Page 149 of The Blairville Legacies

Angrily, I grabbed the pill and tossed it into the living room, when suddenly the glass next to me burst and the water spread across the table like a flood, dragging all the broken pieces in the stream with it.

I jumped to the side, as did my mother, who was now looking at me in horror, as if it had beenmyfault.

I was shocked and didn’t understand anything anymore. My heart was pounding and there they were again,the veins. I wanted to pull down my sleeves, but I had completely forgotten that I was only wearing a T-shirt because I had stripped off my brown knitted sweater while running through the forest.

Mum stared at my arms in pure horror. More shocked than usual when I got my attacks.

Then, all at once, there was a knock on the front door.

“Bayla. Go up to your room now, please.”

I barely recognized my mother. The shock on her face was unfamiliar to me.

Tears of pain gathered in my eyes. The chaos this new life was causing was just too much for me. A faintness threatened to overtake me.

There was another knock and there it was again, the fear.

“Diana! I know you’re there. Please open the door, orIwill,” a harsh female voice called out.

I looked at Mum.

“Who is that?”

“Go upstairs now, please, Bayla!” she snapped and started pacing again. I had definitely inherited that from her.

“Go upstairs!” she snapped at me, and I winced, because my mother had never yelled at me before.

Suddenly, an elegantly dark-dressed woman with straightened brown hair came striding into our kitchen.

I knew her.

Amara Blair.Mum’s childhood friend.

What was the mayor doing here now?

Determined, she looked at my mother, whose jaw dropped.

“She’s not going anywhere, Diana, until we have had an urgent word.”

By the time Amara had entered the house, more fuses had blown in me. I had lost consciousness and crashed to the floor.

Completely shaken up and with a head full of questions, I now sat at the kitchen table. In front of me, an undamaged glass of water. This time without a pill, because I had already had to swallow this crap thing when I had woken up on the couch and Mum had just shoved it into my mouth while the mayor had been distracted.

Right now, Mum was pacing up and down in the kitchen.

Her friend sat in front of me and looked at me with a gentle smile.

If she was trying to comfort me, she definitely wasn’t succeeding. I knew something was up, and I wanted to knownow. But my head hurt, and I felt like a cat that had been run over while parking. I wonder if that’s how the squirrel had felt then, when I’d run over it with Mum’s car.

“How are you, Bayla?” the mayoress now asked, as if we were just sitting together in the café, trying to talk about Mum’s student life.

She continued to smile gently, radiating a certain authority with her entire appearance, one that could not be feared, but also not questioned.

“You can trust me, I don’t bite.”

Was she just making fun of me? Had Mum told her everything?

“Just give her some time, please, just a few days. She just passed out a minute ago.”