I See Me (15 page)

Beau whirled around to face Blackwell, stumbling to his feet. He was badly burned, with layers of newly formed scar tissue and open wounds covering his chest, neck, and upper arms. Both of his hands were furred and clawed.

Blackwell had dark orbs of shadow somehow pooled in his hands. Yes, he was holding some sort of dark light like … magic.

Beau charged, leaping back over the bank of booths again.

He was slower this time. Badly wounded.

Blackwell threw the black orbs. The smoky light slammed into Beau in mid-leap, blasting him backward. He flew past me, through to the end of the restaurant. He crashed into two booths before he stopped, tearing the tables and the bench seats from the wall. He fell amid splinters of wood, cracked Formica, and crushed vinyl.

I heard shrieking. I realized it was me.

Now that I had started screaming, I wasn’t going to stop.

I screamed and screamed as I scrambled off the table to stand in the aisle between Blackwell and Beau.

Beau, my beautiful Beau, wasn’t stirring from among the wreckage of the booths.

I faced Blackwell, the sorcerer of Blackness Castle, Scotland, and screamed.

I screamed until my throat was raw.

Blackwell, who’d been reforming the black orbs of light in his hands, blanched. He dropped the spell. Yes, I’d figured out that I was hallucinating some sort of magic, just as Beau had told me when he looked at my sketches.

The sorcerer held his empty hands toward me in surrender.

“Rochelle, please,” he coaxed. “This was not my intention. My doing —”

I squeezed my eyes shut, grabbed a fistful of my own hair, and pulled. I yanked so hard that my eyes watered.

“Get out, get out,” I screamed. “I will rip you from my brain. I will tear you from my mind. I will shred you, destroy you with my thoughts, Mot Blackwell, sorcerer of Blackness Castle, Scotland.”

I opened my eyes and locked my gaze to Blackwell’s. “Do you believe me?”

He nodded.
 

Hoyt stumbled out from the bar and made his way toward Blackwell. His face and hands were badly cut.

A tiger, easily eleven feet in length landed silently on the still-upright table to my right. The table shouldn’t have been able to support its weight, but it did. The tiger let loose a snarling growl that rattled the windows. Then it turned its glowing green eyes on me.

I wasn’t afraid.

Hoyt, on the other hand, stumbled back behind Blackwell. “Jesus. A fucking tiger. That ain’t good, boss.”

“No, it isn’t,” Blackwell said grimly. Then he pulled a business card out of his inner suit pocket and placed it on the empty table beside him to the right. The people on his left had finished their desserts and were looking over the bill.

“You will need me, Rochelle Hawthorn,” he said. “You will want to know what I know someday, and I will willingly trade. I’m a fair man. You could be formidable, but you’re lost. You don’t understand your power, and there are very few who could teach you. The pack will lock you in a gilded cage. They hoard their power. With me, you could live. With me, you could have a life and riches.”

“Get out.”

He nodded, reached back, and grasped Hoyt’s arm.

The spellcurser cried out as if the bone was broken.

Then the sorcerer brushed his fingers across his chest and disappeared.

With a pop, my ears unplugged.

People started screaming. They looked around, taking in the destruction surrounding them as if waking from some dream. Then they jumped from their chairs and fled the restaurant, brushing by me as they did so.

The tiger seemed to frighten them most of all.

I ignored them, stepping through the rubble of the trashed tables toward the exit. The tiger that used to be Beau walked at my side.
 

I reached to pick up Blackwell’s business card. As I did so, I realized that my mother’s necklace was still tangled in my fingers, and I paused to feel the weight of the stone in my palm. Its touch steadied and calmed me further. I dropped the business card into the depths of my bag. Then I went outside to retrieve my bike.

Nothing was real anymore. I didn’t have to worry about who was hurt or afraid. It was all in my head anyway. I was stuck in the hallucination.

Everything made sense now.

Beau.

The way I’d felt about him. Our instant connection.

That he stayed with me even in the blatant face of my crazy.

But … the hot apple juice was a lie. A lie of love whispered in my ear by my evil, broken brain.

I could let it crush me. I could let it destroy me. I could try to break the hold of the hallucination. I could try to wake up.

Or I could stay with Beau.

I’d made a promise.

I wasn’t going to be the one to leave.

I wasn’t going to be the one to expose the lie.

I didn’t love him any less for not being real. He was magic, conjured by me.

My magic.

He was mine.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” Beau whispered. “I’ll fix it. I’ll protect you.”

I woke.

Beau wasn’t beside me, and I thought for a moment that I was waking out of a dream, or a hallucination. But I felt alert, aware, and oddly settled. A sure sign I’d forgotten to take my pill at some point. A warning sign.

The Brave was moving, and quickly — if lying in the back bed having just woken put me in any condition to judge. I was still dressed in my jeans and hoodie, but I was underneath the covers with my sneakers and socks off. Light leaked in around the edges of the brightly striped orange curtains.

I struggled to get loose of the tightly tucked blankets and sat up, tugging the blinds open above my head. The sun hadn’t risen yet, but the sky was lightning ahead. We were driving along a paved road. Fields stretched away to either side. I couldn’t see the ocean anymore. As I watched, we passed a massive field of grape vines. An orchard? A farm? Nope. By the sign that blurred past, I was looking at a winery.

The Brave was moving way too fast, easily exceeding the speed limit if I couldn’t read the signs as they blurred past. I slipped off the bed and started toward the cockpit, realizing as I stepped through the kitchen area that none of this was actually happening.
 

Did I even own the Brave? Was I lying on the floor of the RV right now, hallucinating? Had I never actually recovered from the hallucination that hit the night I crossed the border? Maybe I’d never even gone to the diner where I thought I first met Beau.

Had I even left Vancouver? Or had I hallucinated the entire day of my birthday?

I could see Beau in the driver’s seat, but I grabbed my bag from where it was sitting on the bench seat of the dinette instead of going to him. I unzipped the inner pocket and pulled out my mother’s necklace. I stared down at the large, dull stone and the broken chain. What had the jeweler said? That it was worth fifty thousand dollars? How utterly absurd.

An eight-month-pregnant woman gets in a car accident in Vancouver and dies, giving birth but never waking up to give her own name? She carries a necklace worth fifty thousand dollars, but no ID. Every social worker who’d ever been assigned to me passed the necklace along with my file all these years.

Where had I broken with reality? At what point did I become so lost that —

“Rochelle?” Beau called from the cockpit. “You up?”

I loved the way he said my name. The way his accent claimed it, made it unique. I could admit that now. I could be fully head over heels for him. Just because he was in my head didn’t mean he wasn’t real to me.

I wasn’t lost at all. I was completely found.

“Yes,” I called forward as I tucked the necklace in my hoodie pocket and wandered up to the cockpit. Beau filled the driver’s seat — his knees up too high on either side of the steering wheel, which he gripped fiercely.
 

He flicked his eyes up to the rearview mirror to look at me hovering over his shoulder. His eyes were bright green with no hint of blue now. They were bright, like they’d been when he morphed into a tiger in my dream last night. People’s eyes didn’t change like that, so that was just another confirmation that Beau was a hallucination. Even in human form, he wasn’t real.

He’d been hurt last night, severely burned by Hoyt’s curses, but I couldn’t see any evidence of those terrible wounds on his face, neck, or hands now. I was glad to see he was unharmed, but the speed of his healing only reinforced the truth that my mind was generating everything I was seeing.

I kneeled on the carpeted stairs between the driver and passenger seats, wrapping an arm around the back of Beau’s headrest to steady myself. The speedometer was steadily pointing at 70 miles an hour. I knew that was too taxing a pace for the Brave to keep up.

“You’re driving awfully fast,” I murmured as I laid my hand on Beau’s arm. The muscles of his forearm were ropey with tension.

“She can take it,” he said, as if he knew what I was thinking. “The road is straight through from here to Portland.”

“Portland?”

“Yes.” He flicked his eyes to the rearview mirror again.

I smiled at him, and for some reason this made his beautiful face contract with pain. He looked back to the road before him.
 

“I’m not a hallucination.” His tone was a combination of anger, frustration, and sadness.

I smiled brighter, wider. “I never said you were.”

“Last night. You told me everything last night.”

“I don’t remember saying anything like that.” I continued smiling. My jaw and cheeks ached with it. I needed him to keep up the premise. I wasn’t sure I could maintain the delusion if he started questioning it … and by him, I meant me, because he was obviously part of me. Some part I’d desperately needed even if I hadn’t known it consciously. I’d needed someone to love, and my broken brain had conjured Beau.

“I’m real, Rochelle,” he said. “I’m real. Tell me I’m real.”

“You’re real,” I said obligingly.

The steering wheel creaked underneath his hands.

“Beau!” I snapped.

He loosened his grip. “Sorry, sorry.”

“I’ll get you some cookies.” I stood up to make my way back to the kitchen.

“I don’t want any cookies!”

Ignoring him, I opened the bathroom door and escaped inside, wanting to wash my face and brush my teeth. Three empty pill bottles were rolling around in the sink.

I slammed the door back open. “How dare you!”

“They’re bad for you,” Beau replied. “Even the asshole sorcerer thought so.”

“You don’t control me, Beau … Beau …” I faltered. I didn’t know his last name. If he was a figment of my imagination, shouldn’t I know his last name?

“Beaumont Jamison. I get my name and skin color from my father, who’s a petty-criminal spellcaster I’ve barely even met. And the shapeshifter gene from my mother, who suppresses her changes with alcohol and accepts weekly beatings from a man far weaker than her. A man who happens to be my sister’s father, whose magic is only good for one thing. Being a fucking bully.”

This was a lot of information all at once, some of which sounded pretty fanciful. But then, I knew I shouldn’t underestimate the creativity of my broken mind.

“You can’t rescue someone who doesn’t want to be rescued,” Beau said.

I wasn’t sure if he was talking about his family or me. “It doesn’t matter anymore,” I whispered.

“It matters, Rochelle. You matter.”

I retreated into the dinette area, digging my sketchbook out of my bag and crossing my legs on the bench seat. I found some charcoal and flipped to a blank page as I settled in. I hovered my left hand over the page, thinking of the events of last night … well, the last night that had occurred in my head. I always sketched after an overwhelming hallucination, and none of my delusions had ever been more overwhelming than last night.
 

But I was oddly calm. The sorcerer and the spellcurser, as Beau had called them, hadn’t haunted my dreams. In fact, I didn’t remember dreaming at all.

“Beau’s tiger,” I whispered as I stared at the blank page. The tiger that had walked by my side — defending me from the sorcerer despite whatever the spellcurser had thrown at it — was the second most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. Second only to Beau himself.
 

I would draw the tiger. Its wide-set, brilliant emerald-green eyes. The black and white markings that defined the shape of its broad, orange-furred face.

Nothing happened. The blank page stared back at me. I could always draw. I looked up and out the side window to sort out my thoughts, to focus. It didn’t work.

“Why Portland?” I asked, loud enough for Beau to hear me.

“It’s the territory of the West Coast North American Pack,” Beau answered. “If the wolves don’t rend me limb from limb the second they scent me on their territory, they might protect you from the sorcerer. Actually, I’m hoping they’ll protect you even if they do kill me.”

Fear soured my empty belly. I tried to brush it away with the assurance that this was my hallucination, and that I wouldn’t let anything bad happen to Beau. Except … I’d let him get hurt last night, hadn’t I?

“I don’t understand.” I whispered the words, but Beau somehow heard me.

“I know,” he said. “I can explain, but I can’t stop. Okay? You’re very special, Rochelle. I wouldn’t risk it, except the sorcerer said something about the pack, like he’s afraid of them. And I don’t know of any other Adepts nearby. Not anyone powerful enough to stand against that asshole.”

“Adepts?”

“People with magic. That’s what they call themselves. The ones who know what they are, at least.”

“But they’ll kill you?”

“I’m an outsider, and not a wolf. The dominant shapeshifter species are werewolves. They’re very territorial. I’m a loner. A rogue, in their eyes. They don’t get that. They kill what threatens them.” Beau delivered this information with the same ease he seemed to apply to everything … everything but me.

“You love me,” I said.

“You doubt me?”

“Not for a second. Not since I … I … saw you.”

“You didn’t create me, Rochelle.” Beau’s voice held its calm. “You don’t even create your sketches. You draw what you see with your magic. Your Adept senses. That’s what the pain, the headaches are, maybe. Your magic. I don’t know what you see. The future, or the past? Or if you just read magic, decipher it? But the pack will find someone to help you.”