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I knew full well that I was not. Storm had insisted that I agree to seek psychological help as a condition of being hired onto his cases, and then Theo had insisted the same after he had worked his magic on me and found that the outcome was not as he had desired. We had been trying to merge together the two parts of my separated personality in order to get rid of the troublesome and dangerous half. But instead of being banished, it seemed my troublesome half was more me than either of us had thought.
The outcome would have horrified the old Diana too, but I was glad to be me. Or we, I should say. Despite not knowing exactly what that meant. The only part I regretted was not knowing exactly what ‘we’ was.
Theo was probably right to be worried. For the past three weeks a feeling growing inside me had been keeping me lying awake at night. At those times the almost-music of the world, the song of the universe that I was hearing, became a deep and dreadful menace. There were bad things in the world, it seemed to say. We need to stop them. Stop them. Stop them. Stop them. We need to kill them. It’s our duty. And those words resonated inside me and felt good. Too good. Like love or lust maybe. It was a wanting, a yearning, that was bone deep.
And that was how I knew I was going to do it. Sooner or later I was going to kill someone or something, and it was just a matter of when and how and who. And I needed to make sure I got the right who, otherwise I was not going to be able to face Theo or Storm or even myself afterwards. I didn’t want to become the monsters I was meant to hunt.
I was hoping it would be just one. Kill one monster and get the urge out of my system and go back to a normal life. The kind of life where I could go to work and come home and relax in the evenings with a wonderful someone of my choosing. And I knew exactly who I wanted that someone to be. Was that so much to ask?
So here I was, stuck with seeing Roopa twice a week more often than I would like, because Theo thought I needed to talk through the anxieties he was sure I must be suffering. Little did he know that I was high as a kite, reveling in this seemingly endless sunshiny good mood.
“So Roopy-Roo, what do you want me to say?” I asked her, trying not to give her a big fat grin.
“You tell me,” she retorted.
“Are you really a qualified therapist?” I asked her, a question I had asked during every one of my six sessions to date.
“Yes I am,” she snapped.
“Did you get qualified so your family would stop calling you mad?” I said cheekily. This was probably going a step too far, but I couldn’t help goading her. Her family life was immensely interesting, probably because I had never had one — or at least not a real one.
“They wanted to lock me up in an asylum and throw away the key,” she said pertly, looking rather pleased with herself. “So I told them I will become a qualified therapist and then we will see who is mad and who is locking who away!”
Her answer took me by surprise. She had always refused to speak about this before. Seizing the opening, I asked her, “But I’m the only real client you’ve ever had, right?”
“There is no need for your boss to know that,” she said craftily.
“Theo already knows all about you.”
“Not him. The handsome one.” She waggled her heavy dark brows at me. If she tweezed them a little she would have a striking face instead of a forbidding one. I preferred it forbidding.
“Theo is handsome,” I told her stubbornly.
“That Theo is a silver fox. But I mean the other one. The one who is hot as fire and has been keeping you up at nights.” She cackled, clearly interested in seeing if I would blush in a maidenly fashion.
I sighed exaggeratedly. “I wish he was keeping me up at nights.”
She roared with laughter. “Ha! So he has been keeping you up at nights!”
“Did I deny it?”
“No. But you didn’t admit it either. It is one of your big dark secrets that you like to hide as if it makes you special.”
“Don’t say that. I thought I was special. Now you’ve gone and hurt my feelings.”
“You children are such babies. It is easy to look at you and see what you are thinking.”
“I’m not a baby. I’m twenty three.”
She tutted. “You are an embryo. Even my children are older than you.”
I sat forward in my chair. “Really? How old are they?”
“Never you mind. You may think I’m old,” she gestured down at herself, “But when you get to my age you’ll know what it is when your body still wants a man. Just because he looks like fire and you look like ashes, it doesn’t mean you won’t take a long juicy look. Hmm?” She waggled her eyebrows again. I swear she did it to make me squirm.
She seemed to know full well that I was rarely in the mood for squirming, but that didn’t stop her from trying. I waggled my eyebrows back at her. “You should come into the magi shop and try your charms on Theo.”
“Never mind that. Tell me about your hot one,” she insisted.
