Vicki Pettersson - The Scent of Shadows

“Shh,” she said, pulling my head to her chest. I rested it there. Rested, it seemed, for the first time since my mother had left me a decade ago. I closed my eyes, slumped against her soft chest, and inhaled deeply. I knew her now, I realized. The twin bouquets of roses and the herbs she brewed for her own teas were fused upon her breath and skin, her signature scent stamped like a star on the surface of my temporal lobe.

Gradually, the distress and misery left my body, sliding away through my tears, and I relaxed. My sobs were replaced by blessed nothingness, my body went limp against hers and, after one final sniffle, I lay silent. Greta continued to rock me, and though I knew she still feared what’d happened that morning, still feared me, I was so grateful for the momentary kindness that I didn’t care.

“Thank you,” I said, swiping the back of my hand over my face. “Again.”

“One of those days?” she asked quietly.

“One of those lives,” I muttered, a bitter laugh hiccuping out of me.

“You’re overwhelmed, dear. You’ve toured the sanctuary. Met the others—”

I held up a hand and cut her off. I shot her an apologetic glance before lowering my palm and sighing. “What I am is tired of people either treating me like some chosen deliverer or an evil pariah. Mostly, though, I’m tired of pretending to be someone I’m not.”

“What do you mean?”

I mean that I am so fucked up you wouldn’t be talking to me now if you knew who I really was. You’d run and hide and cower in the corner. You’d scream for help, you’d flee for your life . I met my gaze in the mirror. Isn’t that right, Joanna? Olivia? Whoever you think you are .

Greta was watching me through the reflection too, but her face slid out of focus like in the movies, dissolving into the background as my own grew sharper. It was like my skin was thinning out, the bones beneath beginning to jut through the meticulously sculpted image reflected there. I swallowed hard.

“Everyone I’ve ever been close to in my life is either dead because of me or I pushed them away long ago. Even my mother ultimately left because of me.”

“That’s not true. That wasn’t your fault.”

“And I like violence,” I went on, ignoring her, hands clasped tightly around my knees. “I’ve never admitted that before, but I do. I like to inflict it, I like the power of having inflicted it. I go into dark places searching for people to harm me, just so I can mete out justice in my own twisted way. With my fists, Greta. With the hatred that fills my heart.”

She smiled, deflecting the seriousness of my words. “So, what you’re saying is you’re not perfect?”

“You don’t understand,” I said, whirling on her. “I can’t do this! I can’t be the person you all expect me to be!”

“But you’re Zoe Archer’s daughter.”

“I’m the Tulpa’s daughter too.”

She tilted her head. “Is that what’s bothering you?”

“It’s what’s bothering everyone else,” I said, and told her about my run-in with Warren in the hall.

Greta let out a weary sigh. “We had just finished a session. I hypnotized him, and he lived out his greatest fear in his mind. Your fates are deeply intertwined.”

That brought my head up. “What do you mean?” I asked. “What fear?”

Her eyes grew sad, the edges tightening as she shook her head. “That you, the woman he’s pinned all his hopes on, may betray him.”

I could only gape at that. Warren’s actions made sense in the light of her words, but the words themselves didn’t quite compute. Me? Betray him?

Greta tried for a reassuring smile. The tightness in her jaw kind of ruined it. “When your mind is that vulnerable, every sense is amplified. Seeing you so soon after he felt, watched, heard, and scented your betrayal—”

“But I didn’t betray him!”

“But his mind believed you had.” She leaned back on the settee and waited for my eventual nod. “Think of an athlete visualizing success for himself on the playing field. The mind can’t tell the difference between what’s imagined and what really happened. Warren lived out your betrayal, or the possibility of it, up here.” She pointed one delicate finger at her own head. “Don’t worry. He’ll be back to normal soon. As normal as Warren can be.”

She was joking, but I couldn’t manage a smile. It did, however, get me thinking. “Do you think this hypnosis might help me?”

“What do you mean?”

I tried to keep my voice steady, but my hope trembled out in the words. “I mean, would you be able to draw out more of the Light in me? Bring it more to the forefront? Make it stronger than the…other side?”

She picked up her glasses from the small table at the head of the love seat, putting them on as if to examine me closely. “You’re concerned about the balance of Light and Shadow inside of you?”

And she was watching me so expectantly that I found myself telling her; about the construction workers, and how I used my senses to plow through their lives. What it had cost them. And how it made me feel.

“Powerful. Superior. Untouchable.” I swallowed hard, not wanting to go on, but afraid if I didn’t things would remain the same between Warren and me. Between us all. “I couldn’t predict what would happen, and, believe me, if I had I wouldn’t have done it, but I did do it, Greta. I did it on purpose.”

I paused for her reaction—revulsion? disgust?—but got only silence. Then a slow, rising interest that grew as Greta tapped her finger against her thigh and considered me over the rim of her glasses. “And you want me to rid you of the impulse to play God, is that it? So that if this ever happens again you won’t feel the need to stand in judgment?”

“It’s not my job to put anyone in his place. I know that now, and I…I don’t want to be like him .” And I didn’t. I didn’t want lashing out at others to be my first instinct anymore. It was a defense that’d served me well after my attack, and in the years I’d had to live under Xavier’s disapproving stare, but it was different now. Because I was different.

“I can’t plant anything in your psyche that isn’t already there, Olivia,” Greta said as I rose to pace the floor in front of us, my boot steps muffled beneath her Persian rug. “I also can’t remove Shadow impulses. It’s part of who you are.”

I stopped before her. “But can you teach me to control it?”

Greta pressed her lips together in a look so scrutinizing I was afraid the answer would be an immediate no. But after what felt like forever, she nodded, and motioned for me to recline where I was. A sigh rocketed from my body as tension uncoiled in my belly, and gratitude for this small kindness, when kindnesses had been so hard to come by of late, teared up in my eyes.

Drawing a chenille blanket over my lower body, Greta loomed over me like a benevolent angel, and the last thing I saw were her earnest gray eyes, cloudy with intent. Then she slid a cool palm over my face and began to count. The numbers formed beneath my lids—cloudy and ephemeral and ghostly—and I began the backward spiral into the recesses of my own mind.

I’d never been put under before, and therefore wasn’t sure that I could, but I listened to the soft lilt and direction of Greta’s musical voice and let her words settle into me, bone deep. My arms grew heavy at my side and my heartbeat slowed like an insect being caught and trapped under the sap of a weeping elm. My skull was light in contrast, thoughts floating there like feathers, as disconnected and random as if they belonged entirely to someone else.

Warren’s baffling treatment of me was forgotten, as were Chandra’s cruel remarks and Hunter’s probing ones. All of these thoughts were like papers cluttering a desk, quickly swept aside as light and insignificant, the real work etched more permanently on the surface beneath.