Nepenthe • Something that can make you forget grief or suffering.
Never feeling like they belonged was a feeling that Lissa Dragomir lived with, even with her family and life long best friend, although they aided in that feeling not being so strong...
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Dr. Rasković waited a few seconds, letting the weight of Kate's confession settle. Not judging. Not soothing. Just present.
"Kate," he said quietly, "tell me what you mean when you say you see the dead."
Kate swallowed. Her hands tightened around Alec, who sat curled in her lap, fingers rubbing anxiously at the seam of her sleeve. He didn't speak—he rarely did—but he felt everything. "It started after..." She hesitated. God, where did it even start? "After the kidnapping on New Years."
She forced the words out though barely above a whisper "I see ghosts."
Dr. Rasković absorbed this without flinching, even if this was ot at all what he was used to hearing from patients "Can you describe what you see?"
"It changes." Her voice came thin and cautious. "Sometimes it's just a feeling. Like someone stepped into the room behind me. Like eyes on my back." Her throat tightened. "Sometimes it's a shadow. Or a face. And sometimes it's so clear I forget they're supposed to be dead."
Alec pressed himself into her side at the tremor in her voice. Kate smoothed a hand down his small spine automatically.
The therapist nodded slowly. "Whose faces do you see?"
Kate looked down at her boots—snow-stained, scuffed, too small in the vastness of the Academy.
"Rose," she whispered.
Dr. Rasković's brows lifted. "Novice Hathaway?"
"I never met her," Kate quickly said, knowing that she's not supposed to know Rose. "But I've seen pictures of her and I've seen her. Always near Lissa. Like she's still watching over her. Like she never left." Her eyes flickered. "She... reacts. To things. She looks worried when Lissa is stressed. She moves closer when Lissa cries. Sometimes she looks at me like she... knows me." She shook her head fast, as if to throw the thought away.
The therapist didn't interrupt.
"And Natalie..." Kate's jaw tensed. "She stays far. She looks... lost. Like she's not supposed to be here, but not always, sometimes she looks like she did when I killed her, pure hunger and darkness."
The room seemed to chill.
"And Marin," she added. "The Guardian that Christian killed. The one he... burned." A flicker of something sharp went through her eyes. "Isaiah. Elena. The Strigoi I killed before the Academy." Her breath hitched. "They're always in the distance. Like shadows. But when I get near the ward lines, they disappear from inside the school ground and I see them hidden in the shadows of the trees—"
