A Shade of Dragon 2(59)

It was just going to be so much to deal with all at once.

The door came open and Dad was there; his face crumpled with relief as he collected me into his arms, and I summoned the will to return his embrace. His fiancée and her son were there, too, but I couldn’t be bothered to remember either of their names at the moment.

I was dragged inside and there was so much light and noise; how I hated this place. And Theon had just dumped me here, like an unwanted dog alongside the highway. They draped me in quilts and demanded to know where I had been, why, who, how, blah, blah, and Michelle, and the police, and Mom would need to be called too… Dad went to the phone and dialed… I didn’t have the strength to stop him. The fiancée checked my pupils and suggested that I was “on something.” Her son asked if I’d been abducted.

I’d told Theon that I would hate him forever if he did this to me, and he’d done it anyway.

My heart felt like a canyon in an earthquake.

Someone deduced that the hospital was where I needed to go. Dad got on the phone with my mom. My mom was on her way, he said. She’d been in Beggar’s Hole since January second, he said. I didn’t ask what day it was. I didn’t care. It didn’t matter. Streetlights washed by in the window as we drove to the hospital; the glass vibrated against my temple. I wanted to sleep for a million years.

The police were at the hospital. They wanted to talk to me. They asked me if Michelle had been with me. I shook my head. They asked if I’d been with this young man—witnesses called him “Theon,” and attested that he was my date on the night of my and Michelle Ballinger’s disappearances. Did I know him?

“No,” I answered flatly.

I didn’t know anyone by the name of Theon, bearing that description?

“No,” I said again.

They wanted to keep me overnight for observation. Mom freaked out; I didn’t care. I stayed. Whatever. They sent me home the next day with a prescription for mood stabilizers.



 



Mom tried to convince me for days to return with her to DC. I wouldn’t go. I didn’t know what else I could tell her; I didn’t want to leave the portal, the cave, the beach where I had met Theon… even though I hated him. Even though I hated him, I couldn’t bear to leave this place, like a widow condemned to her widow’s walk for every month that her husband was out at sea.

“Stay as long as you need,” Dad said.

Mom fumed. She said she would stay in Beggar’s Hole too, then. She would stay in the hotel until I was ready to go home.

I was “just in shock,” she said.

Just in shock.

Yeah.

I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. I stayed up at night and sat in the window seat, gazing out across the strip of beach which seemed a memento from another lifetime. Yet here I was, back again. Reporters called. Mr. Ballinger’s lawyer called and threatened the answering machine with legal action. I wondered where I could get a waverunner. I wondered, if I could rent a boat, how hard it would be to sail it, realistically.

That was when the tsunami hit.

I’d been numb for days, and this atomic bomb of self-pity swelled in my chest and burst, allowing me to finally wail with tears. I couldn’t even make it to my bed to sob into a pillow; I got halfway across the room and crumpled onto the carpet. I sobbed for the hopelessness of my situation. It was no longer under my control whether I ever saw my husband again. Theon was my husband! And he had abandoned me in another world! With no means of contact! Without a word, he had stranded me here, subject to the battery of questions and theories and pleas and judgments. I couldn’t take it. How could he?

I sobbed with bitterness and rage and loss and heartbreak, because dammit, I still loved him. In spite of everything I’d said… I missed his warm, even golden eyes. I missed his steady baritone and his kindness, his logic, his firmness, his fairness.

How could he?

When I roused myself from the marathon of weeping, my eyelids were swollen and my face was sopping wet, but I felt… better. I did feel better. I just needed some answers. I needed to think. Think. How could I get back to Theon?

Because damn it, if he wasn’t going to come back for me, then I was going to go to him. Maybe he didn’t believe that we were truly two halves of the same whole, but I did, and I couldn’t live without my other half.

I was googling astral projection when I gasped to myself and dropped the phone.

An oracle.

He had said that he’d consulted with an oracle before leaving for The Hearthlands again.

An oracle in the cave.



 



I had to wait for nightfall; the entire house watched me with hawkish vigilance. But when the time was right and the house was asleep, I pulled a sweater over my head and a jacket across my shoulders and pilfered a flashlight from the catch-all drawer in the kitchen. It was the first day I had been able to act like everything might be okay—because I had realized that maybe everything would be.