head feeling like an anvil.
"Fucking... damn it," I mumbled, rolling over on my bed and narrowing my eyes, looking up at the crack in the shades, letting some of the morning sunlight though. It was a nuisance, although thankfully the air conditioning unit in my apartment was powerful enough to keep the humid heat out.
I dragged myself out of the bed, groaning. I could almost feel the blood rushing around in my body as I dragged myself over to the bathroom. It was clean, and I couldn't smell any puke from the night before, which said that things could have gone a lot worse.
I picked up a small, pale white crystal that I kept next to the mirror.
To anyone else, it was just something pretty, a decoration, maybe a present that I’d gotten and had nowhere else to put it.
It had a whole other use for me, of course. I gripped the crystal with both hands, closing my eyes and taking a deep breath, feeling something cold reaching through the skin in contact with it.
The headache and the roiling in my stomach was touched by the cold and started seeping away.
There was a limit to what the crystal could absorb, and there was still something of a headache left, but it felt more like a mild case of dehydration that would be quickly fixed after a solid day of hydrating properly.
When I opened my eyes, the crystal had turned from pale white to a deep, dark red, almost burgundy as I placed it back on the mantel. It would return to its regular color in a couple of days, ready to be used again if I needed it. If there is one thing my mother gave me that I appreciated, it was the crystal.
At that point, I froze, looking back into my room, realizing what it was that had woken me up in the first place.
"I need help," I whispered softly, shaking my head and returning to my bedroom, heading the vibrating and ringing from my phone starting up again. I picked the device up, unplugging it from its charger and seeing that there were three other calls that I had missed while sleeping it off. I didn't recognize the number.
With a sigh, I pressed the button to accept the call, pulling it up to my ear as I looked around the bedroom, starting to clean up after the mess that I'd made the night before. Clothes were tossed around; the bed was a mess, and I had apparently had a bit of difficulty getting into it. There were a few vague memories, and I knew for a fact that I had gone to bed alone.
"Hello?" a male’s voice asked.
I blinked, realizing that I'd answered the phone and not said a word since.
"Uh... hi," I answered. "Who is this?"
"My name is Alfred Batten, with Brians, Whitfield, and Rosenstein. Am I correct in assuming that I am currently speaking to Ms. Nilsa Kane?"
"I... yeah." A few seconds were all I needed to make sense of what he was talking about. "The... uh, legal firm?"
"The very same. I am, however, calling you on behalf of your maternal aunt, Moira Cloris."
The name was familiar. I remembered my mom talking about her long-lost sister that had left the country after they’d had a couple of disagreements that could not be worked out. She had never told me what the nature of those disagreements were, but I did remember that Aunt Moira always did send me presents for Christmas.
"Right," I grunted, sitting down on my bed. "How is she?"
"Oh... I'm sorry, I've never been much good at delivering bad news. I am devastated to tell you that Moira Cloris has since passed away. A coronary. I'm so terribly sorry, I was under the assumption that you already knew."
Chances were my mom had tried to call me, but I'd blocked her number a couple of years ago. We'd had a fight—the exact nature of which was escaping me—and I realized that she was a toxic influence on my life, and I cut her out.
"Well, I'm not really on speaking terms with my mother's side of the family," I answered, honestly. "That's not to say that I'm not... well, it is a... I'm sorry, I don't know what to say."
"I understand completely, Ms. Kane. I am merely calling you due to the fact that your aunt enlisted the services of my firm to act as the executors of her will provided that she passed away, and she