Vitality (Vitality Series #1)

Chapter 7 One Year Ago

Her makeup ran down her face like spilt ink across a stony surface, her skin an ashen, sickly gray. Her thin nose was swollen, forehead bumped and bleeding. She was tired of looking at herself. Tired of everything.

Ava's eyes flashed once again to the doorknob to make sure it was still locked. It was quiet now; Jason had quit trying to pound the bathroom door down. She didn't remember all of what had led her to here and now, but she was here, this way, and it all felt wrong. It was not unlike waking up from one very long dream and everything that felt normal once was now skewered. But it was more as if she'd lost herself completely and suddenly, as good as if she had lost the way to breathe.

The bough had finally broken.

She rested her pounding head against the cool mirror, and the water dripping from the faucet caught her attention. It wasted its supply into the sink's basin — if the leak kept on, it would dry out the well, and they'd have no water. There was already a thirst so strong in her, veins calcifying to extra bone, riveting inside like a hot rising sun in dry air. A desperate need for something she did not know. She shakily swallowed down a gasp of agony, clenching her teeth.

Ava wrapped her fingers around the knife that was dug into the old rotted wall and swiftly flung it across the room, hitting right where she wanted, right in the middle of a cluster of stab marks she'd left when she was bored.

Only an hour ago, she'd awoken with no memory of how she'd gotten to bed, how she'd wound up with the burn on her hand, a bump on her head, and why it felt she was missing some integral part of her, why her forgotten heart wanted to explode out of her chest from it.

The dripping continued; it would dry out.

Her, Jason, Keya, and Zo had all dug and built that well themselves. The night had been cold and they were tired and homeless, and it seemed like the idea came to all of them at once as they lay out on the floor of this abandoned shit show. This old automobile shop with the apartment attached to it, located in a rural area off an abandoned highway, was a chance to stay in one place for once. They had all gotten up, scavenged some beer, shovels, bandanas, put on music, and got dirty and drunk like the misfits they were. They made a mess at first but eventually straightened out the works.

There were no towels in the bathroom. Ava ripped off her Metallica t-shirt, which had been cut into a flimsy crop top for summer months, drenched it with water, and brought it to her feverish head — it occurred to her then how cool the weather was. The way it was when it had passed into fall. Yet she couldn't even remember what she had done all summer. What was the last thing she could remember?

A storm was rolling in outside. The moist chill drafted through the window. She looked out at the skies, voltaic with heavy rain and thunderbolts. The moon was full. Ava had always loved it when it was full — but tonight she didn't feel that way. It was prickling her with unease. Nothing felt okay anymore. Why was she so lost? What was wrong with her? What had happened?

She grabbed the glass left on the counter for water and filled it — but before she could get it to her lips, both her hands dropped to the sink, dropping the glass on the torn-up linoleum floor. It shattered, spilling water merged with shards over her feet. Her fingers tightened over the porcelain as her body fluttered, feeling as though she might faint.

Something was changing...

The chill in the air deepened, and she could see her breath. Frost prickled across the mirror, and she felt movement behind her, movement that didn't belong there. The room didn't feel like a bathroom anymore. Nor did it feel like their normal world. The mirror showed everything in the room behind her as it had been, although her lips were growing dusty blue.

Then there was something like unavoidable white noise buzzing at her senses. It was painful to turn, painful to see whatever it was nipping at her neck, but she forced herself to face what lingered behind her like dread.

A blue cloud expanded in front of her, moving like water, as dark and frightening as the deepest ocean. It swallowed the room like a tsunami, rushing wind against her face, stopping before her, and terrifying all thought away, past or present. It was as if everything she ever was had separated from her just then, paused and hanging in an ethereal plane away from her, leaving only pure awareness, her pure self, the core — a part she barely recognized.

Finally, her feet scattered backwards through water and glass and the tattered gypsy throw rug as the thing expanded. Her body flew itself into the mirror and into the sink, pushing as far back as it could, her skin grinding against sharp edges.

With a second look, it was different. Its features were more human now, in fact, a woman's.

The woman reached out for her, and Ava screamed; her own scream startled her quiet; not having been used to emoting her fears. The woman released strained words from her mouth.

"Don't go," it pleaded, as if responding to the very thing that had been at the front of Ava's mind since waking up.

But she had to go... Somewhere... Something was calling for her, like a memory at the tip of her mind, one that could not be remembered.

With the last word, the face became clearer. Ava knew her. It was her mother. And before Ava could react to that — and try to grab for her desperately — the form broke into a hundred pieces of glass, breaking from her thoughts like being violently thrown from a dream. Her hands flew up in cover, but the glass dissolved into sand as her vision became clear and sharp. And the sand disappeared until there were no remnants of it in the quiet room around her, only shards from the glass of water and the broken mirror behind her — the one she had jumped into.

Ava's pupils let go along with her body, and she slid from the mirror and sink, hitting her head on the porcelain, and hitting the hard wet floor with a thud.

Noises sounded: footsteps, fists on the door, yelling. All grew quieter as it came closer, as if she was drifting away from the site. The door burst open, and Jason halted at seeing the mess for a fraction of a second before finding his way to her. He shook her body against the floor with shock clipping through him, his soft bright eyes flicking back and forth rabidly over her almost unseeingly.

Ava didn't respond.

She was a distance away now, with a phantom inside herself. She clung to a place deep within. The place she could not remember when waking and the voice she could not understand. She was paralyzed.

Keya and Zo had come running, their footsteps overlapping each other's before sliding into the bathroom, slipping in blood and water, just as Jason's voice disappeared from his moving lips and consciousness drifted from Ava, though her eyes stayed open. Her mind had gone somewhere too far away now, somewhere even she didn't know.