“No!” Em’s brown eyes flashed, not in anger but in fear. Her hand snaked toward her hair again, but I shook my head and motioned for her to put her hands in her lap, which she did. “I told you, they’re not my parents. I don’t want to see them. If you make me, I swear I’ll kill myself.”

I shook my head, trying to tell Emma she was taking the wrong approach—threatening suicide in the mental health ward never goes well—but I only caught her attention and made her look crazy again.

“Lydia, no one’s going to make you do anything you don’t want to do.”

“I don’t want to be here.” Her voice rose on the end, and the whining from the room next door increased in pitch and volume. One of the two of them was about to lose it, and if Em was that one, we were all screwed.

“Well, that’s out of my control, at least for the moment.” The counselor clicked the top of her pen repeatedly, retracting and exposing the ballpoint over and over. “But I do have several more questions for you.”

Emma scowled with Lydia’s face. “I don’t want to talk anymore. Go tell my parents to go home. Please.”

“We’re not really finished here....”

“I’m finished.” Emma stood, staring down at her. “I’m not going to say another word to you until you get rid of Lydia’s parents.”

“Do you really think that’s the best tactic to take? I’m trying to help you, Lydia.”

Emma glanced at me, and I motioned for her to sit again. She sank onto the edge of the bed and scooted back to lean against the wall. Then she crossed her arms over her chest and watched the counselor in silence. She wasn’t pouting. She wasn’t throwing fits. She just...wasn’t participating.

That was the best I could hope for, considering the state of the resident next door.

The counselor gave it several more minutes, while we sat there in silence—okay, I stood—and the girl next door whined. Then she sighed and left the room, patient file in hand.

As soon as the counselor was gone, I made myself corporeal enough to close Emma’s door. The moment it clicked home, she flew off the bed and hugged me so hard I wouldn’t have been able to breathe even if I’d needed to. “Get me out of here. Please. I can’t stay here. This place makes me feel...bad.”

“I know. It did the same thing to Lydia. I think she syphoned every psychosis in the whole damn place.” I blinked us both into my living room—with a stop in an empty parking lot on the way, because I couldn’t go that far in one shot. The best moment of the day was the moment my feet landed on my own carpet.

Styx perked up from her sleeping spot on my dad’s chair and barked in greeting.

“Holy crap, this has been the worst dayever.” Emma collapsed on the couch and threw her head back against the cushion. Then she winced and suddenly looked guilty. “Well, for me, anyway. I’m sure your dad had a really crappy yesterday.”

And his suffering had no doubt continued, which made me feel guilty for being in my own home, out of immediate danger and in no pain.

I went into the kitchen, and Styx followed when she realized I was headed for the fridge. “Are you okay?”

“Traumatized, but yeah.” Emma exhaled dramatically. “Half an hour in that place felt like an eternity. I don’t know how you made it a week.”

“Me, neither.” I opened the fridge and pulled out a plastic container of still-bloody venison.

“They thought I was Lydia.” She sat up and frowned at me from the living room. “I am Lydia. Except that I’m also Emily Cavanaugh. And Emma Marshall, at least a little. Asking me if I know who I am? Most complicated question in history.”

“Yeah. I’m not sure what we’re going to do about that.” I set the last hunk of meat in Styx’s dish, then dropped the bowl into the sink and washed my hands while Styx scarfed down her dinner. “The hospital knows you as Lydia, who just escaped from a locked mental ward. Again. But the school knows you as Emily Cavanaugh, the niece and legal ward of my father. Who can’t be contacted at the moment, due to the fact that he’s been taken hostage by a demon in another realm.”

“Speaking of—any news about your dad, and Harmony and Brendon?”

I dried my hands on the towel hanging from a drawer handle, then grabbed two bottles of water from the fridge. “No. But we’ll get them back, and when we do, hopefully a combination of my dad’s Influence and your brown eyes will be enough to convince people that you can’t possibly be Lydia. I mean, people’s eyes don’t just change color, right?”

“Blue to green, maybe. Or brown to hazel, depending on the light. But not blue to brown. That just doesn’t happen.” She looked relieved by her own conclusion.

I handed her a bottle, then sank onto the couch next to her, trying to ignore the visceral chomping sounds coming from the kitchen. “Plus, we have the paperwork Tod...procured. Together, that should be enough to firmly establish your new identity.” I hope. But I didn’t let her see my doubt. She obviously had plenty of her own. “So, what happened at school? Please tell me you were faking memory loss for the psych ward counselor.”

“No, that was real. I don’t know what happened, and I think that’s the scariest part of this.” She collapsed against the back of the couch again and blew hair off of her forehead. “Why don’t we ever have normal problems anymore?”