You want to play? Fine. Let’s play.
Something inside her mind clicks, like rusty cogs being forced to turn after years of immobility, and then gives way. Too fast to fathom, she clashes into another, wholly different mind. How she’s done it, she can’t explain, but she grabs onto a sliver of darkness that doesn’t belong and the intruder jerks back. She digs into the black tendril and doesn’t let go, afraid of missing an opportunity to teach this Fae a lesson in boundaries.
A murky blur surrounds Rachel as she burrows deeper, assessing random thoughts that make zero sense, before finding what she supposes are its memories. Discerning faces is near impossible and the landmarks are completely distorted. At times, even the snippets of conversations are unintelligible, the language utterly alien.
Rachel finds a pinprick of light shining from an otherwise impenetrable wall of information, where a filthy little boy, no older than six, sits on a stony outcrop behind a quaint cottage in a picturesque valley. His eyes are on his constantly moving hands. He whittles away at a stick with a sharp knife.
Before she can see anything else, the invading mind seems to buck, tossing her consciousness into the wind, before Rachel’s ethereal self falls first through nothingness and then past memories. She travels at lightning speed back through time, until she plummets into the here and now. The sole resident in her mind again, Rachel shoots her eyes open as residual tremors make their way through her limbs.
Her heart wildly pounds to an irregular beat as she looks around, finding herself still seated at the kitchen chair. Dougal and Mercia, oblivious to the battle she’s just fought—and won—are conversing about Greg’s intrusion the previous night.
Jenny, however, is looking directly at her.
Her mother’s mouth pulls into an ugly, unrecognizable sneer while knowing eyes narrow into slits. Pupils dilate before a hint of red flashes.
Jenny moves faster than Rachel thought possible. By the time the kitchen chair actually hits the linoleum floor, her mother is already on the other side of the kitchen. Cutlery clatters across the countertops and spills into the sink. Grits splatter onto the table. Jenny spins around to face her mystified audience, holding a serrated steak knife against her own throat. She presses down hard, but luckily doesn’t break the skin.
A chorus of flabbergasted, “Mrs. Cleary,” adds to the horrified, “Mom,” echoing through the kitchen.
“You’re hiding something and I want to know what it is,” Jenny says in a voice that isn’t her own.
“I don’t—”
Jenny presses the knife down, allowing a bead of blood to escape the tiny cut.
Rachel raises her hands, palms-up in surrender. “Okay, okay, what do you want to know?”
“Who are you really?”
“I’m Rachel Cleary?” The statement comes out as a question as her confusion grows.
“Are you? You don’t sound too sure—”
“I’ve known Rachel my entire life,” Mercia chimes in. “I swear on my life, the person in front of you is Rachel Cleary.”
Slowly, Jenny turns back to Rachel. “You have a witch vouching for you while your own mother isn’t certain? Curious.”
“My mom’s been through a lot,” Rachel snaps at the intruder in her mother’s body.
Jenny guffaws, or rather the thing inside her does. “Tell you what, Rachel Cleary. Either you figure out who or what you are or I’ll take my displeasure out on your dearest mother.”
“Give me five seconds and I’ll go find my driving permit.”
“Really, Rachel?” Mercia hisses. “Jokes?”
“I wasn’t joking,” Rachel growls back under her breath.
Jenny, or rather the thing inside her, slides the knife away from her neck and reaches back with her arm. With a simple flick of her wrist, Jenny releases the weapon. Hilt over blade, the knife cuts through the air and passes a hairsbreadth away from Rachel’s face. The tip pins into a cupboard door behind Mercia and Dougal, before the serrated blade snaps in half and falls onto the counter.
Glass shatters next, pulling Rachel’s attention away from the knife.
Shards crush beneath the soles of Rachel’s shoes as she walks to the kitchen sink and stares through the broken window. Unable to do anything useful, she simply watches in horror as her mother sprints across the backyard, wearing little more than a shift and a robe.
“Where’s Orion, Rach?” Dougal asks, placing a hand on her shoulder.
Rachel gulps heavily before shaking her head.
“Yer ma needs him. We all do.”
Thanks for stating the obvious.
Rachel turns on her heel and marches out of the kitchen, ready to turn her mother’s room upside down if she has to. An answer should be somewhere in there—why else would this Fae be targeting her?
“Leave her,” she hears Mercia say in the kitchen.
She stomps to the second floor, heads straight for her mother’s bedroom, and finds all the destroyed photos on the floor where they’d been left the previous night. One by one, Rachel picks up the pieces and dumps them all onto the bed.
“What were you trying to tell me, Mom?” Rachel begins putting the pieces back together, her mind working overtime as she searches for answers.
An hour passes, but Rachel remains in the dark as to her mother’s true intentions.
Mercia checks in on her, takes a seat on the edge of the bed.
Who am I?
Two weeks ago, Rachel had known the answer, but it isn’t as forthcoming anymore. The SATs had thrown her off her game. Her journey into the Fae Realm left her reeling, confused, and uncertain. The situation with her mother, though ...
As Rachel sits in her mother’s bedroom, staring at the destroyed photographs, she can’t bring herself to answer the simple question: Who am I? Jenny had subtly hinted at something, at an answer to this question, but those little nudges
