Flying Blind Ch. 04

-------------- -------

That night . . .

-------------- -------

"What the hell happened?" Heda barked when she got a good look at Joanna's face.

The blonde grimaced. "I viciously attacked Alvin's fist with my face. Seriously, I need to take some karate lessons or something. I didn't even slow him down."

"Alvin?!" Heda said, getting louder by the sentence. "I'm going to kill him!"

"You'll have to break into county lock-up to do it," Edgar told her as he applied a cold compress to Joanna's face.

Joanna held his hand, keeping the compress in place. She was aching for Edgar in the worst way, and was annoyed that she was not looking her best. "He lost it. I mean, even I was surprised. Madison was up meeting with Mr. Hannity and then Alvin and his mother come barging in. I don't know how they found out where the deal was going down. I tried to prevent him from going up, but he just punched me. They were already calling security, but I didn't want him screwing things up, so I followed him. I got pretty much thrown into a wall for my effort, but then Mr. Hannity just laid some serious smack down on him. Then Madison bitch slapped the wicked witch of the west."

Heda was checking out Joanna's face when the startled look came over her. "Madison beat up Mrs. Hannity?"

"Yeah, but it was total self-defense as far as the cops are concerned."

"Well, what was the verdict?"

"You might want to ask her," Billy said, looking towards the door to the basement. "It sounds like a 'yes,' but she isn't really talking. She grabbed a bottle of wine and locked herself down there the second she got home."

Heda went over and tried the door. Yep, locked. She knocked, but got no response. "Madison? Babe, let me in?" She didn't hear anything. Time for plan B. "Babe, let me in or I'll break the doorknob and come down anyway." After a moment, she heard footsteps on stairs and the door came open.

Madison's eyes were red and she was attempting to glare, but there was also a lifting of her shoulders and a slight breath of relief. "Screw you."

Heda just caught her up in a hug and held her a couple of inches off the ground. "So I take it things got interesting?"

"Put me down," Madison said, somewhat listlessly. Her feet were slowly lowered back to the carpeted stairs, then she turned on her heel and trundled back down.

Heda followed after turning on the light and closing the door behind her. She got to the bottom and noticed the opened bottle of wine. "Madison, is this really --" She paused after picking up the bottle to find it still quite heavy. "You barely drank any of it."

Madison sulked on her bed. "I realized that I didn't have anything to drink from, so I figured that I'd do the traditional wino thing and drink stuff straight from the bottle. But wine tastes like ass. Now I owe someone a bottle."

"That would be Anthony."

"I wonder if Kevin has any more of that special pot of his."

Heda sat on the bed next to her girlfriend. "Madison, don't make me ask."

The bat-shifter was sitting on her hands and biting her lip. "Yeah. The test was positive. He's . . . Mr. Hannity is --"

"Your father?"

"The sperm donor," Madison said, pushing herself back into the mountain of pillows next to her headboard.

"I heard about what happened. Have you talked to him since you ko'd his wife?" Heda intentionally avoided saying "your mother."

"I haven't spoken to him."

Heda thought that was a weird response, then looked around and spotted Madison's cell phone over on the nightstand. She grabbed in and turned it on. Sure enough, there were several messages from the same number. "You can't avoid him forever."

"I avoided him for twenty years. What's another seventy or so?"

"Madison --"

"What?" Madison shouted, jumping back up to her feet. "How am I supposed to respond to this?! Is there a 'Finding Out Your Brother is Satan for Dummies' that I could read? Damn it, how can you possibly understand?"

"I'm just trying to help!" Heda replied.

"Well stop!"

"And let you sit around the basement and wallow in self-pity?" Heda was on her feet too, and she was agitated as all hell. "You want to get stoned or get drunk, or do anything but just fucking dealing with it. That's bullshit escapism and you know it."

"Ooh, big word! What the hell is the worst thing you've ever had to deal with, huh? Your mother being too popular or your dad being too great or your brothers being too supportive? Or maybe being forced to have all that hot sex with European girls on your parents' dime?"

"Oh, so now you're pissed off at me because my life hasn't sucked? Screw you! I'm not going to apologize for having a good life. You could have a good life too if you'd stop whining about your old one."

"Get out!" Madison screamed.

"Fine. Come talk to me when you're ready to stop being such a bitch." Heda stormed up the stairs, hearing the sound of feet scattering. She wondered how many of her friends had been listening in.

"What the --" Sasha said as soon as Heda was up and the door was closed again.

"Is she --"

"Are you --"

"Maybe someone should --"

"People should just stay the hell out of there until she comes to her senses," Heda growled. "She's got a lot of nerve," she added, tromping into the dining room with a can of Pepsi and a bag of potato chips. "She just isn't happy if she doesn't have something to complain about." Heda found that Billy was in her path. She tried to brush by him, but it was like trying to move a semi-tractor by blowing on it. "What's your --"

"I know you're mad, and you have every right to be. But Madison is my best friend, and I am not going to let you walk away from her. She needs you, and if that means you have to put up with her psychosis, then so be it."

"And you were going to make me . . . how?" she whispered dangerously. But to his credit, Billy did not back down a step.

"Do you know that people who win the lottery have an above-average rate of suicide?"

Heda stared at him blankly. "What the hell does that have to do with anything?"

"Change is hard, even if its for the better. For her whole life, it has been Madison against the world. Then she got me and Sasha and eventually you guys, but she still had the Hannity Clan to rage against. Right now, she's confused, scared, and she needs an enemy to take it out on or to blame. Don't let her make YOU that enemy."

Heda sighed. "We can't just let her do what she's doing though."

"I know. And unfortunately, I'm all out of sage-like wisdom," Billy said, finally giving way so that Heda could sit down. "She has friends, a girlfriend, and possibly even a father who wants to love her. Most of that has happened in the course of a month. That's an awful lot of change, but she'll adjust. If I know one thing about Madison, it's that she's a survivor. But for her sake, and maybe for mine too since I hate seeing her like this, I'd like everyone to bend a little. Yeah, you can't let her push you around because of guilt or anything, but let her get her head above water again."

Heda munched discontentedly on a potato chip while the room went silent.

"So what do we do?" Joanna asked at last.

"I guess we --"

"She's gone," Sasha said, poking her head in the room.

"What?" Heda said, getting quickly to her feet.

"I was just going to see if she wanted a drink or anything. The door was open and she's not down there."

"Fuck!" Billy and Heda said together.

Outside, Madison was running. As soon as the conversation had moved away from the door, she had thrown on her jogging clothes and snuck out the front door. She had not had an opportunity to go running for a while, and she badly needed to burn off steam. There was a public park with a running trail a few blocks from the house, so she made a bee-line for that and started to push herself to the limit. Her echolocation was on full-blast, so she could see everything for hundreds of yards in every direction with perfect clarity.

She realized after a few laps that she was not even really mad at Heda. She was not sure where that rage had come from, but she knew that she did not want to screw things up with that woman. She felt guilt for sure, but mostly over Mr. Hannity. When she had left the hospital, he had seemed genuinely distressed. His life was probably pretty shook up too, and he was under a much bigger microscope in the shifter community than she was.

'Billionaire banker discovers blind daughter abandoned at birth,' she thought. 'Film at eleven.' She just wanted to bang her head into a tree until it all made sense. Or until she lost consciousness. Whichever came first. Madison picked up the pace again, rounding the area next to the plastic spiral children's slide before applying the brakes hard. Scanning forward, she discovered that she was most definitely not alone.

---------- -------------------------

To be continued . . .