Deja Who (Insighter #1)(24)

“Sorry, forgot you weren’t necessarily up on context. My mother and I are done now, and I should feel worse, right?”

“Not our job, tellin’ you how to feel.”

“My mom keeps slipping me law school applications because of this thing with my father I’m not going into because we’re doing your thing now,” said Archer. “Nightmare! She’s practically wallpapered my bedroom with them. So I know all about annoying parents. We’re partners in pain, Leah.”

He winked at her and she snorted. Yes indeed, the man she couldn’t see who walked around in a cloud of fun understood exactly how she felt. She sat on one of the benches and looked at her friend and her former stalker and gave in to the rare impulse to cough up.

I am all alone now; my mother has never looked out for me and will never look out for me and the only thing that’s changed is that I finally made it official. But closing a door doesn’t mean I can’t open a window. Or the door to the storm cellar. Or something like that. What will it hurt to open up, just once? After all the patients who found the courage to open up to someone they knew wasn’t exactly loaded with empathy?

“I think. I want. To tell you guys something.” Hmm. Starting was difficult. “About me. About why I’m the way I am.”

“It’s not all the drugs you did in college?” Cat asked.

“No! Well, mostly no. When you’re an Insighter, one of the things they have you do is research your own past lives. Write up clinic notes on yourself—it’s practice for the patients you’ll hopefully be able to help one day. So. Once upon a time,” she began.

“Excellent,” Cat said, making herself comfortable on the opposite bench. “Better with pudding, though.”

“It would be better with pudding. Or . . . you know what, Your Honor? I wish we had marshmallows to roast. And a fire. And chocolate. Oh, well, continue.” Archer plopped on the ground at her feet, shook the hair out of his eyes, and peered up at her with those oddly lovely mismatched eyes. “It’s gonna be a good story, right?”

“Oh, no. The heroine is either ineffectual and passive, or dies. A lot.

“Once upon a time . . .”





THIRTEEN



Clinic notes: Leah Nazir, Chart #3262

Date: 9/17/1999

INS: Chloe Hammen, ID# 14932

My name is Jean Rombaud.

Jean Rombaud was the French swordsman ordered by Henry VIII to behead Anne Boleyn. Wasn’t that thoughtful of the fat tyrannical son of a bitch? He could have had his queen burned, or tortured, or both. When it came down to it, he could have not blamed her for miscarriages likely caused by his fat tyrannical sperm (he was as wide as he was tall when he died, for God’s sake).

No and no and no. Instead he decided the woman he had pursued for a decade should be buried in pieces. But no messy crude axe for Anne Boleyn; Henry Tudor wanted only the best.

So Jean Rombaud, expert swordsman, blitzed into town, killed the queen, and blitzed back out. And he was troubled by his duty, which was the reaction of a sane man. He had never been hired to cut off a queen’s head before. And because of the King of England’s Great Matter, he of course knew not just who she was but where she had started and how she had come to the scaffold.

Here was a woman who literally changed the world, here was a man tripping on autocracy, and Europe could not wait to see how it played out (can you imagine the Internet uproar if it had existed back then? Henry Haterz! Anne Rulz!). But Jean, who had a front-row seat to how it would end, did not feel especially fortunate. The opposite, in fact—though not so unfortunate as the queen.

But he wasn’t there to debate the politics of legal murder. He wasn’t there to make friends or enemies; he was an independent contractor with a job to do. With misgivings, he did it, and he did it well—Anne Boleyn Tudor likely never felt a thing.

And when it was done, Rombaud was, too. “Thank you for the recommendation, here is your legally murdered wife’s head, a pleasure doing business with you, I may use you as a reference, good luck with the Reformation.”

Then he got the hell out of England, a place that always afterward gave him the creeps. He watched with the rest of Europe as the morbidly obese sociopath went through four more wives, again indulging in the legal murder of wife number five: Katherine Howard, Anne Boleyn’s cousin. Rombaud felt bad for the beheaded teenager, but was glad to be away from it all.

The end. Except not really.





FOURTEEN



Clinic notes: Leah Nazir, Chart #3262

Date: 4/1/2002

INS: Chloe Hammen, ID# 14932

My name is Louise élisabeth de Cro?.

Louise élisabeth de Cro? was the governess for Marie Antoinette’s children. She saw the revolution coming from the nursery where she taught her soon-to-be-exiled-and-then-beheaded students about the divine right of kings. (And probably some math, too. She did not teach How to Survive a Revolution.) She watched it all come down, and when her charges were dead or exiled, she faded into the background to work on her memoirs. She outlived her students by decades.

So: survivor’s guilt? Yes. She had always backed the Bourbon family; her favorite ring had Lord, save the king, the dauphin, and his sister engraved on it, which is rather awful when you consider the Lord pretty much blew that one off.