Ricochet Through Time (Echo Trilogy Book 3) (20 page)

23

Her & Me

I stand paralyzed, staring down the barrel of a black pistol. I don’t move as Apep-Carson presses the nozzle to my forehead. I don’t even breathe. All I can think is—I don’t want to die.

Stillness settles around me. Quiet. The others are now paralyzed, too, like me. Everyone seems to be holding their breath. Like me.

I swear I can feel every single blood cell rushing through my veins. I can feel every molecule of oxygen and carbon dioxide and nitrogen and argon in my lungs. A slight breeze flows in through the open doorway, rustling the tendrils of hair that have escaped from my bun. Sweat inches down the back of my neck.

I don’t want to die.

Marcus is closest, a few feet to my right—hands up, like a criminal. Dom is facedown on the floor behind him, closer to the door. He’s bleeding, maybe still alive. Maybe not.

I look at Marcus, meet his eyes. I try to tell him with just a look how badly I want to
not
die. I’ll do anything—give up anything—to not die.

“Let me pass,” Apep-Carson says, “or I’ll kill sweet little Kat here.”

I can feel my whole body shaking.

Apep-Carson steps forward, the pressure of the gun against my forehead forcing me backward. He takes another step. And another. I don’t know how I manage to walk backward without tripping. Without my knees giving out.

I’ve moved far enough now that I can see my mom. I’ve never seen her look so terrified in my entire life. The second our eyes meet, my chin trembles, and tears break free, streaking down my cheeks. I don’t want to die, but even more so, I don’t want my mom to watch me die. It’ll kill her.

“Nik,” Marcus says.

I look at Marcus, but he’s staring at something behind me. At Lex, I realize.

“I know,” Nik says. “I’m not fucking blind.”

I have no idea what he’s talking about, so I return my focus to my mom. I try to tell her how sorry I am with just my eyes. I try to tell her I forgive her and I love her. I try so hard, but all I seem able to do is cry silently as Apep-Carson pushes me backward.

“Don’t you go anywhere yet, Mother,” Apep-Carson says, then clicks his tongue, tutting. “I really wouldn’t, if I were you. You won’t stop me.”

Hope flutters in my chest. Is someone going to do something? Is someone going to stop him from killing me? Is someone going to save me?

“Who said anything about stopping you, shit-stain?” Nik growls.

Apep-Carson’s face contorts with rage. The muscles in his forearm tense, making the veins and tendons stand out. This is it. I’m going to die.

Something slams into me, and I’m thrown to the side. It’s my mom. She’s looking at me, watching me fall. Disgust is painted across her face, and blame fills her eyes.

BOOM.

My mom’s accusing face is shattered into a million pieces of bone and skin and blood.

I gasped awake, my heart thundering and my lungs sucking in air. Sheets damp and cold with sweat were tangled around my legs, restraining me. I fought against them, frantic to be free. Panic from the nightmare bled into reality, infecting my mind and telling my body to run, to fight . . . to
do
something.

Except there was nothing to run from. Nobody to fight. At least, not here. Not in my bedroom in the middle of the night. Here and now, I only had myself to wrestle. I only had my memories to contend with, my guilt and self-loathing to battle. Here and now,
I
was my greatest enemy.

I blew out a breath and, with a hand, brushed back the long tendrils of hair stuck to my sweaty face. This had been going on for two months—the nightmare. The panic. The guilt. I relived the worst moment of my entire life every time I closed my eyes. I was exhausted all the time, but there didn’t seem to be any way to make it stop.

Resigned to yet another night without sleep, I sat up and reached over to turn on the lamp on the nightstand. I opened the nightstand’s top drawer and pulled out a deck of playing cards and a small spiral notepad. Curling my legs up, I pushed the bedsheet to the side and shuffled the cards.

Solitaire had been my go-to method of passing the time lately. I kept score, Vegas style. According to the notepad, I was $4,133 in the hole.

If I was lucky and maintained my focus, I’d be able to get back into the three thousands tonight. It was barely past midnight. Plenty of time until morning.

I started dealing, laying out seven cards in a row, then six, then five . . .

It was going to be another long night.

***

Bang. Bang. Bang.

“Kat!” Jenny, Lex’s “real” sister, called through the bathroom door. “Let me in. Please?”

I stared down at the mountain of hair in the sink, then looked at my reflection in the mirror. Better. Much better.

“I’m seriously about to pee my pants!” Bang. Bang. Bang. “Let me in!”

“There are eleven other bathrooms in this house,” I said, raising my voice so her human ears could hear me. “You don’t
need
to use mine.”

“Fine, but if there’s any leakage while I waddle my way down the hall, you’re doing my laundry.”

I rolled my eyes. She was barely halfway into her pregnancy, just a couple months ahead of Lex—hardly into prime waddling territory. Still, I unlocked the door.

Jenny shoved it open. “Cute hair,” she said, brushing past me. She paused at the sink. “Aaaaand, there’s the rest of it.” She continued on to the partitioned toilet area. “You know that self-administered haircuts, especially drastic ones, are a sign that you’ve lost it, right?”

I glanced at my reflection in the mirror. My curly brown hair was now roughly shoulder-length, where it had been a whimsical waist-length just minutes earlier. I had my mom’s hair—and the rest of her—and I could no longer stand the sight of my own reflection. It was like she was in the mirror, her almond-shaped eyes staring back at me with just as much disgust and accusation as I felt. She’d never worn her hair shorter than her waist. Now, I didn’t look quite so much like her.

“It’s not that drastic.” I glanced down at the hair collected in the sink, feeling a little sick and wishing I could make it disappear.

Jenny flushed the toilet, then stood in the doorway while she adjusted her underwear under her maxi dress. That was all she wore these days; she claimed they had to have been invented by a pregnant girl. “Do you want me to even it up for you?” She held out her hands, wiggling her fingers. “I promise to wash ’em . . .”

I really tried not to smile, but she was just so ridiculous that a tiny one snuck out. “Sure,” I said, tucking my weirdly short hair behind my ear and averting my gaze. I glanced at my reflection again, then down at the counter. Damn it, I still saw my mom standing on the other side of the glass. “Not like you can make it much worse.”

“Sugar,” Jenny said, putting on a ridiculous Southern drawl. “I’m an artist. Worse is my spec-i-al-it-y.” Her eyes met mine in the mirror. “But seriously, what are we going for here? Like, a long bob? A choppy bob? An inverted bob? Wash and wear?” She glanced down at the hair-filled sink, then back up at me. “And how am I supposed to wash my hands?”

“Oh, right. Sorry.” I retrieved the garbage can and loaded it with the mound of dark curls in a few handfuls. “What style do you think would look best? I just—” I stared hard at the hair I was transferring into the garbage can. “I want to see someone else when I look in the mirror. Not me. And not
her
.”

It should’ve been me . . .
That bullet had been meant for me. Maybe if I hadn’t ignored my mom’s requests to see me, maybe if I’d gone to talk to her before Apep showed up wearing his Carson suit, things would’ve worked out differently. Maybe if I hadn’t acted like a stubborn, resentful child, she’d still be alive.

“She loved you, Kat.” She was quiet for a moment. “Look, I know you’re mad at her for betraying you and abandoning you and all, but I think she really proved who she was in the end—your mom, who loved you.”

Jenny didn’t get it, and I hated whining to her about my problems. She had her own stuff going on. She just lost her Grandma a few weeks ago. That, on top of her pregnancy and Lex’s glaring absence, well—I wasn’t the only one struggling right now.

“I just—” I shook my head. “It’s like I don’t even know who I am anymore. Everything I thought I wanted—all of my hopes, my plans—somehow, they all involved my mom. I mean, she was
my mom
. It was just her and me against the world for pretty much ever.” I set the little waste bin down on the floor and looked at Jenny. “And now she’s gone, and it’s my fault.”

“Kat . . .” Jenny’s eyes shone with empathy and sympathy and pity, all things I’d come to hate over the two months since my mom’s death. “You know that’s not true.”

I scrubbed my hands over my cheeks, erasing any sign of tears, and cleared my throat. “So about my hair . . .”

Jenny stared at me for long seconds, then sighed and shouldered me out of the way so she could get to the sink. “You need to talk to somebody, Kat. I’m worried about you.”

“Please, J . . .” I met her eyes in the mirror while she washed her hands. “Not right now.”

“Fine.” She dried her hands, then dropped the hand towel onto the counter.

“But you’ll still help me with my hair?” I asked her, biting my lip.

“Of course I will.” She laughed under her breath and shook her head. “So here’s what I think—you say you don’t know who you are anymore. Well, who says you have to figure out ‘who you are’ from the inside out? Why can’t you do it from the outside in? You know, ‘fake it till you make it’?”

I frowned and shrugged.

“Who do you want to be, Kat?”

“I want to be . . .” I stared up at the ceiling, thinking. “Tough. No, badass. I want to look like someone who doesn’t care what others think of her. Someone who can hold her own and knows it.” I met my own eyes in the mirror, for the first time in a long time not seeing hatred in the eyes of the person staring back at me. “I don’t want to rely on anybody else.” I didn’t want anybody else I cared about to get hurt because of me. “I want to be able to take care of my own damn self. Period.”

“Okay, sooooo . . . I’m not sure we can really capture
all
of that with a cut and style, but I’ll do what I can.”

I looked at Jenny in the mirror, meeting her smirk for smirk. And then I passed her the scissors.

***

I sat on the second-to-last step in the entryway, staring at the spot on the floor where my mom’s body had lain. My head rested against the banister, and I listened to Marcus, Neffe, and Aset talk in the kitchen. I liked listening to them talk, carefree and unaffected by my presence. Lately, voices hushed and conversations died when I entered a room, even if only for a moment. I didn’t want to be the girl everyone felt sorry for. The girl they walked on eggshells around. But I was.

“I’m going to head down to sit with Tarsi,” Marcus said. I could hear felted chair legs sliding on the kitchen’s tile floor. “Any procedures scheduled for this morning?”

“Just dialysis,” Neffe said. “And that’s in about an hour.”

They’d roused Tarset from her induced coma a couple weeks ago, and she seemed to be doing alright. She mostly just slept. Some of her organs were still having issues functioning on their own—like her kidneys, thus the dialysis—but her recovery, however slow, had brightened Marcus’s mood considerably. Now, instead of brooding through every meal, me-style, he engaged with the others, sharing stories of Lex’s travels through time and conjecturing with Aset and Nik as to what she was doing at this or that exact moment. Right now, she was supposedly in Florence in 1480, frolicking through vineyards and picnicking on hillsides with a fifteenth-century Marcus.

I watched Marcus emerge from the kitchen, his fingers touching the lump under his shirt, just over his heart. It was the little vial of Lex’s bonding pheromones. More than plenty, according to Re, to last until Lex returned with the twins. Marcus opened the door to the basement, glancing my way. He met my eyes for the briefest moment, then passed through the doorway and shut the door.

“I’m glad we woke her,” Aset said, her voice hushed. “It’s been good for him.”

“I still think it may have been too soon,” Neffe said. “But I agree. He’s been much better since she woke. She’s given him purpose . . . something to focus on while Lex is away.”

“Let’s hope we can keep her recovery moving in the right direction,” Aset said. “If her health makes a wrong turn . . .”

I waited a minute or two, listening to the sounds of water running and dishes clanking as someone washed up in the sink and the thin pages of a magazine turning every few seconds. These mundane sounds soothed me, especially when I could hear them without feeling the periodic touch of concerned eyes on me.

But even that grew dull in time.

Standing, I strolled into the kitchen, tucked a shorter-than-it’s-ever-been strand of hair behind my ear, and paused at the corner of the island, taking a deep breath. Aset and Neffe sat together at the table in the sun-drenched breakfast nook, soaking up a rare dose of November sunlight while they sipped coffee and skimmed their boring-as-hell scientific journals. Nik stood on the other side of the island at the sink, his back to me while he scrubbed some pans.