He fixed his mesmerizing eyes on her.
“But you will forget this.”
Oh, I very seriously doubt that.
“I should kill you and go home,” he said, “but the thought of facing existence without you makes me feel…sad.”
He turned in time to see her hug herself.
“Does that frighten you?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said, meeting his gaze. “I don’t want to feel like this.”
He narrowed his eyes. “Then I shall make an adjustment.”
Chapter thirteen
The Doppler Effect
“A lie which is a half truth is ever the blackest of lies." - Alfred Lord Tennyson
Fully rejuvenated, Hailey awoke strangely excited about leaving her home and everything she’d ever known to go to a college in The Middle of Nowhere. She stretched and stumbled into the bathroom, where she showered, dried, and grabbed an elastic, fully intending to go “bun” for the day, but Tomas had another idea. He shot out of the mirror, scissors in hand.
“Ah!” she yelled, throwing her hands over her head and squishing herself against the wall.
Tomas was fast. Pulling her hands away, he snipped and fussed. When he was finished with the scissors, he pulled out of thin air an otherworldly hairdryer, bigger than the sink.
“Are yeh alright?” came Uncle Pix’s voice from outside the door.
Tomas clicked the gigantic hairdryer on to answer him, brushing and drying and studying Hailey’s head until he was finally satisfied and disappeared.
Standing up with her hands on her head, Hailey hesitated to look in the mirror, but when she did, she was happily surprised.
He’d given her bangs that swept to the side, leaving some longer tendrils, which perfectly framed her face. It looked both dainty and edgy.
“YOU’RE WELCOME,” came a word printed in frost on the glass.
“Why are you here?” she said.
“CURIOUS,” was the next word he made, and then it disappeared.
“What are you curious about?”
“HAILEY-KHU”
“Hailey-khu? What’s that? What does khu mean?”
“SCHATZ,” it wrote.
Hailey opened her mouth to speak but was interrupted by a loud crash coming from the kitchen, and she zipped down the hall.
Uncle Dale was on the floor gathering up pieces of a plate and sang out to her.
“Morning, Hailey!”
“Morning,” she answered with hesitation. “Everything alright out here?”
“Sure.” He dumped a handful of broken porcelain into the trash. “Just a bit of poltergeist shenanigans,” he said, as if it were as normal as a comment on the weather, so she went with it.
