Face Your Fears

Chapter 29

Agnes Schaffer smiled, and there was something like fondness in her gaze as she looked at me. It wasn't the way a therapist would look at their patient. 

It just made this entire situation all the more confusing. My head was still throbbing painfully from the amount of things I just did not understand. 

"What...are you doing here?" I demanded, rubbing my forehead with the heel of my palm. "You're my therapist, you're not supposed to - "

"So this is how Death thought he could do it, then?" Havoc said. His voice had risen several octaves, bouncing off the walls of the church. "By sending a ghost after me? Did he honestly think that would work?" 

He was pacing the floor, raking his fingers through his hair. It was unnatural, seeing this normally suave, put-together man looking as if he were about to fall apart.

"What do you mean, ghost?" I said. "That isn't - "

"Death doesn't know I'm here," Agnes said, crossing her arms as she looked to Havoc. "I'm acting alone."

"Acting alone?" Havoc laughed again, and the sound sent chills down my spine. "Oh, I doubt that." 

"And that's really so difficult to believe?" Agnes said. "You of all people should know that sometimes the dead don't always stay dead."

The only thing my addled brain was able to make sense of was shouldn't that have made Agnes Schaffer a zombie and not a ghost?

"It's your first appearance in over four hundred years," Havoc snapped at Agnes. "Excuse me if I'm a little baffled."

"Or could it be," Agnes said, an unsettling smile beginning to curl her lips, "that the past has finally caught up with you?"

The expression on Havoc's face made it very obvious that whatever past he shared with Agnes Schaffer was most certainly not a pleasant one.

"Wait, what?" I said loudly. "Can somebody please tell me what's going on? I'd honestly like to understand."

Agnes let out a soft sigh, turning away from Havoc to look at me. Her face suddenly looked very different than before. Her skin seemed fairer, less wrinkled. Her hair was becoming lighter, longer, and the gap between her front teeth was gone. It was as if thirty years had suddenly disappeared from her face. Actually, she looked rather beautiful...in a way that didn't seem quite normal.

Whatever Havoc had said about this being her first appearance in over four hundred years made even less sense, because this was not the face of a woman who was hundreds of years old. It was impossible.

Why was I having difficulty believing that it could possibly be the truth, given everything that I had already been through so far? For all I knew, it was the truth.

"My name isn't Agnes," she said. "It's Lucrezia." 

"Am I...supposed to know who you are?" I said confusedly. "Because I don't. I'm more concerned about the fact that your face just changed shape."

"My face has never changed," the woman who I thought was Agnes Schaffer told me, and she was smiling. Why was she smiling? I didn't see anything worth smiling about. "You just weren't seeing clearly."

That could be said about plenty of other aspects of my life. It still didn't make me understand what the hell was going on, though.

"I still don't understand," I admitted. "How are you - "

"Oh, use your brain, you insipid child!" Havoc snarled at me. He had not stopped pacing, and he looked even worse, more distraught, than he had moments before. It was as if he were a wild animal trapped in a cage, prowling around. "You damn well know who this woman is, even if you don't know her by name!"