Kindred

  “When I woke up in the room with Viktor, I noticed…,” I say in pause, looking out ahead, “I told you something had happened to me. I know I must’ve been injured in the wreck, but someone bandaged me up pretty good.”

  Harry just listens. I feel his eyes on me the whole time.

  “In just a few days,” I go on, “the wound healed up and even now there’s only a faint scar left to prove it was there. It’s not natural. I sliced my knee open on the lid of a green bean can when I was twelve. Five stitches, a tetanus shot and a lot of discomfort and that took weeks to heal.” I pull my pant leg up to show him. “The scar’s worse than the one on my stomach and that one had twelve stitches.”

  Harry looks at the scar on my knee, but I doubt he really sees it much. Aside from it being dark, he’s too engrossed in the story and anticipating what all of this will mean.

  “I can’t believe Viktor is alive….” Harry’s voice is distant. It’s like he’s not even talking to me when he says this; his mind is somewhere else, in that dark, abysmal place where all shocking realizations go when first discovered.

  I pull my pant leg back down and bring my knee back up to sit the way I was before.

  “I think Viktor fed me his blood the first night I was there,” I say and it stings as badly as I thought it would. “I think I’ve been bonded to him and I hate myself for it.”

  I hear Harry’s breath release as if he had been holding it in for a long time. The air is stiff with silence and regret.

  “And I can’t let Isaac know,” I add, my voice softer and more deeply affected by my own words. It feels like tears are burning in my chest.

  “But that doesn’t necessarily mean that’s what happened,” Harry says, looking over at me. “Really I think it depends on where the wound is and other stuff. Maybe the cut from the can caused an infection and it took longer to heal. You can’t really base your theory on that.” I can tell how unsure of his own explanation he is, but he’s doing his best to seek logic first rather than jump right into the worst case scenario.

  “I’m not basing it only on that,” I say and his expression falls. “You know I’ve not been myself lately. Fainting spells. Weird suicidal mood swings like what I pulled with Nataša—that was insane, Harry!” I look at him fiercely for a moment. “And then the talking to myself—I think I’m going crazy. Just like Aramei, I think I’m starting to lose my mind and it scares me to death.”

  Harry shakes his head harshly side to side and turns carefully around enough to face me so he can get his point across. “But you said that it was like fifty years or something before Aramei started losing her mind. For you it’s only been, what, like eight months since that happened?”

  “Seven.”

  He opens his hands, palms up. “Well then see?” he says. “I doubt he did that to you—and when was the last time you drank from any werewolf veins, huh?”

  “I haven’t,” I admit.

  “There’s something wrong with you, yes,” Harry says, putting his hands back on his knees, “but it’s likely more medical than anything else. You probably just need some iron pills and Thorazine.”

  “Harry, that’s not funny.”

  He forces the little grin away that tried to creep up at one corner of his mouth.

  “I know,” he says, “but you can’t do this to yourself—Watch, you’ll go to the doctor tomorrow and they’ll have a perfectly logical diagnosis and then you’ll feel stupid that you ever let something like this get to you.”

  I laugh under my breath, but find nothing about this actually amusing. “Well, I doubt they’ll diagnose me with anything illogical. Bloodbondicitis?” I roll my eyes.

  “Okay,” Harry says, giving in to me a little, “maybe they can’t rule something like that out, but if they do diagnose you with something that makes perfect sense, then I think it’ll be safe to assume you don’t have anything worse to worry about.”

  “Maybe so,” I say, still not convinced that any ‘logical diagnosis’ is possible anymore. “But what if, Harry?” I turn my gaze on him again, catching the glint of his eyes in the moonlight, the soft set of his jaw, the thickness of his eyebrows. “Let’s just pretend for a moment that Viktor did perform the Blood Bond with me, just like he did with Aramei—he wanted me as his mate bad enough to kidnap me—if he did it, I’d slowly lose my mind and know nothing of who I am, or who I wanted to be. I would become a mindless, unpredictable…thing…and—.” I stop abruptly, wishing that I could just choke back the words and the image of myself that they shaped in my mind.

  Harry cups his hand atop my bended knee and pats it once. “Then Isaac would take care of you the way that Trajan takes care of Aramei,” he says with such finality and candor that for just a moment I’m able to see a brighter side to the whole thing. But the moment lasts only as long as it takes for the harsh reality of it all to flood my thoughts once more. The reality of being trapped in a body that can’t even bathe herself or understand simple, yet important things in life like shame and humility and inspiration.

  “And maybe Isaac won’t be like his father,” I argue. “Already he’s nothing like his father, Harry. Trajan is cruel and only has a heart big enough for Aramei. He only loves Aramei. The world could burn down around him and as long as it was just him and Aramei left in it, he would be content.” Tears surface in the corners of my eyes, but still I manage to hold them back; the back of my throat and the spot between my eyes stings and itches and burns. “Maybe Isaac will love me less. Maybe he won’t love me at all. Maybe he’ll think of me as used, or tainted. He can never know about this, Harry.” My stare pierces through him at my side. “Do you understand? Isaac can never know.”

  The tears break away and roll down my face, one trailing down the bridge of my nose. I reach up and wipe it away to relieve the itchiness it caused.

  Harry scoots closer and wraps his arm around my back, grabbing my arm and pushing me to lay my head against his shoulder. “I don’t think you’re giving Isaac enough credit,” he says, rubbing his hand in a circular motion against the side of my upper arm. There is a long pause and then he says, “Adria, what scares you more? Losing your mind, or losing Isaac?”

  I sniffle and raise my head. I had never thought of this before and for what feels like forever, I sit on the roof, finally staring up at the stars and I think about it. I think about how while growing up I’ve lost everyone I’ve ever loved at such a young age. My dad. My grandma. My mother. My sister. I think about what it really means to be loved, what it means to be able to love someone. I think about how often love has been taken away from me and how angry I am because of it.

  “My mind,” I answer softly, gazing out in front of me at something that I don’t actually see. “I fear losing my mind more because the way I feel about someone else is the only thing in this world that I know I can control. I’ve accepted that I can’t make anyone love me. I couldn’t force my dad to stay. I could never make my mother understand that I loved her more than Jeff ever would and I couldn’t force my sister to love me more than Ashe.” I wipe all of my tears away stubbornly and I never look at Harry. “Even if Isaac ever stops loving me, I want to hold on to my right to love him for as long as I can.”

  I’ve never opened up to anyone like this before. Not even Alex. Not even Isaac. I’ve never explored this part of my mind, until right now, in this moment with my best friend who seems to never let me down and always knows the right things to say.

  I look up as headlights blur through the darkness at the end of my driveway and my demeanor changes quickly. I sniffle away the last of my tears and rub the tip of my finger underneath my eyes to wipe away any smeared mascara that might be there and I crawl out of this ridiculous, miserable moment that makes me feel exposed. And Harry understands that I don’t want to talk about love and control anymore, so he says nothing in response.

  “You’re probably right, about the diagnosis,” I say, watching as Isaac’s Jeep—with a brand new windshield—drives past the m
ailbox.

  “But none of it explains Genna,” I remind him.

  “Yeah,” he says, “I admit that if anything really is ‘unexplained’, it’s that whole Genna Bishop thing—that freaked me out.”

  Isaac’s headlights blink out after he kills the engine, leaving the front yard dark again and he gets out of the Jeep already knowing where I am. I hear his keys jangling just before he pushes them down in the front right pocket of his jeans. The motion light on the front porch flashes on as Isaac moves closer and he stands near the pool of silver light illuminating one half of Beverlee’s car parked out front. I wipe my face one more time, just in case.

  He raises a hand and waves up at us casually. “Take your time, love,” he says from below. “I’ll wait for you downstairs.”

  Isaac has never even slightly showed jealousy towards Harry and that’s just something else that I love about him. It’s not that Isaac doesn’t have that typical ‘human’ territorial instinct—he proved that two weeks ago when a senior, Mason Bragg, was hitting on me at school right in front of Isaac and Isaac stepped between us, staring Mason down with a look that needed no words. But Harry can do anything he wants. He can hang all over me, hug me, lay his head in my lap—it doesn’t matter because Isaac knows Harry’s heart. He knows my heart.

  “I’ll be down in a second,” I say, waving back at him.

  Isaac starts to head up the porch steps, but he stops and looks back up at us. “Oh and Harry,” he says, “Daisy wanted me to remind you to…bring your thoughts with you—whatever that means.”

  Harry laughs quietly.

  “Thanks, man,” he says.

  “No problem.” Isaac leaves it at that and disappears underneath the roof overhang.

  Harry looks over at me and clarifies, rolling his eyes around a bit, “My lyric tablet—I’ve been accidently on purpose forgetting it for a week.”

  He shrugs it off and comes back to the matter at hand. “Anyway, I want you to know that—and I can’t believe I’m saying this—I don’t think you’re completely crazy. Maybe there really was someone there named Genna.”

  I snap around, surprised at Harry’s change of thought and letting his little joke about my mental stability slide altogether. “Why do you say that now?”

  Harry reaches up and absently scratches the side of his nose, contemplating. “Just that you really do seem perfectly fine, except for the fainting stuff,” he says, “and it just seems weird, y’know?” He thinks about it a moment longer, his eyes knotted pensively. “Is that the first time you saw her,” he says, looking right at me, “in the library today?”

  “No,” I answer softly, more to myself than to Harry because suddenly this puzzle just broke into several more pieces. “No, I’ve seen her since the day I started school.” All of the times I remember seeing her rushes through my head now like a slow-moving series of old photos on a projector screen. “Just about every day in Geometry class, like I told you,” I go on, “I’ve seen her on the bleachers in the gym. In the bathrooms. Harry, she was even at The Cove that night when Viktor came with Julia and my sister.”

  Harry looks all the more investigative now. He rubs the side of his face before letting his hands dangle over the tops of his knees at the wrists.

  Finally, he says, “Then if you’ve been seeing her since before this whole thing with Viktor, that’s proof right there that if she is just a figment of your imagination that your Blood Bond theory has nothing to do with it.”

  It feels like I’ve been yanked from underwater and the things around me I start to hear and see more clearly all of a sudden.

  I realize too, that I shouldn’t even know her name. I don’t recall her ever telling me and the first time I actually spoke to her was yesterday at Isaac’s house. But I’ve known her name since I started school as if I had heard Mrs. Schvolsky call it out at some point, or someone else mentioned it. But if no one else knows her and has never even heard of her, then how could that be how I know?

  “Maybe you should ask Isaac,” Harry says. “Whatever’s going on, maybe he would have a clue.”

  “No,” I say right away. “No way. I’m not giving Isaac any reason to start questioning my mental health. If anything, telling him I’ve been seeing and speaking to someone that apparently doesn’t exist, that’ll do it. He’ll start to wonder all on his own if something more happened to me that night with Viktor, than I’m telling.”

  “Well, if it is true,” he says, pulling himself into a careful stand, “if you think about it, that’s not something you can hide from him forever.”

  My heart sinks into the pit of my stomach. It’s not like I didn’t really think about this before, but someone else saying it, forcing me to face the truth of it, feels so much more real than my time trying to forget it.

  “But like I said,” Harry adds, just before climbing back inside the attic, “Iron and Thorazine pills—it’ll fix you right up.”

  I try to catch him to give him the smack he deserves before he makes it through the window, but I can’t be fast enough while trying to keep from falling off the roof.

  I hear a thud-clunk inside and see Harry’s dark hair rising up from the floor.

  I laugh because he had it coming.

  13

  WHITE STERILIZED WALLS. White elongated cabinets with little silver keyholes. The clean, yet uncomfortable smell of antibacterial soap that you only ever smell while inside a hospital or clinic. I hate that soap. There’s something so oddly cruel about it. My legs dangle off the side of a brown vinyl examination table where just below I can see my reflection in the shiny white tiles that make up the floor. I don’t look at all happy. I look sort of constipated the way my hands are pushed firmly against my cheeks to hold up my weight, how my eyes and forehead are pulled into a hardened, unmoving mass of displeasure. I feel the paper that had been rolled over the bed for me to sit on sticking to the back of my thighs and cool air keeps sneaking in through the loose ties of the ugly gown that covers me.

  I wanted to leave my jeans on and just wear the gown to cover my upper body because there’s nothing they need to do downstairs, but the nurse trained to be sweet and pleasant insisted.

  She’s not fooling me.

  I know the next time I see her come into my room she’ll be carrying the Tray of Doom, lined neatly with little plastic and silver instruments that prove there’s nothing sweet and pleasant about her.

  I should’ve told Aunt Bev to go ahead and come back here with me. No, maybe not. It’s probably better that she doesn’t see this defiant side of her so-called charming Adria.

  There’s a customary knock on the tall wooden door and it clicks open a second afterwards. I wonder if doctors and nurses just do that because they have to, or if they actually think that in that one-point-three-second timeframe if patients are naked, they’ll have enough time to cover up.

  A tall, middle-aged woman walks in; stereotypical, wearing a long white thigh-length coat over her pretty silk top and black slacks. Medical I.D. badge clamped to the coat collar, hanging just over her breast. Silky blond hair with highlights pulled into a ponytail that lies neatly between her shoulder blades. She’s holding my freshly printed medical chart attached to a clipboard.

  “So,” I say with a faint snip of sarcasm in my voice, “why do you people knock before coming in anyway? Not like you wait until the patients say to come on in.” I can’t help it. I’m incredibly nervous and when it comes to needles my civility sometimes detaches itself from my conscience entirely.

  The smile in her eyes is about as faint as my sarcasm: noticeable, but not meant to be blatant. I’m sure she’s heard and experienced worse. And I’m pretty sure she knows I have a fear of hospitals not unlike a large percentage of the population.

  I can go in one just fine, but not when I’m the patient.

  The doctor places the clipboard on the examination table beside me. She smells nice, but I still smell the soap that she washed with from whatever room she left recently.


  Her smile opens up more. “It’s just to let you know I’m on my way in,” she says. “You had plenty of time to undress and put on the gown, I see.” She’s making her point cleverly, not an ounce of offense in her voice. She’s very professional, I’ll give her that much.

  Nervously, I fold my hands together between my thighs and look toward the latex glove dispenser hanging on the wall.

  “So, what’s been going on with you, Miss Dawson?” she says while rolling the stool over next to me and taking a seat on it.

  I let my breath out slowly and look at her. She sits there now with the clipboard in her lap, but no pen to jot down the things I’m going to tell her because Ms. Sweet n’ Pleasant took all of those notes down already for her. I don’t say, ‘But I already told the nurse all this stuff,’ because it’s pointless, like knocking on the door before coming in.

  “I’ve been having dizzy spells,” I begin, “and I’ve fainted twice in two days. A little nausea, but I haven’t actually thrown up. Shortness of breath. Spots in front of my eyes.” I’m not about to tell her that I’ve been seeing ghosts and having conversations with them, or that I think I might’ve been bonded for life to an ancient werewolf after drinking his blood. Not unless I want my very own private room somewhat like this one, minus everything but the white walls and floor and easy access out the door.

  Logical diagnosis. That’s what I’m here for.

  The doctor peers down into the paper, scans it and looks back up at me.

  “Have you been under any stress?”

  I nod, but don’t elaborate.

  “And how often do you eat?”

  I think about it. “Normal, I guess. Just not when I’m feeling dizzy.”

  “On any special diets? Vegetarian? Vegan? Anything like that?”

  “No.”

  She pulls out a pen that had been hidden behind the clip on the clipboard and writes something down in a short, fluid motion.