanley, an opportunity for adoption became available. Dr. Hanley arranged everything for my parents. They were lucky that the international laws and adoption regulations from that time, were nothing like what they are today. Besides, money could buy a lot—including silence, no matter the era.

  My mother loved to tell the story of what their first glimpse of me had been like—apparently, I had made quite the impression. I was screaming and crying as Dr. Hanley walked out of the hospital with me in his arms. I was six months old. He warned them that I was a very colicky baby, but he assured them that a change in my diet would fix the colic right up.

  “Your cheeks and lips were chapped red from your constant crying,” she would tell me, “and your eyes were tightly closed, so I had no idea of their color. And your wild black hair was sticking straight up! But as Darren started to hand you over to me—your bright blue eyes flew right open and you practically jumped into my arms!”

  She always recounted that memory with a smile and a happy little giggle. Even as an infant, I could feel her emotions and I knew how much she loved me. According to Helena, once I was held securely in her arms, I’d immediately stopped fussing and started cooing.

  My parents and their guests were chatting with one another in groups and drinking martinis. They all fawned over me once I came downstairs.

  They told me what a beautiful little girl I was—touching my hair and pinching my cheeks. I loved being at the center of their adoration and of my parents’ world, but I hated to be touched by so many strangers.

  I could feel their emotions when they touched me. Sometimes, I could hear them too, as their thoughts floated painfully through my mind.

  I tried to explain this to my parents, but they didn’t understand. They believed this sensitivity was due to my creativity and aptitude for music. They felt I was being overly emotional and imaginative—precocious even.

  Not once did they believe me, but in their defense, I was outside their realm of understanding and beyond the confines of their perfect little social stratosphere. I kept the ability to hear and feel people to myself, like a dirty little secret.

  I was different and different meant odd and odd was frowned upon.

  Playing the piano had always been easy for me, but eventually it became an obsession. It was a necessary means of expression as I grew older. Music allowed me to focus on something other than the confusion of these random voices and the pain I felt from other people.

  The compilation that I had created specifically for tonight was playing through my mind as I made my way over to the piano. I thought the piece would make for a fun surprise for my parents and their guests. I’d blended several classical arrangements with some current hits to create something unique and quirky. I was fairly proud of the results.

  A few of the guests touched me in encouragement as I made my way over to the piano. I tolerated it with a smile, but the onslaught of emotions were almost crippling.

  Dr. Hanley had been out of the country for several years. The last time he saw me, I was a toddler. As I passed by where he stood chatting with some other guests, he placed his hand firmly on my shoulder and gave it a tight squeeze.

  I took my place next to the piano and waited for my father, Sebastian, to introduce me to their guests.

  “Welcome everyone!” he said, as he settled his left hand on the same spot where Dr. Hanley had inadvertently bruised my shoulder. I tried not to flinch and smiled through the discomfort. He reached out with his other hand to beckon my mother forward.

  When she joined us next to the piano, he continued to say, “My wife, Helena and I, would like to introduce to you, our daughter. She will beautifully serenade your ears off and magically prompt you to empty your pockets for Helena’s latest charity.”

  Everyone laughed, just as they always did. And I curtsied, just as I always did, but tonight for some reason, my heart was pounding. I looked down to see if it were noticeable under my dress and it wasn’t, but it was strong enough that I placed my hand over my heart as if to control the runaway rhythm.

  All eyes were on me—waiting and staring because I made no move to sit at the piano.

  I could hardly breathe through the incapacitating fear that suddenly moved through me—a fear that was not my own! I’d felt other people’s emotions before, but nothing like this and never this strong or this acute!

  I was lost and drowning in the intensity.

  Urine ran down my legs to puddle on the snowy white carpet below me.

  I could feel my parents’ mortification just before they yelled at me, but I was beyond their voices—lost in a maelstrom of terror and agony.

  I grabbed the sides of my head with my little hands and pulled at my hair. I could hear a young boy screaming for mercy. I could feel his little body writhing in pain. His mind was saturated in chaos and confusion, and so was mine.

  I screamed and begged with him until my voice was so raw I could no longer speak and tears poured from my unblinking eyes. I was tethered to him, as he suffered—feeling everything that he felt as he was tortured.

  Mercifully, I passed out and dropped to the wet floor below me.

  Chapter 2

  How quickly adoration turned to disdain.

  Dr. Hanley jumped right in to take responsibility for my care. He’d asked one of the other guests to carry me to my room. My parents couldn’t be roused to pick me up, too shocked by my outburst to move.

  That was the first time I’d been medicated and the very last time I’d been touched with compassion.

  Dr. Hanley had recently returned to town to take a position as the physician administrator at a small private asylum for the affluent. I was admitted there and placed in his care for observation and a battery of tests.

  I submitted to every treatment, Dr. Hanley and all the subsequent doctors, put me through—all in an effort to make my parents happy. I believed they loved me and wanted be better so that I could come home.

  My parents were very passionate in the beginning and completely involved with my treatment plans. Initially that is, but I knew the truth. I could feel exactly how they felt. They couldn’t hide their true emotions from my unusual and unwanted ability.

  They didn’t want me to come home again—not ever!

  For appearance sake, they continued to come to the asylum on a regular basis. These visits followed a similar pattern—they would admonish me for making things up and I would deny that I was.

  “Stop this nonsense, and behave like the daughter we know you to be!” Sebastian would demand, his face a mask of worry.

  A mask that hid his true feelings, of shame and frustration, from everyone, but me!

  “We want you to come home,” Helena asked, looking out the window as if she wanted to escape.

  Well, so did I.

  “Don’t you miss your things? Or playing the piano?” she asked.

 
; Her fear was palpable from across the room. My nose itched with noxious scent and crawled through me in sickening waves of nausea.

  It was obvious they didn’t really want me back. There was no place for this new, odd me within their perfectly coiffed, color-inside-the-lines world. They just wanted their Snow White back. Despite knowing all of that, I still begged them to come home.

  They believed this would be the best place for me to get the help and intervention I needed. The next time my parents came to visit me, it was a surprise. Dr. Hanley personally escorted me to the reception area.

  On my way there, I told myself I’d stand strong. I would not ask to come home again. I definitely wouldn’t beg. Despite my best intentions—I did just that.

  “Please…please, may I come home?”

  My voice stuttered through my sobs as I tried to explain to them that I was in pain. How my back felt raw. I even reached between my shoulder blades to show them where it hurt.

  Dr. Hanley explained to my parents that the drugs were playing tricks with my mind, so they completely discounted my complaints of pain. There was nothing to see, they reassured me, but I wasn’t reassured, not in the least.

  They maintained that there was nothing marring the skin on my back, at least not that they could see. But it burned terribly, like a raw wound that had been splashed with rubbing alcohol.

  I was completely shocked speechless when they told me I could come home for a trial visit.

  “Thank you,” I whispered with my head lowered—afraid to look at them in case they changed their minds.

  Once I was home, I tried to do as my parents asked. I tired to be what they wanted, their little Snow White, but the voices inside my mind had other ideas. They relentlessly cried for mercy and begged for help. I couldn’t control them, nor could I shut them out. The constant noise was painful and debilitating.

  My parents didn’t know how to handle me or the supposed voices, and gave up trying. I was readmitted, but this time to a different asylum. Dr. Hanley would no longer be my doctor, to which I was extremely thankful. Whenever I thought of being in his care, fear would flash through me and pain would ghost over my back.

  That was my final trip home. I’ve often wondered if my parents had wanted to rescind my adoption. If they could have, would they have sent me back to Scotland, like returning damaged goods for a refund?

  They were all about appearances, so that would never do. Instead, I was all but forgotten. They informed their circle of friends that I was away at boarding school, but my parents were fooling no one, least of all their friends. They all knew the truth—I was crazy.

  However, in the event a cure was found, my parents made sure that I was well educated. So in-between my various therapies and when I could pay attention through the drugs, I had the best of tutors that money could buy. They didn’t want me to seem ill-bred and backwards or unable to hold a sophisticated conversation.

  Who were they kidding? It felt as if they lived in an alternate reality and one that I would never inhabit. However, none of that would matter, as I would never go home again and I refused speak after that last attempt at living with them.

  It was during this dark, lonely time that my secret friend came to me. She was the only thing that would keep me sane over the years to come. I didn’t know what her name was for the longest time. We didn’t really need them, but eventually she told me her name was Mia.

  I cherished the fact that she trusted me with something so precious. Yet, I felt guilty because I didn’t share mine too, I just couldn’t!

  Eventually, my parents quit trying and quit visiting. They gave the doctors free reign to implement the treatments they felt were necessary. Whatever was needed to cure me of the voices crying for mercy and whose pain was palpable, as if it were my very own. Consequently, I’d been through hundreds of cures over the past fifteen years, yet the voices remained and the emotional pain was still just as crippling.

  The asylums and hospitals that my parents had me admitted to were all private institutions and as such, the staff only reported to them. Each new doctor and every new facility did as they pleased. They loved to remind me that I belonged to them and was utterly worthless.

  They called me a freak and I paid for the distinction by becoming their personal lab rat. For fifteen years they’d tested every new drug on me in hope of finding a cure. Some of those drugs were helpful. They kept my mind quiet and the voices distant, but others would steal my control.

  And this was when the staff loved to strike!

  I lost days and occasionally weeks at a time, with no idea what had been done to me or by whom. I’d be covered in bruises and I could feel the staff gloating and see their spiteful, smirking faces.

  I hated knowing that I’d been so vulnerable—unaware and unable to protest or protect myself. I hated every single one of them for abusing me.

  Once the drugs finally wore off and their hold over my mind lessened, I tried to remember the lost time. But I was rarely able to recall anything and I usually gave myself a wicked headache for my troubles.

  Helplessness would wash over me and I would drown in despair.

  Money and influence had bought silence, stole my freedom and eventually stole my will to live…

  A new administrator had been hired to oversee the asylum. He had spent his first few weeks reviewing every treatment plan implemented. Now he was in the process of assessing every patient individually to decide whether or not their treatment plan was the correct one. It was my turn and one of the hateful staff came to bring me down to the admissions room.

  To occupy my mind and my trembling hands, while I waited for the new administrator, I picked at the frayed hem of the thin, threadbare gown I wore. It did nothing to keep me warm, but I hadn’t been given time to change.

  I thought about all the administrators and doctors that had come and gone through the years. A countless succession of nameless and faceless white coats, purposely blurred in my memory. I tried not to borrow trouble thinking of all the what if’s that would accompany this new admin.

  I looked up when I heard a familiar, yet unexpected voice call out my name. I froze as fear slithered through me causing a visceral response. I wanted to jump up and run away. My heart rate supported that idea—racing out of control, but it was futile. I was trapped and had nowhere to go and he knew it!

  “Won’t you even say hello to your new administrator and doctor, my dear? How long has it been now? Hmm? At least fifteen years I’d guess. You’ve moved around a lot, but then so have I, but the law of averages was in my favor. I knew you’d eventually end up in my care once again,” Dr. Hanley told me from the doorway of the admissions room.

  My time with Dr. Hanley at that first asylum had been relatively short, but that time had weighed heavily on my psyche. So much had happened there. All the initial tests and observations had been done under his direction, so the pain and the trauma of all that was associated with him. Whether it was fair or not to hate the man, I did and passionately so!

  Occasionally, I had what I thought could be memories or flashbacks from my time with Dr. Hanley. They didn’t make sense and surely wouldn’t have been allowed. But I have since been disabused of that notion—anything and everything could and would be done. No one would stop the abuse. There were no rules and no regulations.

  I vaguely remember a dark room. The smell of incense hung heavily in the air. Dr. Hanley hovered over me as I sat motionless in a chair. He muttered to himself in a chant-like fashion in a language I didn’t understand. I tried to move away, but couldn’t.

  “You can’t move, so stop trying!” He barked at me suddenly, causing my eyes to widen in fear—the only movement I could make.

  I felt blood run down my spine from between my small shoulders where he had been carving deep into my flesh. I wanted to scream, but couldn’t. Whatever he had given me, had stolen my voice and prevented me from doing so. Except within my mind, where I screamed for mercy.

  “It’s s
trong in you! I knew it when you were a baby.”

  What was he talking about?

  “I just knew you’d be the ultimate sacrifice and I told Hulbetto. He needs you and quickly, the others are fading—they’re always fading too quickly,” he told me, though I didn’t understand what he meant or the disgust in his voice.

  He stopped carving to gather something behind me. The burning pain on my back intensified to the point that I wanted to pass out to escape it, but couldn’t. Why—I screamed in my mind—why would my mother and father allow this?

  “I knew when I touched you on your way to the piano!”

  I didn’t mean to hear his thoughts when he touched me—I thought to myself.

  “But your outburst by the piano solidified it,” he told me, before he began to carve into my flesh once again.

  I didn’t mean to hear that little boy either—or feel his pain!

  “Just a bit more on this glyph…”

  “I see you remember the reaping,” Dr. Hanley said, anger evident in his voice.

  I didn’t answer because I didn’t know what that had been just now—memory, hallucination, fabrication? But whatever it was, the residual terror still echoed through me.

  “Your parents ruined my apprenticeship!” he said, the anger escalating in his voice, “They didn’t care about you and were ashamed to call you daughter. But not that day. No, they had an attack of conscience and withdrew you from the asylum. My asylum!”

  Spit sprayed from his mouth and rained upon my face. I refused to wipe it off, I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of knowing how much it bothered me.

  I stared at him in mute silence. The only control I had in my world was my voice—and I refused to give it to these heinous people. I hadn’t spoken aloud since I was eight years old.