Insanity (20 page)

“Mama will take you to the store,” Darius said. “We’ll get you set for a few days, until we sort this out.”

I hugged myself and tried not to shake. “How are we going to sort out my father?”

“Levi and I will go to your house and check on him,” Forest said, “and do what we can to help with his healing.”

“You can’t.” I shook my head, feeling terror rise like heat to my face. “It’s not safe.”

Forest looked confused. “You said he wasn’t conscious.”

“The house and yard are protected—warded. And Addie’s conscious, and she’s not herself. I’m afraid she’d kill you faster than my father would.”

Addie in her rumpled apron, spent and brittle from the power she had used ... I didn’t want to think about it, but the image jammed itself into my head.

“And how’s she supposed to hurt us?” Levi asked. “She got her own knives or something?”

“She’s not Madoc, but she can use power.” I sighed. “If Addie threw an unchecked spell at you, it could go off like a warhead and take out half the neighborhood.”

“Spell. You mean like a witch’s spell?” On anybody else, Levi’s expression would have been a sneer. On him, it was more like normal. “I don’t suppose you’d care to show me one, would you?”

“I can’t.” I let go of myself and shook my arms to get the blood flowing through my hands again. “I have to use talismans and potions and powders—you know, props. But the supplies are at my house. All I’ve got is my willow charm.”

I slipped a hand into my jeans pocket and took out a piece of woven willow that Addie made for me when I was younger. It was almost a circle, with a cross on the inside. “The only time I
can work more than basic spells without props is when I’m upset, and then I can’t control what happens. It’s random.”

“Sounds like Madoc blood to me,” Forest said.

Darius pulled his glasses down, studying me with his eerie white eye. “Nope. It’s something else.”

Forest and Levi didn’t argue, because Darius could see the truth of anyone or anything, see power in all its colors and forms.

Levi studied me for a while, then finally said, “I’ll ask Imogene to go to your house.”

My whole body went tight at the mention of the old woman. I didn’t really know what she was, but she was tied to Lincoln and to the power my father feared and hated.

Who are the real witches, us or them?

“Imogene can leave the hospital grounds?” Forest asked.

“Yeah,” Levi said. “Just not often, and not for long. And don’t worry, she won’t pick any fights.”

My breath came out in a huge rush. I hadn’t even realized I was holding it. Just knowing somebody would check on my father made me feel better.

“Meanwhile, I want to go to Lincoln and keep reading Imogene’s records about the different types of spirits,” Forest said. “I’d rather we know as much as we can before you spend too much time working there, Trina.”

This made me feel so tired and heavy that I sat down in the armchair nearest to the door, trusting Darius to stop Levi and that freaky beagle if they charged. “How can I start work and act like everything’s not totally insane?”

Darius came over to where I was sitting and got down on his knees in front of my chair. His big hands rested on my shoulders, squeezing, then moved to my cheeks to cup my face and keep me looking at him.

“You act a zif,” he said as I studied my reflection in the black lenses of his glasses.

“What?”

“A-s i-f,” he clarified. “As if. Until things are okay, you act as if they are.” He pulled me forward and lightly touched my lips with his. Tired or not, I felt tingles spread across my shoulders, and the soothing comfort of having him so close to me.

“I’m sorry, baby,” Darius said in a low, quiet voice. “Would you rather walk away from all this? Because I’ll go with you, if that’s your call.”

For a few seconds, my heart beat faster, and the room seemed to narrow until I couldn’t see anyone or anything but Darius. I thought about heading back to UK, about getting away from my father again, seeing my friends, and patching up the shredded life I had started to build. I had been doing pretty good at college—and Darius meant it. He’d go with me if I got up from here and drove straight to Lexington.

But what would happen at Lincoln then?

There was evil loose in that hospital, and it was trying to get out and kill people. It
would
kill people. Imogene and Levi and Forest, they could only do so much. And no matter what Forest said about my father’s sins not being my own, my father had made everything so much harder for them.

If Darius and I walked away from Never, we’d be part of
letting terrible things happen. How terrible and where it would all end I had no idea, but it didn’t bear thinking about.

“Act a zif.” I let out a breath, keeping my eyes on Darius. His respect—and my conscience staying clean—seemed like a fair trade for everything I was giving up. “All right. Guess I better get busy practicing my nothing’s-crazy face.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

When I took my assigned wad of keys from Ms. Miller, my supervisor at Lincoln Psychiatric Hospital, my hands shook.

Act a zif
...

I had to get the extern hours for my future as a social worker. I needed a bachelor’s degree, then a master’s if I really wanted to do it right. The bonus was, I could help our little group of fighters keep an eye on what was happening at Lincoln in the process. But mostly I wanted to help Darius and keep him safe from my father. If I could just understand the real fight going on at Lincoln, maybe I could make my father understand it, too.

Time to be a good actress. I made myself smile. My new black skirt and white blouse itched. My new black flats pinched my toes. I smelled like Darius’s mother, because I had used her soap. Not that my nose was good enough to tease out that scent from the vanilla and cinnamon and pumpkin and watermelon and citrus and pine scents of the air fresheners, unlit candles, and potpourri in the offices all around us.

Act a zif
...

I couldn’t whimper or shut my eyes or obsess about my father. Imogene was due to check in again in fifteen minutes.

Thunder rumbled above the giant stone building, and I twitched at the sound. I had been listening to Ms. Miller for over an hour as she told me how to clock in, where to find my assignments, how to be sure I didn’t transmit infection, and how to report patient abuse if I saw it. We were sitting in her office, where the walls were painted pink. Seriously. It was pale, maybe more of a coral, but it was
pink
. And she was wearing a slightly mismatched three-piece blue pantsuit.

Why did that matter? I never cared what people wore. Ms. Miller had a big, bleached-white smile and thick bleached-blond hair, yellow on top of blue in front of pink.

I needed an aspirin. Or a nice, coma-inducing tranquilizer.

Rain splattered hard against her screened and barred window, making me jump.

Act a zif
...

Act as if I didn’t want to throw up.

Act as if I didn’t want to run away from Lincoln and never look back.

Act as if I wasn’t about to cry every freaking minute.

Ms. Miller kept talking, but I had no idea what she said. I caught the “You’ll be starting on Unit C” part, though, and I managed to keep focus through, “It’s our chronic ward. Today I just want you to observe, get to know your people.”

She blinded me with another megawatt smile.

My people
. Who were my people again, exactly? Surely she
couldn’t mean my father, the man I left for dead. Or Addie, who had bashed her husband in the head to save me.

I held back a sigh and kept right on trying to act normal.

We left Ms. Miller’s office and walked into one of the hospital’s long, tiled hallways. Rainy gray light spilled from open office doors, mingling with the hall’s white-blue fluorescence until the whole place seemed overcast. It reminded me of Addie’s funeral home, how everyone who worked there tried to make it bright and happy, but in the end, it was what it was—a place where the dead came to be stuffed in a box.

I shivered and clutched my notebook to my chest.

Darius had been waiting right outside Ms. Miller’s office door. My own personal bodyguard, all glamoured up by Forest and Levi to be invisible. I couldn’t see him, but I caught the scent of his aftershave and heard the comforting whisper of his breathing. I imagined his big shoulders going square as he fell into step behind us. His handsome face would be grim and stern and he was probably checking out each of the multicolored offices in case some monster came hurtling out from behind the fake fig trees.

The farther we got away from the office area, the more the building smelled like stone and cleanser and dampness, and the grayer the floors and walls seemed to become. Thunder kept up a steady beat, and when we passed windows, hard rain was hammering against the safety glass.

Ms. Miller led me through so many locked doors that I lost count, each set seeming bigger and thicker than the ones before.
When we finally got to a door marked CAREFUL, AWOL RISK, ENTER WITH CAUTION, I felt like I was in the center of a giant maze I could never escape. I held the door long enough for Darius to get through, then moved my hand. The door slammed with a loud, metallic clang. I found myself looking back at a tiny square window, set just above eye level.

Locked in.

Didn’t matter that I had keys. It still felt freaky.

When I turned and rejoined Ms. Miller a few steps down the hallway, Unit C stretched before me like a corridor into an alternate universe. The walls were cinder block, like at a school, but painted a light blue. Everything seemed dull and functional, even the chairs and tables pushed up against the walls on either side of the hallway. A few bulletin boards had cheerful fall decorations tacked to them, but they didn’t help much. This felt like a quiet place. A sad place. It smelled like urine and air freshener. I didn’t really want to be here.

There was one man sitting in a chair, wearing jeans and a sweatshirt. He held his face in his hands, and he was rocking.

Didn’t look like he wanted to be here, either.

Ms. Miller led me to a desk at the far end of the hallway and introduced me to a short woman with black hair and loud yellow scrubs. I didn’t even process her whole name, just sharon and that she was the unit’s RN, and I could ask her for help if I needed it. The nurse pointed out a table where I could be out of the way and “observe,” and she told me the patients would be back from their morning groups soon. Then Ms. Miller gave me
a gigantic smile and told me to return to her office at the end of the day with my notes, and we’d go over my experiences.

As she walked toward the unit elevator, I just stood there, not sure what to do. My brain kept refusing to engage.

“Table,” Darius whispered, and I jumped.

Sharon, still only a few feet away from me, stared like she might need to evaluate me instead of working on her charts.

I managed something like a polite smile, walked slowly away, and seated myself in a heavy plastic chair at a plastic table. From my vantage point, I could see the doorway, the nurse at the desk, and the one patient sitting in the unit’s hallway to my left. On my right were the seemingly empty chair where Darius sat and a few doors leading to bedrooms on either side of the hallway.

“Should have looked before you touched that furniture,” Darius mumbled. I heard the
pat-pat
of his massive hands as he examined his own chair, then eased his big frame into it. “Probably hasn’t been cleaned in a month.”

Before Levi and Forest made him vanish, he had been wearing jeans and a black T-shirt with a Lincoln Psychiatric emblem. Must have gotten it during the brief time he worked here as a security guard, before he got charged with murder and lost his eye. I imagined him sitting in his chair, his dark glasses glittering in the neon lighting.

“Don’t stare, baby,” he said, and I thought he might be grinning. “They see you looking at nothing, they might keep you here.”

I plopped my notebook on the table, careful to avoid a grape-colored stain that was probably sticky. When I opened it, I
scrawled,
Not funny
. Underlined it a few times. Added exclamation marks.

Darius laughed so that only I could hear him, but five tables away, in the long part of the hallway, the man who had his face in his hands lifted his head as if the sound had startled him. His eyes traveled the room until they found me, and he fixed his gaze on my face like he was searching every thought I’d ever had. He was dark-skinned like my father, but heavier, with a slack look about him like he hadn’t focused on anything in decades. His eyes, though—wide and wild and terrified—I couldn’t stand it. I looked away.

Maybe I wasn’t cut out for this social-work thing. At least, not here at Lincoln Psychiatric.

“Don’t sweat it,” Darius said as if he had just read my mind. “You want to work for Children’s Services, not here. This is just field experience. Credit in a class. Treat it like those stats seminars you hated.”

I wrote,
Necessary evil.

“Yeah. That.”

My body relaxed enough for me to breathe regularly, and I turned the page and began to take notes about the surroundings and the man on the unit, who had lost interest in me by then. Who was he? Why was he here when everybody else was away? I supposed people could refuse to go to groups, or oversleep. Maybe they had sick days, too. All of this got recorded as questions for Ms. Miller. No doubt she thought I was an idiot already. Asking intelligent questions might help me make a better impression—and writing down everything I noticed might give us some hint
about the next bad spirit we’d have to fight. Who knew what I might see but not yet understand? Levi and Forest could sort through it all later, when they got finished reading Imogene’s records.

Imogene.

Great.

Thinking about her brought me straight back to my main worry—what was happening with my father.

Darius murmured, “Don’t get all tense again, now. What is it?”