‘‘Yes. What’s got you spooked?’’
Nola put the sheets down in the spare chair and hurried over to sit on the bed next to me. Her tanned skin was flushed red and her eyes looked bloodshot, like maybe she hadn’t gotten much sleep lately.
‘‘How are you feeling? Don’t try to sit. Let me get you water. Do you know where you are?’’
Okay, now she really had me worried. I’d never seen her rattled.
‘‘Slow down,’’ I said. ‘‘One thing at a time. I hurt some. Did I use a lot of magic recently?’’
She nodded.
I exhaled in relief. ‘‘Okay, that explains the memory loss. Is today still my birthday?’’
‘‘Oh, honey.’’ She brushed my hair back from my forehead and her cool fingers felt good. Why did I wish they felt like mint?
‘‘Your birthday was three weeks ago.’’
‘‘Wow,’’ I said. ‘‘Did I have a good time?’’
Nola laughed, but she was crying too. ‘‘No. It was a miserable birthday.’’
‘‘Except for my cool tattoos?’’ Making jokes when I’m scared and the world is falling apart, and I can’t remember anything and just want to cry, is one of my strong suits.
‘‘Tattoos?’’
I held up my hands.
She pulled a tissue out of her pocket and wiped at her face, then blew her nose. ‘‘Those aren’t tattoos, honey.’’
I knew that. I just wanted her to tell me what they were, because I had absolutely no idea.
‘‘I’m going to get you water, and you are going to drink. You are also going to try some broth. While you do that, I’ll try to help you remember . . . remember everything.’’
‘‘I don’t want any broth,’’ I said.
‘‘Too bad. And Jupe is going to stay here and keep an eye on you until I come back.’’
I looked over and, sure enough, the big ox came trotting into the room and rested his head on the edge of the bed.
‘‘Stay,’’ Nola said, to me as much as the dog.
I was so glad she was bossing me around, because it meant she thought I really was going to be okay. But I wasn’t as convinced. I felt sore, inside and out.
Emotions flooded through me—fear, anger, sorrow, loss—in a confusing wave. Even though I hate crying, and had no idea why I wanted to cry right now, I could not stop the tears that ran down my face.
It made me angry that I was crying for no reason, or maybe for a reason I couldn’t recall. And being angry only made me cry harder.
Stupid, stupid, stupid. If I’d had the strength, I’d pound the walls. But I couldn’t even muster the energy to sit up.
When I heard Nola walk toward the room, I averted my face and stared at the curtains. I wiped at my cheeks with my strange, multicolored hand, a hand that did not look like my own. Sorrow tightened my chest, but I took three deep, calming breaths. I could do this. I could survive finding out what I didn’t know anymore. I could survive losing bits of my life, and bits of myself. I’d done it before and been okay. Mostly.
‘‘Let’s get you sitting,’’ Nola said. She leaned over me and I looked up at her. Even though I figured my eyes were puffy and red, and my cheeks and nose were all blotchy, she did not say a word about it. She didn’t make comforting noises, or tell me she was sorry. She was just her normal, strong, matter-of-fact self. ‘‘You’re not broken,’’ she said, ‘‘just a little bruised.’’
She was the best friend ever.
It hurt to sit, hurt more to stay sitting, but with Nola’s help, I managed.
‘‘You okay?’’ she asked.
I was shaking, sweating. ‘‘I’m good.’’
She put a tray over my legs and set a cup of broth, a spoon, a straw, and a carefully folded white napkin on it. There was something about the neatness of the napkin, pressed cloth, spotless white, that tickled the back of my mind. Then the sensation was gone.
‘‘So.’’ Nola kicked off her boots and sat on the bottom of the bed, leaning against the footboard. Something down on the floor mewed. She got off the bed, and sat back down with a little gray kitten in front of her. The kitten picked its way across the quilt, exploring the folds and batting at the ridges.
Cute. I didn’t know she had a cat.
‘‘Where shall we start?’’ Nola asked. ‘‘Your birthday. Do you remember me calling and telling you to come out and visit me?’’
I frowned. ‘‘I don’t think—no, I don’t think so.’’ I picked up the spoon and was surprised at how heavy it was.
‘‘I left you a message because you weren’t at your apartment. You later told me you were Hounding a hit up in St. John’s.’’
The room got hot all of a sudden and twirled like a merry-go-round. I wanted to puke. I think I dropped my spoon. Somewhere in that gut-wrenching chaos were my memories of St. John’s, but no matter how far into it I leaned, I could not snag the bronze ring and retrieve them.
‘‘Here now,’’ Nola said.
She was above me. I was lying again, covered in sweat. But at least the room had stopped spinning. She put a cool cloth on my forehead and I reveled in the simple, soothing pleasure of it. Okay, maybe I wasn’t feeling as good as I thought I was.
‘‘You’re fine,’’ she said. ‘‘I’ll go slower. We have plenty of time to straighten this out. Plenty. Sleep now. Sleep.’’
And I did.
The next day, or at least I hoped it was the next day, I woke early. Tendrils of anxious dreams slid away, leaving me with nothing but a hollow feeling of loneliness. My arm no longer had the IV hooked to it, so I decided to go take a bath.
I pushed the covers back, levered up, and rested a while before making my way slowly, hand on the walls for balance, into the bathroom. I sat on the edge of the tub and rested until I stopped trembling, then finally stood and stripped naked.
The image in the mirror was a shock. Whorls of metallic ribbons marked me from temple to fingertip on my right, rings of black banded my fingers, wrist, and elbow on my left. The blood magic scars on my left deltoid were slashes of red.
A ragged, pink scar as wide as my hand puckered just below my ribs on my left, and a thumb-sized circle sat just below my collarbone.
Wow. So much for wearing a bikini.
I leaned against the sink and stared at my eyes, trying to fit this reality of the new me with the knowledge of the old me. My eyes were still pale green like my father’s, I still had short hair, though it looked like I needed a cut soon, and I was a little on the thin side. Still, I was me.
‘‘This is it,’’ I whispered. ‘‘This is me now. I can deal with it.’’
There was a knock on the door. ‘‘Allie?’’
‘‘I’m going to take a bath,’’ I said.
‘‘Need any help?’’
I did. And I knew Nola would be happy to be of assistance. But what I needed even more than her help was my life back, or at least a sense of normalcy. And that meant sucking it up and taking care of things myself as much as I could.
‘‘I got it so far.’’
She waited outside the door. I took a deep breath and made it back to the tub. I crawled into it and eased down onto the cold ceramic. I turned on the spigots until the water poured out hot.
‘‘I’ll get breakfast started and bring you some towels,’’ Nola said through the door.
‘‘I can do it,’’ I lied. Luckily, she was already gone.
Turns out I did need help getting out of the tub, getting dried, and getting dressed. I also needed some help back to bed. Even so, I felt pretty good about my accomplishment for the day.
I leaned back against the pillows Nola propped between me and the headboard of the bed, and breathed hard until my heart stopped beating so fast.
‘‘A couple more days like this, and I’ll be ready to run a marathon.’’
‘‘How about you get through a meal without passing out first?’’ Nola said.
‘‘Spoilsport.’’
She smiled. ‘‘I have oatmeal for breakfast. What kind of tea do you want?’’
‘‘No coffee?’’
‘‘Let’s start with tea.’’
‘‘Fine. Do you have mint?’’
Nola frowned. ‘‘Mint? Are you sure?’’
‘‘I think so. Why? Don’t I like mint?’’
She shrugged. ‘‘You’ve never asked me for it before, but maybe you developed a taste for it recently.’’
I thought about that, tried to remember if I drank mint tea, but no clear image came back to me. What came to me was an emotional memory of the comfort, ease, and pleasure mint could offer. For whatever reason, I liked mint and I missed it. A lot.
‘‘I guess,’’ I said.
Nola patted my leg and strolled out of the room.
She spent the rest of the day giving me back what memories she could. Not much of it made sense, but I carried an unconscious knowledge, an afterimage of it all deep in my subconscious. My emotional memory was intact. I remembered the grief, the anger, the fear, the pain, if not the actual events themselves.
My father had died.
I’d been shot. Twice.
Accused of murder.
Cleared of that accusation by Mama’s and Cody’s testimony.
I had drawn upon magic so hard that it had been permanently burned into my skin, my bones.
I healed someone.
I’d totally missed out on my birthday. No presents, no party, no song.
I had missed my father’s funeral.
And I might even have fallen in love with a man named Zayvion Jones.
I had done so much, and lost it all.
Nola didn’t seem to think it was something out of the ordinary for me to deal with, but I didn’t think I had ever lost this much memory at one time before. That magic I’d done—the last thing in Mama’s kitchen that Zayvion had apparently told Nola about—had nearly killed me.
If you used magic, it used you too, and I had used the hell out of it, probably without setting a Disbursement. It was just my luck that my price had been twofold, physical pain—a coma—and massive memory loss.
I hoped I had made the right choice. I hoped that if I still knew what I had known then, I would make the same choice.
Wishing I’d done something different—maybe not used magic so much, maybe not gone up to St. John’s, maybe not gone to see my dad, maybe not tried to help Cody—would only drive me insane. And most of the time I felt too close to crazy already.