Breathing Fire (Heretic Daughters #1)

Chapter Four: About That Crazy

DAY TWO

I woke up in a bitch of a mood.  My body hurt even worse than it had the day before, when I had dragged my bruised ass back home late, falling into bed.  

I could smell something burning, and I strongly suspected that it was my bed.  I just lay there for a while, feeling odd for some reason.  I mentally catalogued the reasons why I felt so weird.  

It may have been the fact that I had a spell suspending the powerful regeneration that my body was accustomed to.  It could also be that I had more than likely incinerated some of the important parts of my bed while I slept.  Wouldn’t that be fun to explain?  But no, it was something else.  I just couldn’t put my finger on it.  

I finally got up, stomping into the bathroom.  I didn’t even look back at the bed.  I had no desire to see what kind of damage I had done while I slept.  

I had just redecorated my bedroom, and I had really liked the fresh new look.  It was a mix of orange and brown bedding with a dark, heavy wood bed frame and matching furniture.   It was just the style that I was into at the moment.  I hadn’t even had time to get sick of it yet.  

I slammed my door on the mess.

I just stared at my reflection for a long minute, before what I was looking at sank in.  “What the fuck?” I shouted at my reflection.  Okay, I could be a drama queen.  I could be honest about it.  But this was almost too much for my teetering sanity.  

My long blonde hair had been so straight that it didn’t even bend for more years than I cared to count.  At the moment, however, I was looking at a head-full of corkscrew curls.  They were curled up so tightly that my hair was now a half a foot shorter.  I looked vaguely like a grown-up, battered version of Shirley Temple. 

I just stared at myself, frozen for a long moment.  I had the pale aquamarine eyes that were a trademark of my family.  They were so pale that, when my pupils were dilated, as they were now, my eyes could look almost completely white.  Our eyes had been called many things.  Haunting, ghostly, ethereal, other-worldly, beautiful, eerie, creepy.  Right now mine narrowed with the look of faint disgust on my face. 

“What’s goin’ on?”  Lynn’s muted voice came from my bedroom, shaking me out of my reverie.

I opened my bathroom door and just stared at my sister.  Her short black hair was sticking up in every direction. This was extremely unusual for her.  Lynn’s hair usually did precisely what she wanted it to.  It was the polar opposite of my hair, which usually did nothing at all.  It wouldn’t even take to dye.  The stuff just washed out.  

But the messy hair wasn’t the problem.  What really bothered me was the shiner covering her right eye.  “What happened to you?” I asked her.

“What the HELL?” she asked me at the same time.  

“I woke up like this.”  I fingered my curls.

“You beat yourself up in your sleep?”  She raised a brow at me.

“Oh, that,” I said stupidly.  “That was the druids.  Who gave you the shiner?”

“Hell if I know.”  She looked disgusted with her answer.  “Druids?  Really?  That’s not good.  So Dom found you?”

“Not exactly.  It’s complicated, but for the moment, I have it under control.  Ish.  Just avoid the shop for a few days.”  There was no trail to connect the store to our house, which was no accident.  Welcome to the Church of Paranoia.  I founded it.  “Have your goths call in some of their friends if they need extra help.”  As I spoke, Lynn noticed my bed.  I followed her gaze and cursed.  Her jaw hung open.  The linens and much of the mattress were charred black.