Except there was nothing to run from. Nobody to fight. At least, not here. Not in my bedroom in the middle of the night. Here and now, I only had myself to wrestle. I only had my memories to contend with, my guilt and self-loathing to battle. Here and now, I was my greatest enemy.
I blew out a breath and, with a hand, brushed back the long tendrils of hair stuck to my sweaty face. This had been going on for two months—the nightmare. The panic. The guilt. I relived the worst moment of my entire life every time I closed my eyes. I was exhausted all the time, but there didn’t seem to be any way to make it stop.
Resigned to yet another night without sleep, I sat up and reached over to turn on the lamp on the nightstand. I opened the nightstand’s top drawer and pulled out a deck of playing cards and a small spiral notepad. Curling my legs up, I pushed the bedsheet to the side and shuffled the cards.
Solitaire had been my go-to method of passing the time lately. I kept score, Vegas style. According to the notepad, I was $4,133 in the hole.
If I was lucky and maintained my focus, I’d be able to get back into the three thousands tonight. It was barely past midnight. Plenty of time until morning.
I started dealing, laying out seven cards in a row, then six, then five …
It was going to be another long night.
***
Bang. Bang. Bang.
“Kat!” Jenny, Lex’s “real” sister, called through the bathroom door. “Let me in. Please?”
I stared down at the mountain of hair in the sink, then looked at my reflection in the mirror. Better. Much better.
“I’m seriously about to pee my pants!” Bang. Bang. Bang. “Let me in!”
“There are eleven other bathrooms in this house,” I said, raising my voice so her human ears could hear me. “You don’t need to use mine.”
“Fine, but if there’s any leakage while I waddle my way down the hall, you’re doing my laundry.”
I rolled my eyes. She was barely halfway into her pregnancy, just a couple months ahead of Lex—hardly into prime waddling territory. Still, I unlocked the door.
Jenny shoved it open. “Cute hair,” she said, brushing past me. She paused at the sink. “Aaaaand, there’s the rest of it.” She continued on to the partitioned toilet area. “You know that self-administered haircuts, especially drastic ones, are a sign that you’ve lost it, right?”
I glanced at my reflection in the mirror. My curly brown hair was now roughly shoulder-length, where it had been a whimsical waist-length just minutes earlier. I had my mom’s hair—and the rest of her—and I could no longer stand the sight of my own reflection. It was like she was in the mirror, her almond-shaped eyes staring back at me with just as much disgust and accusation as I felt. She’d never worn her hair shorter than her waist. Now, I didn’t look quite so much like her.
“It’s not that drastic.” I glanced down at the hair collected in the sink, feeling a little sick and wishing I could make it disappear.
Jenny flushed the toilet, then stood in the doorway while she adjusted her underwear under her maxi dress. That was all she wore these days; she claimed they had to have been invented by a pregnant girl. “Do you want me to even it up for you?” She held out her hands, wiggling her fingers. “I promise to wash ’em …”
I really tried not to smile, but she was just so ridiculous that a tiny one snuck out. “Sure,” I said, tucking my weirdly short hair behind my ear and averting my gaze. I glanced at my reflection again, then down at the counter. Damn it, I still saw my mom standing on the other side of the glass. “Not like you can make it much worse.”
“Sugar,” Jenny said, putting on a ridiculous Southern drawl. “I’m an artist. Worse is my spec-i-al-it-y.” Her eyes met mine in the mirror. “But seriously, what are we going for here? Like, a long bob? A choppy bob? An inverted bob? Wash and wear?” She glanced down at the hair-filled sink, then back up at me. “And how am I supposed to wash my hands?”
“Oh, right. Sorry.” I retrieved the garbage can and loaded it with the mound of dark curls in a few handfuls. “What style do you think would look best? I just—” I stared hard at the hair I was transferring into the garbage can. “I want to see someone else when I look in the mirror. Not me. And not her.”
It should’ve been me … That bullet had been meant for me. Maybe if I hadn’t ignored my mom’s requests to see me, maybe if I’d gone to talk to her before Apep showed up wearing his Carson suit, things would’ve worked out differently. Maybe if I hadn’t acted like a stubborn, resentful child, she’d still be alive.
“She loved you, Kat.” She was quiet for a moment. “Look, I know you’re mad at her for betraying you and abandoning you and all, but I think she really proved who she was in the end—your mom, who loved you.”
Jenny didn’t get it, and I hated whining to her about my problems. She had her own stuff going on. She just lost her Grandma a few weeks ago. That, on top of her pregnancy and Lex’s glaring absence, well—I wasn’t the only one struggling right now.
“I just—” I shook my head. “It’s like I don’t even know who I am anymore. Everything I thought I wanted—all of my hopes, my plans—somehow, they all involved my mom. I mean, she was my mom. It was just her and me against the world for pretty much ever.” I set the little waste bin down on the floor and looked at Jenny. “And now she’s gone, and it’s my fault.”
“Kat …” Jenny’s eyes shone with empathy and sympathy and pity, all things I’d come to hate over the two months since my mom’s death. “You know that’s not true.”
I scrubbed my hands over my cheeks, erasing any sign of tears, and cleared my throat. “So about my hair …”
Jenny stared at me for long seconds, then sighed and shouldered me out of the way so she could get to the sink. “You need to talk to somebody, Kat. I’m worried about you.”
“Please, J …” I met her eyes in the mirror while she washed her hands. “Not right now.”
“Fine.” She dried her hands, then dropped the hand towel onto the counter.
“But you’ll still help me with my hair?” I asked her, biting my lip.
“Of course I will.” She laughed under her breath and shook her head. “So here’s what I think—you say you don’t know who you are anymore. Well, who says you have to figure out ‘who you are’ from the inside out? Why can’t you do it from the outside in? You know, ‘fake it till you make it’?”
I frowned and shrugged.
“Who do you want to be, Kat?”
“I want to be …” I stared up at the ceiling, thinking. “Tough. No, badass. I want to look like someone who doesn’t care what others think of her. Someone who can hold her own and knows it.” I met my own eyes in the mirror, for the first time in a long time not seeing hatred in the eyes of the person staring back at me. “I don’t want to rely on anybody else.” I didn’t want anybody else I cared about to get hurt because of me. “I want to be able to take care of my own damn self. Period.”
“Okay, sooooo … I’m not sure we can really capture all of that with a cut and style, but I’ll do what I can.”
I looked at Jenny in the mirror, meeting her smirk for smirk. And then I passed her the scissors.
***
I sat on the second-to-last step in the entryway, staring at the spot on the floor where my mom’s body had lain. My head rested against the banister, and I listened to Marcus, Neffe, and Aset talk in the kitchen. I liked listening to them talk, carefree and unaffected by my presence. Lately, voices hushed and conversations died when I entered a room, even if only for a moment. I didn’t want to be the girl everyone felt sorry for. The girl they walked on eggshells around. But I was.
“I’m going to head down to sit with Tarsi,” Marcus said. I could hear felted chair legs sliding on the kitchen’s tile floor. “Any procedures scheduled for this morning?”
“Just dialysis,” Neffe said. “And that’s in about an hour.”
They’d roused Tarset from her induced coma a couple weeks
ago, and she seemed to be doing alright. She mostly just slept. Some of her organs were still having issues functioning on their own—like her kidneys, thus the dialysis—but her recovery, however slow, had brightened Marcus’s mood considerably. Now, instead of brooding through every meal, me-style, he engaged with the others, sharing stories of Lex’s travels through time and conjecturing with Aset and Nik as to what she was doing at this or that exact moment. Right now, she was supposedly in Florence in 1480, frolicking through vineyards and picnicking on hillsides with a fifteenth-century Marcus.
I watched Marcus emerge from the kitchen, his fingers touching the lump under his shirt, just over his heart. It was the little vial of Lex’s bonding pheromones. More than plenty, according to Re, to last until Lex returned with the twins. Marcus opened the door to the basement, glancing my way. He met my eyes for the briefest moment, then passed through the doorway and shut the door.
“I’m glad we woke her,” Aset said, her voice hushed. “It’s been good for him.”
“I still think it may have been too soon,” Neffe said. “But I agree. He’s been much better since she woke. She’s given him purpose … something to focus on while Lex is away.”
“Let’s hope we can keep her recovery moving in the right direction,” Aset said. “If her health makes a wrong turn …”
I waited a minute or two, listening to the sounds of water running and dishes clanking as someone washed up in the sink and the thin pages of a magazine turning every few seconds. These mundane sounds soothed me, especially when I could hear them without feeling the periodic touch of concerned eyes on me.
But even that grew dull in time.
Standing, I strolled into the kitchen, tucked a shorter-than-it’s-ever-been strand of hair behind my ear, and paused at the corner of the island, taking a deep breath. Aset and Neffe sat together at the table in the sun-drenched breakfast nook, soaking up a rare dose of November sunlight while they sipped coffee and skimmed their boring-as-hell scientific journals. Nik stood on the other side of the island at the sink, his back to me while he scrubbed some pans.
I did not notice how visibly defined his shoulders and back muscles were through his stupid black T-shirt. Who voluntarily wears shirts that thin, anyway?
“Oh my goodness, Kat!” Aset exclaimed. “Your hair! What did you—why—”
Neffe glanced up from her article, raised an eyebrow, then resumed her reading. “It’s not awful.”
Aset was practically sputtering. “But—but—all your beautiful hair. It’s gone.”
I didn’t get why she was making such a big deal; it wasn’t like I shaved my head or anything. I had what Jenny called an ‘inverted bob’—something I’d never heard of before an hour ago. Basically, my hair was chin-length, maybe a touch longer than that in the very front and a whole lot shorter in the back. It was layered, choppy, and pretty damn sassy. Good enough for now.
Aset pushed her chair back and stood, heading my way. “Don’t get me wrong, dear, it looks adorable. It’s just a bit of a shock, that’s all. I wasn’t expecting—you never mentioned wanting to change your hair so drastically.”
I stared at the countertop, where I was digging the nail of my index finger into a small crevice in the granite. “It was kind of a spur-of-the-moment thing.”
Nik laughed. “Now you’re speaking my language.”
I raised my eyes to meet his. “What? Lunatic?”
Nik used to scare me, but ever since he witnessed the scene in the entryway during my full-on, shit-lost moment with Carson’s body, well … I felt compelled to pick fights with him. He’d seen me at my worst. He’d witnessed the full extent of my crazy, and he’d held me when I’d wanted to die. He could’ve just left me alone, kicking and screaming and beating on Carson’s body, but he’d chosen to step in. He’d chosen to bear witness to my shame. The bastard.
“Play nice, children,” Aset said, touching my hair as she passed me on her way out of the kitchen. “I’m heading up to shower.” She winked at me over her shoulder. “And I love the new hair. I’ll meet you downstairs for dialysis in an hour, Neffe.”
Nik leaned his backside against the edge of the counter, crossed his arms, and smirked. “Re likes your hair.”
“Re likes your hair,” I parroted in that bratty voice used almost exclusively by kids. And by me.
“Mature, Kitty Kat. Real mature.”
“Your face is mature,” I snapped. Genius comeback, I know, but I couldn’t help it. My tolerance for a lot of things was nonexistent these days—Nik’s stupid perfect face and creepy eyes and endless tattoos included—but nothing bothered me as much as that damn nickname.
Neffe huffed out a breath, stood, and stalked out of the kitchen.
I watched her leave, then turned back to Nik, glaring. I always felt better after our little tiffs, like fighting with him was an outlet. I could only beat up on myself so much, and I never fought back. But Nik always did.
His eyes narrowed. “You’ve got a lot of anger in you, don’t you?”
I lifted one shoulder.
“You should find an outlet.” I didn’t bother telling him this was my outlet. His pale blue eyes bored into me, that mocking smirk absent for once. “Trust me, kid. Anger is always starving, always ready to consume you. And all you have to do is let it.”
I was tempted to roll my eyes and tell him to shove it. But I didn’t. Maybe it was because he was right—I could already feel the anger eating away at me, eroding parts of my soul. I looked at him, maintaining the tense stare connecting us despite the intense desire to look away. “So what do you suggest?”
“Pain helps some people.” It was an effort not to let my eyes stray down to the tattoos covering his neck and arms. “And I’ve always found beating the shit out of someone therapeutic … in a controlled setting, of course.”
I frowned, considering what he was saying. “Would you teach me? To fight, I mean?” The words were out before I could stop them, and I immediately regretted asking.
Nik shrugged and leaned his back against the wall. I didn’t think he could’ve looked any less interested. An unplugged toaster would have looked more interested than him. “Honestly,” he said, “I’m a terrible teacher, and technique’s not really my thing. Not that I need perfect technique …” He flicked his wrist, a vine of At whipping into existence and snapping so close to my ear that a few short strands of hair fluttered down to the counter. “I’ve got a bit of an unfair advantage.”
My heart thudded in my chest—not frightened, but thrilled.
“But …” Nik closed his fist, and the crystalline vine evaporated into wisps of multicolored smoke. “If you really want to learn, I know who to ask.”
“Oh?”
His lips curled into a self-satisfied smile as he nodded to himself. He was still looking at me, but it was clear that he no longer saw me. “Meet me in the training room in an hour.” His pale eyes scanned me from the shoulders down. “And wear something else.”
“What?” I glanced down at my tight jeans and faded T-shirt. It had been black at some point in its life but was now the dull gray color that black dye fades to after too many trips through the washer, but it was also insanely soft. “What’s wrong with what I’ve got on?”
“You need to be able to bend your legs.” He turned and headed up the hallway toward the front of the house, stride carefree and hands in the pockets of his black jeans.
“I can bend my legs in these,” I called after him.
He let out a derisive snort. “Whatever you say, Kitty Kat.”
I huffed out a breath. “Well what am I supposed to wear, then? Spandex?”
“Don’t know. Don’t care.” He reached for the doorknob to the front door and twisted, pulling the door open. “Just don’t wear that.”
I pressed my lips together and let out a long, frustrated growl. “Dickwad,” I grumbled, following his path toward the front of the house and heading up the stairs. To change.
***
> “Katarina.”
“Dominic,” I said, enunciating each syllable of my half-brother’s name clearly.
I was sitting against the wall on the side of the training room opposite the one and only door to the outside world. The “training room” was actually its own detached building tucked away in the woods behind the main house. I’d never been inside before, and it was pretty damn opposite what I’d been expecting. I’d thought I would be walking into a glorified school gym—the tiny version—with those nasty padded mats that smell like an insipid combination of plastic and other people’s sweat. But the training room was nothing like that.
The walls were covered in horizontal strips of wood, some pale, aromatic variety that gave the room a pleasant, earthy smell. It kind of reminded me of a sauna. But the walls weren’t empty, like in a sauna—plus it wasn’t super hot. Weapons hung on the walls—knives and swords of every conceivable size and shape, staffs and sticks, some as short as my arm and some way longer than I was tall, and other weapons I wouldn’t even begin to know how to identify. There was even a column of whips hanging, neatly coiled, on the wall behind me, just a few feet to my right.
The floor was padded, but it didn’t emanate that oh-so-lovely gym mat odor, and it was patterned with a series of concentric circles, light gray on dark, the outermost of which was a snake eating its own tale. An ouroboros, I knew from my rudimentary study of ancient Egypt—the snake eating its own tail was a symbol of the cyclical nature of time.
Dom toed off his shoes, bent over to remove his socks, laid them neatly over his shoes, and strode into the center of the room, planting his feet in the heart of the innermost circle and placing his hands on his hips. He was wearing lightweight, loose-fitting black pants and a white V-neck T-shirt. “Nik tells me you wish to train.”
I fingered the hem of my capri yoga pants. “Sure.” I shrugged. “Whatever.”
“If you wish me to train you, little sister, I will do so gladly. But I would have your full commitment. Your implicit obedience.”
Ricochet Through Time (Echo Trilogy Book 3) Page 17
