by C. M. Cevis
Liza and Luna both laughed.
“That would be awesome,” Luna said, motioning for Asher to follow her into the living room. She had a spell to remove from a few books, and then they could get started.
14
Rowan had done as she asked that day, and brought Gideon home after bailing him out of jail. She’d gotten a front seat to the entire spectacle, thanks to the sensationalist celebrity news show that had rocketed to fame by sticking their ear points in the business of everyone who had even a drop of fae blood in them.
Maya rubbed her temples. It was a full three days later, and she still hadn’t issued a public statement. Her attempts to converse with her husband and son had ended before they began, her son leaving dinner before the meal was served, and her husband mentally shutting down before they’d gotten anywhere.
She was not trying to be a horrid wife and mother, but she seemed to be succeeding at it anyway.
Maya pressed the intercom button on her desk. “Liz.”
“Yes, Your Majesty,” Lisette answered as she came through the door, tablet in hand as if anticipating dictation.
“Can you close the door behind you, please?”
Liz paused, brow furrowing, then did as asked and came farther into the office. Her tablet was hugged close to her chest, and her eyes said that she had no idea what to do about anything, but she was there for whatever Maya needed. Maya loved Liz.
And now that Liz was here and the door was closed, Maya gave up all pretense of holding it together. She buried her face in her hands. “Am I a terrible person?”
“Your Majesty—” Liza began.
“No. Not right now, Liz. Me, Maya, just Maya. Am I as bad at all of this as I feel right now?” When Liz didn’t answer immediately, Maya looked up.
Liz’s face had softened and she took a seat in the chair on the other side of the desk from Maya.
“You want the truth?”
Maya put her hands down on the desk and nodded. “The honest truth. From an honest friend.”
Speaking the words aloud made her realize that Liz, her hired assistant, was probably the only real friend she had. Maya treasured that and was terrible at making sure she knew that she was appreciated. Oh my goodness, she was terrible, wasn’t she?
“You’re not handling things well right now, no. But who is always perfect? Regardless of what the public demands from you as queen, the reality of it is that you will make mistakes, just like everyone else,” Liz said softly.
“But I am the face of the monarchy. My mistakes aren’t supposed to be out there for the world to see.” She sighed. “More importantly, I can’t even manage a conversation with the man I love or the son I adore. What is wrong with me?”
Liz smiled and reached across the desk, putting her hand over Maya’s. “I suggest taking a few days off. Put out a vague statement about what happened with Gideon to calm the media down, and then spend some time with your family and try to reconnect.”
“But what about—”
Liz cut her off. “Nothing in this office is more important than your family. I can handle things for a few days, and what I can’t handle, you can when you get back.”
Maya’s eyes began to tear up and she sniffed. She had been hiding from her family behind work excuses for… years. “I don’t even know what to talk to them about anymore.”
“Well now is as good a time as any to find out, isn’t it?”
15
Luna looked at the double doors of the rather non-descript two-story office building. A placard beside the door listed the businesses housed within and their suite numbers.
She looked at Liza. “You think we could rent one of these suites and keep our plants and some of the books here?”
Liza chuckled. “Probably. But we’ve got a big drafty basement for that.”
“Yeah, but it also has the weird gates.”
“True.” Liza sighed. “One more reason to figure out how to lock that area up securely.”
Luna nodded. She glanced down at the note she’d written. This was the right building, one of the few in Calidity that she hadn’t been inside of before.
“Suite 205,” she mumbled as Liza blinked out of sight and she walked toward the entrance.
Liza had decided that she wasn’t going to be active while Luna was in therapy. She’d said that she didn’t want to be in the way, a distraction that stood in the way of Luna being able to get better. Luna didn’t have control over when Liza chose to appear, yet another sign she wasn’t just some figment of Luna’s imagination. Today, she’d preemptively chose to be quiet unless she felt like she was needed for something.
Luna took the dingy elevator up to the second floor of the older but well-kept building and walked the thin-carpeted hallway in the direction that the signs indicated.
At suite 205, the plain wooden door swung open almost silently to reveal a small and warmly lit waiting area. It contained a love seat, an armchair, a small table with magazines, and a desk with a computer and someone’s water bottle. Behind the desk was another door. No people.
“Hello?” Luna called quietly.
Nothing.
“Liza, is anyone here?” Lune thought to her sister.
“There’s two people through that door behind the desk. Maybe the doc is finishing up with another patient,” she replied, still invisible.
Luna nodded and took a seat in the armchair. She was a few minutes early. She reached picked up a three-month-old magazine and began flipping through it.
The door behind the desk opened, and through it walked a tall man in an expensive dark suit, followed by a slightly shorter man in a collared button down and khaki slacks.
“Thanks for your time today, Jacob,” the tall man said, turning to the other.
“Any time, Mike, you know that. It looks like Violet might have ducked out to lunch, but do you want to go ahead and make you next appointment?”
The tall man shook his head. “I’m not sure when I’ll be back from California, so it’s probably best if I wait.”
Mister Business Casual—or Dr. Jacob Hise, Luna supposed—nodded. “Fair enough. I look forward to seeing you again. And you know that you can always call while you’re away.”
The tall man smiled, nodded, and held out his hand. “You, my friend, are the best.”
The men shook hands warmly, and Mister Tall and Expensive smiled at Luna before turning to leave the office.
“Ms. Luna?” the doctor asked, turning his friendly smile in her direction.
Luna smiled and nodded, standing. “Yes. Dr. Bates sent me.”
“Of course,” Dr. Hise said, motioning for Luna to follow him through the door behind the desk. “She sent me her notes, so I’m familiar with why you went to her in the first place, and that she hasn’t seen anything medical to explain your current experiences.”
“Yes, she mentioned I might be experiencing PTSD. From my coma.”
The room was bright with mid-morning sunlight streaming through a large window behind an equally large dark wood desk. Dr. Hise indicated that Luna should take the seat on the wonderfully comfortable looking overstuffed couch before he took a seat in a high-backed armchair beside a table with a stack of notepads and a cup of pens.
Once seated, Dr. Hise eyed Luna thoughtfully. “Yes, from your coma. I wasn’t sure you’d want to talk about it.”
“I might be having some trouble sleeping, but I’m fine to discuss it.”
Dr. Hise smiled. “Good to know. I prefer to be sure to which patients I can give frank advice and which need a bit of sugar-coating.”
“Please, give me the frank advice.”
“As you wish.”
They sat in silence for a bit, just looking at each other, before Luna said, “I’ve never been to a therapist before, Dr. Hise, I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do now.” Where their initial conversation had settled her, something in the silence had wound up her nerves.
“You’re not supposed to do anything.
Does the silence make you feel uneasy?”
She breathed deeply, thinking of how to describe what she was feeling. It wasn’t the silence but rather something about… this office. Something quiet and almost imperceptible, but she felt it in her gut. She wasn’t about to volunteer that information though.
“I don’t mind the silence. I mind thinking that I’m not doing something that I should be.”
He nodded, and was that a flicker of disappointment crossing his face? It was gone in an instant, replaced by a toothy smile. “Okay, well first, you can call me Jacob instead of Dr. Hise. I want our relationship to be comfortable. I want you to feel like you can talk to me about anything and everything. And titles get in the way of that.” He chuckled.
“I can do that.” Luna returned his smile genuinely. He was kind of handsome when he smiled.
“How about we start by talking about the dreams you’ve been having, since that is the reason you went to Dr. Bates. Then we can let the conversation move on from there.”
“Sure, okay.”
“Excellent.” Jacob picked up a notepad and a pen from the tale beside him and waited. “Now, tell me what you’ve been experiencing.”
Luna made a face. Where to start? Maybe this hadn’t been a good idea after all.
“Talk, sis,” she heard Liza whisper.
“I’ve been having nightmares about what I went through in my dreams while I was in that coma. Sometimes, they’re just replays of what happened. Other times, they’re what happened with my current brain making it… worse, I guess.”
“Worse how?”
“Sometimes it’s darker, like more than one body showing up on my porch. Or sometimes it’s stranger, like my best friend turns into a zombie halfway through it.” That had been an interesting one.
“Uh, there were bodies?” Jacob asked.
“Right, no one was in the dream but me,” Luna mumbled. Sometimes she forgot that. “The dream started going south when my brother’s dead body showed up on my front porch, so I was the main suspect.”
Jacob nodded his understanding and continued scribbling for a moment. “That wasn’t an occurrence that seemed odd to you?”
“Me being a suspect definitely felt odd, which was why I fought going to jail. But as far as my brother’s death…” Luna hesitated. The real answer was probably no, but what normal person would say that? “Not at the time. I was dreaming. How often do those things make sense?”
“More than you’d think,” Jacob responded without looking up. When he finally did place his pen to the side, he did so with a friendly smile that unfortunately did nothing to help soothe the low-running feeling that something was wrong.
“So, what is it? Do I have PTSD like Dr. Bates thinks, or am I just crazy?”
Jacob chuckled. “You are definitely not crazy, so you can put that concern out of your head. As far as PTSD, we’ve only been talking for a few minutes, and I hesitate to make a diagnosis with so little information. But, at a glance, it does seem that your experience caused you trauma that your brain is still trying to deal with.”
“And that’s what the nightmares are? My brain trying to figure itself out?”
Jacob nodded. “A very common reaction to trauma. It’s not a fun one, but it is a sign that your mind is trying to make sense of what happened to you so that you can hopefully move on from it.”
Luna sighed. “That’s good, I guess.”
“It is.”
“What happens now?”
“Now, you and I keep talking, since you’ve got,” he paused to look at his watch, “about forty minutes left in this session. Then we decide how often you’d like to come talk to me in the future. You and I talk for as often as you need. And if one day, your nightmares stop, your head clears, and you no longer feel the need to come to me in a professional capacity, then we’ll part as friends and I’ll move on to the next person who needs my help.”
That was a plan Luna could get behind. Very no-pressure, just there for the patient, and she liked that.
“Simple as that, huh?”
Jacob nodded. “Simple as that. Now,” he grabbed his pen and notepad again, “since we are going to need to build a base, why don’t you tell me a bit about this brother? Not the one from your dream, but your actual brother. Your relationship, how you grew up, things like that. Let’s try and help your brain by figuring out why he was the family member that appeared there.”
That made sense to Luna. “Alright, I can do that.”
“Perfect. You talk, I’ll take notes, and when you’re done talking, I’ll ask a few questions to fill in any gaps that I may have.”
“Okay. Well, my brother Matt is a few years older than me. When we were kids, he was the typical older brother who pulled my hair and put mud in my bed. But he was also one of my best friends…”
16
Luna had made an executive decision on her way back from Dr. Hise’s office and stopped downtown at a small bakery that she loved. With a dozen still-hot cookies in a bag, she grabbed a few bottles of wine from the store next door and then finally made her way back to the house.
“Zelda?” Luna called as she set her things down on the kitchen counter. She liked to announce herself when she had guests; it kept her from startling them. She walked quietly, or so she’d been told, and she’d scared quite a few in the early B&B days.
“She’s not here,” Liza said, standing beside her.
Luna nodded. “Did you get a weird vibe from Dr. Hise?”
She frowned. “A little from him, yeah. But it was almost like it was his office that was giving off the bad feeling.”
Luna leaned her hip against the kitchen island. “Yeah, what was that about? I liked talking to him and all, but I don’t really like getting bad feelings in a place where I’m supposed to bare my soul.”
“Maybe something bad happened in the building somewhere near his office?”
Luna shrugged. “I don’t know, but I’m not going to feel totally comfortable until we figure it out. Did you get a read off of him?”
Liza shook her head. “No, but I didn’t try. Just wanted things to play out without my interference. Next appointment, I’ll see what I can dig up.”
Luna nodded and started putting the bottles away. “Good. The last thing we need right now is more mystery.”
“Do you think it’s weird that he asked about Matt right after we find out that he’s missing?”
Luna thought about it, but shook her head. “I brought him up, remember? If he had approached the subject out of the blue, sure. But he didn’t.”
“Yeah.” Liza frowned. “I guess I’m just trying to tie things together where there isn’t anything to tie.”
“I appreciate it either way. You’re looking out for me.”
Her twin scoffed. “I’m looking out for me. I just happened to be tethered to you, sis.”
Luna laughed. “You are a terrible liar.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Liza grinned.
17
“What about if you combine the one that you have with this?” Asher asked, pushing the book she’d been flipping through towards Luna.
She looked up from the page describing invisible spikes, and read over the one Asher offered. A general spell for retraction, it was most likely meant for retraction of non-physical things, like permission or promises that needed to be broken. But there wasn’t anything that said that it couldn’t be used for physical things. Like magical spikes.
“Maybe with this doorway spell as well?” Liza asked, indicating the page she’d been reading through. The three had covered a lot of ground over three sessions of research, and now it felt like they were finally getting somewhere.
“Hm. A door with retractable spikes. That might be workable. I’ll have to try it out, play with it a bit. Combining spells isn’t an exact science.”
“It’s not a science at all, so I’m not surprised. But at least you have a spooky basement to test it on.” Asher grinned.
S
he had a point. “It’s not really spooky down there, for the record.”
“Yes, it is.” Liza laughed.
“No, Liza is just a wuss.” Luna said it so straight-faced that Liza and Asher looked at her in surprise before busting out laughing.
“Maybe you should finish out the front of the space, so it looks more inviting once you’ve got your locks in place. It might make things more inviting. For Liza, of course.”
Liza made a face at Asher.
Today had been the first time Asher had been unable to see Liza since the initial conversation about her. It had been five days, longer than Luna thought it would have lasted without her help. Luna had pushed a bit of herself into Asher, just like before, and all was as it should be, but now they knew how long they had between pick-me-ups on Luna’s power. Luna wanted Asher to save the candle for emergencies.
“So, how do we do this?” Liza asked.
“You don’t know?” Asher asked as Luna began reading through the three spells again.
“No, of course not. I’m a psychic, remember? I’m not sure how Lu does what she does, I’m just here for emotional support and to hold an occasional bowl.”
Luna could have sworn she heard the moment where realization hit Asher, and it almost made her laugh.
“You can move things.”
Luna glanced up just as Liza blinked at Asher.
“I’m… going to assume this is the first time you noted that our research would not have been as fruitful if I could not turn the pages. And I’m going to ignore that this is the third time we’ve been doing this.”
Luna snorted a laugh.
“I always thought that was a Hollywood thing, ghosts being able to move things.”
“Come on Liza, give her a break. She has a point: Hollywood has made most of us not-exactly-humans look crazy.”
Liza sighed. “Okay, fair. Normally, it would take a very strong emotion from the ghost and a fair bit of concentration. That’s why the whole pissed-off poltergeist situation exists. It’s accurate in that yes, normally the ghost is really pissed off and that’s why they are throwing things around. But the more peaceful ones, the ones that just want to say goodbye or are watching out for someone until they are ready to move on, they can’t normally manipulate the world around them. I can only because I’m different.”
