"That's it!" I thought back to the date that she spent the night in my room. The date the spell must have been cast.
I was lucky because the only reason I remembered was that it was so close to my birthday.
I pressed the buttons on the keypad and prayed that it would work.
"Gotcha!" I smiled happily as the keypad turned green and the front door popped open. "After you, sir." I opened the door and let Colt lead the way inside.
When thinking about my mother's mind, I'd expected it to be like the castle, dusty and lonely. It had been so long since she'd been herself, her condition worsening and worsening until she was just a shell of who she used to be.
But it was actually the opposite.
Everything in the mall looked shiny and new, from the white marble floors to the brightly lit stores that I had no doubt housed all the memories and parts of her personality that made her who she was. There wasn't a speck of dust in sight, it actually smelled like someone had just mopped the floors.
My favorite scent.
I opened my mouth to call out for my mother, but Colt clamped his hand over my lips before holding a finger up to his.
"There are more things lurking in a person's head than just themselves." He said quietly before releasing my face from his grasp. "It's best not to wake them all at once. Because when we're in here, all of this is real, which means the pain is too. You could even–"
He trailed off.
"Die?" I finished the sentence for him.
"Yes." He said somberly.
I caught myself wondering how that would work. Could he die again, even though he was already dead?
Would his soul be stuck in the hunter trapper too?
But those were all things that would take too long to ask.
I tried to keep myself from glancing down at my wrist, but the ticking timer still burned a hole in it. I tried my best not to let my anxiety get the best of me and focus on the problems at hand.
"Well, let's get to it then." I whispered before taking a step into the mall.
The place was actually pretty cool once I got over the fact that it was in my mother's head, and it had all of her favorite stores and restaurants inside.
I knew they weren't real, but suddenly I was hit by a strong hunger.
When was the last time I ate? I wondered, trying to avert my eyes and the random cravings for the restaurants of my childhood that came with them.
We passed an electronics store and I froze in place, peaking through the window. Each of the television screens played snippets of memories. Some I remembered too, others I didn't.
My fingers fidgeted as I tried to resist the urge to look at the watch.
We had a mission to complete, and my nostalgia wasn't part of it.
I turned to walk away when I felt Colt's fingers wrap around my wrist. "We have time." He smiled sweetly.
I thought about it for a second, so hell bent on not stepping foot inside.
On one hand it felt like an invasion of my mother's privacy, but on the other hand her memories were part of my past, and they probably held a lot of the answers that I was looking for.
Did one outweigh the other?
I sunk my teeth into my bottom lip and thought, my eyes darting to Colt. He held up a finger and signed an X over his heart.
"I won't say a word." His white fangs shimmered in the light.
"Okay, maybe just a peak." I scurried into the store inadvertently dragging Colt along with me.
There were so many TV's lined up across the walls that it was hard to know where to start, too many memories were playing at once. That wasn't even counting the VHS tapes that sat in the racks in the middle like they were on sale.
First of all, VHS? Ew.
I scoffed.
I decided starting anywhere was better than nowhere, so I went to the TV closest to me and realized that there was a small date and time stamped in the bottom left corner of the video. The first was from the day I was born.
I watched through my mother's eyes as the doctors and nurses scurried around me. It was like a home video, only straight from her head.
"Awe, this is from the day I was born." I smiled at Colt.
I was expecting to see some feel good moments, or the magic of birth or something. But instead all I saw was the panicked expression on all the nurses faces. You could tell that shit was hitting the fan, but they were trying to make sure that my mother didn't know.
"What's wrong with her?" I heard my mother say. She used the tone that she did when she was nervous.
"The doctor just needs to look at her for a second." A nurse beside the bed tried to reassure her.
I watched as my father, or the man who raised me, grabbed my mother by the chin and tilted her head toward his. My eyes watered at the sight of him. Just seeing him tugged at my heart strings.
"Hey, everything's okay. Just look at me."
The position of the memory shook as my mother tried to tear her head from my father's hand and gaze to the corner where they worked on me furiously, but his grip was ironclad.
"No, no, no, no. Just look at me. Okay?"
The image got blurry as my mother's eyes filled with tears.
I felt Colt's hand lay on my shoulder.
"What's going on?"
"I don't know, but it doesn't seem good." I pursed my lips and gnawed at the inside of my cheek.
I didn't know why I felt anxious, I knew everything turned out okay, obviously because I was alive to watch the memory, but my emotions were all out of whack.
"She's breathing! She's breathing!" I heard the doctor's deep voice exclaim excitedly. "But why isn't she crying?"
"I don't care! Just bring her to me!" My mother's voice shook. It was less of a suggestion and more of a or I'll get up off this table and kick your ass if I have to type of demand.
They brought me to my mother all wrapped in a blanket. My skin was still recovering from the pale shade of blue that it must have been from lack of oxygen.
"It was like she came back from the dead." One nurse sighed. "She's your little zombie baby."
I was partially offended, but my mother must have thought it was cute because she repeated it in a cringe worthy baby voice.
So when I was born I wasn’t... alive?
I realized that maybe the demonic things in my life had started long before I thought they did.
There were a lot more memories playing on the screens, but I was done watching them. I was tired, and the more I looked the more it felt like an intrusion.
“Hey, let’s–”
Colt clamped his hand over my mouth and pulled me to the ground, a glint of fear in his eyes.
I held my breath and listened. A low growl and a scraping sound came from down the hallway outside the door.
We watched in horror as a big black shadow creature floated past, its glowing green eyes lighting.
I continued to hold my breath, waiting until it passed us before exhaling.
“What the hell was that?”
“My guess? That’s what’s been keeping your mother in here for so long.”
Chapter 19
"Great! Just great! We get this far, this close to freeing both of my parents and everything's going smooth and then this happens." I threw my hands up in the air and tears filled my eyes.