Blessed (22 page)

Having spent two weeks adjusting to her new way of living, including a new trick the canine incarnation of Kaiser had picked up, Ardra was exhausted. She found herself wondering if she was crazy to want to continue living her normal life.

School took up the majority of her time on its own. Add the insane training regiment Kaiser, her suddenly very talkative dog, had her on, trying to find time to spend with Piper to keep her from getting worried and asking a whole lot of questions that Ardra wasn’t ready to answer, burying her parents, and managing to keep both of her grandmothers convinced that she hadn’t completely lost her mind. She was expecting to suddenly drop dead at any moment from being overworked.

She had never really had a problem with stretching herself too thin before, but this was a whole new ball game. Her grandmothers had insisted on staying in town indefinitely after the funeral. Luckily, they were actually getting along for once. It would seem that losing a child together is a pretty emotional experience. Ardra made sure to count her blessing at least once every day. If the two women were to start fighting, she would probably end up burying two more relatives shortly after.

They both filled their days by constantly clucking around her, making sure that she was okay, trying to feed her, asking her if she got enough sleep, asking her if she needed any help with school and sometimes, just for fun she guessed, one of them would ask if she wanted to talk about her feelings.

Her response was always the same: A flat, up front “No.”

She knew they were just worried about her. The fact that she still hadn’t cried over her parents wasn’t helping her prove that she was mentally stable. She imagined that if the circumstances were any different, that fact would probably worry her, too. One of her grandmothers, she was thinking Barbara, had even called the school psychologist and had them call her into his office.

She was finally allowed to leave his stuffy cubicle-sized office and she was sure that he was currently starting a paper on PTSD to submit to
Psychology Today
or something. There had to be some kind of journal that published things like that from doctors. He had been a very pushy man and she didn’t like him.

He kept telling her that she
had
to feel
something
over the loss of her parents. She couldn’t spend her time moping around not crying or expressing her feelings. It was bad for her mental health, which would eventually affect her physical health, and blah blah blah.

She gave up on trying to talk to the man after twenty minutes of him telling her how she was supposed to react to the situation. She really didn’t care much about how he thought she should be reacting. She was reacting the the only way that seemed plausible for  her. It was working out pretty well for her, so it should be good enough for him, too.

She had finally gotten bored and tuned him out completely after he called her cold and robotic. Of course she had feelings about losing her parents. There had been sadness at first. She just didn’t see the sense in wasting all the energy crying about it. Crying takes a lot out of a person. And she had a mission.

All of the other feelings that she had about having her parents taken away from her paled in comparison to the anger. Kaiser had explained that the thing that was coming after her, this Chaos dude, was what had killed her parents. He was almost certain of it. She was supposedly the only thing that could stop him. Well, she intended to live up to that expectation or die trying.

As the head shrink had rambled on and on about repressed emotions, she let her mind wander as his grating voice went in one ear and out the other. She had already decided that she wouldn’t be coming back to see the man again, so she focused instead on going over her drills.

She had trained her new talents every day with Kaiser happily chattering away inside of her head. He was a ruthless slave driver when it came to her self defense against the likes of Chaos.

He was not pleased with her lack of progress and seemed irate that she couldn’t even form a basic shield yet.

The talking dog thing had taken a while for her to get used to. It had surprised them both the first time it happened.

He had just woken up and was waiting patiently at the bedroom door for her to stir just like every other morning. When she slept in much later than usual, he started to get impatient and tried willing her awake.

Come on Ardra, I need to use the bathroom and my breakfast is calling to me. I’m starving!

“Fine! I’m coming! We need to install a doggy door for you!” Morning grumpiness filled her voice as she sat up and stretched her arms above her head and yawned.

She froze and stared at him, eyes wide in shock, before stammering, “I-I think you just talked to me.”

I did?
He thought to himself.

“You just did it again! This is not good! I can’t get enough sleep with you around as it is! Your snoring is enough to keep the dead from resting peacefully! Now you’ve got a direct line into my brain. Great. That’s just grand, Kaiser.” She opened the door and tried to shoo him out but he didn’t move.

“I thought you were going to explode and then starve to death. What’s the hold up?”

I snore?

She couldn’t help but laugh.

“Yes. Now get out.”

She followed him to the back door and stood there waiting for him to finish his business.

The entire time he was out there, he kept testing the boundaries of his new trick.

Can you hear me now?
He’d ask.

“Yes, for the hundredth time. You’re starting to sound like a cell phone commercial!”

It seemed to be a one way street, though. She could hear his thoughts, but he couldn’t hear hers. She teased him about his dog brain not being able to handle her complex human thoughts.

He made her regret it.

If he wasn’t chattering on and on about how good kibble was, or how used to the idea of peeing outside he had gotten, he was torturing her with both physical and metaphysical training. She was always working out or meditating or studying or communing with nature. It seemed that he was making it up as they went. She didn’t really see how any of it was going to help her against Chaos, but both of them were pretty new to the idea of her super powers.

So far her powers consisted of meditating herself into oblivion and turning herself into a human flashlight. Oh, and breathing. Can’t forget breathing.

She was really good at the last one.

The meditation had helped with her sleeping issues. She could now fall asleep in ten minutes flat. No matter how stressful her day had been. The human flashlight thing was her favorite though.

She had been lying in bed one night with her head under the blankets trying to block out Kaiser’s snoring. When sleep still hadn’t come after an hour of staring at the underside of her pillow, she tried recreating the events of the session they had had in her garden world. She matched her breathing to his slow, steady breaths and let her mind wander.

It had been much easier when he had been consciously controlling his breathing, but eventually, the rhythmic, gentle breaths of the warm dog lulled her into a light meditation. Not nearly as deep as the one she had been in at the side of the fountain, but deep enough that her hands suddenly grew very warm.

When she opened her eyes, there was a green glow coming from her body. Not bright and intense like before, but very soft and gentle. It made her think of the old computer that her dad had owned when she was a child. The green light was barely enough for her to see her feet, but hey, it was a start!

She tried to focus on making it brighter, but only succeeded in snuffing it out. She had fallen asleep shortly after her failed attempt, but it didn’t stop her. It became almost a game to her. Every night before bed, she would empty her mind and drop all of the walls that had been built up inside of her over the course of her lifetime. The glow was always there and ready to shine through.

By the end of the week, she was able to concentrate enough to control it without trying so hard that it broke her meditation. She could now light up her entire room and then dim it down to a tiny glow in the palm of her hand. It reminded her of Peter Pan and it was all too easy for her to imagine that she was holding a little tiny fairy. She enjoyed this time while Kaiser was asleep and she was allowed to indulge in a little bit of fun.

A timer had gone off somewhere in the room and she had politely refused to set another appointment.

As she got in her car to head home and purge all memories of the hour with the shrink from her memory, she fished her cell phone out of her pocket and checked it for messages. She was expecting Piper to text her any moment to set up some random event for the night. That had been her routine thus far. As soon as school was out, she was talking about what she was going to be doing that night and trying to talk Ardra into joining her. Not a single day had gone by in almost a week and a half that Ardra hadn’t had to fend her off or dodge around a dinner plan or party.

Today was the exception apparently. No texts and Piper wasn’t standing in the snow beside her car. She must have gone home when her meeting with the head shrink went too long. She made a mental note to text her as soon as she got home to make sure that she was okay.

She climbed behind the wheel and started the car. While it warmed up, she cleared off the light snowfall that had settled on her windshield and back window during school while the car warmed up. She climbed back into the driver’s seat and stuck her hands under her arms to warm her frozen fingers. Cleaning snow off of her car was her least favorite part of winter in Utah. It was so cold and windy that unless you dressed like an Eskimo, you froze clear to the bone in a matter of minutes.

When the temperature gauge finally made the long and arduous trek to the point just above the bottom line on the thermostat, she turned the knob that let the blessed heat into the cockpit, shifted into drive and pulled away from the curb and into traffic.

She let her mind wander a bit and stumbled across the idea of using her new trick to warm her up. Since her mind was already pretty empty after a long day of school and dealing with that horrible man, she took a few deep breaths and her body relaxed. Instead of letting her walls fall all the way down, she thinned them little by little.

She could feel the energy inside of her getting closer and closer to the surface. She watched her hands on the wheel in front of her, not wanting to light up like a glow stick in the middle of one of the busiest roads in the city at the busiest time of day.

Sure enough, she started to feel the warmth radiate throughout her body. Normally, this was about the point when she saw the first sign of radioactivity, so she shored up her walls and waited to see if they held. She considered it a huge triumph when they did. She smiled at herself in the rear view mirror and let the energy inside of her do its job.

As she warmed up from the inside out, she hit the power button on the stereo and sang along with the top forty pop song that came blasting out of her after market speakers. Traffic was slow and it would be a little longer than normal before she found herself plopped in front of the TV doing her homework for the evening.

As she drove, weighed the pros and cons of telling Kaiser about her latest victory in the mind over matter department. On one hand, he might cut her some slack for having the gumption to train while he wasn’t cracking the whip. On the other, he might make her train even harder because now she had more control and he may want her to start pushing the limits to see what she could do.

She quickly came to the conclusion that the second scenario was the most likely and decided that she’d keep it to herself for the time being.

Before much longer, she was going to need to take her jacket off or suffer a heat stroke. She decided that neither option would be much fun while driving, so she let her walls snap back into place and the energy that had been coursing barely below the surface of her skin went back to wherever it was that it came from. The warmth that her body had been producing, added to the warmth of the air that the car was blowing out of its vents, was enough to keep her warm until she was parked safely in her garage.

She heard Kaiser clatter across the tile entryway where he would, without a doubt, be furiously wagging his tail and waiting for her when she opened the door. She chose to throw him off and enter through the front door instead.

As she opened the door into the living room, she was saddened by the sight of the refinished room. When her grandmothers had arrived, they hadn’t asked any questions and just assumed that she had gone crazy when she had heard the news. While that was partially true, they didn’t know how it really went down. She was pretty sure they had thought the same thing Piper had, that she had lit the house on fire. She was more than happy to let them continue to think that. She definitely didn’t want to tell them what had actually happened and she hadn’t been pressed on the issue yet. If she wasn’t going to be forced into lying, she was certainly not going to volunteer to do so.

The two women had gone out the same day they had arrived and bought new furniture, flooring, paint and decorations. The stuff was all delivered and installed the next day. It had confirmed her suspicions that those two women could bully or coerce anyone into anything if they put their minds to it. Maybe that’s where she had gotten it from.

She couldn’t say she was particularly pleased with the mindset. Even if it did come in handy on occasion.

She had to admit that she was doing much better with the lifestyle change than she had expected. She hadn’t had time to sign up to do any volunteering yet, but she was still planning on it. It had been several days since her knee jerk reaction had been to judge someone she wouldn’t have associated with before. She had faith that, given enough self awareness, she could eventually beat the habit out of herself. She gave herself a mental pat on the back and reminded herself that it was all about baby steps. Small victories were victories nonetheless.