“One more,” Forsooth said kindly. He held up a long and bony finger. “I want you to simply stand there, Miss Shadow, as relaxed and open as you can.”
I bit my lip nervously.
Out of nowhere, a flash went off from the dark.
I didn’t look over, but that time, the inspector did. His cheerful, warm expression changed to one that held real anger for the first time.
“No photos in here, Ms. Minx. Come now. You know better.”
I glanced over, unable to help it.
The woman with the orange quill gave a very insincere-looking apologetic simper to Forsooth, batting her eyelashes. She followed that up with a half-curtsey.
I forced myself to look back at the inspector without changing expression.
“Are you ready, Miss Shadow?” Forsooth asked kindly.
Panicking slightly, feeling for some reason that this would be the test that mattered more than the rest, I blurted out a question.
“Eyes open or closed?”
“Open is fine,” he assured me. “Closed is fine. You don’t have to do anything for this one, so whatever helps you to relax is perfectly fine.”
I nodded. After a slight hesitation, I closed my eyes.
I flashed back to the breathing exercises I’d gotten from a library book when I first moved to Southampton. That first year, I had truly terrible, horrific dreams: filled with blinding flashes and blood-curdling screams, green and purple smoke, my parents’ footprints burned into the sidewalk, my father’s horror-stricken eyes, my mother’s outstretched hand.
In some of those dreams, my brother would be dead, too.
In desperation, after the worst of those nightmares, I asked the old librarian at our community library if she knew of anything that would make a person not dream.
The woman was nice enough not to laugh. She thought for a moment, then led me down an aisle I’d never explored in the nonfiction section. After skimming through titles with a finger, she’d handed me a thin, gold-covered book on meditation and breathing exercises.
For months after that, I would sit cross-legged on the floor of my room before I went to sleep. The book explained in detail how to breathe, how to count inhales and exhales and the spaces in-between until the person doing it became entirely calm. Over time, I gradually increased the count in those empty spaces, and slowed my exhales still more.
At some point, it must’ve been enough.
The dreams never went away, but they no longer woke me up screaming.
I never shed the habit of those concentration and breathing exercises, either. I did it in class sometimes, before tests, or when I had to speak in front of a group. I even did it a few times while I faced off against the worst of the neighborhood and schoolyard bullies. It didn’t stop the fights happening, of course, but I’m convinced it improved my chances.
Now, like those other times, I fell back on what I knew.
I breathed in and out, counting each breath, counting the spaces between breaths, focusing on that tight, buzzy area in the middle of my chest. With that weight gone from around my head, my ability to concentrate felt different.
It felt easier here. It felt frighteningly easy.
I grew so relaxed and still, I completely forgot where I was. My hands opened, my breaths slowed even more. Somewhere in that, I grew aware of something fluttering around me.
It felt like millions of tiny feathers.
Or wings, maybe. Thousands of tiny wings.
The sensation loosened the remaining tightness in my chest. The dancing feathers morphed a few seconds later, turning into a warm, liquid sensation that swam over every inch of my skin. Soon it felt more like heated honey.
I stifled a gasp, biting my lip before I could stop myself, and another flash went off, making me conscious that I’d tilted my head back, and now held out my palms, extending them and my arms higher than my waist. My fingers remained perfectly still, but I felt so light, I could have been really floating.
I have no idea how long I stood like that.
