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A Short Tale of Forbidden Love, Red Girl's War, a Promise Made, Scars, and Negotiations
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The wind knifed her through the thin cotton tunic as soon as she stepped out of the shelter of the mall. Frigid wind stung her eyes and gnawed at her face. Boiling clouds overhead threatened the shivering woman with needle-like sleet at any moment. But the cold could go play in traffic for all Dylan cared. Right now, there was a sad, scared little girl camped out on the roof who needed her. How had she let this happen? How had she allowed herself to be so irresponsible? Dylan had known that there were kids who depended on her to be there for them. Why hadn't she been there?
Because I let myself get distracted by Nuada and the whole flogging thing, she reminded herself as she crossed her arms over her chest to conserve her bodyheat. Dylan's teeth chattered in the face of the November iciness. At least it wasn't snowing. Good reason to get distracted. But this can't happen again. I can't let any of my kids get hurt like this again. This is my fault; I should have been there.
Dylan knew Nuada had drifted from her side the moment the wind slammed against her back. As soon as she could no longer feel the heat of him near her, she felt the first moment of panic. Oh, get a freaking grip. Jeez. I've been doing this job for over five years. I can handle this without my Elven security blanket. Yet she couldn't suppress the nervousness - or the grief, sharp as a sword to the gut - when she saw Lisa huddled under the shabby red and white windbreaker that Rafael had given her two years ago for her birthday. The then-thirteen-year-old boy had bought it from a second-hand store, completely legal. His first gift to a lonely, mostly-ignored twelve-year-old with bruised eyes. Red and white: the colors of the Rojos, and the Lobos. Rival gangs, hers and his. Little Red and her Big Bad.
The psychiatrist made sure to clear her throat loudly before getting too close. The security lights on the roof glinted off the barrel of the gun in the girl's hand. When Lisa looked up, hope and heartache in her face, Dylan said, "Hey, there, Lisa."
"Doctor D?" Lisa murmured, sitting up straight. Her bottom lip began to tremble. In a choked voice, she whispered, "Dylan?"
Carefully (the cold, on top of the arduous trek up the countless stairs, was playing havoc with her bad leg), Dylan limped over to the shivering teenager and sank down beside her. Donovan's SWAT guy on the roof of another building - both women could see the sniper, who wasn't even trying to hide - was probably reporting the fact that now she was in the line of fire to the police sergeant down on the ground.
Well, he could get over it. First of all, it was freezing. Common sense said she and Lisa huddle together for warmth. Secondly, the day she became afraid of one of her Sight-kids, she was throwing in the therapy-towel. And Nuada wouldn't let her get hurt. Somehow, despite her admonition to stay out of everything, she knew if her life were in serious jeopardy (and he was one of the few she trusted to make an accurate assessment of that sort of thing), he would protect her.
Though holy crow; this wall she and Lisa were leaning against was like reclining against a glacier.
"Awful cold up here," Dylan said conversationally. Her teeth still chattered. She was careful not to look at the girl who was currently struggling for composure. "Why don't we go downstairs where it's warm?"
"Don't play me, Doc."
Good girl, Dylan thought with a slight smile. She's still got brains. That hasn't changed.
Aloud, the psychiatrist said, "Not trying to. I'm just really, really cold. I know what's going on - sort of - so I know that nothing I could say is gonna get you to budge before you're ready." Lisa gave her a penetrating look, as if searching for the trick. Then the girl relaxed a little. Dylan managed to unhook one of panic's piercing claws from her heart. "So, why exactly are we still camped out here in all this frigid wild nature? Girl Scout merit badge?"
Lisa choked on a laugh. No pussyfooting around for her therapist. Dylan always got right to business, trying to get her patients to laugh while she was at it, even when things were dark. Some of the Sight kids thought it was annoying, but she wouldn't do it to them. Only the ones who didn't mind.
Like me, Lisa thought, and then couldn't help the whisper that followed after: I'm going to miss her so much.
"Is it Rafael?" Dylan asked carefully, her voice deliberately neutral. Even so, she didn't miss Lisa's reaction. Flinch. Hunch down as if trying to avoid a blow. A small sound like a wounded animal escaped the fourteen-year-old; a sound Dylan knew very well. How often had she made that sound herself when she was younger? Especially after getting the "news" from her parents that John - her twin, her other half, her only true friend - was dead? She'd made that same sound at eighteen, six years later, when her twin had stumbled home, still a twelve-year-old kid, beaten half to death, staggering up the driveway with dazed, haunted eyes and magic clinging to him like a thousand glittering leeches.
And when she'd seen Nuada, chained by iron, slumped between the whipping posts, golden blood sheeting down his back. When her heart had screamed and her terror and desperation had nearly choked her. She'd made that strangled sound then, too. Dylan knew this sound, this sort of pain.
"What happened?"
"Doesn't matter," Lisa mumbled, closing her eyes.
Dylan saw the way tears clung to her lashes but didn't fall. And she knew exactly where those words had come from. Sometimes, I could cheerfully throttle her parents.
"Obviously it matters," she said aloud, "or we wouldn't be freezing to death out here." She thought for a long, hard moment. Felt warmth shimmer like a tiny seed in her chest as she made her decision. "How did he die, mihita?" Lisa's shocked face, edged with brittle pain, made Dylan's eyes sting. Oh, Heavenly Father... Rafael's gone. I can see it in her eyes - he's dead. He was just a kid. "You wouldn't be up here if you two stood any kind of chance against all those idiots down there, which means he's gone, doesn't it?"
Lisa drew her knees up to her chest, struggling against the black thing in her ribcage slamming down hard against her. The sleeves of her windbreaker were red, dark as fresh blood in the dingy light of the late November afternoon. Just like the blood spreading across Rafael's shirt. Dark and red soaking his white button-down shirt. The fourteen-year-old shivered as her brother's voice etched itself like acid against her mind. Killed us a Grande Mal Lobo, didn't we, Niña Rojo? Killed us a Big Bad Wolf. Good job. And her parents' voices and the voice of the policeman who'd been first on scene, their words all the same: just a punk. Forget him. You're better off.
Better off? The girl echoed now. Better off without Rafael? Better off without late nights on the roofs of their apartment buildings, watching the stars and complaining about Mr. Molina while they tackled algebra together, since Rafe was actually smart with numbers and she wasn't. Better off without "mystery" notes and flowers in her locker every morning; poems about eyes like Spanish Harlem at night; the wall of the gym, usually reserved for gang tags, sprayed with the most beautiful aerosol art of a girl in a red cloak sleeping curled up against a huge, gray wolf that guarded against the other, black wolves with bared teeth and tawny eyes. Better off with her parents screaming at her about being a nothing-gangster like José and never being able to get into college, with José hassling her day after day about refusing to get jumped - or screwed - in. Yeah, I'm so better off, she thought bitterly.
"Who did it, Lisa?"
"José," she whispered. "Me and Rafael took a walk in the Park yesterday, ya know? Neutral territory, full of crazies. Can't afford to start nothin' over in the Park unless you wanna maybe die. And the Park, that's where you live; everyone knows that. Ceśar'd kill the Lobos for startin' stuff there. And Tito, he'd kill any of the Rojos."
Not everyone wanted to ghost Doctor Myers. Some of the gang leaders had been forced to see her when in juvie or in school. Liked that she respected them, even if she was open about the fact that she didn't like the Life. If she'd been street instead of the school's top head shrinker, what Lisa's brother had gotten his friends to do to Dylan would've gotten José and his friends executed. But you didn't kill your best guy over a white woman who wasn't family or nothing. You just beat the hell out of 'em. And Lisa's brother had limped for days after that. Dylan had actually gotten a text from Tito a few months back, making sure nobody was messing with her. It helped, having "friends" in low places.
"And then what?" Dylan pressed when Lisa had fallen silent for several minutes. She could tell that the fourteen-year-old was far away. Thinking about prowling the woods in the Park with Rafael?
My big, bad wolf, she'd called him during their sessions. And me, his little Red Girl, his Niña Rojo. It's like one of your stories, Doctor D. If only her story hadn't ended the way the fairy tale had, with the wolf lying dead at the hands of Red's brother. Little Red's tears and blood as red as Lisa's windbreaker on the ground.
"Gunshots," Lisa mumbled. Her breath hitched. "Rafe pushed me down but... he didn't... he got hit. I called the cops. Took 'em thirty minutes to get there. Thirty minutes. He was already... And you know what them cops said when they got there?"
Served the little thug right. Respectable people want to walk in this park. These gangsters just breed like cockroaches. With quivering chin and hate in her eyes, the fourteen-year-old stared at Dylan, who looked calmly back at her without so much as a twitch to bely her haunted thoughts or churning emotions.
"They didn't even care. He was dead and they didn't care. They're not even gonna have a funeral for him. His dad said they can't afford to spend that kind of money on a 'traitor.' Just 'cause he loved me, he's a traitor, his dad said. His dad, Dylan! Nobody cares that he's dead!"
With deliberate slowness, her stinging eyes never leaving Lisa's face, Dylan said, "I care." When she saw that the words had penetrated Lisa's brain, she added, "And that..." She'd been about to say "boy," but changed her mind. "That young man is getting a funeral, even if I have to make the arrangements and pay for it myself. He deserves to be remembered with respect. You have the right to be able to visit his grave if you want."
Deep inside where she would deal with it later, her heart was throbbing like she'd been stung in the chest by a wasp. Rafael. Dead. Only fifteen and shot down in the park like he was nothing. Something black pulsed through Dylan once, twice. Pain lanced through her temples. Subsided. She didn't have time for hate or rage now. Not if this was going to end with anything other than Lisa's death into the bargain.
"You... you'd do that? But it's..." Lisa floundered, trying to think of a reason why this couldn't happen. "It's expensive-"
"I've got money to burn and you know it," Dylan replied. "I'm a doctor with no student loans. I live in an itsy-witsy cottage this big, and don't pay a gas bill except in winter. I don't have car payments or insurance and get most of my groceries and stuff through bartering and junk with the Amish community. I've got enough saved up that I can arrange for Rafe to have a decent funeral; this is important."
Another funeral, she added with a touch of moroseness. How many of these am I going to have deal with? How many of these kids are going to die before they even hit eighteen? But she didn't show the exhaustion or the heaviness in her chest. Only kept coaxing the skittish girl.
"And I know that you'd want to be there for that, right? Didn't you promise him once that if he died, you'd go to his funeral? Even though José and even Ceśar wouldn't want you there." Dylan had had a brief word with Ceśar, leader of the Lobos, about the neutrality of funerals before, on behalf of one of her other Sight kids. She'd gotten his little brother out of getting sent to juvie once, so he'd given in, called them even. And Tito would let Lisa go because José was still on Tito's short list and José wouldn't want his little sister going to the funeral of a rival gang member. "You promised Rafael, Lisa."
Promised I'd put red and white roses on his grave, Lisa remembered. Red for true love, white for eternal love. The two combined for togetherness. Thornless, for love at first sight. I did promise that, didn't I? But... "If I give up now, they'll lock me up. I won't get to go anyway." Her small hand tightened on the trigger of the gun. She saw Dylan tense just a little bit. "You know it's not your fault, right, Doc?"
"It's not yours, either," the psychiatrist replied softly. "I can't guarantee you won't spend at least a night in lock-up, but I think I can pull some strings. Maybe get you sent somewhere a bit less-"
"Saint Vincent's again? With Doctor Westenra?"
"Doctor Westenra can take a flying leap off a cliff," Dylan snarled. She felt a faint, far-away sizzle of surprise and confusion that she was pretty sure was Nuada (well, of course - she'd never talked about anyone like that in front of him before). Ignored it. "I'll keep him away from you. Maybe you'll get lucky and Doctor Hollis will be there. He's pretty cute." Another claw of panic unhooked from Dylan's heart when Lisa smiled. Weak. Wobbly. But it had some of the spark Dylan loved about the girl. "And you like the French toast at Saint Vin's, right?" Dylan said, and relaxed a little more when the girl gave a small chuckle. It was weak, and tired, but at least it was a laugh. "Decent breakfast every Monday sounds pretty good," she added. "Bacon, eggs, sausage. Good stuff. And they got those apple juice cups with the tinfoil - you like those."
"Better than my parents' place."
"If I can keep you out of juvie, will you come down with me?" Dylan asked. She'd deal with Lisa's parents later, and Rafael's, after talking to Donovan. "I know what you're up here for: a quick and relatively painless death, so you can see Rafael again. And hon, that option is still open even if you come downstairs with me." She would just have to make sure Lisa didn't want to take it. But candidness was what had won the Hispanic girl over during that very first meeting a year and a half ago, and Dylan was pretty sure it was what would win her over now. "But don't you want to go to Rafe's funeral like you promised?" She could see the battle raging inside the too-thin teenage girl. See how much the girl wanted to put the gun on the ground, collapse in Dylan's open arms, and just sob. Where has your mother been all this time? You should have been able to cry to her. "I'll even buy the flowers, okay? Put the gun down, Lisa. Let me help you. I know what you're feeling. If anyone knows, I do. Let me help."
"You know what it's like to see the person you love more than anything else in the world die in front of you?"
Die in front of you. Nuada, beaten to death by Eamonn's men. Just a nightmare, but so very real. Each breath a struggle under the weight of broken ribs. Golden eyes blinded by blood and suddenly his chest no longer rose and fell with his breath. Dead. Gone. Just like John had been gone when...
Die in front of you, die without you, Dylan thought, and remembered when the phone call from her parents had come through, the day before her twelfth birthday. The day before her twin would come to her in the institution with a cupcake and a new book as her present. His own allowance spent on the book, his time spent on the cupcake. No lit candles - they were against the rules - but he would sing to her anyway. Just like he always did. Tell her to make a wish. Blow out the happy ghosts of birthday flames.
But then the call. Then Doctor Fitzpatrick, the head therapist, pulling her into his office to tell her there would be no more visits, no more books, no more cupcakes on her birthday. No more healing-balm of her brother's love in the face of torture. No more John. Dead, her parents had said. Missing for two weeks. Assumed dead. Dead. And Dylan, all alone in the dark again. They hadn't even had the decency to tell her themselves.
Nuada dying in front of me, John dying without me, she thought, and knew now was the time to push back her sleeves. She just hoped that Nuada couldn't see what she was about to do. The explanation of what he'd see would have been really awkward.
Dylan stretched out her left arm and shoved back the tunic sleeve. She ignored the cold raising goosebumps on her bare skin and touched the thick, fleshy scar at the bend of her elbow where the large vein showed pale blue against the skin. The scar was the approximate size of a fifty-cent coin. Sprawling like a fat, many-legged spider the color of dead flesh. Burning from the cold. Lisa's eyes were wide in her face now. Then Dylan switched to the other arm and showed another mound of scar tissue at the bend of that elbow. Still the same icy whiteness. This scar was even sloppier, though, and concave, as if someone had scooped out a piece of the older woman's arm.
"There are three more that look about like this," Dylan said softly. Lisa's breath from her slack jaw turned the icy air to puffs of mist. "One on each thigh, near the artery and big vein. There's another over my heart, right here." She touched right above the left side of her chest, very near the center. "Each one, I almost died. My parents told me that my twin brother had died. They were wrong, but we didn't know that for six years. When they told me, I cried of course. After that, though... some things... happened. And I thought that if this was what my life was going to be like, then screw it. I didn't have to deal with this. Even dying was better than being alone. Being unwanted. Living in hell. So I tried to cut open the artery, here," she touched her left arm, "with a broken piece of plasticware. It almost worked, but the barricade I had in front of my bedroom door didn't hold up when they tried to get in. Whole thing hurt like blue fire, too. Had to get a tetanus booster, and you know I hate needles.
"Next time I had the chance, I broke off a piece of the framework for my bed - they were cheap back then - and stabbed myself in the femoral artery. Same story. Tried to hack open my right arm with a sharp stone (I was getting desperate at this point); tried to claw my way to the big vein in my other leg. Both times, the goon squad caught me. Finally I said 'Screw it, I'm gonna do this the easy way - straight to the heart.' So I took a pencil - just a little stubby thing; we didn't have pens, too dangerous - and tried to stab my way to my heart so that I could finally just end it."
Every time, the blood had been hot and slick on her hands. The pain had screamed at her to stop, to just let the emotional hurt be and stop the physical agony no matter the cost. But she had kept stabbing and hacking at the flesh over her heart. Focused on the blood pumping hot from the wound. Until she'd seen him - John, terrified and shivering in some dark place she couldn't reach, John, her twin, alone in the darkness - begging her with horrified eyes to stop now. D, you gotta stop now. Stop! And the red-slicked, blunt-ended pencil had fallen to the floor in a spreading pool of blood and she'd fainted from the pain, the exhaustion, the thoughts swirling together and clashing in her head.
She'd phased in and out of consciousness for what felt like years. Finally woken up in a padded room in a straitjacket, the half-healed wound over her heart throbbing. No more chances. No more escape. No more freedom, even the limited freedom they'd let her taste until then. Nothing but blank white walls and the ravenous dark that fell upon her every night at precisely seven o'clock, at lights' out. And when she finally got out of that prison, there had been yet another hell waiting for her.
"And yes, Lisa," Dylan added, forcing those memories away. She wasn't in the dark anymore. Wasn't a little girl anymore. And John was just fine. "I've seen someone I care about very deeply beaten to death in front of me. It was a hallucination - faerie glamor - but while it was happening I thought it was real. I saw someone I... someone I love very much die in front of me in the most brutal ways, over and over again."
There was a sudden shimmer of awareness to Dylan's left, as if someone were staring at her. She saw golden eyes full of puzzlement flash through her mind. A frisson of embarrassment skittered down her spine. Like that's not distracting as heck. He needs to quit doing... whatever he's doing to make me notice him like this.
"So yes," the psychiatrist added, ignoring Nuada's glamored presence. "I know what you're feeling right now: like every breath hurts, like the pain is crushing you and you can't think or move or even breathe without it hurting more and more. Like you'd do anything to erase what keeps playing behind your eyes. It's not even that you want to die. You just don't want to hurt anymore. You don't want to feel anything ever again as long as the pain stops. I've been there." She could see the teenager's chin quivering. See the single tear rolling down the cold, pale cheek. "Now come on, Lisa. You know you can trust me. You know that. Let me help you. Put the gun down, honey."
Blue eyes locked with dark brown. Such pain and heartache in those eyes. Dylan put everything she felt for Lisa – regret; sorrow; desperation; hope; and fierce, fierce love - into her own gaze. Realized the moment the girl saw exactly what she was feeling.
Something brittle inside the teenager cracked. Shattered. The gun slid from Lisa's hand and hit the ground. And the girl threw her arms around Dylan and began to cry.
"Let it out," Dylan murmured, sliding her arms around the thin girl. Lisa's tears were like ice water on her neck. Several feet away, Dylan saw a shimmer of air that flickered every other second with Nuada's image. A "don't-look-at-me-you-don't-see-anything" glamor. But she saw him: his carefully neutral expression, the deep amber of his eyes studying her silently, the questions behind his eyes. Dylan closed her eyes and said only, "Just let it out. I've got you. I'm sorry I wasn't here sooner. I'm so sorry, Lisa. I'll be there next time, I promise. I'm so sorry."
The sparkly, pink cell phone on the ground suddenly buzzed. Dylan glanced at the readout. She didn't let go of Lisa, just kept holding her as the girl sobbed into her shoulder. The psychiatrist recognized the number, though. Donovan. Probably checking on whatever his SWAT team had reported. Well, he'd have to wait. If she broke the moment now, broke the rapport in any way, there was no guarantee Lisa would come down with her. She'd put the gun down, yes - but she could always pick it up again.
"You can answer it," the girl mumbled as the phone continued to buzz. She swiped at her face, the streaks of mascara like black tears on her cheeks. "Probably your cop calling."
"Oh, please don't ever call him my cop again, okay?" Dylan replied, picking up the phone. "He's like my brother. I think I just threw up in my mouth a little." Lisa choked out a watery laugh. The phone beeped when Dylan clicked TALK. "Donovan?"
"Are you done with the hugging yet? Females." There was just a hint of teasing under the gruff words, but Dylan could hear the relief in his tone as well. Obviously he'd been informed Lisa was no longer armed.
"Depends; are you finished being a sexist pig with the sensitivity of a paleolithic troglodyte?" Before the cop could do anything but laugh - this was a familiar "argument," so Dylan knew exactly what the sergeant would have said anyway - she added, "All kidding aside, what are the odds Lisa ends up at Saint Vincent's on suicide watch instead of being shuttled off to juvie?"
A long moment of silence. Then, "You've finally cracked, Doc."
"Don't make me call in my big guns, Donovan." Her voice was quiet, soft as a falling snowflake. Just as cold, too. "You know I hate doing that. And I thought we were friends."
"You think I'm scared of your baby brother The Fed?" The policeman demanded. Dylan didn't say a word. Just waited for several seconds, hoping he wouldn't actually challenge her. John wasn't exactly on her side right now. Or very intimidating. It was more that Donovan didn't want the headache of dealing with the government agent who seemed to have a vast array of high-end contacts and no set place of employment. But a federal agent was a federal agent. The sergeant finally muttered, "Ah, I'm gettin' soft. Your fault, Doc. If you can convince the LT, then I'll pack the kid off to the nut-house instead of lockup. And since I know you, you're plannin' something. Goin' after the parents, huh? You think she's really worth it?"
"I don't waste time," Dylan replied, thinking of José, of Lisa's parents. Of Rafael, dying in his own blood, unmourned, alone... except for a crying fourteen-year-old girl in the woods. This shouldn't have been your story, Dylan thought. But don't worry, Lisa. I'll take care of Rafael now. "I never waste time, Donovan. So you know the answer to that." Softer now, she added, "Please, James. Consider it a personal favor. Okay? She's worth it. Please."
He sighed. Dylan never called him by his first name; not at church, not even when they did the social-friend thing sometimes. Which meant this was really important to her. So Sergeant James Donovan said, "I'll call Peabody."
"Thank you," she said softly, and he could tell she meant it.
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