Page 5 of Visions of Darkness

Clearing the roughness from my throat, I pinned on the brightest smile I could find. “I’m still here for four months.”

Until graduation. Then I would go. I knew I had to. I couldn’t stay here a second longer beneath my parents’ scrutinizing stares. I knew it was done out of love, but that didn’t make it any easier.

My mother and father were always watching me, waiting for me to snap.

To suffer another schizophrenic break. At least, that’s what the doctors had diagnosed me with the last time I’d been hospitalized.

The wound I’d sustained last night burned on my back.

If they knew what I was hiding right then? I’d immediately be back in that place. Terrified and alone. Doctors prodding into my mind like they could find a solution—a cure—for who I was.

“But you’re eighteen in four days. How is my baby going to be an adult?” Affection hitched her voice.

I tried to shift the attention away from me. “Well, you’ll have these three yahoos to keep you company.”

“Names,” Mitch peeped up from where he’d climbed onto his chair.

Laughter rolled from my throat. “Sorry. These sweethearts?”

I lifted my brow at him with the ribbing.

“‘Sweet,’ my ass,” Brianna mumbled out of Mom’s earshot as she moved by me. I gave her a gentle swat to the upper arm, and she sent a smirk my way as she took her seat.

I turned back to Mom. “What can I help with?”

“Can you grab the plate of toast?”

“Sure.”

I wound around the island to the stack of toast on the counter. Mom had just had her dream kitchen put in. The cabinets were sea blue, and the countertops speckled silver and blue and white. The old laminate floors had been replaced with tile that looked like gray wood.

A sharp twinge of discomfort snagged inside me. I wanted to shun the thought that it’d been a bribe from Dad for being a jerk, but I couldn’t shake it.

He’d been one a lot lately. More and more.

Protectiveness swelled from the depths of me. It was the part that hated the idea of leaving here once I graduated from high school. The part that wanted to shield my mother and my siblings.

Not that he’d become violent or was a danger to them.

He was just . . . different.

Had changed after I’d turned sixteen.

When the first wounds had shown. When I’d awakened screaming in my room the first time after I’d been burned. Unable to stop or to contain it. He’d burst through the door and had roared when he’d seen the wound slashed across my chest.

He’d demanded to know who’d done it. Ready to go on a rampage. To hunt down the monster who had dared to hurt his little girl.

But he didn’t know the types of monsters that truly existed. Ones he couldn’t protect me from.

I’d been in so much pain, so unprepared, so in shock that I’d told them what had happened while I was asleep, in Faydor, unable to keep the confession from tumbling free.

I’d taken them back to the dreams I’d been so foolish to share with them as a little girl. Dreams of playing in a sanctuary, in a paradise with others who had the same strange-colored eyes as mine. Ones who were like me, too young to grasp the warnings that had been hammered into my mind a million times by Ellis that I couldn’t share what happened when I fell asleep.

Only what had happened that night—the first night I’d been burned—was so different. It was then they’d come to believe my imaginations as a child had changed and developed into psychotic delusions.

They’d thought I’d done it to myself.

Nerves rolled through me when I felt the air shift from behind, and I peeked toward the entryway as my father strode in. He was tall and thickly muscled beneath the suit he wore. His blond hair was wavy and had begun to gray, though he cut it short in an attempt tokeep it tamed, and his eyes were a lighter shade of brown than the rest of the family’s.

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