Fiction: His First Duchess, Part One, Chapter 3a

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Chapter 3a

Colly dubbed Ammy's bedroom boho-luxe. It was done up in plade green, gold and purple; complete with fainting couch and an Art Deco vanity Ammy discovered at the local antique/jumble store.   She particularly loved her bed, with it's high thread count sheets and blankets. And her headboard! It was some kind of microfiber ultra-suede that begged to be touched, but looked like an escapee from the glamourous boudoir of a 1930's film.

This room was Ammy's bulwark; the place to which she retreated when the world was too much with her. It was no sanctuary during those times like now, when she was too much with herself. 

It was the middle of the night.

   Among wreckage of rumpled bedclothes and pillows she felt...she felt...she felt. Oh God, too much.   Somehow she’d managed to leave the restaurant and get rid of her friends soon after her conversation with...that guy.  She wasn’t sure what excuse she’d used to get away,  that horrible, shaky out of control feeling rising in her chest.  A sudden headache, or something.  Anything to get away.

Ammy managed to quash quash the crazy rising within her as she talked Colly out of trying to give her a ride home.  Didn't Colly and Hosh realize how agonizing it was; their combined concern reaching for her?   Yes, Ammy wanted to scream. And scream and scream; she'd kept her lips over her teeth lest the words 'good night' sound more like Jamie Lee Curtis screen test for Halloween.  Instead, Amelie offered her friends a sweet smile under wild eyes, got into her car and drove away.

The drive had been a dangerous ordeal; trembling and nearly blinded by the stabbing pains in her head. Ammy was dimly aware that she should be worried about causing an accident. Mostly, she was focused on keeping her grandfather's voice and the memories which rode in on it, at bay. Ammy managed wit enough to take less trafficked side streets the half mile or so to her home, but that was all.  
 

Stumbling through the door; Ammy ignored Maven twining about her ankles and mewing pitifully. She made a header for the medicine cabinet; fumbling open bottles of prescription sleeping and pain pills and then to the kitchen, pouring a glass of wine with trembling fingers.  Ammy didn’t care about warning labels or drug interactions, she was reaching for oblivion.  Sweet oblivion.

    She woke around two a.m. Amelie gathered her knees into her arms holding on as best she could, a shadowy figure veiled by the soft draping of the canopy bathed in filtered moonlight.  Coiled.  Coiled around inside herself; she was taught amid the luxurious softness of jewel-toned and velvet pillows and bedclothes Maven curled around her feet. 

    Ammy hated her intuition.  She kept it tamped down, the beast in the cellar.   A powerful, unreliable beast.  She kept it trapped inside her; the animal in a frenzy, worked to escape; attempting to tear working her mind apart brick by brick.  And so Ammy coiled, coiled the chains around its prison; desperate to keep the beast locked in her subconscious.   But it was beyond her control.  Elemental.  Wind and sky keening.  Shadows and dark and glass shattering.  Things that go bump in the night.  And the smell; blood, fear...pain.

'Mad witchling', Grandpere whispered.

Stop.

Breathe.

Stop. Stop.

   Ammy sucked long breaths tearing her mind from the edge of the precipice on which it teetered.  Strength of will babe, strength of will; Amelie Isabelle Harris had plenty of will.  By and by the muscles relaxed, by and by the breathing slowed, by and by sleep overtook her overtook her once again.

The next day, the Fams invaded in force.