HAUNTED
Strange dream, that gives a dead man leave to think!
—Romeo and Juliet, Act 5, Scene 1
Embry's eyes haunt me. I wake, roll out of bed and cross the room, stepping out onto my balcony. Sometime as I slept the storm unleashed. Rain lashes my face, instantly soaking my nightshirt and washing away the sweat from the nightmare. The wind howls and I still, my skin tingling with atavistic recognition.
I grip the balcony, hunching over. It sounds like the anguished, wild grief of a thunder god, not like weather, and I yearn to take to the skies but I'm no winged creature, I will never fly.
God of my father, the grief. Therage. The denial.
I’ve felt it all.
Go back inside, Aerinne,Darkan says.Don’t make this storm be for you. Do not draw his eye.
Do any of us use that pronoun in conversation without everyone knowing there is only one male in this city who doesn’t require anything but a simple pronoun?
My enemy would-be lover can use even the weather against me, and I probably should have known.
The son of Assariel Stormthrone.
I go inside and towel off in the bathroom then crawl back into bed, the balcony windows rattling. My eyes won’t close again tonight.
“I’m having trouble sleeping again.” I stop, laugh, and it’s cold, grating. “Not again. Always.”
The redecorated room suits my mood better—navy paneling instead of dove gray walls. Forest green leather couches instead of the cheery yellow I’ve been whining about for months. Heavy black bookcases stocked with tomes and knickknacks so worn, I think this must be Ward’s real space. It makes we wonder if the first aesthetic was a failed experiment she’s abandoning.
The tint of her glasses is a few shades darker today despite the dim room.“You’re speaking of Embriel.”
As usual, there’s nothing on her face except pleasant neutrality, though I note the familial inflection when shesays his name. Years of our sessions, and he’s become as familiar to her as he is to me.
I stare at hands I sometimes don't recognize. A dishwasher's hands, when Tata Fatma ropes me into kitchen duty. A diplomat daughter's hands when my father asks me to read through and notate his papers—he doesn't need me, he's stealthily educating me. The hands of a friend who enables Juliette’s drinking the way she enables mine.
The hands of a cold, premeditated killer.
All of these hands are mine, and none of them.
“He’s the first, and the only life I regret taking. . .personally,” I add. “I don’t precisely enjoy the others, we’re at war.” I push to my feet, but there’s nowhere to run in this square room. “He shouldn’t have been there. He didn’t deserve to die. But I do.”
The irony, the agony, that Embriel’s father had me in near the same position, on my back, on my knees, but used his hand to lift me up instead of strike me down, isn't lost in the storm. It's amplified. Lightning. . .would be a quick way to go.
Maybe I should walk back into that storm, draw the eye of its Lord.
And maybe I'm a fool to hope for one moment that when he does have me on my back, on my knees?—
“. . .hewillseduce you?—”
—it's a sword he’ll shove in me. What vengeance isdeathto an Old One? None.
My head hurts, and my nose is bleeding again. Resigned, I blot it with the hem of my sleep shirt.
“Aerinne, can you tell me more about what it means to you that he 'didn't deserve to die' while you feel that you do?”
I stand and give her my back. My voice is ragged but I don’t have to expose my face.“What it means. . .I want to die too. There are nights I’m so close to?—”
“Stop.” Her voice cuts through my words. “Aerinne. Look at me.”
I turn, startled by the sudden sharpness in her tone, and study her. Ward never breaks her therapist persona. Whoever she is in her real life, I don’t know. But here, she’s been nothing but calm, neutral, a blank slate for me to throw my thoughts on like blood spatter.
