Rachel Vincent - With All My Soul

“Of course you’re not.” The counselor laid her hand across the file in her lap, legs crossed in her pencil skirt, her pen tucked beneath one finger. “‘Crazy’ isn’t a diagnosis.”

“No, I mean I’m not...” Em exhaled, and her shoulders slumped. I motioned for her to sit on the low, narrow bed, hoping that would make her look calmer, and she did. “Never mind.”

The counselor was quiet for a minute, watching Emma. Waiting to see if she’d say anything else. Then, when nothing else came, she tucked a strand of dark, curly hair behind her ear. “Do you feel like seeing your family now? Your parents are eager to see you.”

Crap. She still thought Em was Lydia. Perhaps an even crazier version of the Lydia who’d escaped.

“No!” Em’s brown eyes flashed, not in anger but in fear. Her hand snaked toward her hair again, but I shook my head and motioned for her to put her hands in her lap, which she did. “I told you, they’re not my parents. I don’t want to see them. If you make me, I swear I’ll kill myself.”

I shook my head, trying to tell Emma she was taking the wrong approach—threatening suicide in the mental health ward never goes well—but I only caught her attention and made her look crazy again.

“Lydia, no one’s going to make you do anything you don’t want to do.”

“I don’t want to be here. ” Her voice rose on the end, and the whining from the room next door increased in pitch and volume. One of the two of them was about to lose it, and if Em was that one, we were all screwed.

“Well, that’s out of my control, at least for the moment.” The counselor clicked the top of her pen repeatedly, retracting and exposing the ballpoint over and over. “But I do have several more questions for you.”

Emma scowled with Lydia’s face. “I don’t want to talk anymore. Go tell my parents to go home. Please. ”

“We’re not really finished here....”

“ I’m finished.” Emma stood, staring down at her. “I’m not going to say another word to you until you get rid of Lydia’s parents.”

“Do you really think that’s the best tactic to take? I’m trying to help you, Lydia.”

Emma glanced at me, and I motioned for her to sit again. She sank onto the edge of the bed and scooted back to lean against the wall. Then she crossed her arms over her chest and watched the counselor in silence. She wasn’t pouting. She wasn’t throwing fits. She just...wasn’t participating.

That was the best I could hope for, considering the state of the resident next door.

The counselor gave it several more minutes, while we sat there in silence—okay, I stood—and the girl next door whined. Then she sighed and left the room, patient file in hand.

As soon as the counselor was gone, I made myself corporeal enough to close Emma’s door. The moment it clicked home, she flew off the bed and hugged me so hard I wouldn’t have been able to breathe even if I’d needed to. “Get me out of here. Please. I can’t stay here. This place makes me feel... bad. ”

“I know. It did the same thing to Lydia. I think she syphoned every psychosis in the whole damn place.” I blinked us both into my living room—with a stop in an empty parking lot on the way, because I couldn’t go that far in one shot. The best moment of the day was the moment my feet landed on my own carpet.

Styx perked up from her sleeping spot on my dad’s chair and barked in greeting.

“Holy crap, this has been the worst day ever. ” Emma collapsed on the couch and threw her head back against the cushion. Then she winced and suddenly looked guilty. “Well, for me, anyway. I’m sure your dad had a really crappy yesterday.”

And his suffering had no doubt continued, which made me feel guilty for being in my own home, out of immediate danger and in no pain.

I went into the kitchen, and Styx followed when she realized I was headed for the fridge. “Are you okay?”

“Traumatized, but yeah.” Emma exhaled dramatically. “Half an hour in that place felt like an eternity. I don’t know how you made it a week.”

“Me, neither.” I opened the fridge and pulled out a plastic container of still-bloody venison.

“They thought I was Lydia.” She sat up and frowned at me from the living room. “I am Lydia. Except that I’m also Emily Cavanaugh. And Emma Marshall, at least a little. Asking me if I know who I am? Most complicated question in history.”

“Yeah. I’m not sure what we’re going to do about that.” I set the last hunk of meat in Styx’s dish, then dropped the bowl into the sink and washed my hands while Styx scarfed down her dinner. “The hospital knows you as Lydia, who just escaped from a locked mental ward. Again. But the school knows you as Emily Cavanaugh, the niece and legal ward of my father. Who can’t be contacted at the moment, due to the fact that he’s been taken hostage by a demon in another realm.”

“Speaking of—any news about your dad, and Harmony and Brendon?”

I dried my hands on the towel hanging from a drawer handle, then grabbed two bottles of water from the fridge. “No. But we’ll get them back, and when we do, hopefully a combination of my dad’s Influence and your brown eyes will be enough to convince people that you can’t possibly be Lydia. I mean, people’s eyes don’t just change color, right?”

“Blue to green, maybe. Or brown to hazel, depending on the light. But not blue to brown. That just doesn’t happen.” She looked relieved by her own conclusion.

I handed her a bottle, then sank onto the couch next to her, trying to ignore the visceral chomping sounds coming from the kitchen. “Plus, we have the paperwork Tod...procured. Together, that should be enough to firmly establish your new identity.” I hope. But I didn’t let her see my doubt. She obviously had plenty of her own. “So, what happened at school? Please tell me you were faking memory loss for the psych ward counselor.”

“No, that was real. I don’t know what happened , and I think that’s the scariest part of this.” She collapsed against the back of the couch again and blew hair off of her forehead. “Why don’t we ever have normal problems anymore?”

“I’ve been asking myself that for months.” I cracked the top on my water bottle, then scooted over to make room for Styx, who seemed determined to burrow into the few inches between us now that she was finished eating. “So, you fell asleep during third period and...?”

“And...I woke up in a bed in the E.R. My throat hurt like I’d been screaming and I had a headache, but other than that, I felt normal. Well, as normal as I’ve ever felt in this body. I’d been there for maybe five minutes when the nurse who came in to take my vitals recognized me. Well, she recognized Lydia. Then there was a whirlwind transfer to Lakeside—they actually pushed me across the parking lot in a wheelchair—and the next thing I knew, I was a confirmed mental patient.”

“We prefer to be called residents. Remember, ‘crazy’ is not a diagnosis.”

“Whatever.” She actually smiled, then twisted the lid from her own bottle. “Evidently the fact that Lydia never actually checked out the first time led to me being fast-tracked for admission today. That place is scary efficient.”

“Yeah. They’ll bend over backward to get you in, then they’ll move heaven and earth to keep you there.”

And for the first time, it occurred to me that Lakeside and the Netherworld weren’t so very different—given a chance, either one of them would steal your soul.

“That place was hell.” Em sipped from her water bottle. “It was like walking around in the opposite of a sensory deprivation chamber. I was in sensory overload. Like being assaulted by everything everyone there was feeling. It was crazy—pardon the expression. Those people are angry, and sad, and frustrated, and confused, and...lost.” She stroked Styx’s fur absently. “I can’t go back there, Kaylee. I can’t.”