by Amie Gibbons
“Annabeth Williamson!”
Oh, I knew that voice.
That was Carvi.
And he sounded pissed.
“Stop throwing a tantrum like a toddler and let me talk to you.”
“No!”
“You can not be pulling this, not now,” Carvi said.
“I’m not pulling anything. I owe you nothing!”
“You owe us keeping to your word. You said you would help. And right now, you’re running. And it’s not because you’re mad.”
“Oh, yes it is.”
A door slammed in the distance and pounding a moment later made me flinch.
Something made a ripping sound and a loud crash and scream followed.
Then it was eerily quiet.
I blinked my eyes open slowly, eyes so dry I swear I heard my lids scratch across them with every blink.
At first, the scene didn’t make sense.
The leather couch I lay on was thick but comfy, and felt like butter under my cheek. The chairs across from me were white ones with dainty flower designs stitched in pink. And the rug underfoot was that faux fur one.
It was the living room in the house my parents rented.
But that didn’t make sense.
Cuz we were in Miami, last I checked.
Unless we weren’t anymore.
What about finding the person who put the hit out on me?
What about finding whoever started the spiral? I had a pretty good idea what they must’ve done, but I still didn’t know who.
Maybe I was still asleep.
Cuz there’s no way we’d made it all the way back to Alabama.
A flash of color out of the corner of my eye made me move my head a fraction and Pyro flew into sight.
“What?” I managed to rasp as he settled on his tassels in front of me.
He tossed his top tassels up like hands and shook his top third, flying outta sight for a moment again.
He came back with his phone, strings flying as he typed.
For a while.
I sat up slowly, making sure my head was on straight.
Okay, I felt okay.
Maybe kinda hung over?
Pyro finally handed the phone over.
“You passed out in the astral plane, so Carvi pulled you out and put you back in your body. The vamps grabbed books from Carvi’s hotel to do research. Carvi has Marco trapped in the astral plane and has a witch using his essence to track his body and will have him shipped here. AB was stewing in her juices all the way back and finally exploded when we got here. She woke your mom.”
Wow.
That was a lot to take in.
I checked the clock on the phone.
Four a.m.!
My mouth fell open.
How long had we’d been in the astral plane?
How long had I been out?
I handed the phone back to Pyro.
“What do you mean, stewing in her juices?” I asked, voice rough.
Pyro typed and held the phone out. “Quil and Carvi both said OCD freak out.”
I shook my head.
What did that mean?
“Hi, sweets.”
Quil walked into the living room.
Sweet baby J, he looked exhausted.
Dark circles made his usually sharp and handsome face gaunt, and his eyes had the reddish cast they took on when he was starving.
When his eyes looked like that, it was safest to toss him some blood bags and back away slowly.
“Don’t worry,” he said like he’d read my mind. “Your mother is running to a night butcher for us. She should be back any moment.”
“We didn’t pack any blood for you?” I asked.
Pyro flipped a tassel at me and flew outta the room.
“We did, but we’ve already gone through it. The power drain…” Quil shook his head.
“Quil?” I held my arms out and he shook his head.
“Not until I eat.”
I nodded.
“The power you lost in your trip, what Carvi said you did, sweets, you could have died. I had to give you blood. A lot of it.”
A pang echoed through my heart.
My guy, my love, my savior so many times over, had given me so much of himself that he was near mad with hunger, and how did I repay him?
Lusting after other guys.
Crying over one I’d never have.
It was something he swore didn’t bother him.
But it was not okay.
“What’s going on?” I pointed upstairs and cleared my throat.
It was so dry.
Pyro flew back into the room with a glass of water.
“Thank you,” I said so emphatically I surprised myself as I took it from him.
He flew up and settled around my shoulders for a quick squeeze before flying back into the kitchen.
“AB is having an episode,” Quil said, the words obviously straining him. “She was boiling over on the plane, but kept it in. When we got here, she said she was packing up, renting a car, and leaving. Carvi said she wasn’t and the fight woke your mother. Your father seems to sleep through anything.”
“Military training,” I said. “He’ll wake up, realize it’s not a danger, and go back to sleep right there.”
Mama on the other hand…
Mama got mean with little sleep.
I was surprised she hadn’t gone off on AB.
“Your mom got up and came out. She seemed angry, but I think she understood what AB was going through and said go ahead and have it out, she was already up so she was going to stay that way. I asked if I could borrow a car. We’d already looked up butchers, and we were able to find one that supplies the nest here. She said she’d go since I looked so weak.”
He stared at me way too hard, eyes nearly glowing.
My heart sped up.
I was starting to feel real awake, real fast.
Our eyes locked and I licked my lips.
He did too.
The door opened and Mama walked in, shaking her head.
I huffed out a hard breath as Quil yanked his eyes away.
“An all-night butcher to supply vampire’s blood,” she said. “I never wrote that.”
Quil was in front of her so fast she yelped and he smiled what was probably supposed to be apologetically but just looked predatory.
She handed over the bag and Quil turned and rushed into the kitchen.
It took me a moment to figure out he did it just in case Mama was squeamish.
“Hi, Mama,” I said, holding my arms out.
“Baby.” She sat next to me and folded me into a tight hug.
I wrapped my arms around her, hugging her back just as tight.
She smelled like home.
“I’m so sorry about all this,” I whispered.
“It’s okay,” she said.
“I know how you get when you miss sleep. You said it yourself, you get sociopathic.”
She chuckled as we pulled apart.
Mama had always been beautiful to me. Every kid thinks that about their mom, I think. But staring at her now, awake and running errands at four a.m., I saw the years painting her face.
How she raised five of us when she was a lawyer and a struggling writer. How her stories of trying to be a woman in a man’s world had shaped us. How we learned from her that you didn’t have to have career or family.
You could have both, but you had to have your priorities.
Mama had quit being a full-time lawyer after a few years, just working from home on research projects she got as a freelancer from law firms.
Back in the eighties, she’d done the impossible, making her own little niche in the legal field, starting her own business taking one-off projects from law firms, writing fiction and making a completely different career in that until she was a semi-famous author.
And all of it while having kids underfoot.
Mama’s life showed on her face.
And I knew, if s
he had to do it all again, she wouldn’t change a thing.
Not even Ava leaving.
Mama had made her decisions, had done her best, and she had found peace, even in the things she’d done that she regretted.
“What are you staring at so hard, baby girl?” Mama asked me, resting her hand on my cheek.
“I just realized all you’ve been through,” I said. “How many times you must’ve made middle of the night runs for sick kids. How tired you had to have been waking up to feed babies. How you kept up two careers doin’ all that. Mama, have you always been this strong? Cuz I never thought of you as anything else, but… did you have to learn to be this strong?”
Tears sprang to Mama’s eyes and she pulled me into a hug again.
“Nobody’s born strong, baby. And trust me, you’re so much stronger than you think.”
A sob escaped me, and I cried in her arms.
“Mama, I miss Grant,” I finally whispered. “It aches. How can I feel this way when I have Quil? Does that mean I don’t love Quil?”
“Shhhhhh. That doesn’t mean anything about any other relationship besides that one. Whoever said falling in love with someone killed the love for another was a damn fool. And it’s a good thing that isn’t true, because then how could a mama love all her children? Romantic love isn’t exclusive, no matter how much people want to believe it is.”
I pulled back.
“Mama, did you ever cheat on Daddy?”
Her mouth fell open.
And I could practically hear the no singing from her brain before she said it.
“Sorry,” I said, smiling as I wiped my wet cheeks. “Quil said I was so powerful… and it doesn’t seem to run in the family… so he was saying Daddy may not be my father.”
Mama blinked quickly.
“Oh baby,” she sighed. “I won’t say I was never tempted. I even had a friend I think I was in love with for a while there, but no, I never had an affair.”
I nodded.
I felt dumb even asking it.
But at least my mama wasn’t offended or hurt.
“I’m sorry my friends woke you up,” I said.
“It’s okay. I think having me run to the butcher helped Quil, and if I hadn’t been up, well, one of those two would have had to do it and neither seems to be in the best mindset for driving.”
“I’m still fuzzy on what happened there, but I’ve been out for a few hours.”
I looked up at the railing that kept the second floor hallway safe.
It really was too quiet.
“Sweets?” Quil said.
I looked over at the passageway into the kitchen and he smiled.
He looked so much better. His eyes had lost that sunken look and his face was pink and flushed.
“Pyro’s making you some food if you’re hungry,” Quil said. “You too, Mrs. Ryder.”
“Please, call me Mandy,” she said. “I don’t feel comfortable with a man a few hundred years older than me calling me missus when I’m calling him by his first name.”
Quil smiled and nodded. “Well, Pyro is making food for you lovely ladies. And there’s still plenty of AB’s cake and cookies.”
“Cheesecake for breakfast?” Mama said dramatically, fanning herself with her hand. “Why, I couldn’t possibly.”
She winked at me and lurched off the couch.
I followed suit.
At least we knew where I got my dramatic streak from.
We walked into the kitchen where Pyro was mixing up nearly done scrambled eggs in a pan.
“I still can’t get over you having a flying carpet,” Mama said. “Let alone one that reads and writes and cooks. You can’t even cook.”
She patted my arm just in case I didn’t know she was teasing.
“Don’t look at me,” I said, putting up my hands. “I don’t know where he learned that from.”
Pyro glanced behind him and flipped a tassel at us dismissively.
“Is it just me, or are those two being really quiet?” I asked, pointing back towards the living room as we sat at the table.
“Makeup sex?” Mama said.
“Mama!”
Oh, right, I got my dirty side from her too.
She did write romance novels after all.
“No, that’d be much louder,” Quil said. “I ran up to check, and Carvi has her in the astral plane.”
“Ohhhhh,” I said, closing my eyes.
“Carvi?” I asked mentally.
“Yes, you can join us, lea,” he said after a moment. “Maybe you can get through and talk some sense into her.”
Talk some sense into her?
What the quack was going on?
I opened my eyes and I was standing in the upstairs bedroom next to the bed.
This room was pretty nice, but not as grand as I was expecting based on mine. It was smaller and had a full-sized bed that would barely fit Carvi and AB comfortably, but the thick green quilt was made out of some silky material and had a nice leaf pattern, and the wallpaper was a very light green that offset it nicely.
The carpet was thick and cushy, and the room had a flat screen TV over the cherry wood dresser, and even had a game console hooked up to it.
AB sat on the bed with Carvi kneeling on the floor in front of her and she turned to look at me.
She had her glasses off. Her eyes were so puffy and her nose was so red, I half thought she might be going through an allergic reaction.
“What do you want?” she asked thickly, crossing her arms.
I focused on her.
What was going on inside?
What couldn’t I see?
The room grew around us.
Or maybe we shrank.
And a clown wearing a tight red and green ballerina costume accentuating her tiny body popped up a few feet away from the bed.
The clown had white face paint and a fancy green and gold Venetian mask.
The carpet crawled away from the clown, leaving hard wood floor, and a tiny bicycle grew outta it, slamming the clown right between the legs.
The clown cried out in pain and climbed on the bicycle, pedaling in a circle, crying and whimpering every time she hit a bump or had to shift to turn.
And she just kept going.
I don’t know how long we watched it.
AB let out a rough, half laugh that made me jump and look back at her. She had her glasses back on and was watching the clown too.
“So that’s what my OCD looks like,” she said softly.
“Why is it a clown?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Why was I seeing Nazis marching across a cheesecake earlier? Or that jackass thanking me the night I had everyone over to distract him on replay? I’m just crazy.”
Huh?
“No, you’re not,” I said.
She shrugged. “That’s what he called me. He’s a therapist, so he’d know.” She pointed to the clown, sniffing. “And look, the proof is right there.”
“You have OCD,” Carvi said, voice as soft as I’d ever heard it. “You’re not crazy. Thomas calling you that was him being an asshole, especially since he is a psychiatrist and should know better. Hell, especially since he’s the one who triggered this in the first place.”
She flinched and looked down.
When had she spoken to Thomas again?
Or was this something he said a while ago?
“You have something off about you,” Carvi said. “And it’s not even bad OCD. It flares up when you have stress or trauma, and it makes you act out, but it’s not something that controls your life or makes you act certain ways every day.”
She drew a deep breath.
“You told me how you scaled it back before, remember?” he continued. “You were a kid and felt you had to repeat a mantra before bed six times, and you knew, even before you ever heard the term OCD, that that wasn’t normal, so you started scaling it back, and now you don’t even remember what it was you had to say.”
“I don’t understan
d how to scale back this OCD though,” AB said. “Any time before, I knew what crazy thing I was doing, so I could stop it. But this? I don’t know what I’m doing besides panicking. I’m not repeating things, I’m not counting, I’m not lining things up so they’re in perfect lines. I don’t know what I’m doing that I can scale back. I just panic!”
“That is what you’re doing,” he said. “You panic because of the trauma, and the OCD makes it worse, and you lash out. Sometimes you go for the alcohol, sometimes you run away, sometimes you start screaming and going after whatever reminds you of what traumatized you.”
“But how do I stop?” she whispered. “I don’t know how to do this. It just came on, like a switch. I can’t take it. I can’t take feeling this way. I have to do something.”
The clown peddled faster, the cries coming more frequently.
“No,” I said, “you don’t. Maybe feelin’ that you have to do something is the OCD. Maybe the idea that you have to take control to get rid of the OCD, is the OCD tricking you.”
Carvi nodded and pointed behind him at the clown. “Annabeth, listen to me. That is not who you are. That is one aspect of you. A small part of you that you have learned to deal with, and can again. And it’s not always bad. Most successful people have some OCD; that obsessive nature is what drives them to greatness. Yours happens to flares up in bad ways sometimes when you’re triggered.”
“But why?” she whispered. “Why does he trigger me like this? He hadn’t been. We’d been friends. Why did the panic come back? I haven’t had a panic attack like that since med school when he’d show up at mixers, or I’d see him in the halls.”
“Because you were repressing it,” Carvi said. “You told me what you could remember about that night, and the way you describe things and the way you reacted says you were traumatized. He traumatized you, AB. You just had a few years to repress it after her left.”
Her eyes flew wide. “Then what made it come back up?”
“My guess? And this is a guess because your mind is too jumbled for me to tell for sure quite yet. My guess is your trigger has something to do with him and sex, which is why you snapped when he slept with someone you saw as vulnerable. But also, maybe compounded by, the fear that others will see you as crazy when you react to him. So you have your fear response, you act crazy, and then you are afraid of that happening again, so once you snapped, it became a vicious cycle.”