Conspiracies (Mercedes Lackey) - By Mercedes Lackey Page 0,56

a tragedy, maybe two, and you’re expected to be all better—or down pills so you can pretend you are.” He just shook his head. “Unfair doesn’t even come close.”

Spirit was torn between shock and wanting to hug and kiss him. Not only was this the first time anyone had acted halfway normal around her, it was the first time any shrink had more or less given her permission to keep feeling bad. And the relief she felt was impossible to describe.

The thought fleetingly occurred to her that Doc Mac could be saying all this to try and trick her into trusting him.…

Well, if so, it was working, and right now, she didn’t care. She wanted to trust him; all of her instincts were reacting as positively to him as they reacted negatively to people like Ms. Smith. She liked him. She had the feeling that if he had been her shrink in the hospital, she wouldn’t be nearly so messed up now.

And for the first time, she felt like talking about it to someone, because she just knew he wasn’t going to cut her off because “her hour was up.” She was going to be able to vent about how bad she felt, how much she missed everyone, everything, and would give up everything to have them back again. How much she envied Muirin and Loch, because they hadn’t had parents they’d miss, and Burke, because he still had his foster folks. How sometimes she wanted to punch the next person who told her it was time for her to get over it. He was going to listen for as long as it took.

So she did. She went through a lot of tissues. Doc Mac was just solid, right through it all. He didn’t get all creepy and ooze sympathy and pretend empathy like Ms. Smith did; he was just there, listening, not saying much, but what he did say made her feel, not better exactly, but as if he understood.

He was a hundred times better than any of the shrinks she’d seen in the hospital.

When she finally wound down, he gave her the rest of the box of tissues and made a couple of brief notes. He talked to her a little about New Year’s Eve. She told him what she’d really seen and felt. He made some more notes, then looked up. “All right, Spirit, you’re good to go. I think you weathered the New Year’s incident pretty well. If you have trouble concentrating, sleeping, if you’re having nightmares, make an appointment. If it’s urgent, come right to me, and I’ll clear my schedule. We’ll try a little talk therapy, maybe a week or two of meds to take the edge off and get you over the hump. Otherwise, having crying fits and being depressed is part of the grieving process, and don’t let anyone try to tell you differently.”

She blew her nose as he added, almost to himself: “And I wish I could get Dylan to believe that.”

She hesitated a moment. Then she made up her mind. “That night … the night of the wreck … I saw something,” she said. “And the crash wasn’t an accident. There was something like—okay, it must have been an explosion of some kind of magic, like a flash of light, except it was dark.”

“Dark, like absence of light, or dark, as if all the light was being sucked into something?” he asked, his eyes suddenly going sharp and bright.

She blinked. She’d never thought of it that way. “The light being sucked into something,” she replied slowly. “So that’s some kind of magic?”

He nodded, and his brows creased. “All the Schools of magic have opposites, like matter and antimatter. You probably haven’t gotten that far yet. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing inherently evil about the opposite, any more than antimatter is evil. But if the usual forms of our magic are hard to control, the dark forms are even harder, because they’re rooted in chaos.” Doc Mac ran his hand over his balding head. “So you saw a manifestation from a magician who was either extremely powerful or just bug-out crazy. Or both. Go on.”

“Something—was just there, in the middle of the road.” She shuddered. “I think Dad saw it, too. It was—I’m not sure what it was. It was—I thought it was a man. A big man, but it was like the light was sucking into him, and—I don’t remember exactly, just that it was evil. And I knew,