Charles claimed the passenger seat, slammed the SUV door behind him, and buckled mechanically — all without looking over at Captain Greyson. He could feel her watching him with calculating, ice-blue eyes. He knew without looking that the severe perfection of her prematurely silver bun would be contrasting harshly with the weather-worn lines around her eyes and mouth. He had the unsettling impression that she was sizing him up just as shrewdly as the ancient prisoner had ten minutes ago. She meant him no ill, but that wolfish gaze was razor sharp and Charles was tired of being evaluated.
“Just drive,” he said quietly. “Please.”
He wanted more than anything to get away from this wretched place and the things he’d learned inside those walls. Greyson nodded, started the car and pulled out of her parking spot, scanning her badge at three separate check points before they turned onto a winding county road. They’d reach Valehaven city limits in about half an hour if the traffic stayed clear.
Out of the corner of his eye, Charles saw Greyson licked her thin lips twice before speaking. “Do you have what you need now?”
Charles turned to look at her at last, raising one eyebrow. That was it? No further interrogation?
“No, Kevrinhart,” snorted the captain, correctly reading his incredulous face. “I don’t want to know. We don’t have a warrant for anything you got in that hellhole. You’re a private citizen right now.”
“So you’re here as… what, exactly?”
“Your friend.”
Charles swallowed and nodded tersely.
“Back home or to the station?” Greyson asked.
“The station.”
They drove in tense silence for another ten minutes before Greyson spoke again, her voice uncharacteristically soft. “What do you need to get her home?”
Charles sighed, squeezing his eyes shut for a moment before looking up at the ceiling of the SUV as he answered. “F.R.E.B. suits, Rot-rub, N95s, and a fully equipped SRTV.”
Greyson’s knuckles grew white on the steering wheel; her silence was deafening.
Charles’ heart pounded in his ears as he waited for her to speak. He was, essentially, asking for her resources and her blessing to go on a suicide mission. His recklessness in the past had been a constant source of aggravation for the rugged, middle-aged woman. He’d matured much in the past ten years, but this…
Even the youngest, stupidest, and most reckless version of himself had never done anything like this.
“I can’t give you men, Kevrinhart,” she said finally, sounding twenty years older. “You so much as ask another officer to come with you, and I’ll arrest you myself.”
“Yeah no kidding,” he muttered.
“But,” said his captain pointedly, glaring at Charles for interrupting her, “I can authorize whatever material resources you need. Say the word and it’s yours.”
Gunthlag locked the wheelchair’s tires and nodded harshly to the nurse typing on a computer at a standing desk across from the bed. This was a room Amelia hadn’t seen before, and it was even colder than her cell. She held back a shiver and bit her tongue in the process. Her mouth tasted like copper and fear.
There were straps on this bed. It was not a place to rest.
“Transfer her,” Gunthlag snapped at the nurse. “We begin at two.”
Then he left. Amelia swallowed thickly as the door shut behind the dwarf.
The nurse’s jaw flexed as he quickly wrapped up whatever he was doing on the computer, then turned to Amelia. It was the faun with wavy, tawny-brown hair and eyes like moss agate. He was, at least, the most efficient of the three medical providers she’d met so far, and always cared for her wounds gently. He wasn’t massive, but he appeared plenty strong enough to pick her up and throw her on that menacing cot.
The faun approached, and Amelia tried in vain to keep her face neutral. Her back pressed against the plasticy fabric of the wheelchair’s backrest as she shied away. But to her surprise, he didn’t reach for her. Instead, he folded his arms and raised one eyebrow.
“On you get, then,” he said in an unreadable tone, jerking his head towards the bed. “I know you can walk, and I won’t deny you the dignity of using your own two feet if I don’t have to.”
Amelia hesitated.
The faun sighed and raked one hand through his hair. “Look,” he snapped. “I’ve got less than twenty minutes to set up for this procedure, so I don’t have time to contemplate our place in the universe. You can stand up and lay on the bed, or I can put you there myself.”
Amelia’s eyes flicked to the door and her hands tensed on the armrests of her chair.
“Don’t,” said the faun harshly. “It’s locked, and you’d be shot with elemental magic for trying. Wanna get yourself killed? Fine. Do it while someone else is on the clock. For now, get on the freaking bed.”
He turned and began setting out small vials of clear liquid and syringes on a clean metal tray. Amelia stood on shaky legs, and the faun hesitated as he waited for her to decide between two terrible unknown fates.
The bed, or the door?
She bolted, running towards to the door on bare feet, and gasped as the faun’s arm caught her around the waist, knocking the air from her as she struggled.
“I’m sorry,” he grunted as he pulled her back towards the bed.
He dropped her on crisp sheets then buckled her wrists and ankles.
“I’m sorry,” he repeated in a whisper. “I never wanted to do this. I never wanted to be this. But now I’m trying to survive. Just like you.”
Amelia snarled and felt her dragon-form snapping just out of reach. It felt closer, than it had before. Maybe? If she could fight him off long enough, her aureate dragon-form might be able to claw her way to the surface.
The faun held her upper arm in a firm, practiced grip, then plunged a slender silver needle into the muscle.
The world… fuzzed. Her limbs went limp. She was still alert, but her veins pulsed with what could only be pixie magic.
Rotshard.
The faun finished setting up for the procedure — whatever it was — with brisk, efficient irritation. Medications were arrayed, machines were set up, data was entered, and electrodes were stuck to her head with a thick, sticky paste that felt disgusting in her hair. Finally an IV was placed in her left hand and neatly taped down. The nurse hooked it to a bag of shimmery blue fluid just as the door opened.
Amelia’s instincts begged her to jump, but the fizzy sedative from earlier hadn’t worn off yet, so her head lethargically lolled to the right and she blinked slowly.
It was Gunthlag and the blunt-earred fae.
Lothienne.
“Good afternoon, little dragon,” Lothienne said cordially. His resonant baritone gave her the creeps, and her body jerked slightly as she shivered — that was the voice of a monster. His clean appearance, however, fit this immaculate medical room a little too well. Had it not been for those ears (and the straps pinning her down), this easily could have looked like a routine procedure at Aethelburg’s Balm Recuperatory.
As if committed to the bit, Lothienne washed his hands with surgical thoroughness, then pulled on a pair of nitrile gloves and sat on a rolling stool.
“Gunthlag, begin recording,” he said absently, tilting his head to one side to pop his neck. “Nick, engage the scanner.”
The nurse nodded jerkily, then stood in front of what looked like an ultrasound machine that was attached to the electrodes on her skull.
Amelia swallowed.
“I’m so sorry, Mrs. Kevrinhart. I can’t find a heartbeat…”
She squeezed her eyes shut for a second, banishing the memories. She couldn’t. Not right now.
Nick flicked a switch and the machine hummed to life, green screen glowing ominously. He stood at the keyboard, pressing buttons and flipping switches with routine efficiency.
“Extraction number one. September twenty-first. Seventeen-o-eight hours,” Lothienne said in a detached tone, as if narrating for Gunthlag’s recording. “We begin with the library, as that’s the location the subject mentioned during questioning.”
Lothienne’s hands flexed and begin to glow with an aura of murky purple magic. Amelia coughed and gagged as the ghastly floral scent from the man in the library last week pummeled her with full force. It was the scent of fae magic. Cursed fae magic.
He rolled closer to the bed on his stool then reached forward, wreathing Amelia’s head in that rotten-plum color and saccharine floral stench — gloved hands hovering just an inch from her face.
“Nicholas.”
“Beginning extraction,” the faun said softly.
Images surged into Amelia’s mind and she gasped, breath coming in jagged bursts as they flooded through her memory.
Footie pajamas and braids as Mom read board books to her and Lucy at bedtime.
Devouring chapter books under the covers with a flashlight and a thermos of tea, four hours before she was supposed to wake up for school.
Mrs. Eldentimbre from the library, and the indulgent smile she always wore when teenage Amelia burst through the doors five minutes before closing with a stack of books to return.
Six years of study at the Starloft Institute of Erudition to get her master’s degree in library science.
The miniature tome of legends Charles gave her on their first date.
All the books that lined the walls of her home.
The Valehaven Public Library.
Local indie authors.
Mommy-and-me painting class.
Morph story time.
The mute man.
One by one, every memory she had about libraries and books flicked through her mind’s eye before… shifting, to the screen on her left.
And it hurt.
Holy lifeblood of realms and portals, how it hurt.
The sensation was a tearing, ripping, rending that left her trembling and thrashing against her bindings while salty tears dripped to mingle with her hair and those sticky electrodes. Parts of her very soul seemed to be pulsing from her mind into that horrible machine — screaming, protesting, clawing every inch of the way.
And then there was…
Emptiness.
A void. Patches of nothingness that ached like… the lack of something? Because something was supposed to be in those blank places.
Right?
Surely she wasn’t meant to be riddled with holes within her own mind and heart and…
Lothienne pulled back, dismissing the purpleish glow of his fae magic and removing his gloves.
“Extraction complete,” he said in a smug tone.
Amelia’s exhausted body wilted into the hard bed as her battered mind teetered. Nick reached out and began gently disconnecting electrodes, one by one. She stared blankly past him as he worked, eyes falling on the machine.
There was a blurry image of man in a room full of books on that green screen — disheveled and frantic — shoving a plastic bag of paper scraps into a pair of pale, feminine hands.
How strange.
For a split second, she wondered who they were. Then, utterly depleted, her eyelids began to flutter. The awful greenish-white room blurred…
And she remembered no more.