Asylum (Touched by the Fae 1)

Do I know better than to push my luck with a new doctor?

Yup.

For one second, I think about taking my gloves off to make a bigger impact, then decide against it. I can barely stomach the blotches, the scars, the ruined skin myself—and they’re my hands. I really don’t like anyone else to see them. Dr. Gillespie is no exception.

Glancing down, I move my hands into my lap, running one hand over the other, grateful for the leather that protects them and hides them at the same time.

“I got burned really bad a couple of years ago,” I explain. He’s read my file. He knows exactly how I got burned, too. “I had to have skin grafts. When my hands finally healed, the doctors said I could keep gloves on if they felt too sensitive.”

“That was in the accident,” he guesses. “When your foster sister died.”

That’s how everyone here refers to it. The accident. It’s better than what the courts called it.

The murder.

“Yeah,” I admit, finally looking away from him. My last glimpse is of his impish face and the satisfied smile he wears.

It isn’t a game, even if I

treat my stay in Black Pine like that half the time. It makes the endless routine—the tiring monotony—more manageable when I do. But it isn’t a game. Not really.

Even so, at that moment, we both know that Dr. Gillespie has won this round.

4

I didn’t do it.

You’d think after all these years that I wouldn’t have to remind myself of the truth. As I step aside to let Martin enter Dr. Gillespie’s office, my heart is thudding, my stomach tight. I didn’t do it, but it’s super hard to convince anyone of your innocence when you’re an in-patient in a facility like Black Pine.

After a while, you give up on trying. Either the doctors believe you or they don’t. Whatever. The only important thing is that you don’t forget.

I didn’t kill Madelaine. I couldn’t. We might not have been blood, but we were still sisters. I never would’ve hurt her. My hands are destroyed because I tried to save her.

Despite what the papers first reported, the courts didn’t really think I had anything to do with her death. If I did? It wasn’t on purpose. During the autopsy, the medical examiner discovered that Madelaine had a broken neck. At fifteen, I was barely one-ten. I couldn’t even open a pickle jar without Mr. Everett’s help. No way I could have done that to her on my own.

But the fire…

The fire is what made the cops, then the courts look at me like a suspect. And that’s because I told them that it was a beautiful man—no, a beautiful fae—with long gold-colored hair and glowing golden eyes who started the fire and killed my sister.

He was the one who tricked Madelaine, charming her toward him, enticing her to give him her neck only for him to snap it easily. He’s the one who built a circle around her body and set it on fire. The one who dared me to come and get her, who laughed as my hands burned.

He did it all. And then, my hands blistered, my throat raw from screaming, he vanished and I was left to take all the blame.

Kindly at first, then more firmly, everybody told me that I made him up. That he couldn’t possibly exist—that the fae didn’t exist—and I used this fantasy to explain the fire. The official statement was that I had a breakdown when I found that Madelaine had died in such a tragic accident. In my grief, I lit a fire as if I was trying to make it all go away.

Of course, then I went ahead and told them about Nine. I spoke about my Shadow Man in such great detail that they decided that my troubles started long before I was fifteen. I just didn’t get a diagnosis until then.

Schizophrenia at first, until they settled on schizotypal personality disorder once I told them that, while I see and talk to the fae, I understand they’re not real.

Anxiety with near-catatonic panic attacks.

And, no matter what I told Dr. Gillespie, just a touch of haphephobia.

That is why I’m here.

It’s been a long six years. I learned early on that no one else believes in the fae so I started to pretend that I didn’t, either. After a while, I wasn’t pretending. So long as I take my morning meds, I’m fine. Sure, I lose it when I think someone might touch me, but that’s just self-preservation. Better safe than sorry, right? Nine warned me not to let anyone touch me. So what if there’s no Nine? That means the warning came from my own mind and, if there’s one person in this world I can rely on, it’s me.

I’m the only one who has never let me down.