When I cracked my eyes open at last, it was a revelation, because I'd been absolutely certain that I'd never be peering out of them again.
Not that opening them was particularly illuminating. For a dizzy half-second I was convinced I'd died and somehow conned my way into heaven, because I was pleasantly warm and white vapor made the edges of everything gauzy and indistinct. The aches that had plagued me since my early morning escape were distant and dull, like a bruise you'd almost forgotten you'd received. I was blinking at a wall of pristine white acrylic, condensation running down its surface every few seconds as the steam billowed around me.
My hands, which had been in the midst of combing through my hair, rising away what smelled suspiciously like Herbal Essences shampoo, stuttered to a stop as I became the guiding consciousness moving them once again. A sound began to build in my throat, and I wasn't sure if it was a scream or a sob. I backed up as far as the three-foot by three-foot walk-in shower would allow, back slamming into the frosted glass doors so hard they rattled as memory came filtering back to me in bits and pieces.
Rending claws. Blood. The sweet, drugging contralto of Lasciel's voice as she shoved me to into a sightless, thoughtless mental void with a smile on her metaphorical face. Shivers wracked my whole body and my legs folded as the full realization of what I'd done hit home.
I'd failed. I'd taken up Lasciel's coin. Embraced the real Lasciel.
I ended up sprawled painfully at the bottom of the shower, limbs folded at awkward angles so that all of my above average height frame could fit into the dinky space. It wasn't she suds that drained into my eyes that prompted the hot, stinging tears. Sobs won out over screams and I curled my bare body up as tight as I could, cordoning myself off in one corner of the shower, trying to muffle the wail I could feel coming. I still didn't know where I was or how I'd gotten here.
"Calm yourself, Molly," Lasciel purred, stepping from the steam an instant later looking like she was ready to bust onto the set of an oversexed body wash commercial at any second.
Gone was the toga, swapped for a white sundress that was rapidly becoming see-through as she stood beneath the spray. For God's sake, why would she even do that? She wasn't even getting wet! Her red hair was perpetually mussed as always, though instead of the childish innocence that her shadow had tried to project, the real Lasciel managed to make it appear the result of an intensely carnal union, instead of windswept disarray.
"I'm not going to be fucking calm!" I shouted at her. I didn't even have the presence of mind to keep the exclamation inside my head. The sound of my fear bounced back at me from the walls. "You...I...we...!"
I couldn't even marshal my screaming panic for long enough to shriek at her.
Lasciel sank down on her haunches so she was level with me, frowning when I shrank away from the comforting hand she extended. It's pretty innocuous all things considered, but all I can see when she reaches for me is the inches-long claws she used to so effortlessly slash through my would-be rapist's throat.
A concerned line appeared between her brows and she withdrew the hand hastily. "I will not harm you, Molly."
"You buried me," I managed to gasp through heaving sobs. My ribs were actually beginning to hurt, unused to clashing so violently against my lungs so often. Of course, I'd never had reason to cry like this before now. "You buried me somewhere in my mind. What happened to being fucking partners, Lasciel? Or was your shadow just feeding me another line of steaming hot bullshit?"
Offense actually tugged her mouth into a prim little line. "I've not lied to you, Molly. I do not subjugate the wielder of my coin."
"Then why the hell-?"
Lasciel pressed the pad of one delicate finger to my lips, shushing the next angry shout. "It was for your own good, Molly. I would not have put you through the psychic trauma of four painful deaths. Not while your ability to shield against such things is so underdeveloped."
My mind was still stuck in the spin cycle, unable to accept this logic no matter how cold and practical it was. Instead, I leapfrogged right to the next glaring problem on the mental docket.
"Four people are dead, Lasciel. Four."
My gaze fell to my fingers, wrapped firmly as they around my biceps. I didn't see a spec of blood on me anywhere. Lasciel had been conscientious enough to return my body scrupulously clean after taking it for a joyride. But there had to have been blood. Lots of blood. And it was my hands used to do it.
Lasciel tsked rather curtly in my direction. "Yes. And?"
And this was precisely why I'd been struggling not to take up her coin in the first place. Somehow the nearly seven months her shadow had been squatting in my brain I'd managed to forget that the Fallen was a creature bent on destruction and chaos, and cared little about how many people died in pursuit of its ultimate goal. Of course human life would mean little to her.
Another tsk and a roll of pale eyes this time. "I don't see why you are so vexed with me, my host. Those men would have defiled and murdered you. Can you honestly say you are sorry they are dead?"
"No, but that's not the point. They are dead and I killed them."
It would be like trying to explain trigonometry to Little Harry. I wasn't sure this was a concept the Fallen could actually grasp.
"No, Molly, I killed them. You are entirely blameless."
I wanted to believe that. I really, really did. But I knew it was false. My mistake had impacted so many lives for the worse. My family. Ken and Rosie. The ladies of the Ordo. Anna Ash. Torelli. Any and all of the people I'd peddled drugs to. The women I'd doomed to die by not stopping Huber. And finally, the nameless men that Lasciel had ended. Scum they might have been, but it didn't give me the right to play God.
It was arrogance pure and simple that had led me to believe that I could tangle with the Fallen. And look where it had led me.
Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea máxima culpa.
My fault, my fault, my most grievous fault.
I turn my face away from Lasciel, unable to take the sight of her for long.
"Go away, Lasciel."
"Molly-"
"Go!" I shrieked, seizing the one-ounce hotel brand shampoo bottle to chuck at her head.
Of course, it flew straight through her and rebounded off the acrylic, but I didn't care. I seized the paper-wrapped soap marked with the logo for the Omni Hotel and Resort. That little detail registered and just fueled my disgust. Of course we were at a luxury hotel. I should have known that Lasciel was going to be a smug bourgeoise pain in the ass. Her shadow was already an elitist snob.
Lasciel looked offended and a little alarmed by my behavior. For my part, I couldn't stop once I'd started. I seized the Herbal Essence bottle next and chucked it at the place she stood. It hit the wall with an even heavier sound of impact and clattered around the bottom of the walk-in shower, bouncing painfully off my toes. My injured thumb was beginning to throb as I tried in vain to flex it around the conditioner resting on the shelf. Sometime when I'd been out Lasciel had splinted the thumb and wrapped it tightly in plastic to keep water off of it.
By the time that I tossed the conditioner her direction Lasciel had finally gotten the message and disappeared from my line of sight. It still wasn't enough to satisfy me. I could still feel her there, hovering like an overprotective parent watching their child throw a tantrum, gracefully turning her eyes away after a minute to see if it would stop.
I threw everything that wasn't bolted to the wall, letting out a half-bellow after launching every projectile. I probably would have tried to smash the glass from the track next if the door to the bathroom hadn't opened. I turned bleary, streaming eyes to the intrusion and switched abruptly to sobbing once more.
Anna Ash stood on the threshold to the bathroom, observing me through solemn, sorrowful eyes, her dark hair pulled away from her face in a functional ponytail. She looked a little peaky beneath the natural cast of her skin, but otherwise unharmed.
Relief slammed into me hard, and I struggled to drag in enough breath to croak her name. At least, I tried. I wasn't sure it was intelligible through the fit of hysteria. I had to look like a raving lunatic, crouched naked in the bottom of a hotel walk-in shower, surrounded by the contents of a toiletry bag, screaming at someone who for all intents and purposes wasn't there.
I'd expected Lasciel to kill her. She'd made it no secret that she cared little for Anna Ash and the ladies of the Ordo. Even if it had been the impetus for my decision to accept her coin, I hadn't really believed Lasciel would spare her.
Anna didn't speak. She just crossed the room and bent to retrieve a fluffy white towel from their shelf, unfolding it with precise movements before turning to me. She pushed the door to the shower the rest of the way open and stood with her arms open and a towel ready to receive me. It really should have felt demeaning or silly to make her drag me up by my underarms and bundle me in a towel like I was a child or an invalid. But in that moment, I didn't have the wherewithal to do it myself.
She flipped the lid to the toilet closed and pushed me down onto it. She helped me to dry off, dress in one of my favorite pairs of jeans and a nice t-shirt, and then brushed and dried my hair. I hadn't noticed, in my earlier hysteria, that it was shorter than I remembered. Someone had cut it off at around chin-length, in a style more flattering than what Huber would have done, that was for damn sure. The color was an unflattering banana-yellow shade, but at this point, it was the least of my worries.
By the time she'd finished, my heaving sobs had quieted to occasional whimpers and a low-key tremor that ran through me every couple of seconds.
Anna set the hairdryer aside and slid a hand into mine, squeezing it tight. With the other, she tipped my face up to get a good look at me. She was savvy enough not to meet my eyes directly, for which I was grateful. It wasn't a good idea to peep in on Anna's soul while I was so vulnerable. The last time I'd mucked about with someone's soul, they'd ended up flopping on the floor like a fish. And if I was honest with myself, I didn't want to know what it looked like in my soul with Lasciel rearranging things like the world's most intrusive roommate.
"Is it you?" she asked finally.
My throat constricted hard at the reminder that, for an indeterminate amount of time, Anna had been looking at my face and seen an alien consciousness staring back out of her from it. I didn't trust my voice, so I just nodded.
Anna hugged me closer, hand coming up to stroke over my hair lightly in a move so reminiscent of my mother that it tugged fresh tears from my eyes. She made nonsensical soothing noises and continued to stroke my hair, holding onto me like that, until the shaking finally stopped.
That took a while. Raw as I was, I could pick up on the ambient emotion in the air. There thankfully wasn't much of it. Concern jostled to the front of the line, pushing aside fear, pain, guilt, and mild but still there, annoyance. In my vulnerable state, even these small grains of emotion rubbed like sandpaper.
Anna was trying to keep a careful lid on her emotions for my sake, holding off for a quiet moment when she could go to pieces without hurting me further. Which almost made me feel worse. She'd suffered far more at the hands of our would-be captors than I had. She'd been dragged across the state by her lying roommate and attacked, almost raped. Then she'd witnessed four grisly murders perpetrated by a literal demon from hell who'd possessed said roommate. It'd be enough to scare the piss out of anyone, and if anyone had a right to feel betrayed and violated, it was Anna Ash.
So why the hell was I the one coming apart at the seams over this?
Get a damn handle on yourself, Molly, I growled.
And so I did. I screwed my eyes shut and I carefully packed each of the spinning thoughts away in a box to be studied and broken down later, when I knew more about my current situation. There was only a handful of questions that were actually relevant. I started with the most pressing.
"What happened. After...?"
"After you took up the coin for my sake?"
I cracked my eyes open and peered at her, dumbstruck. So that was where the guilt was coming from. Anna Ash felt responsible for this mess when she'd had almost no part in it.
"It's not your fault."
She shook her head, brow puckering and jaw flexing in stubborn denial. "If it had only been you, I think you may have found a way out of the situation yourself. I was the liability. I don't have enough ability to defend myself, so you felt you had to step in."
Maybe that had been the final clincher in the decision, but so much had led up to this. I'd put her into the position to be hurt in the first place. I couldn't let her sling this millstone around her neck.
"Lasciel's shadow has been pushing and prodding me for months. Something was bound to give eventually, Anna. If it hadn't been this, it would have been something else. I almost took it up to fight the wendigo. This wasn't your fault. Now could you please tell me what happened when I sort of...vacated the premises so to speak?"
The stubborn denial still lined her jaw, but she didn't argue with me this time.
"Your body changed and you...no, Lasciel, killed the leader first. Then she took out the three holding me. I thought she might kill me as well, but she just shifted back and told me that we had to clean up and go. She retrieved your...um...product before she piled the bodies into the car and used magic to ignite the fuel in the gas tank. We walked a mile to a rest stop where she discarded the clothing and bought new at the gift shop. She used your contacts and in pretty short order she found a buyer for the drugs in Dallas. We rented a car, drove down, and exchanged them for about twenty-thousand per brick. She put it in an offshore account and kept about half a million for you to spend as you saw fit."
My brain bounced like a furious pinball between two of the most prominent details that stood out to me. Half a million. Lasciel had sold all the drugs I'd had on hand for more than I'd thought I'd get for them and stuffed a half a million dollars into my metaphorical pocket like it was chump change. Half a million. I couldn't even visualize what that looked like. My parents weren't exactly poor or anything, but I was used to living modestly. Even more so, after running away from home.
A half a million could buy a hell of a lot of ramen.
The second and more distressing fact that stood out to me was that I was in the Omni Hotel and Resort in Dallas, Texas. Freaking Texas. I wasn't sure how far outside Lafayette we'd been, so my estimate wasn't going to be spot-on, but I'd gotten really good at figuring out drive time on major highways during my time working under Torelli. Lafayette to Dallas was at least thirteen or fourteen hours in good traffic. Traffic was rarely ever good, so I automatically added on an hour as a buffer. So it had taken fifteen or sixteen hours to get here. I could pile on another hour or two to get the car, another hour to find and exchange the drugs, and then yet another hour where Lasciel had luxuriated in healing and cleaning my body at the hotel.
It brought my total up to about twenty hours. I'd lost the majority of a day to the Fallen and I couldn't remember a damn second of it.
I rounded on Lasciel, dragging her image before my eyes with a ferocious scowl. I spoke out loud for Anna's benefit, so she wouldn't think my anger was directed at her.
"You mean to tell me that you bound and gagged me for twenty hours?"
"Twenty-three," she corrected me mildly, perching on the sink. "There was more damage to your cheek than I'd expected, and healing magic can take time and energy. I didn't want you to return in agony, dearest Molly. And I did not bind you. If I meant to bury you, do you think you would have resurfaced? I do not mean to fetter you like an animal. We are partners, you and I."
'Then why was I out for twenty hours?" I fought to keep my voice from rising to a shout again.
"Because," Lasciel explained with the eternal patience of someone speaking to a child. "You wished to be."
AN: Apparently I'm a liar. :) I've been using writing this fanfic to bribe me to keep going on a couple of stories that have been dragging on in my personal life. So I do a 1,000 word to 500 word ratio as a bargain. Complete a thousand words on work, and you can write five hundred on the fanfic. Well, whatever works I guess. XD So I guess that I'm going to do a little more than I thought. But don't be surprised if I do cut off suddenly, because stuff is crazy in my job at the moment.