Chapter 14: Dear Diary

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Dear Diary.

It felt weird not writing "Dear Keel," but the Keel I'd been addressing in these entries all these months didn't exist anymore. He'd been gone a long time now, even if I hadn't been entirely ready to admit it; this new version was a poorly rendered duplicate — obsessive, uncommunicative and unstable. He might have all the memories of my Keel, but he was a stranger. He belonged to the throne and his people. He was Nosferatu, and all that entailed.

I tightened my grip on the pen, and placed the tip down beneath the D in Dear. Some things I couldn't even imagine saying out loud, to anyone.

I thought my freedom would come quicker, I began, but the coma's only made Bruce and Ephraim more paranoid. Even though the dreams are gone and Keel is gone, the two of them are still on high alert. It's absolute lunacy.

 Every single time I want to do anything, it requires a "family meeting." They only agreed to let me go see Fredrick, Estella and Mikey two days ago, after four requests and four meetings! Then they had the nerve to demand Bruce drive me there and pick me up.

Who or what are they protecting me from now? Myself? Sometimes I want to throttle them.

I probably should be wondering if that makes me a bad person, but let's face it, I've done a lot worse things.

I haven't bothered to ask to go out again. If I'm under door-to-door supervision when I visit my family, there's no chance Lucia and I will get the privacy we need to talk to Garstatt. And apparently he's getting impatient. Lucia sounds more stressed out about it every time she calls. "He doesn't understand 'grounded,'" she keeps saying.

This is going to slip away from us; I can feel it, and there's not a damned thing I can do about it. Here's me: the big, powerful sorceress — completely helpless yet again. What a joke.

But that's not even the worst part.

Tell me, Diary, other than going out there to talk to Garstatt, what is left for me in the world? Supes hate me, psychics are supposed to have nothing to do with me, humans must be endlessly sheltered, and the bond hasn't so much as twitched since the coma. Which either means I'm dying in slow motion, or one of these days or hours or minutes it  and Keel with it  will come crashing back into my life, and the games will start all over again.

Either way, I'm living on borrowed time. Everything's changed, yet nothing's changed.

And let's be clear on something: just because I don't want to be with Keel anymore, just because he isn't the same person anymore, doesn't mean I don't still worry about him. Because I do.  

I worry about me too. All the time.

I'm a pariah, an outcast. In school, becoming one used to be my number-one worst fear. All I wanted was to make it to graduation happily anonymous. Now that worst fear has gone and happened to my whole life!

It's not fair. My father made one mistake a long time ago, and now it's destroyed my life and his and Keel's and Bruce's and maybe even Lucia's. It just keeps piling up the debris endlessly. I'm afraid it's never going to end, that it's just going to keep taking more victims.

This is not the life I'm supposed to have. Not the life I wanted.

I'm not at the centre of the tornado.

God, I wish lying worked.

M.

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