CHAPTER SEVEN
in hills of california

TAPPING A RESTLESS FINGER ALONG THE EDGE OF her seat, Violet makes quick inventory of the waiting area—vacant, save for herself and a skinny boy with olivine skin and dark circles ringing his gaunt eyes—outside the therapist's office with a listless boredom.

          White walls, smart-grey sofas and Christmas green cushions, the receptionist's desk shoved in the corner. State-of-the-art interior design, the air-conditioning acclimated at just the right temperature. Apparently, it took people months of being waitlisted to be able to catch a view like this. But Violet's always been on the fast track, as all Korchaks are. Even though it'd only taken her a full week of being waitlisted, her father hadn't been too happy with the fact that she'd even had to wait in the first place.

              —THE LONGER YOU STAY INSANE, THE FASTER YOU DROWN, THE MORE YOU LOSE SIGHT OF WHAT YOU'VE COME BACK TO FORKS FOR—

             Meanwhile, a week of school had gone by, unremarkable and distastefully boring. Nobody's tried to approach her, and Violet hadn't made an effort to make any new friends either. There wasn't a single person in school who didn't think she was collateral damage. She spent her hours until curfew hanging around Sage and Kit, avoiding Paul and fading his existence into the backburner. She'd written letters to her sister and dodged a handful of calls from her mother. Still, the most unbearable parts of her day were the stiff, awkward dinners with her father at a dining table that was missing two people and empty of one forever. She spent those dinner hours staring blankly at Luka's vacant chair, pretending the pickaxe of grief hammering at her heart—ache by ache, memory by memory—didn't make her miss her cigarettes.

            Speaking of which...

            —YOU'RE ALREADY ROTTING—

            Violet cranes her neck to face the clock on the far wall. Four on the dot. Her appointment is in fifteen minutes. She has a pack of Camels in the pocket of her grey hoodie, a lighter in the pocket of her jeans, and the bathroom was only down the hall. That'd buy her ten minutes of reprieve from the anxiety crawling in her veins, like a million fire ants making a nest of her guts. Although, being left alone with her thoughts isn't such a good idea after all.

           "Hey."

             It's the boy. Skinny, sleep-deprived, unkempt hair, creased clothes. He's looking at her with rampant curiosity, sizing her up like a tailor making little notes of what kind of stitches to put in a suit. With pale, disinterested eyes, Violet takes measurements of her own. He's about her age, give or take, with hollow cheeks and crooked teeth, too scrawny to be a threat, but it didn't seem like he considered her to be one either. Her gaze catches on his bright orange sneakers, conspicuous as a traffic cone.

              "Yes?" Violet drawls, cocking her head.

             If the boy detects the frost in her tone, the unwelcome bite of her words, he doesn't make any indication that he did. "You're new here," he remarks, lifting a brow.

           "I am."

          "What's your name?"

          "Violet." She figures if she answers in monosyllabic increments he'd give up hope of pursuing further conversation. Small talk, she could handle, because small talk could potentially be useful to gather intel about people. Just not anywhere near a psychiatrist's office. Or anywhere near the inevitability of the imminent question looming over both their heads: what're you in here for? Violet figures she doesn't care much to give an honest answer. Or any answer at all. Neither does she care much to know anything about this boy. Unless he can give her information about vampires and werewolves living in Forks, specifically about women with red hair and red eyes and Luka's whereabouts. Other than that, he's useless.

               "Like the flower?" His eyes spark in amusement. Violet doesn't understand it.

          "Maybe."

          "Cool," he says, one corner of his mouth quirking upwards. "I'm Finn. This your first session, right?"

          Violet hums noncommittally.

          "If you don't mind me asking—"

          "Violet Korchak?" The receptionist, a slight woman with auburn hair and vulpine features, calls tentatively, her squeaky voice sluicing the static silence of the waiting area.

               "That's me," Violet says, straightening to her feet. Saved from the inevitable question, she holds in her sigh of relief, rolls her shoulders back, and sends the receptionist a charming smile—her father's sort of smile, a smile that said Vote for me. When she was younger, she'd practiced this borderline sociopathic smile over and over again in the bathroom mirror until her cheeks numbed and she'd shed the naive smile of a girl who knew only happiness and pretty summers.

               "Dr Paige is ready for your appointment," the receptionist says, with a timid grin. She gestures down the hall to a glass door at the end of the short corridor.

            "Perfect," Violet says, and doesn't once look back at Finn as she strides towards Dr Paige's door.

             Some questions were better left unanswered. Some people best left wondering.

☾

WHEN AARON'S CAR ROLLS TO A STOP BY THE CEMETERY GATES, Violet's fingers involuntarily curl tighter around the piece of paper in her hands. It's an old drawing—a relic of Luka's—she'd taken with her to California, a sketch of black masses and dark shapes sketched in deep and strong pencil strokes, both distinct and indistinct at once, of monsters in the woods and devil horns and a smile made for killing. He'd drawn it a few nights before he'd died. If Violet paid attention to omnipresent signs, she might've noticed this particular omen prophesying what would plague her for the years to come. A physical reminder of everything she had to suffer in her head, and yet...

Violet glances out the window. Glancing at her through the rearview mirror, Aaron wordlessly cuts the engine and waits, in the thick silence, for her to get out of the car. In the space of the first one and a half weeks of her residence in Forks, she'd seen more of her driver than her own father's face. Aaron drove her to school, to her first therapy session yesterday (and, without a doubt, would keep driving her to the ensuing prospective ones), to Sage or Kit's house when she didn't feel like skating all the way to La Push in the rain that assaulted Forks more than she'd appreciated, and to other places when it was raining too heavily to walk or skate.

Now, even though it isn't raining, nor is the sky dark enough to be cause for concern, Aaron had offered to drive her to the local cemetery when she'd announced to the empty (save for the cook, the maids, and Aaron) house where she was going. Violet hadn't declined either. She doesn't really know why she'd taken him up on the offer. It's not like she doesn't know they way there—Sage used to hang around the cemetery in Forks during her weird gothic phase when they were younger, and often dragged Violet and Kit along. Kit, in true Kit Lahote fashion, would comply, but, in the same vein, would complain and jump at every noise.

Steeling herself, Violet opens the door and steps out.

"Wait here," Violet says, tight-voiced, to Aaron, who remains in the driver's seat. Then, as an afterthought, she adds, "or come, I don't care."

"I'll wait out here for you," Aaron says, voice tinged with melancholy. "Take as long as you need." He's had his grieving time. He'd been driving Luka around before Violet was even in the picture. Luka had always treated Aaron like a close uncle. Totally unprofessional, but that was Luka Korchak for you, an angel with the sun in his smile. But now the light's been snuffed out and the sky's a blacked-out chaos of monsters and shadows and things that go bump in the night.

With a stiff nod, Violet shuts the door and strides towards Luka's grave.

—HE'S NOT EVEN HERE, WHY DID YOU COME?—

Gritting her teeth, she lifts her chin high, rubs the paper between her fingers, but carefully enough not to crush it.

Among the other cracked and crumbling tombstones, it's not all that difficult to spot Luka's. If the many bouquets of flowers—always fresh, always littering the space around the slab of stone—aren't already a dead giveaway that it'd been recently visited by the many friends Luka had or the few girlfriends he'd casually dated way back when, it was the way her feet always found the same path she'd walked four years ago, when she'd last visited. It was the way the fortress of ice around her heart cracked and melted, bleeding down into her lungs, into her kneecaps, into the couple weak steps she'd taken before almost collapsing by his grave. It was in the pain lancing through her chest, a pain that blurred into the emptiness of loss, the reminder of everything was there that wasn't anymore, a loss that ached so hard it felt like anger. It was in the shake of her hands, the way her quaking fingers fumbled with Luka's nightmare drawing, the way she had to fight for control just to wrestle a cigarette out of her pocket and flick the lighter on, put the flame to the end of the cigarette.

With the first inhale of nicotine, she traces the letter L engraved on the tombstone.

It's empty. Everyone knows that there was no body to bury in the first place, only that the Korchaks' first and only son had vanished, and the tombstone with his name and 1986 – 2002 engraved on it was merely a formality. Just another set of bones to lay to rest

That should've been me, Violet thinks, taking another callous drag from her cigarette. That should've been me instead, with no pulse in my bloodless veins and no more superficial smiles in the grave where I can finally be bones and dust in a box buried and forgotten six feet under graveyard dirt; out of sight, out of mind. Reprieve for a girl sempiternally shrouded in a smothering thunderstorm of this palpable sadness. Though for this elongated moment, there's no tears left to shed because her heart along with every smithereen of emotion died four years ago in the parking lot with Luka. Albeit, all that's left behind in the aftermath is a gaping chasm of nothing and the urge to tear a hole in her chest just to fill it with something — anything other than the guilt that sits like poison in the decaying house of bones.

         Cursed, is what she is, essentially, with apparitions of pale skin and lambent red eyes and teeth staring at her in the bleeding darkness, ghosts and monsters haunting her peripheral vision. Closing her eyes at night is another cheap joke the universe slides her way, tricking her into thinking: this is it, this is when it finally happens, I'll die now and feel nothing else. And then she wakes up screaming and crying for a boy who won't come home. A boy, seventeen forever, a death falling entirely on her shoulders. Why hadn't she done something?

  —YOU COULDN'T HAVE DONE ANYTHING. YOU WERE HELPLESS THAT DAY, AND YOU ARE HELPLESS TODAY—

In some way or another, Violet doesn't think she deserves to feel like this, weighted by a past compromising the present and butchering the future. Then the moment evanesces quickly enough and she is an affliction of blue veins on porcelain skin and aching knuckles and cold eyes masking ruination once more.

Nothing stirs within her, no eminent poignance or regret or even a little ache in her chest. By this point, Violet is just tired of a multiplex of things. These days, exhaustion is more familiar than her own bedroom. Being, being herself, being nothing but painful reminders and the diabolical manifestation of agony. Existence is punishment; cursed to make mistake after mistake after mistake. No point curbing the contemptuous thoughts malevolently stinging her brain in a maelstrom of unrelenting aggression, a million angry wasps compressed into the space between her ears.

  "I'm home," Violet says to no one. Smoke billows out of her mouth. She feels a little stupid, but there's no one else at the cemetery. Just a bunch of dead people and their little place markers on Earth. "I made it," she continues, meaning to speak to Luka, even though she knows he's not dead, just missing, just gone, just a blank space in her life. Pushing down the urge to burst into tears, the urge to turn back and head home and fight her demons another day, she sets the paper down beside a bouquet of withering daisies. She doesn't even want to think of what Luka might think of the scars under her sleeves, the ones she marks herself with in moments of quiet. Blood in the sink. Memory by memory. Cut by cut. "You're not going to be proud of the shit I pulled to get me back here. I set someone's house on fire. I've stabbed people—not fatally, of course, but you never liked violence—" I seem to be made of the very substance— "I've cheated and lied and blackmailed and stolen.

"I've lost someone important, too," Violet says, throat seizing. It takes a minute, a beat of dead silence, of the sympathetic whisper of the wind through the trees, the rustling of leaves, a distant bird's cry, until she finds her voice again. "Livvy was... you would've liked her. She got me hooked on smoking, but, like, that's whatever. She got me through my last days in California, away from home. That's what's important."

She pauses. Like there's a chance that Luka might answer. It's a foolish hope, but she stops talking because it feels right. So she smokes and she waits. What would Luka have said?

But the voice that answers is not her brother's. Nor is the presence anyone she's particularly familiar with.

"Hello, Poppy."

Shadows at her back seemed to scatter. Spine tensing, Violet turns, looks up.

A man with copper skin and a grave face stares back. Sam Uley. In four years, he's changed too. Cut his hair, grown some muscle, got a little taller. There's a certain meanness in his eyes that wasn't there four years ago, either. But the look he fixes her is not cruel. It's cold, calculating. But so is her frosty glower.

"It's Violet," she says, flatly.

She remembers Sam. If only a vague memory. Luka and Sam were friends. It made sense. Somewhat. They were the same age, though, they never went to school together since Luka went to school in Forks, and Violet wasn't entirely sure how close Luka and Sam were, but they knew each other somehow. Otherwise, why else would he be here?

"Violent Violet," Sam muses, still towering over her. A small grin curls his lips. The nickname Paul had coined for her strikes a sore spot in her gut. "I remember. Didn't know you picked up smoking. Your brother was so against it."

"I was in California a long time," Violet says, stiffly.

"Four years," Sam says, lifting a brow. "Lot of things can change. I get it. Why'd you come back, though? Thought all those fancy Cali schools might suit you better."

Was he calling her a brat? Maybe not directly, but it seemed implied. Even so, she wasn't obligated to tell him anything. Violet flicks cherry ash off her cigarette and takes a loose drag. Sam Uley might know her brother by some mysterious coincidence, but he does not know anything about her. Who is he to judge, anyway? "My friends are here," she gives him the short version of the truth. Her friends are here, her brother's killer might still be here, and where else would she finds clues to spark the beginning of her investigation for the truth? California was nice, maybe at a later time—after she got all her answers. "My father is here. My home is here."

"But your mother's gone. So is your sister."

How did he know all this?

"What about them?"

A strange, indecipherable look flickers across his eyes. Something akin to pity, something akin to sorrow, something akin to regret. How does this partial emptiness feel like home? How can a broken family feel the same? It doesn't. It never will. Violet has come to terms with that truth. But she's never been unoccupied by other business long enough to let herself ruminate over these things. She should hurt. And she had. Four years ago. But this Violet does not hurt anymore. This Violet has knives under her clothes and a criminal record. She's set someone's house on fire. She's almost killed people. And she's gotten away with all of those. She's grown too many layers of skin. Who else can she be afraid of? What else can touch her?

—EVERYTHING ELSE ON THE INSIDE—

"Nothing," Sam says, shaking his head. Then, he sucks in a slow inhale. "Your brother's a good guy. I've always thought he was... something else."

Intrigue sparks in her chest. "You knew him?"

"Kind of." There's a distant look in his expression. Something contemplative. His eyes flicker down to Luka's old sketch of monsters and heavy pencil strokes blurring and blurring and blurring into a mess of darkness and smudges and he blinks, suddenly struck by something. He's holding something back. "We had mutual friends."

"Huh," Violet muses. That was unsurprising, to say the least. Luka was well liked by many. Too many. "Did you hang out a lot?"

"Not really. He's always down at the beach with his friends, though. Big group, always playing soccer against my people." Violet assumes 'my people' means everyone who was native to the Reservation. Sam scratches the back of his neck absently. "That's the only time I see him. He's kind of gold, actually. Always smiling. I've only heard good things."

"Have you guys ever spoken?"

"Once or twice," Sam says, a tiny, mystifying grin ghosting his lips. "Funny guy."

A little breeze picks up, fluttering the ends of her hair, brushing them against her shoulder. Her sweater feels ten times too thin in the sudden chill. The sky looms overhead, overcast and blanketed with omen, ever-unpredictable with its promise of rain. Tugging her sleeves down to her fingers in a transient moment of self-consciousness, Violet raises a brow, waits for more. She's not exactly asking him if he believes her story—that Luka's been taken (not killed, really) by a woman with red eyes and sharp teeth and that a large black wolf had saved her, but couldn't save him in time—though she's hoping, desperately, secretly clinging onto that tiny, crumpled-up shred of hope, that he might. But, after a long beat of silence, she realises that's all Sam is willing to give. Disappointment makes her purse her lips, fills a weighty, liquid lead pool in her gut.

—HE'S ANOTHER DEAD END, BUT HE MIGHT BE HIDING SOMETHING IMPORTANT—

"I guess I should get going," Sam says, lightly, stuffing his hands into the pockets of his sweatpants. "See you around, Daisy."

"It's Violet," she says, but her voice is absent of its initial venom.

Amusement lights up his dark eyes as Sam barks out a harsh laugh. He throws a wave over his shoulder as he turns away and heads for the exit. "Sure. Later, kid."

"Bye," Violet says, to Sam's retreating back. She doesn't take her eyes off him until he's nothing but a dot. Away, away, away. Small, smaller, smallest, gone. Vanished round a corner.

            She lets the cigarette burn down to the filter without taking another drag.

☾

THAT NIGHT, she dreamt of a boy-sun—too familiar but with a face so smudged she can't recognise him anymore—made of gold and light wicking off his shoulders, running down an empty beach, darting in and out of reach though her fingers close around nothing, laughing and laughing his heart out like he's being chased under a moon locked up by shadows.

AUTHOR'S NOTE.

SOOOO JustSav  MADE ME THIS GIF BANNER AND I LEGIT CRIED YALL SHES SO SWEET AND TALENTED—NO CAP HER WRITING IS ONE OF THE BEST ON THIS SITE:

I MEAN...... HOW BEAUTIFUL :')

im gonna move stuff around so i can put this in the introduction chapter hehe