The Biting Cold: An Athanate Novella (Bite Back: Outsiders Book 1) by Mark Henwick

Author:Mark Henwick [Henwick, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Marque
Published: 2015-08-06T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

It was very early in the morning, two weeks before Christmas, a few days from my appointment in court. I was sitting up in bed with my laptop. Sleep was impossible.

There was something comforting about the barely audible clicking sounds of my keypad. Work distracted me. Work was better than crying and blowing my nose.

Is this still work?

I’d refused to see Scott professionally. As a therapist, I had to have the belief that I could resolve the patient’s problems, and I’d decided I didn’t have that belief. A combination of time available and personal involvement that made it impossible. Officially, this wasn’t work.

I still hoped I could help him, even though I’d not managed to shake one single branch of the structure that comprised his delusion.

On the personal side, without my job to go to, every day would have been more difficult to face without him to think about. We’d become friends in an odd sort of way. Outside of his central vampire delusion, he was as sane as any man. He was good to be with. It felt pleasant. Odd, but pleasant.

It was a slow process. Every day another bombshell. I ended the sessions feeling shaken and he’d used that to control the flow of information he’d reveal at any one time.

I did feel guilty that our conversations about his delusion seemed to feed it. I’d never caught him in an inconsistency, but as we talked more and more, his rationalization added level after level to this secret Athanate world of his mind. The whole thing had reached Byzantine levels of complexity.

He’d incorporated me entirely into it.

We’d been lovers since 1816, apparently. In keeping with the scandalous behavior of Byron and Shelley, we hadn’t been married. Not only that, we hadn’t been exclusive. We’d been a foursome. There was enough here to fuel several papers in the Journal of Psychiatry, given time I didn’t have and a stronger will to look at it.

Why was it so uncomfortable to think about it?

Was I being sucked into his delusion?

According to Scott, after Cologny in Switzerland, we’d lived in Canada and then moved to Michigan. The Athanate followed a set of principles tied up in what Scott referred to as the Hidden Path. This required that the Athanate live within the community, disguised by their apparent humanity. Part of that was to have real work and identity in a world growing increasingly regulated. Fifteen years ago, I’d chosen psychiatry and shown an aptitude for it. I had been a breadwinner for our little family. In another ten years or so, we’d have had to move on and reinvent ourselves elsewhere. In the meantime, it had been necessary to develop a ‘real’ Michigan native called Amanda Lloyd for me to use.

Scott also mentioned we kept second identities and had plans to disappear in emergencies.

I’d never mentioned my second identity to him. It was another hugely unlikely coincidence that I’d had to put behind me.

As to what had happened to split us, Scott

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