She reached up to pull her hands through her hair and found practically nothing when she went to touch. If laughing aloud wouldn't have made Marina suspicious of her mental state, she might have done it. She'd cut her long blonde hair the day before. Now it was short, like a pixie, on top of her head. Truth was she hated it. It had been a huge mistake and she was going to have to wait now until it grew back. However long that took.
What should she do now as a nervous habit? Bite her nails? Smoke?
"Are you even listening to me? I said we need you to go and get him."
Oh hell. "Me?"
"You're perfect for the job."
No she wasn't. "Why me?"
"Because he's locked away in an insane asylum and quasi-catatonic."
Charma suddenly needed to move. She strode to the other side of the room, and tensed on the balls of her feet. "Come on now. Really insane people give me a headache." She'd been in their heads too many times. She might as well wear a sign that said 'Got a troubling issue? Don't worry. I'll find you, and I'll bear the burden of your problems. After, you'll feel great'. The truly mentally ill were dangerous to her. She couldn't take on their issues and still function in her own skin.
Marina nodded and crossed the room pulling her into another hug. Charma stopped breathing for a second. Dear Gods, would she never stop touching her? She dug deep, looking for her calm interior. It was wrong to get angry with someone who was trying to be helpful, she knew that.
"I know it's hard." Pity flooded Marina's voice, which made Charma want to gag. "You'll take some ibuprofen before we go in and you'll be fine."
"It's not that simple and besides maybe it's Drew in there."
Charma hoped the mention of Drew, who was Marina's soul mate although he refused to acknowledge it, would distract Marina sufficiently to get her off her back. Marina could easily become obsessed when thinking or talking about him.
"I somehow doubt Drew, having hidden himself so perfectly all of these years, has gotten dragged into a mental institution in New Jersey." Marina paused. "Maybe it's your soul mate."
Suddenly Charma felt like a teenager discussing the cute boys on the football team. She rolled her eyes. This was getting out of hand. "It would be fitting somehow wouldn't it? Charma, how did you guys find each other? Well, I busted him out of a loony bin.'"
"You're so funny." Marina bit her lower lip. "Sometimes I don't get you at all."
Charma knew that too well, and she knew something else too. It wasn't her soul mate in that place. Her other half had died years ago. She'd felt him pass.
The truth that she didn't have a half who would complete the whole pair they needed to be, created two major implications. The first one was she would never find true love, never know her other half, and never feel the kind of connection she watched Kal and Isabelle share. However, it did make her happy to help someone else find his or her soul mate. It would be nice to have another Outsider around. Someone else they always should have known, but didn't.
The second implication was a doozy. The prophecy, the one the Great One had written, the one they were all way too familiar with, said that the eighteen Chosen Ones had to be all together to defeat the Great Evil. Hers was gone. So even if they somehow found the other twelve Outsiders, they could never win. That was—if the prophecy was to be believed.
They were destined to lose no matter their efforts.
So why couldn't she bring herself to tell the others? Because she was a healer and she was unable to cause harm. Telling them would bring such distress—they would never again be whole, and besides, maybe there was another way to win. Probably not, but she tried not to give up hope.
Until she could find a good way to tell the others that didn't cause them pain, she'd just keep it to herself.
She shook her head. First, she needed to deal with the problem of Marina. "Tell you what, I will go to New Jersey, and get our compatriot out of his cell." She really hoped he wasn't in a cell. "I will, of course, require your assistance with that." Truthfully, she had no idea how to go about doing such a thing, even if Marina thought she did. "But you have to leave me alone for a few minutes so I can quiet the darkness."
There, she'd said it. She'd made her deal. Marina could take it or leave it.
Her sister of the universe's eyes filled with tears. "But Charma, that could hurt you. You shouldn't be doing stuff like this. It's not in your nature."
Biting the inside of her cheek, Charma continued, "It is. It is precisely in my nature and within my power. I have to be left alone to do it. Are we clear?"
Marina looked at the floor before raising her head to nod. She lifted one finger and pointed it at Charma who couldn't help grinning in surprise. "But if you die, or fry yourself, Leonardo will have my head. So don't get hurt."
Laughter was not something Charma had anticipated could happen on a night like the one they shared except she found herself giggling. She really didn't want another hug but she could feel that Marina needed one so she crossed the room to draw her close. "You're my family too, Marina."
Marina nodded and pulled out of Charma's embrace before turning to leave. She paused at the door and Charma thought she might say something. After a moment, the other woman continued on her path and closed the door behind her.
Maybe she should have invited the other Outsider to stay and help, but Charma was more than used to doing these things alone. Marina would just be a distraction.
Moving back over to her table and closing her eyes for a moment to silence the night again in her own mind, Charma tried to breathe deeply. It was harder now. She'd been so worked up over Marina's idea to go to the mental institution she'd lost her calm and let more of the darkness inside of her.
She needed it out.
Quickly, she relit the candles and stared at the small flames as they flickered brightly. The orange and red burn comforted her. She could get through this. She could control the response.
She closed her eyes and called the night into her. If she'd been using her powers on a human or another Outsider it would be a fast procedure. As it was, she wasn't sure how long it was going to take. A minute? An hour? A year?
The darkness had a mind, like any other person. And what a mind it was. She could navigate a human psyche; find the darkness or the pain. Still she wasn't sure how to comfort a darkness that was happy being the way it was.
Could she give it some light?
She checked her mental shields and strengthened them by picturing the cliffs off their island. Daunting, secure—no one could breach them if they weren't meant to be there.
Come to me. She silently beckoned the darkness to her.
She would invite it in but only partway. She could control how far it went.
Hello, Charma.
And there it was.
In her brain and embedded in her soul.
She let herself travel into the depths of its mind. Generations, millenniums really, of sorrow lay dormant there. It wasn't the being that was sorrowful—oh no—it had caused the distress and it was happy about it. So what portion of what was out there called for the soothing if not the being itself?
Charma gulped. She needed to get this done and get it out of her, and away from her family.
Do you think I will be so easy to control?
She wouldn't answer it. Conversation was not on the menu for this experience. Silently, she willed it to pacify. Healing was what she did; she could make it leave the universe alone, if only for tonight.
She imagined pure white light moving from her fingertips, meeting the darkness, surrounding it. The black entity pushed against her own, testing her limits, challenging her. Grinding her teeth, she didn't give in.
She wasn't there to play.
The hard part was next. Charma needed to infuse the darkness with her light. Send part of herself out there into the abyss so that she could soothe their surroundings. But the Evil One did not want to be soothed.
Her muscles clenched as if she carri
ed a heavy object, which she did, if only in her mind. She imagined she pulled behind her a large tree trunk. Using nothing but will, she flung the trunk over her right shoulder into the darkness that only she could see. As the tree hit the blackness, it exploded sending with it a surge of white light.
In her head, she heard the blackness scream as it wrenched part of itself from her body. Drained, she collapsed to the floor of her bedroom and one last time let her senses reach outwards. The night was calm. She'd soothed the unsoothable. Done the impossible.
But at what price?
She closed her eyes and was not surprised by what she found there. She'd given the Darkness part of herself, and in return she'd kept part of it deep in her soul. What that meant, she didn't know but she was certain she would find out.
Chapter Two
It had been livelier here when he was a child.
This place his mind invented, his first steps into dementia, was more fun when he hadn't comprehended the significance. Irony was a funny creature. Jason Randall had been bored out of his mind during his Psych rotation in Medical School. Now, he was stuck inside a delusional fantasy of his own invention when five years ago he had rolled his eyes at any mention of becoming a psychiatrist during his studies. Jason was capable of understanding nearly everything. A fact he accepted as pride not ego. However, he knew nothing about this particular subject and couldn't think his way out of his problem.
Was this his mind punishing him for his boredom?
The likelihood was that his preferences in study had nothing to do with it, which seemed fine to Jason. If there was one thing he knew for certain, it didn't matter what the reasoning of his psyche happened to be. He was alone with his own thoughts in this strange place that only existed for him. And he might never leave.
He closed his eyes and tried to bring the Periodic Table of Elements to his mind's eye. Science had always been his strongest suit, he found comfort in its books, loved everything to do with it, adored how everything just made sense.
Hydrogen—1, Helium—2, Lithium—3
Medical school had been an easy decision to make and at thirty, he'd been on top of his game, rising in the field of cardiology.
But now he was trapped in a garden. Not a real garden, but a pretend garden. It was more like a prison that his subconscious invented. The fantasy no longer resembled his childhood daydreams of Eden. And, he was clearly getting worse every day. If he was Adam in this scenario then Eve had gone missing. In her place was a being out of his worst nightmares. Satan or a more vile entity came every night to torment him.
Jason hadn't been raised religious. The only son of a wealthy industry giant and his third wife, his parents had worshiped the gods of money and privilege. So he couldn't even blame the whole experience on a bad religious education. He'd never spent any time in a house of God and so there was no way to pin this on that.
His mother had once told him that she knew heaven answered prayers because she had wished and longed for a baby, and then just when she thought it was impossible, out of nowhere Jason had popped into her life like a stork had dropped him. Whatever plans they'd had to adopt children from orphanages in foreign countries disappeared with his arrival. Jason never knew if he should feel responsible for that. All of those children who'd never gotten to live his quality of life left behind because they'd had him. Sometimes the thought bothered him and he was never quite sure as to why.
As a child, he tried very hard to fit in and to do the things that were expected of him. It was why he had pushed himself to forget about this place and not visit it in his dreams once he'd understood that most people didn't have a place they visited night after night. He'd managed to kill off the part of himself that needed this sort of fulfillment. His parents would have thought it was strange if they'd known and the last thing Jason ever wanted to be was different.
* * * *
He stood, regarding the blonde haired girl that haunted his dreams. Night after night, they met here, in their shared garden, and talked about life. She claimed she was an Outsider and she was so beautiful he almost let himself believe that she wasn't made up or a figment of his overactive imagination.
He'd either never learned or couldn't remember what her name was. She always asked him to come to her, to join in her quest as this so-called Outsider. Finally, when he was twelve, he'd forced his delusions from his mind. You couldn't function in society if you clung to the unreal, that much he knew.
Kind of funny, then, that his mind had reinvented this place to have his way-before-mid-life crisis. Maybe crisis wasn't the right word for what had happened to him. Jason couldn't seem to wake up at all anymore, and when he had managed it weeks before, he couldn't seem to speak. The right word for his condition had to be comatose.
He was bound within the confines of his own mind, fully capable of cognizant thought, but unable to tell anyone what was happening to him.
His parents had finally given up a month ago on homecare and had placed him in a very expensive, albeit bland, mental institution, where the best and the brightest psychiatric doctors poked and prodded him all day long. The few times he'd opened his eyes before he stopped being able to do that, he'd known where he was. After all, he'd sat on the board of the foundation that had created the institution in the first place. There was a wing named after his maternal grandmother.
Not too long ago, he'd had the pleasure of electric shock therapy. He had been conscious through the whole thing, not that he'd been able to communicate that to anybody.
He'd make it clear, if only he could, he hadn't meant to kill the man that came after him in that parking lot—he certainly hadn't meant to kill him like that. Or at least as much as he could remember what happened in the parking lot. Things were kind of hazy as to exactly what happened but in any case he was sure he wasn't supposed to be trapped in his own mind, doomed to live out eternity in this place without her for company.
The blonde goddess who had been a constant companion in his dream life was disturbingly absent from his current delusions. He would give anything to see her face appear in the garden with him. As a child, he always thought of her as his soft, gentle princess. She had certainly looked at him as if he were her knight in shining armor. Her savior from the things that haunted her, she had told him.
But thinking about her now was doing him no more good than it had done him when he was a child and had daydreamed about her during gym class. He needed to live in reality, even if reality really sucked.
Running a hand through his blond locks, he tried to get out some of the knots but it was a mostly fruitless endeavor. His hair had gotten longer in the real world and it was growing accordingly here. Evidently, donating a wing didn't earn him a trim from the nursing staff. His hair fell down past his ears towards his shoulders as if he was a rock star or some kind of artist instead of a world-class heart surgeon. He usually had about a days' worth of blond stubble on his chin before someone cleaned him up and took a razor to his face. As for the rest of him, as far as he could tell, he was still thin and lean, as he had always been, and he didn't seem to be shrinking which meant that he still stood at just less than six feet one inches tall.
Deceptively strong for his frame, he had once shocked his entire family when he had lifted a box containing a newly delivered fireproof safe off the stairs without even blinking an eye. After that, he had been more careful to not lift things he shouldn't have been able to handle.
Fitting in was the name of the game.
The wind around him picked up and blew the trees back and forth. Leaves fell to his left and right. Even the green grass seemed to move with the wind. A pain started in the back of his head and he rubbed his neck to try to relieve the ache even though he knew it wouldn't do any good. The wind was always the first sign of the nightmare beginning. As per usual, the woman who he thought of as Satan appeared out of thin air.
Brown hair and grey soulless eyes, she looked the same every time she appeared. Her figure, like the near-a
norexic women in magazines, was flawless but not to his taste. He raised an eyebrow, checking her out. Her breasts were too small; she might as well be a little boy.
"Hello, Jason, gorgeous." She smiled showing her perfect array of white, porcelain colored teeth. "How are you today?"
"The same as ever." Jason braced himself. It was only a matter of time before the hurting would start.
"I'm having a rough day." He never asked but she always volunteered. Evidently, he was supposed to be concerned with her comfort.
She sauntered towards him. "My brother is making me crazy. He had one simple job when he came to this plane of existence. He was supposed to eliminate the Outsider's special children and enslave humanity. My family has done this millions of times in millions of places. But he's been screwing it up, and so once again, here I am cleaning up his messes. He won't even be appreciative when he finds out."
"Sounds rough." Jason had been listening to her talk about these so-called Outsiders for weeks now. His left-brain must have been working double time. Here he was inventing his own mythology. "Tell me what portion of my mind you represent?"
The woman sighed. "Not this again." She shook her head. "Every time you doubt me J, I have to hurt you more. It's time for you to accept who and what you are. Think about my feelings. I come to this place, I find myself an Outsider, rather easily I might add, and my Outsider doesn't even have the decency to know what he is."
An Outsider. Well, he had always felt like something of an outcast among society. It was funny that he kept coming up with this word in all of his delusions. What a strange name for him to have invented. He wished he had a notebook to write this stuff down.
Jason stood up. He felt better being taller than her. Not that it would stop her from causing him massive amounts of pain if she so chose. At least it gave him the appearance of not submitting blindly to her abuse. She needed a name and she wouldn't give him one so he'd started to think of her as Self-loathing. It seemed as good a name as any and it was the reason his mind had invented this whole dramatic play for him to endure every day.