* * *
I hate being barricaded inside a building with enemies outside. I also, for what it’s worth, hate that this is something I know about myself, because it’s happened more times than I could count. Thanks, property laws, for making my way of life illegal.
There’s never enough air or something once you barricade the doors. There’re always too many people, both inside and outside, when you barricade the doors.
We’d waited half the day already. The sun was high overhead.
When I’m fighting off a panic attack, I go into scientist mode and observe my body. I think to myself: how am I feeling? As specific as possible. How and where exactly is the worry manifesting in my body? How long does each “wave” last and how intense is it on a quantifiable scale, like from one to ten?
This serves two purposes. First, it gives me something to do. Just the act of trying to track my feelings distracts me enough to break out of the worst feedback loops of anxiety. Second, it gives a database of sorts that I can refer back to. Okay, I could say to myself, you’re having one of your existential loneliness panic attacks: expect three major waves with a high water mark of seven on the panic scale, one every three to five minutes, each one lasting roughly a minute before ebbing back down to a level four. Or if it’s a false alarm medical panic attack, that’s good for a single eight followed by a descending succession of waves until it’s over.
Knowing what I’m in for keeps the panic from controlling me utterly. It knocks each panic attack down one to four increments on that scale.
This was the old “barricaded inside a building with cops outside” panic attack. Well, in this particular case, it wasn’t cops, it was armed strangers and an evil magician. Which was better in some ways—they didn’t have the institutional authority to lock me into a cage for the rest of my life—but overall kind of worse because Sebastian was not what could be called a rational actor and it was impossible to tell what he might do with what power he had.
So that was the kind of panic attack I had. The worst kind.
A couple of the waves, they hit up toward nine, maybe ten. A wave of panic that hits nine, it takes me right out of scientist mode and right into that prison called my own head. I sat on the couch closest to door, my head between my knees, and tried to count my breaths. I couldn’t.
I tried to drink my tea. I couldn’t.
It was just all too much. For way too long, it was all too much.
“Can I join you?”
I looked up. Vasilis.
The past few days had wrecked him, and he looked it. The darkness under his eyes had reached the skeletal stage. His hair was a frightened, uncombed mess. His lip quivered under his mustache, a nervous tick.
“Yeah,” I said.
He sat next to me, but not rudely close.
“I can only imagine what you think of me,” he said.
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t mind him opening up to me, though. Any distraction at all was welcome.
“Every excuse I could tell you, it would sound like something Sebastian would say. That’s part of what’s eating me alive, seeing all the parallels between me and him. I want to say ‘I’ve lost everything!’ because in a lot of ways I have. Heather was my world. I wasn’t hers, but she was mine. I just . . . accepted that dynamic, while we were together. I knew she was going to leave me one day.”
That wasn’t what I thought he’d tell me. I lifted my head to listen better.
“When you all came to town, I thought: ‘This is it. She’ll leave with these people.’ I accepted that. But of course, the reality is so much worse.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. I thought, for a moment, about what I was apologizing for. “There’s this thing, when people die, where people always blame themselves. I’m maybe hyperaware of that being what people usually do, because I do the opposite. People die, and I absolve myself of guilt. Clay died, and yeah it was partly because of a demon but I’m sure it was partly because of loneliness. And I know he loved me, non-romantically, and I loved him, non-romantically, but I didn’t keep up with him as well as I could have. I chose solitude. I chose the road over him.”
“We can’t save one another,” Vasilis said.
“I know we can’t. But if I could go back knowing what I know now, I would have stuck with him, and I bet you anything he’d still be alive and I bet you anything I’d be happier than I am right now. So that’s what I’ve avoided thinking about. And with Heather . . . she made her own choices. You can’t blame yourself for that.”
“I wasn’t blaming myself for Heather’s death. I was blaming you and Brynn.”
If I’d been in any other mood, I might have taken that badly or pointed out his botched attempt to save her. Instead, I just nodded.
“Which is bullshit, of course,” Vasilis said.
“Mostly bullshit. But it’s true, if we hadn’t been here, she’d be alive right now. It’s not our fault, but it’s still causation and not correlation. What do you call that?”
“Life,” he said. “Chaos.”
“Yeah.”
“I understand Sebastian. I understand what he’s thinking, what he’s feeling. I know magic. I don’t have a natural aptitude, but I’ve been studying it for years and I can perform most rituals if I’ve got the right book in front of me. Now I’ve got a book, here in my apartment, that could bring Heather back from the dead. I could sacrifice myself to bring her back, but I won’t. And I know why Sebastian grabbed other people instead of doing it himself.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because Sebastian didn’t want Gertrude alive for her sake. He wanted her alive for his
