Six rules undying book 2, p.9
Six (Rules Undying Book 2), page 9
“They were here,” stared right back.
She grabbed her chest again, feeling her heart beat faster and faster. Her breath became shallow and the world started to spin.
“Paige? Baby?” she could hear from beyond the bathroom door.
“You need help?”
“They were here,” she whispered. She grabbed her mouth and grimaced. As she pulled her hand away, streaks of red mixed into the water. “I need help. I so need help,” she muttered to her reflection right before calling out, “I’m fine.”
She wiped down the mirror again and then wrapped herself gingerly in a towel. She stepped out to find Cal waiting patiently in the bedroom, just texting away in his chef’s gear and Crocs. She smiled at her gentle giant and gave him a weak kiss on his freshly shaved head. As she pulled away, however, a gust of sickening cologne assaulted her nose.
“Wow, can you wear that much at work?” she asked as she rubbed her eyes.
Cal only looked at her quizzically.
“That’s a lot of cologne,” she explained as she struggled into the bare minimum of clothing required for decency.
“I’m not wearing any—just deodorant,” he said. “I think the guys would mind if I didn’t.”
“Must be that,” Paige muttered. She wrinkled her nose as Cal came over to gallantly hook her bra and help her slide into her shirt.
“Take it easy, babe. I don’t want to see you hurt,” he said, toying with her hair. “Wow, what shampoo are you using?”
“Hmm?”
He pulled one curl out and watched it spring back perfectly, like one of those unnatural flawless ringlets from a hair care commercial.
Paige tilted her head back and forth without so much as a crick and watched her bouncy mountain of hair fall over her shoulders, supermodel-style.
“When did it get so long?” he asked incredulously.
“It’s just wet.”
“You should wear it down more. It’s sexy, babe.” He got a twinkle in his eye. “You know if I didn’t have work—”
“And I didn’t have five fractured ribs?”
He kissed her neck. “Maybe the rest of you will heal up all superhero-like and when I get home tonight—”
She pushed him away playfully. “Easy, tiger. The doc said four to six weeks before any strenuous activity,” she said. “Now you get going. I’ll be fine until Mom gets here. Shoo!”
Cal rubbed his face and tried his best not to stare at a surprisingly perky little booty taunting him under yoga pants. He let out a deep breath, adjusted his trousers, and sauntered to the door.
“There is just something different about you, babe. Rawr!” he growled before finally heading for the door.
“Hey, can you get more yogurts on your way home?”
“Really?” he asked incredulously, but he nodded before slipping out the door.
Paige went back to her prophetic mirror and dared to open her mouth. Sure enough, four bright white new incisors filled her previous gaps. However, her canine teeth now all wobbled like she was suddenly back in elementary school. As she wiggled her tooth, she noticed that all her nails needed trimming as well.
“What is going on?” she asked the stranger in the mirror with her face.
She wandered to the living room and pulled open her laptop for a bit of twenty-first-century problem solving. She ran her hand along the side of the machine, pausing at an empty USB port. She closed her eyes.
“Remember, it’s never about being paranoid. It’s about being paranoid enough.”
She started looking around the table for something, hunting for an object among napkins and controllers, but only managed to find her DVD remote half-hidden under one edge of the table. As she pulled it out, a little white plastic cap slid across the carpet. As she picked up and rolled the little cap in her fingers, she shuddered uncontrollably.
“Pull yourself together, Paige,” she muttered as she pulled up the search engine and typed in “extra sets of teeth.” After a half hour of staring at horrifying images of malformed teeth across the wonders of the Internet, she nearly screamed as a knock sounded on her door. She limped over to find one Maria Lucia Carmichael surrounded by grocery bags.
“Where is your brace?” she asked the moment the door opened.
“And hello to you too, Mom,” Paige said. Without thinking she reached for one of the bags on the ground and was instantly chastised with a full-on Italian motherly diatribe.
“Have you gone crazy on painkillers, sweetie?” Maria snapped as she swept in and grabbed the bags. “I didn’t get you out of the hospital just to see you get yourself thrown right back in—”
Paige began nodding and tuning out as her mother continued to hem and haw. As she opened the fridge, Maria positively seethed and turned red. “And that Calvin doesn’t even get you food! I swear, when I see him, I’m gonna wring—”
“Mom,” Paige protested, “we went to the store yesterday.”
“Oh really?” Maria sniffed as she pulled out the lone take-out container of cilantro chicken and a half-empty six-pack of beer.
“What, did you just buy booze and condiments?”
As if on command, Paige’s stomach growled, loudly. Maria proceeded to fill the fridge with containers of chicken soup, pasta, Sunday sauce, and every other bit of love an Italian mama could manage. She topped it off with an enormous container of tiramisu, creamy coffee-laden temptation barely concealed under a layer of plastic.
“How are you ever going to heal if you don’t eat?” Paige’s mom asked. “Your pants are hanging on your hips already. I’ll heat this up, and let’s see if you can get something in you before your appointment.”
Before Paige could so much as protest, Maria dumped the curry and some take-out rice in a bowl and shoved it in the microwave before helping Paige with socks and shoes. “And where is your brace, young lady?” she asked.
“My neck is fine—”
“Paige Presley Carmichael,” Maria sighed. Paige winced at the dreaded mention of her middle name. “Did you go to medical school while I wasn’t paying attention?”
Paige responded by turning her head to the left and to the right.
“Look, Mom, it’s fine!”
Maria narrowed her eyes and pulled the freshly heated curry out of the microwave. “Be careful; I left it a little cold because of your teeth, but you never can tell when you nuke these things. The middle is always freezing or thermonuclear.”
Paige eased dutifully onto a barstool as her mom presented her with a fork. Maria began an up close and personal inspection of the faded bruises and lack of swelling around her daughter’s eyes and throat.
“Speaking of teeth,” Paige said as she stirred her curry, “do you know if anyone on your side of the family had hyperdontia?”
“Excuse me?”
“Did you, you know, ever have like a third set of teeth?”
“A what?”
Paige gingerly pulled back her upper lip and showed off her shiny new chompers. Maria stared in awe at the difference in the color. “Did you go to the dentist already, sweetie?”
Paige shook her head. “I’m telling you, new teeth just grew in—”
Maria raised up a hand. “Just eat. We’ll ask the doctor when we get there.”
“Well, I was reading it was hereditary, so I thought I’d check—”
Paige paused to put a spoon of sauce and rice in her mouth.
The moment the green gravy hit her tongue, she gagged and spit the entire mouthful right back into her bowl. She continued to spit and curl back her lips as the soapy, metallic taste refused to leave her tongue.
“Ugh, that’s rotten,” she spat.
“What—is it old? It smelled fine when I—”
“It tastes like kissing a stick of deodorant, Mom!”
Maria daringly slid her finger along the far edge of the bowl, sniffed the green sauce a few times, and then brazenly took a taste.
“It’s not rotten, sweetie—just really heavy on the cilantro,” she declared.
“I can’t eat this,” Paige declared, pushing the bowl away and chugging down some thoughtfully provided water from her mom. As the smell wafted into her nostrils again, Paige started to turn as green as her curry.
“You used to love cilantro,” Maria said, looking on with concern.
“Didn’t your handouts talk about weird tastes and smells from the concussion?”
Paige nodded. “Look, can you—?”
Without skipping a beat, Maria swept the dish away and poured the whole lot into the disposal. She then produced a bag of soft, squishy garlic knots from her final grocery bag of wonders. “Come on; we can eat these on the way.”
They rode most of the way in silence, chomping away on fresh-baked bread until they made it to the doctor’s office. Only once they settled in the lovely gray-speckled chairs in the corner of reception did Maria scratch her head and say, “Your grandfather.”
“Hmm?”
Maria nodded. “My dad had extra teeth, I think. He had to have his canines filed when he was young. At dinner we used to joke that he was a vampire. Grandma Jean never laughed,” she said.
“Anyway, make sure to ask the doctor. You want me to go in with you?”
“Mom, I’m not twelve,” Paige sighed. “Can you e-mail Grandpa and ask him if he had the teeth thing?”
“If he’s not too busy seducing his nurses.” Maria laughed. “Also, ask about the taste thing—”
“Paige?” the nurse called at just that moment.
“I got this, Mom,” she said before squeezing her mom’s hand.
A few minutes later Paige stared in abject horror as the scale slid to 115 pounds. The nurse actually had to look at Paige’s flat stomach for a moment before writing the number down.
“Are you sure this scale is right?” Paige asked.
The nurse nodded and proceeded to lead Paige back to the exam room. Paige went through the motions of answering all the questions, of being poked and prodded and then transferred to the diagnostics lab at the practice for another round of X-rays, and then more and more waiting. Finally, her doctor made an appearance after she had managed to read every poster and pamphlet in the room at least twice and change into a lovely mint green hospital gown.
“So, how are we feeling?” her doctor said with a very tight smile before settling down to peer at the computer screen rather than looking at the patient.
“Um, OK, I guess, you know . . . considering,” Paige muttered as her doctor continued to frown at her electronic chart.
“So, how many weeks ago was this accident?” her doctor asked.
“Weeks?” she asked, confused. “I was . . . attacked last Friday.”
“That’s simply not possible,” the doctor said, staring at the two sets of X-rays. He pulled up two sets of her chest and pointed to multiple bright white spots in one and the relatively more solid-looking ones in the other. “I think that your records must have been mixed up.”
“What?”
“See here and here? There are no more fractures on these ribs, and as you can see, the bones in the first image are thinner and more delicate than the X-ray taken today. I think the lab made a mistake—”
“That’s impossible. I had five broken ribs. I was there—”
“You have two possible hairline fractures near the sternum, and they are almost healed,” her doctor said dismissively. “And as for this supposed fracture on your neck—”
“No—”
“My dear, you simply aren’t that badly hurt. You should be grateful—”
“Grateful?” Paige barked. “Grateful? I was attacked and almost killed. I spent a weekend in the hospital in pain with five broken ribs and my teeth falling out, and you’re telling me what? That it wasn’t real?”
“Now calm down—”
Paige punched the rail on her bed and watched in shock as it sheared from its bolts and clattered to the floor. The doctor rose to his feet and stared in horror at the wild-eyed girl glaring at him from under a mountain of untamed curls. He pointed to the pictures again.
“Either the doctors made a mistake at the lab or you’re Superwoman. Which one sounds more likely?”
Paige slumped back in the bed and looked at the images incredulously. As her chest sank, she became painfully aware that after her little outburst, her ribs no longer bothered her at all. In a
daze she endured more questions, more poking, and more tests—
tests after tests.
Finally, she heard the words, “Why don’t I let you get dressed?”
The doctor then hurried from the room.
Paige stumbled over to her pile of clothes. Her phone vibrated a few times in her purse. She slipped it out to see a text from Tina.
“Soft opening on Friday. Please come to the new pub! Heart emoji, Tina,” the text read. The next message popped up. “Free chicken for you + one!”
“Who am I to argue with free chicken?” Paige sighed as she slipped into her T-shirt and jeans. As she buttoned the waist, her back twinged. She winced as she went through the motions of the checkout process and listened to the nurse in a total haze even as a prescription was handed over. Eventually she found herself in the waiting room, and while she could hear her mother snapping at the doctor, she found herself distracted by the lingering scent of vomit and cleaning fluids in the carpeting.
“I’m going to get some air,” she said as she just kept walking.
“If you think you can just dismiss my daughter—” Maria was saying.
She took a few deep breaths and dialed her boyfriend. “Hey, babe, want to have date night on Friday for a change? Get free food? Meet some interesting people?”
- 6 -
“Tell me why you’re here, Paige.”
“Because I’m tired of being afraid.”
Paige steadied her hands as she perched uneasily in a folding chair. Her confession booth took the form of a tiny little office tucked in the back of an old school gymnasium in the wilds of Old Collierville, Tennessee. Across the Spartan, molded-metal desk, Nadia Volkov stared intently at her visitor while rubbing a finger across the faint scar on her chiseled jawline. Stripped of her makeup and fashionable wardrobe, the Russian still managed to look effortlessly glamorous in black workout gear with a singular violet braid draping over one shoulder.
“Why are you afraid, Paige?” Nadia asked, her voice softer, warmer than Paige had ever heard at the party.
Paige looked down. “I know it’s crazy. I shouldn’t have bothered you—”
Nadia’s brows furrowed a bit. “Come now—do I seem bothered? Do you see anything else I could be doing right now?”
With that, she motioned to the wall of windows beside them both.
The main room of the gym stood barren and silent, with only a few dust motes filling the cavernous space on a bright Sunday morning.
“It’s just it’s Sunday morning, and I only called last night . . . ”
Paige started gnawing on her lip, a much easier feat with four oversize new canines.
“While I must admit it’s rather uncommon for me to meet a potential new client at a restaurant soft opening, it’s not the weirdest call I’ve ever gotten. You seemed so distant the other night, even
with your boyfriend with you, that I had to at least drop by your table,” Nadia said.
“All you did was save me from one more retelling of just how many times my boyfriend beat his friends in Call of Duty that week,”
Paige said. “It was not the most exciting date ever—even with free chicken.”
“He seemed pleasant enough when I said hello,” Nadia noted.
“Recently, it’s been a little . . . awkward. I feel like I’m imposing everywhere. I feel like that right now—”
“Remember, Paige, I gave you my card. That is generally construed as an invitation— even to us crazy Russians. Now, why don’t you stop apologizing needlessly and tell me what is really going on?”
Paige wrung her hands. “I’m afraid,” she said softly.
Across the table Nadia remained calm and composed. She waited patiently, silently until Paige pulled her purse from the floor and started rummaging. Paige finally pulled out a little orange bottle and slapped it on the table. The pills rattled from the force.
“Two weeks ago I was attacked right outside of the house. That asshole knocked me unconscious, broke my neck and five of my ribs. I ended up in the hospital,” Paige choked out.
Nadia eased out of her chair and slipped around the desk. She crouched down next to Paige and took her hand. Bolstered slightly, Paige swallowed hard before continuing.
“I looked like I’d been hit by a truck, but then . . . but then . . . it’s going to sound completely crazy, but in less than a week, I don’t have a scratch on me. I go to the doctor, and he says that the hospital made a mistake. He apparently said that I was having . . .
having an anxiety attack, and he gave me some stupid pills to calm me down.”
“He actually said the hospital made a mistake?” Nadia asked incredulously.
“My mother had an absolute fit, and I don’t think I can ever go back to my doctor after the scene she pulled—not that I’d ever want to see that jerk again. Have you ever seen a type A Italian mom who
feels like her daughter was insulted? I didn’t even know you could conjugate the word fuck so many ways.”
Both of them laughed a little. Paige glared at the bottle again.
“I had gained ten pounds in less than a week. My teeth fell out, and I even told the doctor that I was blacking out, you know, losing time. You know what he did?”
“What?”
“He made me take a pregnancy test!” Paige snorted. “I was like, maybe you should have thought of that before bombarding me with all those X-rays.”
“What a dick,” Nadia said, squeezing Paige’s hand again.
“I am so sick of feeling like this. He recommended therapy, and here I am talking to a personal trainer!”
“So?” Nadia offered.
Paige pulled her hand away and buried her face in her hands.
“You probably think I’m crazy too,” she muttered into her fingers.
Nadia crouched down and tried her best to look the poor girl in the eyes. “Oh, Paige, I think you are very brave.”
