Sloane Briallen

CW Sloane dealing with thoughts about grief and trauma.  Mentions of rape and family death.

I was in the shower.  A tall, gangly eight-year-old, all knobby knees and pointy elbows, washing out my torturous butt-length dark hair.  I was going to Mickey and Bell’s for a sleepover while Mom went out on a date with her boyfriend Chaz.  I used to tease him about his name.  Even at that age, I knew the name Chaz sounded like a jerk name.

“You going to be out of there soon, girlie?” Mom asked.  There was only one full bathroom in our house, and Mom didn’t like using the other one.  She was “putting her face on”, as she called it when she put on make-up.

“Yeah.”  I grabbed the body wash and my washcloth, snapping the bottle open with my teeth.  I stuck my mouth under the showerhead to wash away any residual soap left on my teeth from the cap to avoid the bitter taste.

As I scrubbed down, Mom said, “So.  You’re birthday.  What do you want?”

“I don’t know.”  I’d been spartan even as a child.  I would see things on TV that I wanted, but I never held them in my head long enough to tell my mom when she asked.  I spent most of my days outside with Mickey and Bell.  We played a lot of pretend.

The shower curtain enveloped me, and I squealed as my mom poked my sides through the plastic.  “Mom!”

Laughter answered my indignation.  “You never tell me what you want.”

I growled at her in the back of my throat, which earned me more laughter. 

I heard the front door open with the ringing of the bell Mom had put on it like they had in convenience stores.  When I was a toddler, I’d been terrified of the dark, as well as monsters in the dark.  She had put a bell on the front door for me.

“Sheila?” Chaz called out.  They had been dating just over a year.  I kind of liked him even if he was cheesy and weird.

“We’re almost ready!” my mom called back to him.  She didn’t tell me to hurry or anything.  She was good about letting me do things in my own time.

I turned off the shower and something shattered.  “What’d you break now?” I asked as I pulled the shower curtain aside.  “If you—Mom!” I shrieked. 

Footsteps thundered down the hallway, and a tall brunette with olive skin appeared in the doorway.

Chaz almost tripped over my mom where she lay on the floor facing me. Her eyes were closed, a glass jar of face cream next to her, broken. 

He got to his knees, shaking my mom’s shoulder.  “Sheila?”  He looked up at me, eyes wide.  “What happened?”

“I don’t know!”  I shook my head.  “Mom!” I shouted, my voice rising hysterically.  “Mo—”

I jerked awake with a choked gasp, sitting bolt upright.  I looked around wildly, fear freezing my chest.  Where was I?  How—

“Sloane!”

Mira’s voice stopped me.  I swiveled around to follow her voice to find her just getting up from a chair by the door.  I dully recognized that we were in my room.  The chair she sat in was out of place with the children’s décor.  It looked like a chair you’d see in a waiting room.

The man sitting in a chair next to her definitely looked out of place.  He was beautiful and one of the very few examples of facial hair that I had ever found myself liking.

Mira threw her arms around me, leaning all of her weight into it.  It caught me off guard, and I almost fell backwards.  I caught myself with one arm, putting the other around her.  “Mira.”  I looked up at the man, brow furrowed.  He had a smirk on his face and when his eyes met mine, I saw a light dancing in them.

Well, at least someone was having a good time.

Mira pulled away, sitting next to me on the bed, and I was shocked to find tears.  “You stupid, stupid, stupid vampire.  Do you know how fucking worried I was?”  She grabbed one of my hands, lacing our fingers together.

“What happened?”  I didn’t remember anything past the quickie with Amara in the closet.  Past that, I had . . . gone to the dining hall, maybe?

“You don’t remember your absolutely freak out in the dining hall?  Where you filled the whole thing with soulfire?  Someone tried to poison Cyly, but you drank the poison instead.”

The memories came crashing back as she spoke.  A meal with half the royal family.  The dead man’s blood. 

Fear and anger flared but before I could get worked up, they suddenly dimmed.  As if the memory was further away than it actually was.

It was familiar. 

When I had flooded the dining hall with soulfire, I had chased the royal family out.  Flashbacks that I couldn’t stop had been playing like movies in my head.  My rape.  My mother’s death.  Mickey and Bell’s disappearance.  My death in October.  All of it was fresh, untarnished by time.

Then, an impenetrable wave of calm had enveloped me.  There was a brief flare of guilt and shame, but it had smoothed out quickly.  And then I’d felt Mira in my head.  She hadn’t said anything, but it was so familiar that I knew it was her.  I had barely had a chance to think, she’s putting me to sleep, before everything went dark.  It was something she had done when I was younger and couldn’t get me out of the PTSD flashbacks.

But where had the calm come from?  Mira couldn’t soothe and put me to sleep at the same time.  It was too much.

“It’s Faren,” Mira said, hooking a thumb back at the man sitting by the door.  “Incubus who can manipulate emotions.”

“Like Zeren,” I murmured, looking at Faren.

“Correct,” he nodded.  His voice was gorgeous like deep bells.  “Had Zeren been turned into a living vampire he probably would have been an incubus.”

I should have been more upset about having my emotions manipulated, but I couldn’t be.  Due to the aforementioned manipulated emotions.  And weirdly, I was also relieved.  The feeling of calm that came with the manipulation was familiar.  Zeren had done it to me in the past, and I associated the feeling with him, which was a positive.  I really liked Zeren.

“We like Faren,” Mira told me.

I looked him over again.  “I would hope so, if you’re just letting him sit here, fucking around with my head.”

“He’s the only reason you’re even in here and not still wreaking havoc in the dining hall.  I couldn’t get into your fucking head because you were so triggered.”  She thumped me on the head with her free hand.  “Why didn’t you tell me that things had gotten so bad?”

My brow furrowed.  What do you mean?  I was terrible at projecting my thoughts, but since Mira was holding my hand, it didn’t matter.

You’re a fucking mess.  More tears welled up in Mira’s eyes.  You’ve been spiraling for days.  The nightmares.  Mickey and Bell.  The dead man’s blood when you first got here.  This new dead man’s blood that was meant for Cyly.  It’s been building, and you finally broke in the dining hall.  Why didn’t you tell me it was getting so bad?

I shrugged.  You’re here to do a job.  I didn’t want to bother you.

It brought me back to the other day, thinking about how I was alone.  I was alone in a strange place, after having had to survive alone for years.

The tears spilled from Mira’s eyes, and she leaned forward to hug me again.  I felt her regret and sadness as if they were my own.  It was a bone-deep ache that gnawed at me.

Grief flooded me, breaking through whatever dam Faren had put up in me. 

“Finally,” I heard Faren mutter.  I looked over Mira’s shoulder to see him stand up.  My eyesight was blurry, but it was because of tears this time.  Not dead man’s blood.

Mira broke away from me to look back at Faren.  “What?”

“Sloane is letting herself grieve all that’s happened to her.  She’s safe enough to be left alone now without fear of the fire making an appearance again.”

My brow furrowed, the grief temporarily quieting in the fact of my confusion.  “Didn’t it stop when I passed out?” 

“Only because I’ve spent the past ten hours stoking your emotions to make sure you didn’t activate it while you were asleep.  And while it’s fun to actually exercise my abilities to help for once, I am exhausted.  So, I will leave you both to it.”  He left.

Mira tackled me into the bed, hugging me tightly.  I hugged her back, tangling our legs together and burying my face into the crook of her neck.  She pet my hair with the arm trapped between my neck and the bed.

“I’m sorry,” she said through a stuffy nose, her voice watery.  “I haven’t been here.”

I shook my head.  “You don’t have to be.  It’s not your responsibility—”

“You’re family,” she interrupted me.  “It’s our responsibility to take care of each other.  I should have known when I had to kick you out because of all the nightmares.  I should have realized how your meeting with the vampires in the woods would rekindle the issues from Samhain.  You were dosed with dead man’s blood and torn to pieces.  Of course it would fuck you up.”

“I could have volunteered the information.”  I, of all people, knew the value in talking out my feelings.  I had urged Karhi to do it with his siblings.  I had urged Mikko to do it after he was tortured when I was still in Phoenix.  I had just fucking told Devlin two nights before  “I’m shit at taking my own advice.”

“Yeah.”  She nestled in tighter.  “I’m here, though.”

That seemed to be all the permission I needed because the floodgates opened, tears pouring from my eyes.  I gripped Mira as tight as I could without hurting her, sobbing into her shoulder.

Mira cried, too.

I don’t know how long we laid like that, hiccupping and hyperventilating and crying and letting grief overcome us.  I grieved what had happened to me in October.  I grieved my rape.  I grieved dying.  I grieved being so fucking scared all the time.

I grieved Mickey and Bell coming back with explanations that didn’t make anything better. 

But finally, the tears dried, and our throats were raw, our voices hoarse, and I felt lighter than I had felt in days.  Maybe months.  Fuck, maybe years.

“I’m cold,” Mira murmured.

I chuckled, pulling the blankets and sheets over us.  While I hardly felt the warmth that enveloped us, Mira relaxed against me.

“You okay?” I asked her.

She shrugged the shoulder not mashed into the bed.  “I’m worried about my friends.  You.  The Phoenix crew.”

“Is something going on with them?”

“Ever since October, we’ve been having trouble with shifters.  I guess Aisha is still pissed about you.  They’ve broken windows and tried to attack the four of them.  It’s been a thing.”

I had expected that to be an issue, but it still sucked.  I had even helped Annie fend off a couple shifters when I was still in Phoenix after Samhain.

Mira told me about everything that had been happening in Phoenix.  She finished by saying, “But they got through it because Bell showed up at the last minute.”

I stared at Mira, stunned.  “Bell?”

“He was looking for you.  Thought maybe you went there.  Mickey is in the Twin Cities.”

I rubbed my forehead.  “Of course they did.”  I hadn’t even thought of them trying to find me after everything that happened.  I had been too busy being angry they hadn’t called or really texted.  “When did you last talk to them?”

“Couple days ago.  We’ve been playing phone tag and leaving three-minute-long voicemails to give each other information.  I also learned that Carlos has been very heavily involved with them.  I figure the protection of Slamface Vásquez and a wolf with soulsilver is more than enough.  The cops have already backed off from them.  And it sounds like the shifters have also been backing off.”

That was a relief. 

I wanted to ask if she had heard anything about Mickey or Bell beyond that they were looking for me but doing that would be the coward’s way out. 

“I haven’t,” she answered anyway.

I smiled gratefully at her.

“You can always reach out.”

“Fuck that.”

“That’s what I thought.” 

I changed the subject.  “So, Mikko gave you back the necklace he pawned?”  I remembered when he had pawned it.  Mira had been devastated.  It was from her grandmother, a family heirloom.  I had almost beat the shit out of him the next time I saw him.

Mira reached into her shirt and pulled out the smokey topaz on a leather cord.  It was just like I remembered.  “It’s been so useful,” she said.  “It helps me block out heads better to let me focus on the ones I want to focus on.”

I smiled at her.

She tucked the necklace back in her shirt.  “Okay,” she said as she did.  “So.  Amara.”

Oh fuck! We hadn’t had a moment with each other to talk about Amara.

“One, you two are boning.”

“Yes.  I’d ask how you knew, but . . .”  I vaguely gestured at my head.

“Actually, she copped to it earlier.  We were doing these interrogations, and she admitted it as part of them.”

My brow furrowed.  “Why did she cop to it?”  Not that it really mattered, everyone knew or had caught us in the middle of making out.

“I can’t really talk about it.  It doesn’t matter.  So anyway, that’s one.  Two is . . .”  She raised her eyebrows at me.

“She’s a wholeass anthroshifter.”

Mira grinned conspiratorially.  “Daoine is going to lose her shit when we tell her.”

“She really is,” I laughed.  “Amara has been saying, ‘oh, I can’t tell you what I do for the house’.  I’m sitting here like, ‘probably spy shit’.  Since that’s what anthroshifters have historically done.”

Mira snorted.  “Probably.  I’m not allowed to ask about it, either.  Hazel assumed I would figure out from being in her head.  But I really didn’t.  I figured it out from years spent with Daoine’s antics and her aura and shit.”

“Seltzer.”

“Seltzer,” she agreed.

We talked for a while longer, catching me up.  She told me about what she’d been doing—everything that wasn’t bound by her contract anyway.  She asked me for help at one point with translating Arabic, but my dialect was Moroccan.  I couldn’t understand Egyptian very well so helping her with Amara’s inner monologue didn’t help her at all.

There was a knock on the door that made us both jump.  I wasn’t used to not hearing people outside of a room.  Mira probably wasn’t used to not hearing people’s heads before they knocked either.

“It’s Aoife,” the knocker said.

I got out of bed to open the door.  It was indeed Aoife.

“Hey,” she said.  She looked me up and down with concern, as if checking to make sure I was in one piece.  “Are you okay?”

I shrugged.  “I’m functioning.  I’m sorry about what happened.  No one got hurt, right?”  I figured I wouldn’t be lying in bed with Mira if I had hurt anyone.  I would probably be in the dungeon again.

“No.  Cyly says your soulfire stopped just short of hitting them.  It followed them out, but it never got within a few feet of them.”

Good.  Everything after the dead man’s blood was a blur that I remembered in bits and pieces between flashbacks I couldn’t stop.

“I came to see if Karhi was here,” she said.  She looked over my shoulder.  “Looks like he’s not.”

“Why would he be here?” I asked.  I heard Mira getting up from the bed to come join me.

“I haven’t been able to find him since he left with Mira to go to you.”

“Oh,” Mira said from behind me.  I heard the wince in her voice.  “That, uh, that might be my fault.”  I looked at her to see that she was clenching her teeth in a grimace full of regret.

“How so?” Aoife asked.

“He was making it too hard to calm you,” Mira said, looking from Aoife to me.  “I told him to get the fuck out.  I may have forced him up to get him to leave.”

“Mira,” I said sharply.  “He’s spent—”

“Five hundred years being controlled by his sire, yes.  I’m aware.  But you were a very real fucking hazard, and he was actively making it worse with his guilt and shame.  He needed to fucking go.”  She rolled her eyes.  “He’s so busy playing martyr that he can’t get his shit together.”

I scrubbed my hair back from my face.  “He’ll be wherever there’s drugs.”

“Drugs?”  Aoife shook her head.  “I’m not naive enough to say there’s no drugs in this castle.  But I wouldn’t know where to procure them if I did.”

“Who would?”

She looked at the floor for a moment, brow furrowed in thought.

I felt it in the air when it clicked together for each of us at the same time.  We probably all had the same memory come to us, in fact. 

“Sevilen,” we said in unison.

We found Sevilen in the quarters he shared with Aoife.  He was getting ready for bed.  I hadn’t realized how late it had gotten.  Well, early.  The morning of the eighteenth already. 

Sevilen wore a pair of sweatpants but was otherwise naked from the waist up.  He had scarring all around the base of his throat and along his chest and stomach.  It was from whatever disease he had had when Aoife turned him. 

He had taken out his prosthesis for the night.  There was a metal cap on the stub of his arm, some faint scarring around the edges of it.  It had a hole inside for installing the arm.

When we came in, he covered part of one pec with what was left of his arm and the rest of his chest with a splayed hand and a book of piano music he had been holding.  “My virtue!”

Aoife rolled her eyes.  “If you’re worried about your virtue, don’t walk around our quarters half naked.”

Sevilen pouted, giving Aoife the slightest bit of a glower.  “Woman, when I’m in our quarters, two things are free—my arm and my nipples.  You could have knocked.”

“I’m not knocking on my own apartment.  Sev, this is the living room.”

She had a point.  Like the other living quarters, I had seen in the castle, we entered into a living room.  On one side was a grouping of couches.  On the other was a baby grand piano and a set of cabinets filled with trinkets from all over the world.  I saw some wooden carvings, a didgeridoo, among other things.  There were two hallways off the back of the room disappearing further into the apartment.

“When did you start hating me, wifey?” he asked, batting his eyelashes and giving her big doe eyes.  He had finally put down the book of piano music and stopped trying to hide his chest. 

Aoife turned to glare at me, of all people.  “This is your fault.”

“How is this my fault?  Mira and I could have stayed outside while you grabbed Sev.”

“You called me wifey to him the other day and now he won’t stop saying it.  We aren’t even married.”

“Oh.”  Yeah, no.  That was my fault.  I even remembered saying it.  “Wait, since when does marriage fucking matter?  Y’all have been together for centuries.”

Aoife flicked her hand at me dismissively.  “Whatever.  Sev, have you seen Karhi?”

“Not for several hours,” he shook his head. 

“When did you see him?”

“I guess it would have been around the time of the kerfuffle in the dining hall with our resident firecracker here.”  He nodded to me.  With anyone else, I might have felt guilty, being reminded of what had happened.  With Sev, he was just a chaotic golden retriever with only the best of intentions.  When he called me a firecracker, it was affectionate, not a dig.  “He looked rough.”

“Did you tell him where to get drugs?” I asked.  I still remembered finding Sevilen passed out in Mira’s living room, having found a cocaine stash that Mikko had forgotten he hid in a vent while high out of his mind.  It had been after Mikko quit coke, thankfully.  And Sev had done us a favor by making sure there was no coke left anywhere in the house.  Even if he had taken enough to kill someone.  He woke up an hour later with a headache.  Mikko wasn’t there that day, fortunately.

When we had asked him what he was doing, he had said he hadn’t had coke in a while and was excited to try it again.  That was when Aoife found out that Sevilen knew a lot about drugs.  He apparently knew how to make cocaine and was always trying new variants when he got the chance.

Sevilen’s brow furrowed.  “Drugs?  I mean, I guess.  I told him where the wine cellar is.”

Wine cellar.