Mind Games: An Urban Fantasy Novel (The Lillim Callina Chronicles Book 6) (2 page)

“Someone has to be,” she replied as we slid to a stop in front of a small blue house with white trim. It didn’t seem that big, or very new, but something about it seemed familiar although I was reasonably sure I’d never seen it before. A basketball hoop with peeling paint stood off to the side of the driveway. It was the kind with a giant adjustable pole so you could lower or raise the height of the basket. It looked like it hadn’t been used in a few years. Still, it was odd. I didn’t remember playing basketball, or really any other sport… ever. Then again, the only thing I remembered doing for the last several years was monster hunting.

“Your old hoop broke, and we moved it out of the way,” my father said when he caught me staring at it. “I hadn’t thought about it, but we can get you a new one if you like.” He raised his eyebrows at me.

“I’m good,” I said, slowly getting out of the car and testing the concrete driveway with my feet. It felt real enough. So why was everything so weird seeming? I mean, come on, basketball? I was barely five feet tall. Why would I have been into a sport based on being absurdly tall? If this was the best my hallucinations could do, they were going to have to try a lot harder.

I smirked to myself as my mother came over and walked me toward the front door. My father was searching in his pockets for his keys, and after what felt like forever, he tugged out a single key and pressed it into the door lock.

“How many times have I told you to just put all your keys on a ring?” My mother asked as he twisted the lock and pushed the door open.

“About as many as I’ve told you I don’t like bulky things in my pockets,” he replied, stepping inside and moving toward a strange beeping device beyond the doorway. There were a few more beeps in a different frequency before the sounds died away completely.

“Well, don’t come asking me to find your keys the next time you lose them because you’ve strewn them about the house.” She pulled me through the door and pushed it shut behind us. “It’s why I bought you that catchall.”

My father shrugged sheepishly. “I like the catchall, but it’s not where I empty my pockets.” He said more, but I wasn’t listening anymore. Instead, I was staring around the room. The walls were painted mango and had black and white photographs of scenic cliffs covered by clouds that reminded me of exactly what the cliffs at the edge of the floating city of Lot had looked like.

A shiver racked my body as I turned away and stared at the ugliest brown couch I had ever seen. It sort of wrapped around the entire room like a snake, surrounding a coffee table with a bunch of childish art laminated into the surface. They were all crayon drawings of a purple-haired girl doing all sorts of random things like swimming with the Loch Ness Monster or escaping from a shadowy figure in a castle.

Each one brought back a memory of a time my mother had trained me to be a demon hunter, only these were the drawings of a five year old. How could they depict all my memories, and oh my god, I was actually insane. The thought hit me like a sledgehammer to the face, and I stumbled backward until my shoulders pressed against the wooden door.

“Lillim!” my mother cried, whirling around to grab me before I could fall. Her hands fixed on my arms, keeping me from sliding down the wall. “What’s wrong, baby?”

“Those pictures…” I murmured, nodding toward the table.

They both looked at the table, and the entire room held its breath. “What about them?” my mother asked, eyes very serious as she studied my face.

“I thought…” I said before I realized what I had been about to say. So instead of saying, “I thought they were real,” I finished with, “I thought you threw all my art away.”

She let out a sigh of relief as a smile crossed her lips. “As crazy as it sounds, Lillim, I couldn’t bear to get rid of the table. I sat with you as a little girl while we picked out the pictures from your art collection.” Tears gathered in the corners of her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she murmured, her breath warm on my neck. “I should have known it’d be confusing.”

“It’s okay, Mom,” I replied, knowing she would blame herself now if I did anything crazy. Even now I could see the wheels spinning inside her brain, constructing all sorts of scenarios about how the damned table was going to make her lose me. But she wouldn’t lose me, not like that anyway.

My mouth twisted into a hard line. Unless… unless this was just my hallucinations trying to make me feel like I was insane when I wasn’t. Well played, hallucinations. Well played. You almost got me.

“Can I see my room now?” I asked, extricating myself from her hug. She stood there looking at me for a long time before nodding slowly, and I got the distinct impression I’d hurt her feelings. I reminded myself that her feelings didn’t matter because she wasn’t real, even though I felt like the world’s worst daughter anyway.

She gripped my hand, squeezing my fingers and leading me down a narrow corridor before turning into a room on the left. The door was already open, spilling sunlight into the hallway, and as she pulled me inside, I gasped.

Drawings covered every square inch of the space. It looked like someone had actually painted scenes depicting a purple-haired girl with two swords as she rampaged through the underworld, slaughtering all sorts of supernatural bad guys, all over the walls. On my left, a person who looked remarkably like my mother stood back to back with the purple-haired girl as demons surrounded them. Lightning flashed from the clouds above them, casting their faces in shadow.

I took a step forward into the room, my brand new black tennis shoes sinking into the plush gray carpet as I turned in a slow circle. “Who did all this?” I muttered, staring at the floating island of Lot drawn in the corner of the room. The girl stood atop its walls, her hand clutching a boy’s as they stared out at an army of demons. The sky above them was torn asunder with flashes of light as a masked man flew toward them, jet black katana in hand.

“We did it together,” my father said from behind me. “I drew and you painted.” He swallowed, and I could hear the hurt in his voice because I didn’t remember.

I spun, shaking my head like I was a crazy person. “No,” I murmured, tears clouding my vision as I stared at him, hurt and anguish twisting his features. “No, I don’t.”

“Shh,” my mother whispered, wrapping her arms around me and hugging me tightly. “We can paint the walls if you like.”

“No,” I murmured again, shaking out of her grip as I took a couple steps away from her toward the bed. It was positioned so the sunlight would land right on the pillow. I sat on it anyway. It was harder than the mattress at Mercer & Mercer had been, reminding me of the bunks back in the Dioscuri city of Lot.

“Honey, it’s okay,” my mother said, still looking at me like she didn’t actually think it was “okay.”

“It’s not okay,” I said, shaking my head as my vision blurred and tears spilled down my cheeks. “I lost years of my life, years with you because I was trapped in a made up fantasy world.”

“Oh, Lillim,” my mother said, scooping me up in her arms like I was still a little kid. “Don’t worry about that now. I’m just happy you’re back with us.”

“And here I am reduced to chopped liver again,” my father said, spinning on his heel and moving to the door. “I’ll go get some paint. What color would you like your room to be?”

Chapter 3

It felt like I’d been home for only a few minutes, but somehow, I was going back to school to complete the last quarter of my senior year. Amazingly, I’d managed to keep up with some schoolwork while inside the mental hospital, which made no sense since I didn’t remember doing any of it. In fact, the only thing I remembered about any sort of high school experience was facing down a giant cyclops before homeroom. Evidently, that hadn’t been real.

Still, the doctors had signed off on the whole going back to school thing. In fact, they’d insisted it would be good for me to get back into the swing of things. I stared up at the ceiling of my pink room and let out a slow breath as the fan above me spun in a slow lazy arc. I barely remembered painting the room or picking the color. There were just vague glimpses of memory surrounding the event: My dad and I walking around a hardware store. Covering everything with plastic. Him attacking me with a paintbrush. The disjointed painting session that followed.

It was all rattling around in my brain like a bad movie montage. Just thinking about it was like watching a slideshow played in fast forward. Still, we must have done it because it’d been weeks, and the room had gotten itself painted the day after I’d come home.

My room didn’t even smell like paint anymore. Instead, the smell of rose potpourri drifted into my nostrils from a little object plugged into the outlet by my too small, too hard little bed. It was weird at first because I hadn’t known it was there. The smell of wild roses had just filled the room. Embarrassingly, I had whirled, looking for the Keeper or some other sign of fairy, only to come face to face with the tiny scent-spewing device.

I rolled over on my stomach and stared at it. I sniffed. Roses. I was so crazy it was, well, crazy. I needed to get a new scent. Maybe pine trees or lemons? Lemons seemed good. Pine trees might remind me of werewolves.

To say I was trying wasn’t exactly true. I existed in a weird state where I wasn’t quite sure if my world was real or not. Sometimes it definitely felt like I was the only stable object within the world, and my reality just wasn’t orienting itself properly, but then there would be little things, like the rose-scented potpourri. It was just enough for me to look over at it and wonder if I made up the Keeper of the Wild Hunt.

Still, if I was planning on making someone believe they were insane, this is exactly what I’d do. I’d plant little details here and there to make it seem like the person had latched onto a tiny kernel of truth and spun it into delusions of grandeur like Rumpelstiltskin spinning straw into gold. Except that’s also exactly what a crazy person would tell herself.

There was a knock at my door. Not loud enough to startle me even though it did anyway. I sat up quickly as the knob turned slowly, my cheeks flushed and embarrassed even though I didn’t know why. It wasn’t like I’d been doing something I wasn’t supposed to do.

“Lillim?” my mother asked from the other side. The door was barely cracked open like she didn’t want to disturb me. I still wasn’t used to her walking on eggshells around me. Whether or not my memories of her in the Dioscuri were real, they were all I had. The Diana Cortez of my memory was more of a kick in the door and pull me out of my bed by my ankles kind of woman. She did not peek in on her daughter, fearing the worst.

“Yeah, Mom?” I asked, getting to my feet and padded across the gray carpet toward the door in my pink socks.

She pushed the door open wide enough for me to see her entire body in profile though one of her hands was out of view. She looked tired despite the smile painted onto her face. I wondered how she had slept. Probably not well judging by the dark purple bags under her eyes. Her hair was a little more disheveled than usual, but that may have been because she was about out of medical leave time. As soon as I started back at school, she’d be back at work. Evidently, staying home to babysit your insane daughter didn’t pay the bills. Who knew?

“I was wondering how you were feeling,” she asked, coming into the room. “Are you excited to go back to school?”

“I guess.” I shrugged, not quite sure what she was doing as she smiled at me. It wasn’t that I was unused to her checking up on me, but well, that’s exactly what it was. In the world of the Dioscuri, my mother had been about as comforting as a rabid hyena. Here, she was actually trying to bond with me in a way I’d only read about in books. It was actually kind of disconcerting since I didn’t know how to react.

She smiled at me, taking my hands in hers and squeezing. I swallowed, tears gathering at the corners of my eyes as I looked away from her and tried not to cry. She must have taken my reaction to her sudden show of affection as a need for comfort about the school thing because the next thing she said was, “If you don’t want to go back just yet, we can figure out a way to make it work.”

“No,” I shook my head, taking a deep breath and forcing myself to look at her. She was still smiling. Before I could say anything else, she pulled me in close for a hug. As her arms wrapped protectively around me, sobs began to escape out of my lips.

“What’s wrong, honey?” she whispered, voice strangely comforting. “You can tell me. I’ll do my best to help, no matter what it is.”

“Nothing,” I sobbed into her shoulder, barely resisting the urge to run away. This was everything I’d always wanted. I could admit that to myself but never to her, and not just because this might all be some kind of weird delusion. How would she feel if I told her my problem was that I wanted her to be loving and caring when she
was
everything I ever wanted? It made me feel guilty beyond measure, partially for disappointing this version of my mother, but mostly? Mostly, it made me feel like the worst person alive for wanting my Dioscuri mother to have been this way. And she was dead and gone.

How was that for cherishing her memory? I was a horrible person, and what was worse? Because I was so damned broken, I couldn’t even react to this version of my mother being nice to me like a normal person.

“It seems like something,” she whispered, brushing my hair out of my face. “Are you sure you don’t want to talk about it?”

“I don’t,” I said, sniffing as I looked into her brown eyes and smiled. “I just missed you is all.”

“I missed you too.” She stared at me for a long time before smiling at me. “If I had my way, we’d spend more time together, but you need to go back to school.” As she finished the words, she clasped my right hand in hers and began leading me toward the doorway to my room. Had she just thought I’d overreacted because I was going to school and wouldn’t be around her for a few hours a day? If it was, I didn’t have the heart to tell her differently.

Besides, what would I say? No, the real reason I missed you is because in the world of the Dioscuri, you’re dead and gone? Because in that world, you were more slave driving taskmaster than mother? No, I couldn’t say that. But I could sure as hell feel it.