World After

ALL KINDS of worries swirl around in my head.

I take a deep breath. I try to shove all the worries aside and focus on being centered.

“Mom?” I keep my voice quiet and calm. What I really want to do is crawl under the seat to get out of her way when she goes nuclear. But that’s not an option.

I hold out a bottle of water. “Do you want some water?”

She looks at me like I’m mad. “Stop drinking that!” She snatches it from my hand and stashes it away below the rear window. “We need to conserve it.”

Her eyes dart around every corner of our jail. Her desperate worry shows in every line of her face, and she is the picture of anxiety. It seems there are more of those lines showing up every day between her eyebrows and around her mouth. The stress is killing her.

She rummages through her pockets. With every smashed egg she finds in her pockets, she gets more frantic. To my relief, someone has taken her cattle prod. I hate to think how much force that took.

“Mom?”

“Shut-up-shut-up-shut-up! You let those men take her!” She grips the metal mesh with one hand and the seatback with the other. She squeezes until all the blood runs out of her hands, turning them into white claws.

“You let those monsters do all those horrible things to her! You sold yourself to that devil and couldn’t even save your sister?” The ridges between her eyebrows mash together so hard they look nightmarish. “You couldn’t even look her in the eye when she needed you most. You were out there hunting her, weren’t you? So you could kill her yourself! Weren’t you?” Tears stream down her tortured mask of a face.

“What good are you?” She screams in my face with such intensity that her face turns crimson like it’s ready to explode. “You’re heartless! How many times have I told you to keep Paige safe? You’re worse than useless!”

She slams her hand against the mesh repeatedly until I think it might bleed.

I try to block it out.

But no matter how many times I hear her raging at me, her words still pierce through.

I curl into my corner, trying to get as far from her as I can. She’ll twist anything I say to fit her crazy logic and then throw it back at me.

I brace myself for one of her fury storms. Not something I want to experience in a jail so small that we can’t lie down. Not something I want to experience any time, any place.

If it comes down to it, I’m big enough now to beat her in a fight, but she wouldn’t stop until I had to hurt her. Best if I can just soothe her.

But I can’t think of anything to say to calm her. Paige was always the one who did that. So I do the only thing that comes to mind.

I hum.

It’s the song that she hums to us when she’s coming out of a particularly bad spell. It’s what I think of as her apology song. Sunsets, castles, surf, bruises.

She might ignore me or she might go berserk. It could soothe her or make her angrier than ever to hear me humming her song. If there’s one thing you can count on with my mother, it’s that she’s unpredictable.

Her hand whips up and slaps my face.

She hits so hard I think I’ll always carry a palm print on my cheek.

She slaps me again.

The third time, I grab her wrist before she makes contact.

In my training, I’ve been hit, punched, kicked, shoved, slammed, and choked by all kinds of opponents. But nothing hurts as much as a slap from your mom.

I remind myself that it’s been several weeks since she’s been off her medication, but that does nothing to ease the sting.

I brace myself to subdue her somehow without hurting her, hoping it doesn’t escalate too far out of control. But it turns out I don’t have to.

Her expression shifts from fury to anguish. Her fingers loosen against the metal mesh. Her shoulders stoop, and she curls into a fetal ball against the door.

She shakes as the tears take over. She cries in big, baby-girl sobs.

Like her husband has abandoned her to the monsters.

Like her daughters have been torn from her by demons.

Like the world has come to an end.

And nobody understands.

If Paige were here, she’d hold Mom and stroke her hair. Paige would comfort her until she fell asleep. She’s done that countless times, even after our mother hurt her.

But I am not Paige.

I curl into my own corner, gripping the soft fur of my teddy bear.

I DREAM I’m with Raffe again.

The surroundings look familiar. We’re in the guest cottage that Raffe and I slept in the night we left the office. It’s the night I learned his name, the night he went from prisoner to partner, and the night he held me in his arms as I shivered in a nightmare.

The tat-tat of the rain against the windows fills the cabin.

I look down at my then-self who is asleep on the couch under a thin blanket.

Raffe lies on the other sofa, watching me. His muscular body stretches languidly across the cushions. His dark blue eyes swirl with thoughts I can’t hear. It’s as if the sword became self-conscious after telling me so much about Raffe, and now it’s keeping his thoughts hidden. Maybe I pushed too hard when I asked about that kiss.

There’s a softness to Raffe’s look that I’ve never seen before. It’s not that I see naked longing or tender love or anything like that. And if I did, it would just be in my messed-up fantasies.

Not that I fantasize about him.

It’s more the way a tough guy who doesn’t like cats might look at a kitten and notice for the first time that it can be kind of cute. Sort of a reluctant, private acknowledgment that maybe cats aren’t all bad.

The unguarded moment is gone in a heartbeat. Raffe’s eyes shift to look toward the hallway. He hears something.

He tenses.

I wait, straining to see.

Two sets of red eyes get larger as they creep closer, silent as death. They peer into the living room from the darkness of the hallway, watching me.

Whoa. Why didn’t I know about this?

In a flash, Raffe is up and ru

The hellion shadows leap and bound back toward the bedroom, absolute black against dark gray. They dive through the open door where cold air flows out like a river.

Raffe and the creatures drop into slow-mo as they race for the broken window beside the bed. The rain sheets in through the gaping shards as the curtains dance in the wind in slow motion.

I know I’m supposed to copy Raffe’s movements as he attacks but I’m too busy watching what’s happening. The creatures are ru

Were they spying on him? Are they going back for reinforcements?

The hellions would have made it out the window if the first hadn’t shoved the second out of the way into the curtains, causing the second to grab the first in its panic.

As they jockey for position, Raffe slices through the one jumping out the window, cutting it almost in half. Then he cuts the second one, slicing its throat.

Raffe looks out the window, making sure these two are the only hellions.

He staggers onto the bed and winces in pain, bending over to catch his breath. The bandages on his back bloom with dark blood stains where his wings used to be.