183. Promises Kept

Bridgeport, present day...

Eloise kept her promise to Devon and stuck to her weekly appointments with Dr. Reddy, the therapist he had found through a friend.

For the first few sessions though Eloise didn't say much. In fact she didn't say anything at all, she was just content to lie on the couch and stare at the ceiling while the doctor scribbled pages and pages of notes in her thick notepad.

"What are you afraid of?" The doctor asked in that calm ‘I can wait forever’ tone of hers during their fifth session.

Eloise simply snorted, and brushed off the question. But the doctor's words had hit home. She was afraid of opening up about her grief only to end up revealing too much about what she’d become. She didn’t trust the doctor to be accepting of her condition, didn’t trust her to keep it to herself either. She knew how Devon felt about Vampires, surely he’d leave her the moment he learned the truth. She couldn’t lose him. Couldn’t lose her son either.

The following week, while on her way to see Dr. Reddy, Eloise had an epiphany. She didn't have to talk about her other self if she didn't want to. No one had to know about the darkness she carried; if she worked hard enough at it, her grief and the monster she’d become could be two unrelated issues.

Once the realization hit her, it was easy for her to talk about her father and tap into the emotions she'd hidden for some time now. Every session after that felt like a breakthrough, and Dr Reddy was impressed with the progress she was making.

On two occasions Eloise felt comfortable enough to have Devon sit in with her during her sessions. He, too, was impressed with the overall positive changes he'd noticed in her.

Soon though, with her grief out of the way, Dr. Reddy wanted to focus on her ‘episode’ as they'd come to refer to the day she came home naked a little over a month ago.

Eloise refused to talk about that day. She assured Dr. Reddy and Devon it was a onetime thing. But it was a blatant lie since she'd transformed three more times after that. She remembered the moments before the transformation, but nothing about what she did when she was in wolf form.

When Dr.  Reddy suggested hypnosis she flat out refused, bringing an end to her sessions with the head doctor. It wasn't hard to convince Devon she didn't need therapy anymore; after all he'd seen a vast improvement in her general wellbeing.

Now that she wasn’t seeing the therapist, Eloise found she had time to visit the library and research the monster she’d become. But the large medical volumes and history journals didn't give her the answers she needed and for the first time in her life Google let her down.

Her obsession with tracking the man who'd turned her into a monster began soon after her library visits failed to give her closure. But her evening jogs proved to be fruitless. He was never at the beach where they met, and his scent was growing fainter with each passing day.

Eloise's search wasn't the only one that had come to a standstill. William Thornton's trackers had not made any progress. By the time they’d gained access to the crime scene at Waylon’s Haunt, it was so severely contaminated they couldn't pick up the wolf's trail. The fact that there had been no road kill since then complicated matters even more.

Thornton, on more than one occasion, found himself wishing the wolf would just slip up already. He desperately needed to turn things around with the Council. Since the humans were blaming Vampires for the attack at Waylon’s Haunt, he was getting a lot of heat from the higher ups to fix the mess before it became a Class A catastrophe…

_______

Credits: Dr. Reddy, the therapist, was created by Aussie Karima.