I had to talk to the police. I told them I couldn't remember what happened. Oren was in the bed next to me, in the emergency room. He didn't say anything to anyone. I overhead the doctor saying that the trauma had disturbed our minds. I'd blocked out the memory, apparently. In reality, I just didn't want anyone locking me up for being crazy. And it does sound crazy, doesn't it?

I was kidnapped and tortured by the prince of another world. I didn't know how I got out, exactly, or how I managed to bring Oren with me. It was obviously the same way that Jack traveled between the worlds, because it had felt the same, but I wasn't aware that I was capable of doing it. Even if I did have the medallion. A small voice whispered in the back of my mind that Jack had called it a passport. An even smaller voice reminded me that he'd also called it a transporter...

I realized then, that the medallion wasn't just something to get me through customs, it was my ticket, my seat, and the plane itself. I glanced over at Oren.

It even let me take passengers, apparently.

Oren had to stay in the hospital longer than I did because Zephan had longer to do his work on him, whereas I'd left the party a little earlier than he'd wanted me to. Sometimes there are more important things than being polite to a host. Staying alive is definitely one of those things.

I went home, wrapped in bandages, with a bag of replacement dressings and a box of pain pills. I walked into the kitchen, and put my bag down on the table. I needed another pill, so I went to get a glass of water. Then I saw the floor. Where Oren and I had come in.

I stared at it. I couldn't take my eyes away. It was like I was hypnotized. I'd seen blood before, but never that much, never mine. Not like that. I don't know how long I stood there, staring at the dried blood on my kitchen floor. Long enough that my entire body began to shake, that I shivered with the returning pain.

"What happened?" Tyler asked. I jumped. I hadn't heard him come up behind me.

"I..." I had to force the words past the lump in my throat, "was attacked."

"Here?" he asked, staring at the blood stain with wide eyes.

"No," I shook my head. I took a step away from the blood, so that I stood behind him. "Could you get me a glass of water?"

"Sure." He stepped, warily, over the blood. I took a tablet out of the packet. He handed me a glass and I took the pill. "I'm sorry I wasn't here," he said, quietly.

"Where were you?" I asked, realizing he'd only just come in, that he must have been gone since a couple of days, to have not seen the blood earlier.

"A friend of mine has a place in the Valley." Tyler shrugged. "I slept on his couch. I had left you a note by the door."

"Oh." I hadn't seen it.

"Yeah."

"I'm going to go lie down," I said. I picked the bag up and tried not to look at the blood.

"Okay," he nodded.

I didn't go to sleep. I didn't even lie down, actually. I mean, I'd planned lying down, it's not like I'd lied to Tyler. I just never quite made it to bed. I sat in front of my dresser, staring at myself in the mirror.

I had a vivid bruise across one cheekbone and my lip was split. My nose was swollen and dark circles spread out under my eyes. My hair was frizzy and shot out in different directions. I felt along the edge of my hair, feeling the small round ends from where my hair was singed. I grabbed a pair of scissors and took to the ends of my hair. I pulled the strands forward, trying to see what I was doing as I cut the burned ends off.

"Would you like a hand?" Karlotta asked. I dropped the scissors.

"Sorry," I said, picking them up. I wondered if the jumpiness was a side effect of the medication. It couldn't be from what happened. If it had made me jumpy, and on edge, if it had a lasting affect then it was like he'd won. "What was that?"

"I just thought," my mother said, coming up closer behind me, "since you can't see the back properly..."

"Right," I held my hands up, holding the scissors. She put her hands over mine and I made myself relax. I opened my barriers a little, letting my power spill out until I felt an almost solid presence against my hands.

"You have beautiful hair," she said, guiding my hands through the tortured mess.

"It's annoying," I said.

"It's more like Catriona's," she pointed out, "than it is like mine."

"Except for the color," I said, comparing the shades of black in the mirror. We worked in silence for a while, the gentle snip, snip of the scissors the only accompaniment to my beating heart, my quiet breath. The absence of speech between us made the other absences more noticeable. The absence of a second heart beat, beside mine. The absence of my mother's breathing. Her hands, even pressed against mine, guiding me, had no warmth, no real substance. They were an ethereal presence that I could only sense because of that part of me that she could never learn to accept, while she lived. Now that she was dead, I think she recognized the death inside me, and finally saw that there was nothing to fear.

"Did you want to talk about what happened?" she asked. It took me a moment to realize she was talking about my hair, my injuries. I shook my head.

"I survived," I said. "Right now, that's enough."

"Is it?" she asked, her hands still against mine. "Is it really enough, just to survive?"

"What more do you want from me?" I asked, feeling the crushing weight of my exhaustion catching up with me.

"I don't want anything," she said, letting go of the scissors and moving to stand in front of me. "But I think you want more for yourself."

"You don't know anything about me," I said, resting the scissors in my lap.

"No," she shook her head. "I didn't know anything about you. For years I didn't know. But I think I do now."

"Just because you're dead," I said, derisively, "you think you know everything?"

"No," she gave a wry smile, "you know death doesn't impart any great knowledge."

"Yeah, I know."

"But I've been here. I've watched you and listened to you, these past few months. And I know that you're not the kind of person who's content to just let things slide. Everything you do screams that you demand more. You crave justice, Laurel." She squatted down in front of me so that she could stare straight into my eyes. Her eyes looked so much like mine, it almost hurt to look at them. "I know that part of that is my fault, because I didn't do right by you and you're trying to reset the balance. And I know that's something you want to do. The way you've pushed that man, the one from the other place, how you said that politics should be fair." She put her hand over mine and squeezed it gently. "Whoever did this to you," she said, "they deserve to be punished."

I couldn't face the searching look in her eyes any longer. I looked away. My eyes went to the corner of my room, where Kieran's royal blue jacket had fallen to the ground.

"You're stronger than you think, Laurel," she said. "I know you are because you do survive. You survived the crap we put you through, and you've survived this. And I truly believe that every time you do survive, you get stronger."

"You don't," I told her, unable to wrench my eyes away from Kieran's jacket, "you just hurt more."

"I can't make that pain go away."

"I wasn't ask-"

"But I can tell you this," she cut me off. "You have a choice. You can let that pain break you and drag you down. You can let the people who hurt you win, or you can choose to fight. Hang on to who you are, Laurel. No one can tear that out of you."

Her words didn't make any of the pain go away, but they did make me realize something about myself. She was right, I was a survivor of pain, emotional and physical. I was the person who spent all of my time tamping my anguish down. I'd been a thesaurus of pain long before Zephan tortured me.

But I didn't let it stop me.

I was the shambling zombie, a broken corpse that kept dragging itself forward.

Even if I didn't know what made me keep going, what magic held me up, I was there, I survived, and I knew exactly where I was going.

---------------------------------------

A heart to heart with deceased mother, shucks.

Do you think Laurel will get her justice? And how?

Til next time,

x zuz