BLOOD FOR BLOOD ─ paul lahote

[ 007 ] in hills of california

              "Yes?" Violet drawls, cocking her head.

             If the boy detects the frost in her tone, the unwelcome bite of her words, he doesn't make any indication that he did. "You're new here," he remarks, lifting a brow.

           "I am."

          "What's your name?"

          "Violet." She figures if she answers in monosyllabic increments he'd give up hope of pursuing further conversation. Small talk, she could handle, because small talk could potentially be useful to gather intel about people. Just not anywhere near a psychiatrist's office. Or anywhere near the inevitability of the imminent question looming over both their heads: what're you in here for? Violet figures she doesn't care much to give an honest answer. Or any answer at all. Neither does she care much to know anything about this boy. Unless he can give her information about vampires and werewolves living in Forks, specifically about women with red hair and red eyes and Luka's whereabouts. Other than that, he's useless.

               "Like the flower?" His eyes spark in amusement. Violet doesn't understand it.

          "Maybe."

          "Cool," he says, one corner of his mouth quirking upwards. "I'm Finn. This your first session, right?"

          Violet hums noncommittally.

          "If you don't mind me asking—"

          "Violet Korchak?" The receptionist, a slight woman with auburn hair and vulpine features, calls tentatively, her squeaky voice sluicing the static silence of the waiting area.

               "That's me," Violet says, straightening to her feet. Saved from the inevitable question, she holds in her sigh of relief, rolls her shoulders back, and sends the receptionist a charming smile—her father's sort of smile, a smile that said Vote for me. When she was younger, she'd practiced this borderline sociopathic smile over and over again in the bathroom mirror until her cheeks numbed and she'd shed the naive smile of a girl who knew only happiness and pretty summers.

               "Dr Paige is ready for your appointment," the receptionist says, with a timid grin. She gestures down the hall to a glass door at the end of the short corridor.

            "Perfect," Violet says, and doesn't once look back at Finn as she strides towards Dr Paige's door.

             Some questions were better left unanswered. Some people best left wondering.

☾

WHEN AARON'S CAR ROLLS TO A STOP BY THE CEMETERY GATES, Violet's fingers involuntarily curl tighter around the piece of paper in her hands. It's an old drawing—a relic of Luka's—she'd taken with her to California, a sketch of black masses and dark shapes sketched in deep and strong pencil strokes, both distinct and indistinct at once, of monsters in the woods and devil horns and a smile made for killing. He'd drawn it a few nights before he'd died. If Violet paid attention to omnipresent signs, she might've noticed this particular omen prophesying what would plague her for the years to come. A physical reminder of everything she had to suffer in her head, and yet...

Violet glances out the window. Glancing at her through the rearview mirror, Aaron wordlessly cuts the engine and waits, in the thick silence, for her to get out of the car. In the space of the first one and a half weeks of her residence in Forks, she'd seen more of her driver than her own father's face. Aaron drove her to school, to her first therapy session yesterday (and, without a doubt, would keep driving her to the ensuing prospective ones), to Sage or Kit's house when she didn't feel like skating all the way to La Push in the rain that assaulted Forks more than she'd appreciated, and to other places when it was raining too heavily to walk or skate.