A Shade of Dragon 3(2)

“Oh. I must’ve forgotten.”

“I can see how it’d be easy to forget,” Mom allowed. Her eyes crusted with tears, and only this roused me from my stupor of self-pity. Mom never cried. Ever. “You’ve hardly looked at any of us since you got back, much less spoken. Even the police couldn’t get a word out of you. They keep reminding us that Michelle is still missing, but there’s only so much you can do. You’re just a girl.” Mom wasn’t speaking to me so much as herself now. “If you’re not ready, then you’re not ready, and besides, Michelle… Michelle is probably…” She pursed her lips and looked down into her own lap.

My instinct was to snap again—“No one needs to worry about Michelle Ballinger; she always comes out on top!”— but I held myself back and instead said, “I suppose I’m afraid you’re going to have me committed.”

“Oh, Nell. First of all—you’re nineteen. It’s not legal for your parents to assume guardianship of you without a court order that you have been found unable to mentally care for yourself.”

A smile cracked the corner of my lip. That was Mom. She’d be a lawyer until the day she died, and she seemed to sense that it was the reason for my rueful grin, as she squeezed my knee again and strained to make eye contact with me. I wasn’t making it the easiest thing in the world to do. “What I meant to say is”—she laughed softly—“you can trust us. You can trust me.”

I held her gaze and sucked in a breath. There was only one way to determine whether or not that was true.

“What if I told you that I left our dimension?”

Mom’s eyes iced over. “What?”

“If you’ve been here for, what, over two weeks now—Dad must have told you about Theon.”

And then her eyes darkened. Black ice. “He did mention an older gentleman,” she allowed. “A foreigner you’d met on the beach who claimed to be a prince in his home country.” Mom’s eyes slid away and hardened further as she thought of Theon—the Theon she had been told to hate. “But his home country didn’t even exist.”

“But it did,” I interjected.

Her eyes flew back to me, and I recoiled slightly.

“He took me there,” I explained in a rush. “And I was kidnapped by an ice prince named Lethe.”

“An ice prince.” Mom exhaled. Her chest sagged inward. “And Michelle? Did the ice prince kidnap her as well?”

“He married her,” I answered.

Mom whimpered and one hand came up to her lips. Her eyes squeezed shut tightly.

“Oh, Nell,” she sobbed. “What must you have been through, to create such an elaborate story? Maybe we will never know what that psychopathic bastard did to you.”

I reeled at her reaction. She thinks I’ve gone completely crazy. And she thought that Theon had done something to me.

“I’m telling you the truth.” How could she beg and plead, and then, before my story had even really started, dismiss it all as some traumatized fantasy world? I wished there was some way to prove to her that where I had been was real. “Go into the cave on the beach if you don’t believe me! Ask the oracle!”

“Stop,” Mom said.

“I knew this would happen.” I stood from the couch and moved past her, head pounding, desperate to depart from the house. I didn’t belong here. I had never belonged in this world, and now that I’d found my place, I’d been thrust from it. Here I was hung up on a rail. Go to school and get a job. But there—on the other side—I meant something. I mattered. There was Theon, and a city in the throes of insurgence, and magic, and destiny. Here there was The Shenandoah Institute, where I was still a freshman with an undecided major. Here was living in DC with my mom, television, and cars, and dating apps. It would make anyone want to die, wouldn’t it? “I have to get out of here,” I said, making my way to the front door. My hands were shaking.

“Nell, please!” Mom cried, getting up from the couch. “It’s getting dark! At least take your pepper spray!”

I turned to look over my shoulder at her, and it did move me to see my stoic mother’s face streaked in tears, to hear her begging me to not go outside in the dark, as if I was five years old again. But I couldn’t go back; not to last week, and not to last year. I couldn’t undo what had happened to me. I couldn’t erase Theon, and I wouldn’t, even if the technology existed.

“I have to get out of here,” I repeated. “I have my pepper spray.” Turning from her, I wrenched open the door and a blast of January wind cut into the living room. I stepped onto the porch and slammed the door behind me, descending the long wooden stairwell onto the isolated strip of moonlit beach.