Dhara rested her arms on her knees, her fingers threaded together as she almost pleaded with Nicolette. “Tell me how you got rid of it. I’ll do anything.”
“You’ll have to,” Nicolette said, turning back to look at her, her eyes haunted. “But learn from my mistakes. I went through seven exorcisms to rid my body of its possession. All it did was tear at my mind, fracturing it even further. Those memories are as terrible as the ones from the rape, and I can never get rid of them.”
“If not exorcism, then what?” Kean asked. “What finally worked?”
“It’s called an Incorporation,” Nicolette said, her throat tight. “The only way to release those memories from the dark power binding them is to…relive them with someone who can release them while removing the corrupted magic from you.”
Kean shook his head. “Who does that? A witch? A healer? A mystic? Does the name Percy Cross sound familiar to you?”
Nicolette looked away, her already-pale face now ashen. “Yes, that’s him.”
“You look terrified,” Dhara whispered. “Because of Percy Cross?”
“No. He did his job,” Nicolette said, looking back at her, but with eyes that spoke of dark secrets and deep shadows. “The people who did this to us,” she said, drawing a deep breath. “They wanted to help. To make sure that we wouldn’t spend countless nights up, reliving painful memories. It was done with good intention. But all that these spells do is invite the possibility—it doesn’t happen every time, you see—that we will actually end up trapped in a nightmare of proportions they cannot even imagine. Before I was cured, if I am in fact cured, I tried to take my own life a total of fourteen times. Nine of those times, I wasn’t aware of what I was doing. It was the Disgorge, controlling me. But six of those times, I just didn’t want to live with it anymore.”
Dhara swallowed hard, the girl’s pain so potent that she could feel it from across the room. It was strong enough even to cut through the inner turmoil that lived within Dhara. “I’m sorry,” she said. “But now…”
“Now it’s better,” Nicolette agreed. “But if you think that you’ll ever be the same…you won’t. It’s not just the night of the rape that I have to live with anymore. It’s all the horror that followed and the reliving of the rape. I’m a changed person. I stay in here, where I know that I won’t have to interact with anyone.” She smiled slightly, shaking her head in bemusement. “This is as much as I’ve talked to anyone in a long time. Strangely, it isn’t as terrifying as it could be.”
“We’re not too scary,” Kean agreed, his light tone helping to put the girl at ease. “Nicolette…I don’t mean to be an alarmist here, but…a close friend of mine told me that many people don’t survive this process. But even as painful as reliving all of that would be, especially with someone burning the corrupted magic out of the memories, is it really so dangerous that it can become fatal?”
Nicolette moved her eyes from Dhara over to Kean, taking a long moment before she spoke. “A lot of people don’t survive because they don’t get help in time. They don’t realize what’s happening to them. They don’t know the difference between a possession and a Disgorge. They don’t know how to be treated. So they put themselves through any number of spells or cleanses or exorcisms that just feed the power of the entity. Or they kill themselves. But there are those, yes, who do go through the proper cleaning process who die.” She looked back at Dhara. “And it’s because they lose the will to live. The pain, the misery, the despair—it’sall so intense that it overtakes your body. Not just your mind but your physical functionality. You start to slip away, and it feels…incredible. Because there’s no pain when you slip away.”
Dhara looked over at Kean, finding his gaze grim and his lips set in a thin line.
“Not going to happen,” he told her, gripping her hand tightly. “I won’t let it.”
“I won’t let it either,” she said.
“How long have you had this?” Nicolette asked, interrupting them as they stared into each other’s eyes. “How long have you been suffering?”
Dhara pulled her eyes from Kean’s and looked back at the girl. “A few months. Three, perhaps.”
“That’s not very long. Some people live with the horrors for years. Their memories are bad but not as potent, and they corrupt less intensely.” Nicolette sighed. “What you have to remember must be terrible.”
“I don’t know,” Dhara murmured. “A mystic told us that someone blocked off my bad memories and replaced them with good ones that I wouldn’t question. Nothing specific. But for many years, I’ve believed that I had this idyllic life growing up. But I didn’t.”
Nicolette looked at her with such deep sympathy that it almost made Dhara afraid. “Adding memories that replace the bad ones…that only feeds the corruption of the magic. Every time your mind has to reference one of those false memories, it twists the spell further.”
“But for so many years, nothing at all happened to her,” Kean said. “She was fine, until her thirtieth birthday.”
Nicolette frowned, tilting her head. “I’ve never heard of age being a factor. Sometimes a significant change can shake loose what’s been lying dormant. But not a birthday.”
“I moved across the country, from California to Boston,” Dhara told her, biting her lip. “That was significant.”
“Yes, that would trigger the Disgorge,” Nicolette agreed. Then she suddenly stood up. “Please go. I’m very tired. I’m not used to so much stimulation, and I cannot think about the past for so long. It will bring on a depression.”
Dhara looked over at Kean, and they both stood up, Kean’s arm immediately encircled her waist as he spoke to Nicolette. “Thank you for talking to us. Your story has helped us a lot. I’m sorry for all you’ve been through.”
“Thank you,” Nicolette said. “I hope that you’re stronger than me, Dhara. Even before all of this, I was never physically strong. Psychics often are not, because so much of their energy is focused in their mind.” She gave a light, humorless laugh. “I’m not even a very good psychic. But if you are stronger than me, perhaps you will not live the rest of your life too afraid to leave your house, exhausted by even the thought of human company.”
Impulsively, Dhara walked over and hugged the girl fiercely. “Don’t give up,” she whispered. “There’s time for you to be strong again.”
Nicolette stiffened in her arms at first, but then patted Dhara’s back lightly. “Maybe. Someday.”
“Start now,” Dhara advised, letting her go and stepping back. “Thank you.”
Nodding, Nicolette motioned toward the door. “Please let yourselves out. I’m going to sit.”
Then, as the small, almost elf-like girl sat back down in her chair, Kean led Dhara to the front door and ushered them both out of the house, the brightness of which was certainly meant to be a contrast to the darkness of Nicolette’s past and the thoughts that still haunted her.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Kean
“Poor girl,” Kean said, walking down the sidewalk with Dhara again, the heat starting to fade as the sun lowered in the desert sky. “What a terrible thing to happen to her.”
“That’ll be me.”
Kean shook his head. “I knew you were going to say that, and I won’t stand for it. It’s not going to be you, Dhara. I won’t let it. You have me, which is an asset she didn’t have.”
“She had her mother,” Dhara pointed out. “Surely her mother loves her and was there with her the whole time.”
He gave her a look as they passed by a house with purple gravel in the yard and an array of small cacti decorating the walkway. “Did you meet Cassandra? She didn’t exactly seem warm and supportive.”
“But she was the one who cared enough about her daughter to get her the spell in the first place.”
“I don’t know,” he said, coming to an intersection and trying to decide where to go next. He wasn’t familiar with the area, and only some light research had allowed him to figur
e out where to find the paranormal hangout. Where to go from here was a bit of a mystery, but he trusted his instincts and went left, heading toward the downtown Santa Fe area.
“What do you mean you don’t know?”
“I mean, it might have been a way to try to put a Band-Aid on the problem without having to really deal with what had happened to her daughter and her own guilt over it,” Kean suggested, looking over a Dhara again. “Just make her daughter forget, rather than talk about it.”
Dhara frowned slightly. “That’s a big assumption. She’s a mother. A mother loves her daughter enough to do anything to help her, even if it does end up backfiring.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Kean watched as realization dawned on Dhara, and it made his heart hurt for her.
“I guess that’s not always true,” Dhara said. “My mother couldn’t have cared less about me, apparently. I don’t even know who she was. She probably wouldn’t care if I was dead.”
Taking advantage of the fact that they had to stop at a crosswalk, he pulled her into his arms and kissed her, nuzzling his beard against her face the way she liked. “I’d care if you’re dead. And so wouldthe people who saved you from whatever terrible life you were living. There have always been people in your corner, Dhara. And there always will be.”
When she looked up at him, her eyes were so soft that he wanted to sink into her and never surface. If they could just disappear somewhere together and never have to answer to another responsibility, fear, or problem, then he would happily fly her away right that moment. He was in love with her, and the more time he spent with her, the more he realized that he couldn’t ever just walk away from her. Though he had ardently defended his Celtic Dragon Clan’s responsibility to breed with a person chosen for him, like his parents had done before him and their parents had done in the generation before, it seemed less and less plausible that he could actually bring himself to do that. Though it was true that dragon matings did not always include romantic love and that was understood in their circles. It just didn’t always work out that way. His parents had certainly developed a love for each other, and they had been together romantically as well as for practical reasons of duty. His fellow clan member Moira, however, had parents who led largely separate lives. They were friends and companions, but beyond mating for the sake of producing Moira, that aspect of their relationship didn’t exist.
He had thought, at first, that he could have an arrangement like that with whomever he was paired with and still build his life with Dhara, but the harder he fell for her, the more that even the thought alone felt like a betrayal.
But none of that would matter if he couldn’t save her from the Disgorge possessing her. Kean kissed her softly and tugged her hand. “Come on. Let’s get a room for the night and figure out where we can find Percy Cross.”
“Or,” Dhara said, looking past him. “There’s a library right there. I bet they have a computer we can use.”
He looked in the direction she was looking and laughed slightly. “A library. I like the quaintness of it. I can’t remember the last time I did research in a library.”
“Spoken like a true non-academic,” she said, rolling her eyes at him and starting to cross the street in the direction of the library, leading him behind her. Even under the circumstances, he could appreciate the opportunity to walk behind Dhara, his eyes fixated on the sway of her ass beneath the thin fabric of her dress. He couldn’t get enough of her, and once they were free of all the problems they were facing, he could envision spending weeks with her, never getting out of bed. There wasn’t a single place on her that he didn’t want to stroke, kiss, and tease, and he’d never properly had the chance to do that, given that their couplings were so frantic that they took place wherever they were at the time—which was rarely a bed.
They walked into the library, aisles of books surrounding them and hardly another human being in sight. He lifted an eyebrow at her as she led him back toward the computers. “I told you nobody uses these anymore,” he whispered, sliding his arm around her waist.
“I use them,” she retorted, bumping her hip against his.
She seemed, as far as Kean could tell, to be her normal self at the moment. Her flare-ups of anger came and went, and he never knew when to expect them. But for the moment, she was the Dhara that he had first met—the one who he had fallen in love with.
As she sat down at the computer and turned it on, he bent over her and kissed her neck. “I love you, you know.”
“I know,” she said, leaning back against him and tilting her head to give him better access. “But we’re not supposed to do this in a library.”
“I don’t care,” he said, sliding his hands down her arms and whispering in her ear. “I’m a dragon shapeshifter. I can do anything I want to you, anywhere I want.”
He could feel the shudder that moved through her, and it inspired a thrill of passion in him. Now wasn’t the time to bend her over the table and take her the way he wanted to, but as soon as the moment was right, he would have to have her again.
“Kean…”
“Mmm?” He was still nuzzling her neck and nibbling at her ear.
“I have an address for Percy Cross.”
That brought him out of his erotic reverie, and he glanced up at the computer screen. “That was fast.”
“I’m a researcher. It’s what I do. At least that part of me is still functional.”
“All of you is functional,” he said, moving to sit in the chair beside her as he drew it closer to hers. “Let me see.”
He looked at the computer screen and saw an entry for a Percy Cross who lived in Santa Fe and who was approximately age fifty-five. Dhara had clicked on the button that showed recent addresses and, assuming that the search engine was correct, they had a whole history of address listings to go off of.
“I’ve done plenty of searches before,” he said, looking at her, impressed. “But none that gave such concrete answers so quickly.”
“Well, it helps that his name is Percy,” she said. “And I did some work narrowing the results down. You just didn’t notice because you were nibbling on me.”
“I’m slightly offended that you could concentrate while I was nibbling on you.”
She rolled her eyes at him, elbowing him lightly. “Come on. Let’s go. I’m getting antsy being here.”
The sudden shift—from playful and open to his attentions to antsy—surprised him, and Kean took a longer look at her. “Are you starting to feel it again?”
Dhara nodded. “Yeah. It just comes out of nowhere. I feel like I could murder you, but don’t be offended. I love you a lot. I just also hate you right now.”
He took a step back from her, holding his hands up. “Understood. I think that’s how most marriages work anyway.”
There was a slight smile on her face, but also a flash of something else in her eyes that he didn’t recognize as his Dhara. It was always sad when she disappeared behind the spirit haunting her, and though he wanted to reach out and touch her to try to draw her back to him, he gave her the space that she undoubtedly needed.
“Okay, let’s go,” he agreed, stepping back and letting her walk out ahead of him. “We’ll go see Percy Cross now.”
“I think we should,” she agreed.
Implied in her tone was the idea that if they didn’t see him fast, they might be in for a serious problem. Just the thought had Kean putting on the speed, hurrying Dhara out of the library and hailing a cab.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Dhara
It was well past dark before they arrived at Percy Cross’s house, and under other circumstances, Dhara might have felt badly about the fact that they were going to knock on a stranger’s door at almost nine o’clock at night and ask for his help, but she could feel the Disgorge growing stronger within her again, feeding on her emotions and corrupting them with its anger and misery. She wanted to lash out every time someone drew a breath, and the mere sound of Kean’s footsteps in
front of her as they got out of the cab and walked up to Percy’s front door was enough to make her almost want to claw her own skin off just to have some sort of distraction from the horrible sound.
Dhara let Kean walk ahead and concentrated on keeping herself steady and trying to separate her own thoughts from the one growing from the pit of seething infestation inside of her mind. She barely noticed as the door opened, and she only briefly glanced at the old man with his hunched back and gray hair. Instead, all she could focus on was the way the air was crackling around her and how the ground seemed to be shifting under her feet. Her vision was narrowing in, blackness on the periphery that she knew would soon swallow her whole.
Instinctively, blindly, she reached out for Kean, grabbing his arm as he stood talking to the man whose life they had just barged into. “It’s happening,” she said, her voice raspy and laced with an anger that was undeserved. “It’s happening now, dammit!”
Kean’s arms were around her in a moment, sweeping her up as though she weighed no more than a feather. His incredible strength would normally be something that shuddered right into her core, setting her on fire for him. Now it wasn’t even a footnote in her mind as pain began to pulse through her extremities and an unseen hand wrapped around her throat, beginning to cut off her airway.
“Dhara,” Kean said, holding her against him as they still stood on the porch of Percy’s house. “Dhara, stay with me, honey. Stay with me. Percy, I have to get her inside. You see what’s happening to her right now.”
Whatever Percy might have said, Dhara didn’t hear him. She was getting swept away, the darkness moving over her as she descended into a land of her own torment. Every instinct in her told her to fight against the forces possessing her, and she pushed her arms out, her hands connecting with nothing other than Kean’s face as he tried to hold her in his arms.
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