She nodded her understanding, then flipped him off when he turned his back.
“Come on, girl. You need to see a doctor.” Using her key in the lock of a rusty looking car, Caley yanked open the door and held it for me to get in. It seemed like a bad idea… to get in a car with a total stranger. Didn't it? My gaze darted around us, looking for alternative options, but what else was there? I had no memory of anything prior to waking up in that alleyway less than an hour ago.
A motorcycle revved its engine loudly, making me jump, and I saw Caley's boyfriend glaring at us from astride the metal monstrosity.
“I promise I don't mean you any harm,” Caley coaxed, bringing my attention back to her and away from the piercing green eyes of her biker boyfriend. True again. Was it normal for people to tell so many truths? I couldn't remember. Unable to voice my concern, I nodded my head at the imposing man on the bike, and she got what I meant.
“He also means you no harm,” she said carefully. There was something strange about the phrasing of that, but I couldn't put my finger on it. Caley smiled softly and reached out a hand like she might touch my arm, pausing when she saw the blood on the side of my dress. “Holy shit. You really are bleeding. Come on, hop in and we’ll get that taken care of, okay?”
Glancing down, I saw Caley was right. Not only was my side going numb, but the patch of blood on my dress had seemingly doubled in size.
I needed medical attention.
There was no way around that. Nodding, I climbed into the passenger seat of her car and sat tentatively. My backside was bruised and sore, much like the rest of me, so I needed to shift around a bit to get comfortable.
Caley slammed the car door, then hurried around to the driver’s side and slid in, cranking the engine. As she shut her own door, a wave of nausea rolled over me and I clutched at the door handle.
“Shit, girl. You really are in a state, huh?” she commented, pulling out of the parking lot and onto the main road.
Without my voice, I was unable to tell her to stop. To let me out. To ask her what the fuck was happening to me. My stomach churned and I knew it was only a matter of time until I threw up. Clamping a hand over my mouth, I closed my eyes and felt my head swim with dizziness.
The pungent reek of smelted metal, silver droplets rolling down my skin and tracing ragged scars in my flesh. This smell was similar to that … that flicker of something buried deep inside my head. I railed against it, crushed the fragment of memory down but it was too late.
Something was really wrong.
The vehicle around me felt like a coffin, hurtling me toward a death I’d somehow managed to avoid for … for a long time. All this pain and bleeding, this dizziness and disorientation and yet I was still here.
But if I didn’t get out of this car, I wouldn’t be for long.
“Almost there,” Caley said, her voice strained as she noticed my distress. I couldn’t look at her though. I couldn’t look at at anything. Instead, I kept my eyes squeezed shut and thought of that man, Arlo, and his beautiful green eyes, his glorious ink. I made myself imagine what it would feel like to have his big hands on my hips, lifting me up onto the edge of a table, stepping between my thighs …
“Fuck, finally,” Caley breathed and my eyes snapped open as the car stopped moving, right in front of a large white building with a sign that read Our Lady of Sorrow.
I practically tore the door handle off in my panic to get out.
“Hey, whoa, calm down! It only opens from the outside, hang on.”
Caley hopped out of her side and I waited, tense and sweating as she came around the car and opened the door for me. The second she did, I threw myself out and onto the pavement, panting and gasping as the intense nausea rolled and boiled in my belly. My head was fuzzy, my ears ringing with a high-pitched noise that made me feel like I was about to pass out.
“Let me help you inside, girl. You look even worse than you did before.” Caley wrapped her arm around my middle and lifted me to my feet with surprising strength for her size. My breath sucked past my teeth in a silent gasp as her arm pressed into yet more injuries, but I ground my teeth together and walked with her into the hospital.
As soon as I stepped foot inside, I knew I'd made a mistake.
The bright lights blinded me and a sea of voices swelled into a cacophony inside my head.
“I told you—I was headed into the office after a late lunch.” Lie. That was a lie. A man was staring a woman down near the reception area, one arm held limply at his side, the fingers of his other hand clutching his bicep like he was in pain.
“You're cheating on me, aren't you?” she asked with a small sniffle, and the man scowled.
“Of course I'm not,” he snapped back, making me feel dizzy with the force of his words. They were said with such vehemence and yet, the lie was so powerful that it made me sick.
Or at least, something was making me sick.
I tore away from Caley's grasp and stumbled back outside, heading straight for a small patch of green and a row of spindly trees. As soon as my feet hit the moist earth, I felt better. Not great, just … better.
“Can you help me?” a thready voice asked, drawing my attention toward the sidewalk. Sinking to my knees in the wet earth seemed to help a little more and I felt my nausea sliding away a bit.
Until I saw the thing that was speaking to me.
“They spray the grass with poison twice a week,” the creature said, its thin, bony arms like twigs about to snap. It was female, nude, with ashy skin and sunken cheeks, protruding ribs and legs no wider than its arms. “And the blood,” it told me, pointing at the doors of the emergency room, “there's so much blood here, so much iron.”
“Wait up!” Caley was shouting behind me, picking her way across the wet grass in heels.
“I'm dying,” the creature told me, bending low in front of me, her eyes like stars in a withered face. I imagined she'd once been very pretty. Once…
But everything she said, it was the truth. I could feel her words like flashes of bright heat inside my chest, a small flame for each honest thing that was said. I was grateful for it, too, because the lies … those were the worst. They cut my heart open like blades.
“Babe, what are you doing?” Caley asked, pausing beside me and breathing heavily. “You don't need to be afraid of—”
“Take my spirit,” the creature said, interrupting the waitress with a week, reedy exhale. “Put my energy to good use somewhere else.”
“Are you …” Caley came around to stare at me … and then at the dying girl … and then me again. “Oh shit … You can see the dryad?”
I kept my gaze on the strange woman with the sunken cheeks, her sallow skin lit by the fluorescent red of the Emergency Room sign. I decided briefly to ignore Caley. Of course I could see the woman. Why wouldn't I be able to?