Try and Catch Me

The bad girl (1)
“So it’s really true?” Yolly asked.

Lia took Yolly to her room as they left Frankie back at the study room to tell the details of the seller and the bar to Eldric’s right-hand man. Now that the blur of last night faded away, she was finally seeing the room she was in. It was a big room, perhaps the biggest one she had seen with her two lives combined. Judging from the decorations and impersonal things around her, this was the mayor’s guest room. One would never think to find an extravagant room like this with its superfluous designs when one had seen the external facade of the house. Guess it was all just a front for that mayor.

Sitting in front of one of the windows, Lia set her jaw and took a couple of deep breaths. Underneath that caring and kind face of the mayor was an evil persona, ready to pin his crimes to other, more innocent people. Eldric told them earlier how the mayor was in a makeshift cell for working for The Unseen. A muscle twitched on her face.

“That she died? That people burned her to death and that they tried to stone me to death? When everything, ‘everything,’ is that mayor’s fault!” Lia could not bite back the growl in her voice. She was seething in anger.

Yolly sat back on her chair and watched outside. The town still seemed like a ghost town, almost no one was out of their houses. The people who went to Lia’s house were all questioned. What happened in the questioning, she did not know. Eldric did not tell and there was barely a time for her to ask. She did not care anyway.

She placed her hand on top of her pocket discreetly, feeling the paper inside. It was in her mother’s handwriting and it contained the ingredients for the antidote. Some parts of the paper were burned but she could easily guess what the items were. She could try to do a mixture but she could not bring herself to do it.

The paper rested in her pocket was only featherweight yet it seemed as though it weighed more than a boulder. The secret for everyone’s cure was in her hands. But she had not told a single soul about it.

Yolly sighed. “I want to thank you and your mother for saving me. If not for the two of you, I’d be a goner.”

“I didn’t really do anything.”

“Oh come on. You did the delivery. It was risky. You have to leave because of that and that… oh, it’s so dreadful!” Yolly covered her eyes and Lia was afraid that she would start crying. Then Lia would really be at a loss on what to do.

“Besides that, how are you feeling? Mother said the medicine she gave you needed more adjustments.”

Yolly waved her hand dismissively. “I’m feeling fine. Great even. Though I feel feverish every now and then but nothing as serious as the one before. And,” she wagged her index finger, “I didn’t have those dreamily things last night. That was a good sign.”

“That’s good then.” Lia pursed her lips and asked what was on her mind. “Do you think these people,” she gestured on the people outside, “need those too?” She felt stupid just as the words left her mouth.

The older woman studied her before speaking. “Girlie, they might seem like the bad guys in your eyes right now but tell me, if it’s your mother who’d been sick and doing all those — gruesome things. Won’t you feel mortified? Wouldn’t you want them to feel better? No one knows the cure. And then here comes the mayor telling them one, giving them the answer they so badly needed. I’m not siding with them, because we could have avoided all this when they just stopped and use their damned brains. I’m only giving you a perspective to think about.”

Their conversation was interrupted by a knock. Frankie entered the room as Yolly and Lia stood. As Lia watched the two leave, Yolly turned back to Lia.

“Your mother, no matter how evil people are, would always choose to help them. Stupid but also kind of heroic. She has always been irritatingly like that.”

When Lia was finally alone in her room, she watched outside the window with the paper in her hand. “Mother, but I’m not kind like you.”