Authors: Rachel Vincent
Over?
My stomach clenched around nothing, and anger on Farrah’s behalf blossomed like a fresh bruise on my soul.
“Are you sure you’re real?” she asked, and I could only nod, still trying to understand what she wasn’t really saying. “What about him?” She looked right at Tod and he gave her a small smile.
“Yes, Farrah, I’m real, too.”
Her frown was a child’s pout, innocently skeptical. “You ask a lot of questions for real people.”
“Yeah, I guess we do,” I said, though I had no idea what she meant. “Farrah, what can you tell me about your baby’s father? Can you tell me his name?”
She shook her head again, and long brown hair fell over
her face, half hiding one brown eye. “The baby isn’t real,” she said. “So he doesn’t get a name, either.”
I stood, frustrated, and nearly jumped out of my own skin when cloth rustled behind me.
“Hope you’re not expecting any of that to make sense,” a new voice said, and my grip on Tod’s hand tightened as I whirled around to find another resident in the doorway. Her bright blue eyes—shadowed by dark circles—seemed to watch the entire room at once, but never quite focused on us, and I realized she couldn’t see us. Maybe she couldn’t even hear us. But she clearly knew we were there.
“There’s no message in her madness.” The new girl stepped hesitantly into the room, like a blind woman afraid of running into a wall. “No hidden code. She’s been told she doesn’t exist, so she believes it.” She took another step forward and I almost felt sorry for her, wandering around in the dark. Figuratively. “I tried telling her she does exist, but since I’m evidently not real either, she doesn’t believe me. I don’t think she even hears me.”
“She can’t see or hear us,” Tod whispered, and I knew by his volume alone that he was unnerved. “How the hell does she know we’re here?”
“Maybe you’re not as good at this as you think you are,” I whispered, my gaze glued to the new girl. Who was starting to look vaguely, uncomfortably familiar.
He shook his head. “I’m every bit as good as I think I am.”
“If you’re going to hang out in my room, show yourself. Loitering unseen is rude, you know.”
I glanced at Tod and he shrugged, waiting for my opinion. And finally I nodded.
I knew the moment Farrah’s roommate saw us because she gave a startled little yip and kind of jumped back, bumping
her hip against the shelves bolted to the wall. “Two of you. Didn’t see that coming.”
“Sorry,” I said, and the roommate’s gaze narrowed on me like my face was a puzzle she needed to solve.
“Thanks for…showing up. I was starting to think I really was losing it.”
“Are you sure you’re not?” Tod asked, and I elbowed him in the ribs. No fair making the residents doubt their own sanity. They got enough of that from the doctors.
“As sure as I am that you’re standing there,” the roommate said. Then she laughed at her own joke, and discomfort crawled over my skin. I hate nut-job humor like Emma hates blond jokes.
“How did you know we were here?” Tod asked, his grip tight around my hand, suspicious frown trained on the newcomer.
“Because Farrah doesn’t talk to herself. She doesn’t talk to anyone, actually. At least, no one the rest of us can see. And I’ve seen enough to know that just because I can’t see something doesn’t mean it isn’t there.” Her focus shifted to me again, and again she seemed to be looking for something in my eyes. “You don’t remember me do you?”
“Should I?” I asked, my discomfort bloating like a corpse in the sun.
And then suddenly I did remember…something.
“Lydia…” I whispered, and she nodded, obviously pleased, while Tod’s focus shifted between us. “You were here when I… And you…did something. You helped me.”
“I tried,” she admitted, and her small smile faltered.
“And now you’re Farrah’s roommate?”
“Yeah. The staff thinks they’re doing us a favor. The residents think it’s a joke. You know, the two mute girls sharing
a room…” She shrugged and sank onto her bed staring up at us.
“Because Farrah only talks to ‘real’ people, and you… You didn’t talk either, when I was here.” Or had she? My memory of Lydia was fuzzy, but her voice wasn’t unfamiliar. And the confusion I couldn’t quite see past made me worry that I might not be done with Lakeside after all….
Lydia shrugged. “I don’t say much to the staff because when I do talk, they tend to extend my stay. But you’re not staff.”
“Maybe she can help us. With Farrah,” Tod suggested, and Lydia’s eyes widened in interest.
“We need to know about her baby’s father,” I said, wishing I could sit, but unwilling to let go of Tod’s hand. I didn’t want to be seen by the next aide to walk down the hall. “Do you know who he is?”
Lydia shook her head. “She talks to someone at night sometimes. Someone I can’t see or hear. I’m assuming it’s him, based on the things she says.” Lydia glanced at the floor, cheeks flushed, and I realized she’d gotten quite an earful from the side of the conversation she could hear. “At first, I thought she was talking to him just now, but obviously I was wrong. Unless you…?” She glanced at Tod, and he shook his head once, sharply. I almost laughed.
“If you’ve never seen or heard him, how do you know he’s really there?” Tod asked, and Lydia frowned up at him.
“I know, because she talks to him like she was talking to you guys, and
you’re
really here.” Lydia turned to me. “How did you do that, anyway? You’re a
bean sidhe,
right? But
bean sidhes
can’t…be invisible.”
She knew what I was. She’d probably known before I had, back when I was still a Lakeside resident. Why did it always seem like everyone else knew more about me than I did?
“I’m a reaper,” Tod said, and Lydia’s eyes went round
with the first sign of fear I’d seen from her. “Don’t worry,” he added before she could freak out too badly. “I’m off the clock.”
Lydia nodded hesitantly, like she didn’t quite believe him, and I got the feeling she’d liked him better when she couldn’t see him.
“Does anyone else ever visit Farrah?” I asked, drawing her attention away from the reaper. “Anyone other people can see?”
“Her dad came once, but her mom’s dead, and I get the impression her family doesn’t want anyone to know where she is. Or how sane she isn’t. Not that I blame them.”
“This is so messed up!” I glanced back at Farrah and that ache in my heart flared to life again. “If everyone else could see who she’s talking to, they wouldn’t think she’s crazy!”
“Oh, she
is
crazy.” Lydia folded her legs beneath herself on the bed. “She just doesn’t hear voices. And that baby’s killing her.” She rubbed both hands over her face, and I realized she was almost as pale as Farrah, the hollows beneath her eyes and cheekbones almost as dark. “I’ve taken what I can, but if I keep that up, the kid’ll just kill us both.”
“What did you take from her?” Tod asked, and Lydia turned to me instead of answering.
“Do you remember?”
“No.” But I was starting to. “You took something from me, too. Pain,” I said, struggling to pull the buried, fuzzy memory to the surface of my mind. “I needed to wail for another patient, and it hurt all the way down…” My free hand found my throat, and I could almost feel the echo of that old agony, so much worse back then, when I hadn’t understood it and couldn’t control it. “You took the pain, and that helped me hold it in.” And if I’d screamed again, they would
never
have released me. “You got me out of here…”
“I just did what I could,” Lydia insisted. “But there’s not much more I can do for Farrah.” She sighed, and the pain in that sound was beyond the physical. “Maybe I shouldn’t have done anything. She would have lost the baby if I hadn’t helped in the beginning, but at least
she
would have lived. Now it’s too late for both of them.”
“She’s going to die?” My voice was barely a whisper, and I couldn’t stop staring at Farrah, who still flipped pages in her book as if we weren’t even there. She’d tuned us out as soon as we started talking to Lydia—evidently we were now “unreal” by association. “Are you sure?” I asked, and Lydia nodded.
Tod glanced at Farrah. “Why do they keep her here, if she’s so sick?”
“They don’t,” Lydia said. “They take her over to Memorial when she gets too weak, but all the doctors can do is feed her. The tests all come back negative. They have no idea what’s wrong with her. But some of the older nurses say she’s just lost the will to live. They’re kind of right.”
“Because she doesn’t believe she
is
living,” I said, and Lydia nodded. “But it’s more than that. It’s the baby,” I insisted, flashes of Danica’s miscarriage connecting the two girls in my mind. “Farrah would have lost her baby early, just like Danica did, if not for you. How far along is she now?”
“The nurses say she’s twenty-eight weeks. Why?” Lydia asked, her focus shifting between me and Tod. “What’s wrong with the baby? And who’s Danica?”
“She’s a senior at my school. I think her baby and Farrah’s
baby had the same father.” And I was really starting to wish I’d printed the faculty picture of “Mr. Allan.”
Wait a minute
… I turned to Tod, acutely aware that we’d now been holding hands for at least twenty minutes. “Does your phone get internet?” Mine didn’t.
He nodded, already digging it from his pocket with his free hand. “I splurged—I don’t have many bills.” He handed it over, and it took me a minute to find the site I wanted, typing with only my left thumb.
“Farrah,” I said, when I’d found the faculty images on the Crestwood website. She didn’t even look up, so I tugged Tod closer so I could kneel by her bed again. “Farrah, is this your baby’s father?” I zoomed in on Allan’s face and held the phone in front of her book. Farrah tried to shove my hand out of her way, but I just pushed back. “Look at him! Is this him?” I demanded, and finally she looked.
And her brown eyes watered. “David,” she whispered, and my short thrill of triumph was swallowed by anger on her behalf.
“It’s him.” I stood, already turning back to Tod, but Farrah grabbed my hand, holding the phone firmly in front of her face.
“Who is he?” Lydia asked, while I stood hunched over, so Farrah could get another look.
“I don’t know his real name.” I dropped onto my knees again to get more comfortable. “But he’s an incubus in heat. He taught at Farrah’s school just long enough to get her pregnant, and now he’s at my school. And since Danica just miscarried his demon seed, I’m pretty sure he’s set his sights on my best friend. But I’m not sure why, since Farrah’s pregnancy seems to be progressing in spite of…everything.”
“Insurance,” Tod said, kneeling next to me. “Most human women can’t carry an incubus baby to term, so he’s increasing
his chances of a successful harvest by planting as many seeds as he can.”
My rage knew no limits. “And with each one, he’s damaging a teenage girl, or abandoning his own newborn daughter, or both at once, with no guarantee that he’s even spawning a son.”
“My baby’s a boy,” Farrah insisted, still staring at Tod’s phone, and my arm was starting to cramp from holding it out. “Not a real boy, though.”
What, was she carrying Pinocchio?
“Did the doctor tell you that?” I asked, gently pulling the phone from her grip. I stood and handed Tod’s cell back to him, and her gaze followed it until it disappeared into his pocket. But then she went back to her book, dismissing us as “unreal” once again.
“She’s right,” Tod said. “She wouldn’t be in here if she was carrying a girl. Girls are born human, from normal pregnancies. Boys are incubi, and if the pregnancy doesn’t kill the baby, it usually kills the mother slowly, both body and mind.” He shrugged when I just stared at him. “I thought you knew that.”
“I didn’t.” And I was starting to think that ignorance was at least somewhere in the neighborhood of bliss because the more I knew, the angrier I got.
“Me, neither,” Lydia said, and after a long, awkward moment of silence, I looked up at Tod.
“Well, I guess I have what I came for,” I mumbled, trying to swallow the sick feeling I got every time I looked at Farrah, knowing what was going to happen to both her and her baby.
“Wait, you’re leaving?” Lydia stood, eyes wide in panic. “Take me with you,” she insisted, when I stared at her in surprise. “Or at least get me out of here.”
I glanced at Tod, but he only shrugged. “Your call.”
Why was it
my
call? “Lydia, I can’t. What about your parents?”
“They put me in here. Please, Kaylee.” She stood, eyeing me desperately. “I’m a syphon. Do you know what that means?”
I shook my head, fairly certain she wasn’t offering to steal gas for my car in exchange for orchestrating her escape from a mental institution. ’Cause that would be…crazy.
“I take things from other people. Anything. My body has an innate need to maintain balance between what I’m feeling and what’s being experienced around me, and when there’s an imbalance, I get the urge to take some of whatever there’s too much of, to even things out. I’ve spent my whole life fighting that need for balance to keep from poisoning myself with other people’s problems, and this is where it landed me.” She spread her arms to take in all of Lakeside.
I could certainly sympathize.
“I took your pain, and I’ve been taking some of Farrah’s illness,” she continued, as sympathy for her swelled inside me. “I can syphon some things on purpose, to help, like I did with you, but I don’t always have a choice. When there’s too much, resisting it is like trying to swim with your hands tied. I can’t do it.” She grabbed my free hand and held on tight, like I could somehow pull her above that brutal tide. “Farrah’s going to die, and if I’m still here when that happens, she’ll drag me down with her.”
“It wouldn’t matter if we got you out,” I said, heartbroken that she and I might be facing parallel ends. “If it’s your time to go, you’ll go, no matter where you are.”
“Maybe not,” Tod interrupted, and I turned to him in confusion while Lydia’s eyes shined with hope. “And not for
her,
either,” he added, glancing at Farrah. “An incubus pregnancy
is…well, it’s a sort of supernatural intervention, like Doug dying from a frost overdose. It trumps the natural order of things. Same thing for Lydia, if she becomes collateral damage. This probably isn’t when or how they’re supposed to die. Either of them.”
Ohh
. I glanced at Lydia in growing horror. “So, leaving her here is like murder?” I asked, and Tod shrugged.
“You’re not pulling the trigger. But you’re not taking the gun away, either.”
“Please, Kaylee,” Lydia begged. “Get me out of here. I did it for you. You owe me.”
She was right, and I was rapidly running out of time in which to repay my debts. “Will you do it?” I asked Tod, and he nodded. “I can’t take you both at once, though, so I’ll have to come back for her.”
“No, take her first,” I insisted. “I have a couple more questions for Farrah, and I still want to check on Scott. I’ll wait here for you.”
“You sure?” Tod knew how much I hated Lakeside, and that the thought of getting caught there terrified me.
“Yeah. Just make sure you come back for me.”
“Nothing could keep me from it,” he said, and I believed him.
I let go of his hand, and mine suddenly felt cold. And empty. And when he reached for Lydia, I had a sudden mad urge to slap her hand away and reclaim his for myself, in spite of what I owed Lydia, and my genuine need to help her.
“You ready?” Tod said, and she nodded, taking his hand.
“What are you gonna do?” I asked, trying not to see where they touched each other, or wonder what it meant that I cared. “You can’t go home, can you?”
She shook her head. “They’d just send me back. But I’ll be fine. It can hardly get worse than dying in here, right?”
she said, glancing around the space she shared with another mental patient in a secure facility. I knew how she felt, but I also knew that starving—or being attacked—on the street wouldn’t be any better.
I glanced around the room until I found a pencil on her desk, then pulled the twenty-dollar bill from my pocket. “This is all I have,” I said, scribbling my number on a scrap of paper from my pocket. I wrapped the money around it and handed it to her. “Call me if there’s anything I can do to help. I gotta warn you, though, this offer expires on Thursday.”
She frowned in confusion, but took the twenty and my number and shoved them in her pocket. “Thanks.”
I nodded, and Tod met my gaze. “Be right back.” Then they both disappeared, and sudden panic nearly overwhelmed me. Anyone who walked in would see me. I could be arrested, or even mistaken for a resident by some eager new staff member. Neither of those catastrophes would last once Tod came back for me, but that knowledge did nothing to calm me.
So I focused on Farrah, who didn’t seem to know Tod and Lydia were gone.
I sank onto the end of her bed, facing her. “Farrah?” She didn’t look up. “I’m real, remember? You can talk to me.”
She shook her head without looking up. “Real people don’t talk to Lydia. She can’t hear them, ’cause she’s not real.”
“You’re not real either, right?” I said, hating myself a little for stepping into her psychosis. “But you hear real people. It’s the same for Lydia.”
Farrah seemed to think about that for a minute, her hand frozen in the act of turning a page. Then she looked up and met my gaze. “Oh. Yeah.”
“Since I’m real, just like David, do you think you could tell me a little more about him?” I held my breath, sure she wouldn’t fall for that one. But then…
“He’s
beautiful,
” she said, her gaze losing focus, as if she could see him in her mind.
“Yes, he is.” Blanket policy when talking to the insane victim of incubus procreation: agree with everything she says. “But I was hoping for a little more than that. Do you know if any of your friends know him? Like you know him? Are any of them having babies, too?”
“Erica tried,” Farrah said. “But she got sick, and her baby died. It must have been real.”
“How awful,” I said, as she flipped more pages. “Anyone else?”
“Tiffany. But I haven’t seen her in a long time. She’s not real. But her baby is. It’s a girl.”
“How do you know it’s a girl?” I asked, as chills broke out on my arms. I hoped Tod would be back soon.
“David told me. He was sad.”
“Do you know where David lives?” I asked, and Farrah shook her head.
“He doesn’t take students to his house. That would be inappropriate.”
“Of course.” But evidently sleeping with them wasn’t. “So you only saw him at school?”
“Except when he came to my house.”
I sat straighter in surprise. “Mr. B—I mean David came to your house? Were your parents okay with that?”
“My dad wasn’t home. But my mom didn’t mind. She liked David.”
Uh-oh
. I closed my eyes and swallowed the sick feeling creeping up from my stomach. “Farrah, Lydia said your mother died. Was that
after
David started coming to your house?”
“Yeah. Doesn’t matter, though, because she wasn’t real. So she didn’t really die. I won’t, either.”
“Because you’re not real?”
“Right. You’re going to die, though,” she said, looking right into my eyes, and my chill bumps doubled in size.
“How do you know that?”
Farrah shrugged. “Because you’re real. Everything real dies.”
Thoroughly creeped out, I stood and backed away from her bed, and Farrah went back to her book, like I’d never been there at all. And for a moment, I envied her effortless ability to simply move on, like nothing she’d heard mattered. At first, I’d thought facing death would do that for me, but somehow, the less time I had left, the more there seemed to be to do. And it all mattered.
Nervous now, I crossed the room and opened the door enough to peek into the hall. It was empty. I glanced at my watch to see that nearly five minutes had passed. How long did it take to blink into the parking lot, then blink back? Was something wrong?
Tod would never leave me there. Not if he had any choice.
Five minutes later, I’d gone through most of Farrah’s stuff without learning anything new, and I
had
to get out of that room. Every passing second brought the next nurse check closer, and I could
not
be found at Lakeside, in the room of a missing resident.
Finally desperate, I took off my shoes and put on the plain white bathrobe Lydia had left behind. Then I pulled the ponytail holder from my hair and shook my head, leaving my hair down to half-hide my face, and knelt by Farrah’s bed one last time.
“Do you know Scott Carter?” I asked, and she nodded.
“How…um…?” Turns out there’s no polite way to ask exactly how crazy someone is. “How is he?”
She looked up at me slowly, eyes wide, expression more co
herent than I’d seen from her so far. “He’s real, but he doesn’t know it. So don’t tell him. He might not wanna know he’s going to die.”
That made two of us.
“Thank you, Farrah.” I stood and took one last look at her, wishing there was something I could do to help her. Then I sucked in a deep breath and stepped into the blessedly empty hallway.
I’d gone four steps when a door opened at my back and soft-soled shoes squeaked on the floor. I didn’t turn. Unless she got a good look at my face, whoever was behind me wouldn’t know I didn’t belong. I could have been any brunette mental patient in a bathrobe—a fact which unnerved me enough to make my hands shake. So I shoved them into Lydia’s pockets.
My heart pounded with every step, and when I stepped into the open common area at the center of the ward, agoraphobia crashed into me like a hit from Eastlake’s defensive line. The light felt too bright and the tile floor seemed to go on forever. People milled around like living land mines I had to avoid, without looking like I was avoiding them.
When I passed the TV room, my fists unclenched in my pockets. When I passed the dining area, I exhaled slowly. But I didn’t dare look up from my feet until I’d passed the nurse’s station without triggering any alarms. And even then, I could still hear my pulse rush in my ears, each surge counting down the seconds until I might be caught.