Cordelia was not speaking to Alex, no matter how many times he tried to “explain” awkwardly in the middle of work. She felt betrayed somehow, even though she didn’t know if it was Alex who told Messina to use her mother against her, or if Messina was able to divine that using his evil bureaucrat powers. She wasn’t sure which would make her feel better. The only thing that did make her feel better was treating Alex like a stranger, so she went with that.
By comparison, Brendan and his confusing flip-flopping behavior, which he seemed to have stopped for the moment, seemed pretty minor. So he’d been weird one morning, big deal. He’d been unrelenting in his support for her in every other moment, including anchoring her in their disastrous “meeting” with Messina and keeping her from trying to flip that stupid metal table at one of the most powerful supernatural beings in the League. For that alone, he’d earned her loyalty.
The casket entity—or Pandora, as Cordelia had dubbed her, because she was a mystery that lived in a box—seemed to resent Messina’s presence as much as Cordelia did. The next morning, he’d been present in Jillian’s office watching the video feed while Cordelia and Brendan attempted contact and the casket refused to engage. She refused to show Cordelia so much as a flash of an image for days, as if she was trying to prove to Messina (and Cordelia, for that matter) who held the power in the relationship.
Honestly, she felt a little sorry for it. It was lonely, so desperate for anyone to contact it that would latch on to anything. She knew what it was like to be so alone, isolated, needing someone who understood so badly that it was a physical ache in the bones.
Cordelia kept pushing herself, thanks to Messina’s threats. And at one point, she slipped and dared to put her hands on that glassy obsidian surface before Brendan could stop her. She ended up waking in a clinic bed again, resulting in more medically-ordered time off work.
Messina had not been impressed. For that matter, neither was Dr. Carmody.
Cordelia couldn’t find it within her to give a damn.
OK, maybe she felt sort of bad about Dr. Carmody.
So she visited the post office and spent time with Bonita, who seemed like an island of calm compared to what was happening in the village. Sensing her restlessness, Bonita taught Cordelia all new tricks, like how to push images out instead of pulling them in, a tactic Bonita had once used to show her husband how much she loved him.
And she helped Cordelia build her mind palace. Cordelia’s started with the hangman’s rope dream. She built the apartment—sad and non-descript, nothing scary beyond its inescapability—and then she built the gallows inside of it, shoving the crowd of screaming townsfolk in there and them slamming a thick door shut on the memory, vowing that it would stay inside, never to escape again. Even the mental gesture was enough to take a tiny bit of weight off of her shoulders.
She worked through the worst of her visions. Memory by memory, she locked them away in those popcorn-ceilinged studios. She was sure a therapist would tell her that locking away that pain instead of processing it was unhealthy, but it wasn’t her pain in the first place. It was someone else’s, dumped into her head as a convenient storage place.
Besides, she had enough issues to deal with. As she built those apartments, the resentment she felt for her mother seemed to flare all the more. If Bernadette had just a little bit of grace about not receiving the gift, if she’d nurtured Cordelia at all, life would have been so much easier.
Bonita seemed to sense this tension and Cordelia suspected her of activating some sort of lovingly intrusive mom phone tree, because suddenly, she was finding coolers on her porch every day filled with homemade comfort foods. Having a suspicious nature, she verified the identity of each well-intended elderly lady with Bonita to make sure she didn’t get poisoned in some fairy tale scenario.
The more she built her mind palace, the easier it was for Cordelia to maintain her shield. She supposed it made sense. The shield wasn’t fighting to maintain control over all of the old visions bouncing around in her head, so it was easier to keep new ones out. Bonita enjoyed testing her by handing her mail—which was probably a violation of several federal laws, but Bonita was her own supervisor—to see if she could block out messages from emotionally loaded packages.
This particular morning, she handed Cordelia a thick manila envelope marked with a set of scales by the return address. Cordelia focused on keeping the emotional vibrations thrumming from the paper out of her head. She turned it over in her hands. The return address was listed as a law firm in New Orleans, Gable, Raghetti, and Marks, and was addressed to a William Boone.
“Nothing?” Bonita asked, her gray brows raised.
“Not a flash,” Cordelia said. “Why?”
Bonita shrugged, her expression coy. “I refuse to violate the sacred trust bestowed upon me by the local residents.”
Cordelia smirked. “Of course you wouldn’t.”
“But if I did, I might ponder aloud whether this is the final divorce settlement paperwork for the Boone divorce. Billy and Naomi Boone were married all of three and a half years before they filed for divorce—huge scandal, because dragon shifters don’t divorce but honestly, a marriage between a dragon shifter and a big cat shifter is just asking for trouble,” Bonita drawled. “The divorce has dragged out for twice as long as they were married, because dragons don’t give up their treasure and lions don’t give up anything they consider their own. It has been one of the nastiest legal battles in Mystic Bayou’s history. And if this is the final decree and both of the Boones have touched this paperwork, their anger should be poring through the envelope like radiation.”
Cordelia shook her head. “I don’t feel a thing.”
“Very impressive, my young apprentice,” Bonita said.
Cordelia asked, “Is that the end of my homework for the day?”
“I suppose you can take a break and go have a piece of pie,” Bonita said, waving her hand airily.
“Speaking of which, I met a new eligible bachelor in the pie shop the other day,” Cordelia told her with a grin.
“Oh, honey, I haven’t dated since I don’t know when,” Bonita scoffed. “And I don’t know if I should start now.”
“I’ve heard you considering how lonely you are. Besides, Walt’s sweet and kind of cuddly. You could use a little sweet and cuddly,” Cordelia insisted.
“Walt Benson? With the mustache?” Bonita made a hand motion over her mouth.
“He’s nice,” Cordelia said. “And I get the feeling that he’s lonely, too.”
“Do you think the mustache is negotiable?” Bonita asked.
“OK, I’m going to make this happen now,” Cordelia giggled. “Because of stubbornness…or possibly because I like seeing things stirred up. Maybe a mix of both.”
“Well, I hear that most good relationships start out of stubbornness,” Bonita said. “All right, all right, you go have your piece of pie and some rest, before somebody figures out that I’m letting you fondle the general public’s mail. We’ll talk about sad mustaches some other time.”
Chuckling to herself, Cordelia left the post office. Maybe she did have time for a piece of pie. There always seemed to be time for a piece of pie in Mystic Bayou. People seemed to accept that as an excuse for not being on time or even showing up. “Sorry, I was having a piece of pie.”