Selma bit her lip. The way his fiery gaze locked on the gesture didn’t ease the sense she was being scrutinized, but if she could make him believe that her latest “hallucination” had been a freak accident and not a relapse, this might be over quicker.
“I... haven’t had an episode since I was seventeen. I think maybe it was just due to the stress of the situation, and I hadn’t eaten all day...” Her voice died at his cocked eyebrow.
“You don’t need to lie to me, Selma.” His tone was mildly admonishing, but also gentle—the kind of tone someone would use to correct undesirable behavior in a skittish cat. “I am very good at recognizing deception. They never disappeared, did they?”
Splendid. So apart from having fire-eyes and horns, her new doctor was also a living lie detector. She shook her head.
“How did you manage them for so long on your own?”
There really was no way around it—they were going to talk about all the details of her miserable existence with this illness, and she was going to be permanently put back into a system that had no way of helping her, and every way of ruining what levels of contentment she’d managed to scrape together over the past ten years.
“I learned to ignore them,” she said, voice low and defeated. “I found that if I didn’t pay attention to them, the monsters wouldn’t be able to tell me apart from everyone else. It’s easier in the daylight.”
Dr. Hershey cocked his head as he watched her, his burning eyes falling into shadow. He almost looked like a normal person, apart from the horns and ears. “Interesting. That must have been very hard.”
Selma shrugged. “It was at first, but now it’s easier than... than before.” She gave him a pleading look. “I was doing alright. I really was. Last night was just...”
“What happened last night?”
She shot him a quizzical look. “Didn’t they tell you?” She was pretty much used to having every detail of her life readily available in file format to anyone with a doctorate.
“They did indeed, but I would like to hear it from you, if you don’t mind.”
It was strange, really. She’d spent all her life keeping as much distance from them as she possibly could, and now she was sitting right in front of one who seemed genuinely interested in her well-being, almost... caring. It was intensely disturbing.
“I saw a girl being led away by three of...” She glanced quickly at his horns and stifled the words “your kind” from coming out of her mouth. “...uh, three of the illusions, and she looked very scared, so I couldn’t not help.”
“But they weren’t illusions, were they? There were three men there, according to the police report. You did save a girl from her rapists,” he said, leaning forward and supporting his chin in one big hand. The way he was watching her now, as if she were the most intriguing creature on the face of the Earth, was not much better than his previous scrutiny.
Selma shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “Well, yeah. But... to me, they didn’t look like men, and... and when they tried to hurt me, I... panicked.”
“You say ’tried to.’ Did you fight back?”
She shuddered at the memory of the metal rod connecting with hard bone, sending shocks of vibrations down her arms. “Yes. It wasn’t enough, though. It never is...”
When the police officers came, the tentative grasp she’d had on her broken mind snapped completely. A flash of the scaly monster who had ripped the pipe from her hands made her gasp. His claws tearing through her clothing had hurt, as had his fist locking around her throat.
Selma couldn’t remember anything after that, apart from the sound of gunshots and the footsteps of the police officers sprinting to their rescue. She hadn’t stopped screaming until the paramedics injected her with some kind of sedative.
“I... I’m sorry, I... don’t recall the details so well.” She wrapped her arms around herself in an attempt to quell the sinking feeling of despair. She would never escape the waking nightmare that was her illness.
Dr. Hershey patted her soothingly on the knee, transferring heat to her skin through the fabric. “That’s quite alright, Selma. I know you must have been very frightened. Would you mind elaborating on what you mean by ‘it never is’? Have you been hurt by people you see as monsters before?”
Of course he’d picked up on that. She bit her lower lip, nodding. “A few times, when I was a kid. Only one time really bad.”
His orange gaze narrowed, something reminiscent of anger flickering behind it for a short moment before he managed to regain that soothing therapist-expression. “Sexually?”
“Oh, no. Mostly just...” She’d been about to say “normally,” but thought better of it. Instead she rolled up the loose leg of the comfortable white pants she’d been given upon arrival, twisting her leg to reveal the long scar down her calf.
Dr. Hershey trailed his finger up it, leaving an electric trail in his wake, and the thought that she was happy she’d shaved her legs the morning before sparked in her mind. Blushing at that—completely irrelevant—contemplation, she resolutely stared at the horns sticking up from his wavy locks. Goosebump-inducing touch or no, horns did not belong on a man’s head, and they certainly subtracted from the charms of his firm jaw and wide shoulders.
“This was vicious,” he said, the softest touch of his breath grazing her skin. “And certainly not a figment of your imagination. Did anyone catch the perpetrator?”
Selma pulled her leg back, shifting so the fabric slid down and covered her skin again. “No. Some passerby saw her, though. Said it was a young redheaded woman. She ran when he came to help me.”
“And to you it was...?”
She grimaced. “A monster.”
