A Little Bit Ninja

8: Spawn of a Nut Job (Revised)

 A/N: This chapter is dedicated to the wonderful xImprintedx for being super awesome and dedicated--she read and commented on every chapter even when her computer pooped out on her half the way through. Way to show us all about fortitude!

She's got a great story called, With My Last Breath, that is of the paranormal/ romance variety. Read it kids.

Chapter 8: Spawn of a Nut Job?

The woman in the picture was unquestionably my mother. She had the exact same color of white blond hair that I’d inherited from her. Her face seemed a little wane, lacking the healthy glow I always associated with my mother, but that was understandable since these were pictures of a dead woman.  I couldn’t see her eyes, because they were closed, but I had no doubt they were the same startling color of green that mine were.

That picture, paired with my scar and the story Anton just told me, felt like a punch in the stomach. My breaths suddenly weren’t bringing in enough air. I closed my eyes to cut off the sight of the macabre pictures, but it was like they were burned into my retinas. 

 “Jadie? Jadie? Listen to me,” I could hear Anton speaking in a soothing voice to my right. “Breathe. Just breathe. Can you hear me?”

 Can’t he see that I’m trying? It’s my lungs that are malfunctioning, not my ears.

“Hey, just inhale nice and deep,” he continued, “Then exhale slowly.”

 Next to me I could hear his breaths, showing me by example how I was supposed to do it. Moron. If I could just command my lungs to cooperate, I would have done that by now.

“Try again. In….”he dragged the word out for several seconds, and I tried to follow through. “Good.” I could feel the vice on my chest loosen a little, “Now out….just like that.”

I did a few deep breaths, just to prove to myself that my lungs weren’t going to back out again.

“Man, I’m sorry,” he started in as soon as I let out my third breath. “I knew they were kind of morbid, but I didn’t think you would lose it like that. I shouldn’t have shown them to you.”

Why was he bringing up the pictures again? This was so not helping me maintain my composure.

“I can’t believe you had a panic attack though,” he said with amusement. “So are you okay now? Your breathing looks back to normal but your face is a little p—”

I cut him off.

“Can you just give me a second to absorb this?” I asked, trying to keep my tone free of the snappiness that I was tempted to use.  Okay, maybe it didn’t work.

“Oh. Yeah. Sorry.”  

I felt a twinge of remorse for being short with him when he was just trying to help me, but then I checked myself. Hello, the guy had just shown me the most traumatizing thing I’d ever seen besides my mother’s corpse. Well, I guess that was my mother’s corpse too, but from a different occasion?

I couldn’t really wrap my mind around this. Obviously, I wasn’t dead, so how did that picture come about? And since I knew that I was definitely not dead, could the woman in the picture (I still had a hard time admitting it was my mom) be alive as well? Or could somebody have been stealing her identity?

I needed a nice warm bath to help me mull this over, but that didn’t seem like a viable option while tied up in the back of a get-away car.

“Okay, Anton, I need you to start over. You need to tell me what’s going on here.”