Hey there,
I hope you are enjoying all the sporting activities this weekend, having success avoiding the sporting activities if you dislike them; enjoying lots and lots of food if you celebrated thanksgiving this week or… if none of the above apply that you’re having a wonderful day full of smiles.
This week, I’ve been busy completing assignments… attempting to understand structures and legal frameworks inside the European Union and wondering why they needed to use the term ‘council’ for everything.
On a writing note, I had an amazing idea for a book pop into my head yesterday and I’m trying to note it down then let it ruminate while I work on getting The Above & Beyond Series up and running. One of the difficult parts of that is that is finding a cover I feel happy with.
Although I adored my first cover and the wonderful designer who made it for me, unfortunately, as with lots of the problems when you move away from a publisher, they decided I wasn’t allowed to keep the cover. *blows raspberry* I could renew the rights of the picture as that belongs to the person who created it but… well… sometimes it’s good to have a clean break and so I’ve been hoping to find somewhere I can get a lovely picture of a waterwheel and work on building the cover that way. Either way, I know the cover will come together when it’s good and ready to.
I have some more of The Empath reworked for you. This week’s chapter is that rather important meeting between Aeron and a certain Doctor Llys. It’s funny how their story really became the backbone of the series especially when Doctor Llys wasn’t really meant to have a role beyond Serenity… but I guess she and Aeron knew a lot better than me!
Chapter 4
I entered the head psychiatrist’s office for my daily session less than an hour after the incident but it weren’t the elderly letch called Doctor Bison sittin’ waiting for me, nope, but a thirty-something lady with brightest shade of lipstick I’d ever seen.
‘Come in and take a seat,’ she said, not once looking up from her notes but the light from the computer monitor bounced off her eyelashes and brought out the color of her irises: looked not quite blue or green… gray?
Val butted me forward with her baton and I took a seat in the visitor’s chair with its welcoming restraints—Ol’ Bison’s idea—He’d been in Serenity longer than most of the inmates had been alive an’ was the kinda guy Freud would have loved but as a specimen instead of a fellow psychiatrist. This lady, on the other hand, emanated a different energy: that she was real in love with her job and her books and her certificates; that she was real proud of her achievements, and she’d not wanted, in the slightest, to be stuck in this institution with the likes of me.
Guess Val felt the same seeming as she was sporting a bruised jaw but she simply nodded to the doctor and trudged on out.
‘Aeron Lorelei,’ the doctor said in a cultured accent. ‘Interesting name.’
I nodded, transfixed by the energy dancing around her. She was definitely a go-getter.
‘You were Lori’s cellmate?’ she asked, her gray eyes tracking over the words of the report in front of her.
I nodded again and stared at the large doctorate certificate on the wall cause it was kinda clear the doctor weren’t interested in looking at me. Her name was Dr. S. Llys and she’d gone to Yale—so she was ivy league then. Figured.
‘It says on your file that you believe you can see people’s thoughts,’ she said in a non-committal tone.
I sighed. Most people who started off saying ‘you believe’ usually finished by saying I was delusional. I might have been a lot but I knew what I felt and what I saw.
‘Aimee tells me that you knew Lori would attack Sheila,’ Llys said again in a non-committal tone.
I folded my arms. ‘In what context?’
Llys looked up and her stormy gray eyes were unnervingly clear—yeah, she thought I was trouble and if she kept up her attitude, I would be. ‘Is there more than one?’
‘You started by saying I believe I can see people’s thoughts then you say Aimee said I knew Lori would attack—’ I held her gaze and stuck out my chin. ‘—so it ain’t too obvious to assume you’re referring to my foresight rather than the actual incident.’
She raised her eyebrows—she could raise them all she liked. I could throw out a sentence when I needed to. Yeah. Stick that, Ivy League.
‘Did you sense that she was going to attack beforehand?’ Llys asked with a flick of a dusty blonde eyebrow.
‘Yes.’
Llys sat back and perched her hands together in a prayer-like pose. ‘You knew Lori would attack Sheila and you didn’t stop her.’
‘Yeah.’ I flexed my biceps ‘cause it used to freak Ol’ Bison out. He hadn’t liked women with muscles and I had more muscles than most.
‘Why?’ Llys studied me but she had some guarded feeling around her like a one-way screen I couldn’t see through so I looked out of the window behind her.
When you’re stuck inside grey dank walls for so long, it’s funny how much greener everything looks beyond… even if there was snow fluttering ‘round which would soon cover it… and even if it was through bars and barbed wire.
Llys wouldn’t get that I’d had to help the guard with Tiz or that Aimee and the others were trying to help and not hurt anybody. Llys had never seen Tiz near shiny objects and I hoped she never would but if I told her, she might stick Tiz in solitary and we all hated solitary.
‘Freedom,’ I mumbled wondering why.
‘Yours?’ she asked.
I laughed. Now she was just being dumb. I might have gotten peace from Lori screaming all night and her desperation coating the walls of the cell like thick black tar but no, it only chained me up more inside knowing I couldn’t have done nothing to help her.
‘Did you convince her it was a good idea?’ Llys fired off without moving her hands from her pose. ‘Is that the way you work?’ Her dusty blonde eyebrows dipped in the middle. ‘Is that how you and your friends entertain yourselves?’
I raised my eyebrow. Even Bison hadn’t accused me that quick. Even so, Psychiatrists must come off production lines ‘cause they all got mad when you didn’t give the satisfactory answer to fit you into box a, b, or c. I didn’t much like psychiatrists.
‘Nice of you to think so highly of me,’ I muttered.
‘I haven’t formed any opinion of you yet,’ she said in a calm tone but her energy was bouncing around again so she picked up a gold pen and tapped it to her desk. I could only guess that Aimee had been kinda prickly in her session, before mine, to get Llys so agitated.
‘Haven’t you?’ I laughed and flexed my biceps again. ‘You sat there reading the opinion of a man who should have retired forty years ago,’ I said and shook my head. ‘You’ve borrowed his opinion of me and he didn’t know me.’
Llys smiled.
I smiled right back.
Her energy was flickering about like crazy ‘cause I’d told her exactly what she’d done and it was confusing her. She would put it down to observation skills from the way her aura swirled. It was easier to think that way. It was logical. Doctors liked logic.
‘So who are you?’ she asked breathing slowly in through her nose and out through her mouth.
I rolled my eyes. Psychiatrists were all the same—if in doubt, switch the question. ‘Aeron Lorelei, but then I thought you’d read that on the notes.’
‘Is this the way it’s going to be, Aeron?’ she asked, her eyes stormy and her lips thinned. Psychiatrists were definitely irritated when they started using your first name.
‘That depends on you, Tess,’ I shot back.
She froze and her aura fired off in panic. Yeah, how could I possibly know her mother’s pet name for her?
I smiled—there was no use in her trying to outplay an Empath ‘cause I could see all her cards.
‘Out.’ She pointed to the door, eyes hard.
‘Huh?’ I cocked my head.
‘Get out. Now.’ She glared at me like she was gonna shoot me with her gold pen.
I shrugged, got up, and headed out the door to Val who stared back at me.
‘Lorelei?’ she glowered up at me from under her eyebrows.
‘She kicked me out,’ I said with a shrug. It was the fastest I’d ever been kicked out of a session.
I liked it.
