“Your father and brother were the leaders of your wolf pack?” I continued, getting back on track.
“Yes. Your psychic powers didn’t tell you I was a wolf shifter?”
“They don’t work like that.”
He raised one of his thick eyebrows, and although the situation was quite grim, I couldn’t lie—I was enjoying the banter. Sure, maybe I’d enjoy it a bit more if the context of his visit was more banal, but I had to commend the guy for how he was holding himself together.
It explained those brick walls.Do I have brick walls?
Is it weird that I can never see my own emotions?Maybe I’d be too powerful.
Certainly wouldn’t need as much therapy.
…did I remember to schedule my next therapy appointment?
“How do they work then?”
I extended my hands to him, and there was a crackle of electricity between us. But instead of being intimidating or scary, it was pretty damn intriguing.
“Let me show you.”
He looked down at my palms, his stare lingering with an almost physical weight. But what I didn’t expect was for the brick wall in front of him to suddenly shoot up by about six more layers, like his emotional stonemason took a bump of something really effective.
But before it could get awkward, he rested his palms on mine. For a split second, I was distracted by how broad andwarmthey were, but I managed not to let my thoughts get off track. Really, quite the accomplishment for me.
“Close your eyes, breathe in deeply through your nose, then out through your mouth.”
“Is that all?”
“That’s allfor now.”
As his eyes shuttered closed, I wrapped my thumbs around the side of his hand, tightening my grip just enough for our palms to have full contact.
And finally, I was in.
The wall he had so meticulously curated, whether intentional or not, ascended into the heavens brick by brick, as if time were reversing itself. And as they flew into said heavens, I got sight of the swirling miasma within him.
If I thought my client, whose husband was cheating on her, had been a lot, this guy blew her out of the water. He was a category five storm, with new emotions emerging almost as soon as my mind processed the previous one.
I saw dread. It zipped around the edges of my vision like those marks in my eye that I tried to chase on a bright day but always stayed just out of focus. Like it wanted to be known but refused to be pinned down. Below that, like tentacles reaching up and desperate to grab anything they could, was a vicious and sickly purple-brown that reminded me of rot. When its reaching grasp managed to connect with another emotion, it left decrepit stains wherever it touched, like a disease trying to spread as far and as quickly as it could. Nauseating.
“There you go. Keep breathing for me. In, then out. In, and out.”
There was the crackling crimson of anger, not shining bright or hot like it usually did with people, not burning or sparking. More like it was simmering. Like it was barely being held back and just waiting for the opportunity to blow. Yes, the brick wall was making more sense with every passing second. The man before me wasn’t just trying to keep other people out. He was also desperately trying to keep thingsin.
“Once you feel able, and once you are ready, look within yourself and concentrate on what it is you truly wish to know.Open yourself to the fates, and they will open themselves to you.”
Bottling all that up couldn’t feel good. Actually, I knew down to my core that it didn’t. When I was a kid, I’d spent a lot of time trying to act like everyone else, trying to be normal. It wasn’t until my mother gathered me into her arms and explained that just because my mind worked a little differently, it didn’t mean I was any lesser. It didn’t mean anything was wrong with me. From then, I’d learned to love a lot of my quirks, to embrace them instead of fighting them, but it hadn’t been an easy journey. Especially since the large part of it happened during puberty, which everyone knew was a very peaceful and completely rational time in folks’ life. Ha!
“There you are. I’m beginning to see...”
“See what?” he asked, eyes cracking open. I gave him the Look™, and he quickly shut them again, allowing me to finish parsing through the manic smears of color going this way and that.
Deep blue shame rained down like a miserable, chilled drizzle on a dreary, cold day. The electric yellow of his worry floated through randomly, like bubbles with rainbow rings of crackling energy spinning within them. Fear. Fear stood like thick walls at the top and bottom of my vision that were trying to slam together, shaking and trembling with their efforts, with only a single pillar at his center to stop them.
And what was that pillar?
What a question that was. Because it wasn’t just one thing. Sure, the majority of it was the same brick that comprised his wall, the same brick I hadn’t been able to break through without physical contact, but notallof it was.