Page 19 of Hush, Little Baby

A panic attack.

No, no, no.

Not here.

Not with them.

Not when there’s nowhere to go.

“I—” I try to say something, but the air breaks in my throat. “I can’t—”

Nikolaus’s hand stills at once.

“Charlie.” His voice lowers in a way that cuts through the rushing in my ears, but not enough to fix it.

My lungs are too small, and my chest is too tight. The car is too closed in, the doors locked, the night gone, the club gone, Lana gone, my coloring page gone, my half-orange mama cat abandoned on the floor.

“I can’t breathe,” I gasp, and it comes out broken, almost squeaky, not like my voice at all.

“You can,” Nikolaus says, so calm it makes me want to cry harder. “You are breathing, sweetheart. You just need to slow it down.”

I shake my head because he’s wrong.

He has to be wrong.

If I were breathing, it wouldn’t feel like this.

If I were breathing, my hands wouldn’t be tingling, and my face wouldn’t be hot and cold at the same time. If I were breathing, I wouldn’t feel like I was going to float right out of my body and leave myself behind in this expensive black car with these scary guys.

Constantine says something from beside us, but I can’t make it out.

It’s only a sound.

A low, muffled sound.

Nikolaus turns me so I’m no longer looking at the window, my face pressed up against his chest instead. I make a weak, frightened noise and push once against him, but my arm has no strength in it, and he doesn’t even seem to notice except to gather me closer.

“Easy,” he murmurs. “Enough of that now, baby boy.”

I don’t know what that means.

I don’t know how to be enough of anything right now.

His hand comes to my face, thumb brushing under my wet cheek, then down to my mouth. He pauses there, just a second, the pad of his thumb resting against my lower lip.

“Open for me, baby.”

I stare at him through watery eyes. My brain tries to understand the words, but they get drowned out by too many other things.

Open?

Why?

“I—”

“Open,” he repeats, softer this time, though there’s something in it that doesn’t sound like asking. His thumb presses gently against my lips, and because I’m too scared and too little and too scrambled to decide anything else, my mouth parts.

He slides his thumb inside, and the shock of it makes me go still.