22.
“Where are we?” I asked as Harry guided the car into a rest area a couple hours later. I shouldn’t have bothered asking, because as soon as I did, I saw a sign on the rest area roofline—”Welcome to Kentucky,” and it had one of those information booths visible inside the glass front of the building, just like any visitors center when you crossed a state line.
I’d completely missed our entry into the Bluegrass State, and our exit from Tennessee. It might have been nice, under other circumstances, to just enjoy a road trip like this.
But when a deadly metahuman was pursuing your friends, and they were heading into a confrontation with the bastard, it was hard to pay much attention to the natural wonders of America. My mind was on kicking ass and taking names.
Well, hopefully kicking ass and taking names. Getting your ass kicked and your name taken didn’t really bear dwelling on.
Harry slid the SUV into a parking space and shifted it into park. He blinked a few times, moving at a pretty slow clip for him but still incredibly fast compared to most humans. He rubbed his eyes a couple times, and I realized that it was getting toward noon, and he’d been driving all night.
He threw open the door just as Cassidy did the same behind him. Eilish opened hers behind me, and I got out as well. We all looked a little stiff, given that we hadn’t stopped since the ass kicking back near the Alabama line. I looked at Eilish; she was probably bruised beneath her clothes, unless her meta healing was stronger than I supposed. She walked a little more gingerly than the rest of us, though she moved quicker than Cassidy, who just freaking dragged.
Cassidy had been on her computer for most of our drive, not saying a word. That was common in the car, the silence, for which I was generally thankful. The loudest noise was the slightly labored breathing of Eilish over what I guessed was a cracked rib or two. My assumption was that by tomorrow she’d be a hundred percent, but again, I didn’t fully know her healing capabilities.
“I wish I could sleep more,” Eilish said as we entered the rest area. A couple women were behind the counter in the visitor’s booth, one smiling and facing us as we came in, another talking to a guy in a flannel shirt with a baseball hat on. She seemed to be giving him the tourist spiel, and was handing him brochures about the natural wonders of Kentucky, which I listened to with one ear while dragging myself toward the restroom, my tiredness far out of proportion with my day’s efforts.
“Sleeping just wastes the day,” I said with a healthy serving of sarcasm. Like we could waste the day any more effectively than sitting our asses in a car.
“I’m going to need to waste some of the day here when we get back in the car,” Harry said, pulling away from us to head to the men’s room, which lay to our right. “Decide among yourselves who wants to drive.”
I looked at Eilish; Eilish looked at me. She shrugged, and I started to look at Cassidy, but she’d already disappeared into the women’s room, seriously dragging ass. “I’m injured,” Eilish said, suddenly favoring her side more dramatically.
I started to argue, then just shook my head. “Fine, I’ll drive,” I said. Might as well; it may have been a while, but it was probably like riding a bike. Hopefully Rose hadn’t sucked the memory of how to do so out of my head.
Eilish held the door for me, cringing at the movement. I ducked into the bathroom and found a row of stalls. There must have been twenty of them, and fortunately less than half were occupied, so I picked one and in I went. It certainly smelled better than that gas station.
Once done, I came out and washed my hands, looking at myself in the mirror. Everything seemed to be about where I left it. Hair? Still bad, mussy and messed, cowlicked where I’d slept on the window. The blond notes were starting to fade, allowing my darker roots to show through. I had a couple centimeters before I’d have to deal with that, though I was sure a reasonably tall guy could already see them pretty clearly.
My face still looked haggard. The dark circles hadn’t grown but hadn’t receded, either. My throat looked skinny, and I tried to assess myself as an enemy would. It just made me look like a prey animal, being this thin, like someone could grab me by that neck and snap it with so much greater ease than they could have before, when I was … sturdier. The fact that my double chin had completely evaporated should have made me look so much hotter.
But instead I just looked … dead. Even after three months of regular feeding, of sleeping in a warm bed instead of wherever I could find a sheltered spot, of being in the same place rather than being run all over the Scottish countryside, I still looked …
Skeletal. Like I’d left a quarter of my body weight along with my memories. I looked to either side; there was no one out of the stalls. I lifted my shirt and yep, I could still see my ribs.
Needless to say, this was not something I checked very often, even in the privacy of my own bathroom. Avoidance was key to my strategy of … well, avoiding my problems.
My wrists were like little tubes, and when I lifted my pants legs, my shins and knees were bony and exposed. I wore slightly less baggy clothes now, but I still swam inside them.
“Holy shit,” I whispered to myself. I could eat a thousand waffles and I wasn’t sure it’d make a dent in this … this …
I didn’t even have a word for it.
“Whew,” Cassidy said, the sound of her stall unlocking filling the air just before she popped out and hit the sink next to me, splashing cold water on her face. Eilish joined us a moment later, taking the sink on the other side of me. The Irish woman still looked sour, but when Cassidy came up from her splashing, she looked—
Uh.
Positively chipper.
“I feel great,” Cassidy announced, mopping her face with paper towels. The cadence of her speech was lightspeed compared to where it had been when we’d entered the bathroom a moment earlier. I stared at her skinny frame, which … shit, I looked thin compared to her, which rang like an alarm bell in my head. She mopped quickly and delicately at her forehead, and then under her eyes, no makeup coming off on the towel because … well, she didn’t wear any. “It’s a beautiful day,” she announced, staring at herself in the mirror, and for a second I thought she might lean forward and kiss her own reflection. She seemed to think better of that, though, probably calculating the bacteria per square inch on a rest area bathroom mirror, and out she went, humming something awfully jaunty.
“Didn’t she just lose the love of her life a day or so ago?” Eilish asked, watching her with brow furrowed.
“Yep,” I said. “Didn’t she just enter that bathroom stall looking like death itself was about to claim her?”
Eilish threw me a look, one which turned frozen quickly, and I caught the significance: You’re one to talk about looking like death, that was what she was thinking. But she said: “Uh, yeah.”
I analyzed all the available data and came to a quick conclusion. “Shit,” I said.
“Yeah,” Eilish said again. “What do you reckon?”
“Amphetamines,” I whispered, meta-low, in case there was a random narc hanging out in one of the occupied stalls. “I reckon amphetamines in some form.”
“Should we say something to her?” Eilish asked, pushing the water on and rinsing her hands. She, too, was speaking meta-low.
I laughed, and it came out short and super bitter. “I don’t think I can deal with the irony of me hosting an intervention for anyone else right now,” I said. “Besides, her … whatever … is none of my business.”
“Hey, amphetamines are serious business,” Eilish said. “I had a friend who died from them.”
“They’re truly terrible,” I agreed, “for humans. Which Cassidy is not. And it’s not like she smoked them, so—I dunno. This doesn’t sound like my problem.”
“A fine friend you are,” Eilish said, looking at me in the mirror, the disappointment thick.
“In case it escaped your notice,” I said, looking right back, “Cassidy is not my friend. Cassidy is someone I had pay ten million dollars to in order to help me out of a life-threatening jam when all my friends showed up for free. Now I owe her a favor, and she’s dragging me out of my—I dunno, hibernation—to collect. If you think this favor I owe her includes worrying excessively about her consumption of illegal drugs that may not even adversely affect her function? You’d be wrong. That is way outside my purview.” I shifted my gaze back to my skeletal self in the mirror. “Besides … I think I’ve got other things to worry about right now.”
“Yeah, worry about yourself, I guess,” Eilish snapped. “I’m starting to see you’re quite good at that.” And she stormed out before I could offer anything but a sputtering reply, leaving me alone with my reflection, the girl in the mirror a stark reminder that not only should I feel like I was alone in this, but that I wasn’t even truly myself right now …
If I could actually remember who I really was.