Susan remained subdued for the evening, speaking only when spoken to and answering questions with as few words as possible. I hoped that she wasn't getting any ire directed her way outside of my suite of rooms, though having Dain's anger fixated on her for even that brief period seemed like plenty of time to become freaked out. Unlike me, Susan had no particular value to Dain, and he had killed a lot of people, many of them innocent. Catching his attention for even a second was probably something the entire palace's staff tried to avoid.

The day caught up to me around sunset, all the anxiety and stress collapsing into a black hole in my chest. I changed into a new t-shirt to sleep in (another Goodwill find of some sort, heather-gray with bold orange letters declaring "IDGAF"), found a pair of pajama pants, crawled under the covers, and started bawling.

I couldn't stop the flood of memories, and I didn't even want to. Little flashes of James, all my cherished memories of him, rushed through me. They interleaved through the stark memory of his death, coming one after another: his lopsided smile when I did something silly, I'm king of the world!, the way he would lean his chair back and look at me upside-down, CRACK, the embarrassing walrus thing he always did with straws, even at nice restaurants, Jaaaaames!

Mourning consumed me, and I let it. He was gone from the world forever, and I'd lost him forever. The suddenness of that loss still felt unreal, even with six days of a slow death, wounded and alone. I felt like such a monster when it came to grief, because I always seemed so much less affected than people around me. When the family dog died, I cried over his grave, and though the sorrow came after that, it never overwhelmed me. I watched my mom sob over every new piece of his life that she found, sitting on the stairs with a wad of dog hair she'd pulled out of the vacuum with tears running down her face, and couldn't understand.

I threw myself into grief, because I'd been able to talk to a fae Queen and snarl my way through conversations with the Beast of Phazikai, and sometimes I had forgotten my misery. People turned into ghosts when their loved ones died, and I was trading repartee with people who weren't even human. What kind of person can do that? Who can set aside their grief and let it claw only inside of them, until it curls up quiescent, like a cat in a carrier? What did that make me?

Exhaustion eventually claimed me, wrung out and weary, with dreams full of loss and fear, and the shapes of monsters.