Freyja, please keep me strong.
Twenty-Six
“Relax your muscles. This will only hurt a little,” the man in the white medical jacket assured me as he held a needle above my abdomen. I recognized him as the same man who’d taken my blood earlier.
He’d entered the room after I’d lain on the table to spite John, refusing to show how my wounded abs still ached with the controlled movement. He’d prepared my lower stomach area by cleansing it with yellow liquid and then placing blue paper cloths around the patch below my belly-button so that only a square of my skin showed. The women had covered my legs with a thin sheet before exiting the room.
The operating room looked much like the hall—stark white and clean. Except, it held a tray of sharp objects and against the far wall stood a metal cabinet.
I shivered with a chill that had nothing to do with temperature.
The man, whom I assumed was a doctor, plunged the large needle into my skin and deeper into my abdomen. Stinging and intense pressure ripped through my stomach. I screeched and flailed my arms to push him away, to escape. Freaking liar—it hurt way more than a little.
Two Hunters ran to each of my arms and held them at my sides. Trapped. I was trapped and despite these men, I was alone. I closed my eyes against the pain. Warm, wet tears trickled dwindled down my cheeks. Concentrate on the tears, I begged myself. Concentrate on how they feel along my skin.
My breathing stilled for two seconds before the doctor shifted the needle while still inside me and I screamed again, clawing my nails into the table I lay upon.
“Almost done,” the doctor said to the Hunters holding me down, reassuring them rather than me.
I stared at the ceiling to keep from watching the pain he inflicted on my body. The needle moved again, and I ground my teeth and squished my eyes shut to keep from crying out.
These Hunters, every one in this room, would pay for this.
The doctor walked out of my peripheral vision and I looked down. He was done. I exhaled and moved to rub my stomach, but the Hunters still held my arms in place.
“It’ll be a few days before we know if these ova inseminate or not,” the doctor said, messing with glass bottles in the cabinet. He bent to place a bottle and the needle he’d used into an insulated box on the ground I hadn’t noticed before. “Until we know, keep doing what you’ve been doing. No pharmaceuticals or supplements of any kind, daily sunlight outside, and refrain from intense physical harm. At least until the ova take with the sperm.”
He lifted the box and his white coat opened just enough for me to notice the dagger in its sheath, hanging from his belt.
“Are you the one who drugs the women too?” I let slip. “Before you sell them off to the highest bidders?”
The doctor rolled his eyes like I’d been nothing more than an annoying fly buzzing in his vicinity. “What are you going to do with it once the ova produce an embryo or two?” he asked John, the “it” being me.
John put his hands on his hips like they were discussing cars. “Oh, I don’t know. Sell it? Use it for target practice? He hasn’t decided.”
He? John must have been referring to their leader, the elusive Hunter in charge of all American Hunters.
“Well,” the doctor said, his shoulder pressed against the door to open it, “let me know. We could make top dollar selling its parts to a few fringe scientists I know.”
John gave him a nod and the man in the white coat left the room, having just stolen my eggs as though he were doing nothing more than plucking fresh eggs from a hen house. I hoped he would be around tomorrow.
The two women entered the OR again and hurried to the space behind the curtain.
“Like we’d let humans know the existence of Wild Women,” John scoffed under his breath. He motioned to me with a wave of his hand. “Get up and get your clothes back on.”
They were done with me. They’d forced me down here, commanded that I strip my clothes from my body, that I lie on this cold table and allow them to pluck my future daughters from my womb, and now they were done with me.
I vowed to Freyja to make it my personal responsibility to see that each person in this OR burned in this building.
I eased from the table, not fast enough for John by the way he urged me to hurry. My stomach muscles burned as I twisted my torso to climb down. My breath hitched as I shuffled slowly toward the white curtain, toward the women and my clothing. My dagger wound smarted with the addition of the large needle prodding around my belly.
The women dressed me without touching my skin and without making a sound. After fastening the shawl, they presented me to the Hunters who stood on each of my two sides to escort our group from the OR. The bright circular light above the table shone down on the rolling tray and glinted off the scalpel sitting beside gloves and a glass bottle of solution.
I needed that scalpel.
My abs burned with each step, my uterus cramped, but I had no choice. I needed that weapon. A foot away from the tray, I took a step in front of the two Hunters, held my stomach, and heaved over, howling in pain. The commotion bought me a second to swipe the scalpel on my way upright. The Hunters rushed to my sides.
“Stop messing around and get moving,” John demanded harshly.
The Hunters grabbed my elbows before I could slip the thing into my pocket. I held tight to the sharp metal object, its tip poking my inner wrist.
I almost wished the men would have dragged me back through the building and up the stairs the way they’d dragged me to the OR, with how badly I cramped each time I used my core muscles. But no such luck. They dropped me off at my room as though we’d just gone for a leisurely walk and I hadn’t had a huge needle plunged into my abdomen. Call me cruel, but I dreamed of watching someone shove a needle into their testicles and then see how quickly they walked after that. Or hell, even their stomachs. But unless a magical revenge fairy showed up tonight, I highly doubted they’d get to experience what they’d put me through. I took comfort in knowing their ends would be much worse than a needle to the groin.
Alone in my locked cell of a room, I sat on my bed and considered my next move. I didn’t want to do it, but what choice did I have? I unbuttoned my jeans and slowly pushed them down my legs, taking care in how much I used my core muscles for balance. I hoped to Freyja my abs didn’t ache this badly tomorrow morning when the Wilds came calling for a fight. What I prepared to do would compromise me even more, affect my ability to use my right leg. If I didn’t do it, though, I was as good as dead, unable to access my huldra. Goddess, I missed my huldra.
She’d become a real part of me, not some aspect of myself I hid away in shame. Anger and a sense of vindication rose through me. My lower back ached, my bark missing a key component of its existence. The tips of my fingers, my palms, the soles of my feet, tingled with want.
The Hunters had silenced my huldra, they’d tried to remove my power—called it evil and unsafe. I yearned to feel her pulsing through me, to grow vines from my fingers, branches from my palms, and roots from the soles of my feet.
I wanted my huldra back. I wanted all of me back.
I grabbed for the scalpel sitting beside me on the bed and carefully inserted it into my thigh, just deep enough to trace around the hastily tattooed new tiny red crosses at the edges of my identification number. Blood met the blade and still I cut. I ignored the pain and let raw anger push my hand to press on, to go deeper, to cut their handiwork out from my skin. And when the red crosses were nothing more than bits of bloody skin on the wooden floor beside the foot of my bed, something in me demanded more.
My huldra.
She was waking up.
And she was pissed.
Tomorrow, I would fight for my freedom and for the freedom of those I cared about. I wanted nothing belonging to the Hunters on my body, nothing symbolizing the years of oppression my kind had lived under by their hands. The identification numbers they’d tattooed into my thigh after I’d had my first menstrual cycl
e covered a larger portion than their newest red crosses. And while I’d tattooed tree branches over their numbers a while ago, in an act of rebellion, that was no longer enough.
I sucked in a breath and pressed the shiny, sharp metal to the top edge of where the first number started, and drew it down, past the other numbers, to create a box of blood. My heart beat sped, along with my anxious need to get them off of me. Vines slowly protruded from the tips of my fingers, and the scalpel lost its shine, the metal covered in slick, warm blood, but I kept cutting. As the last piece of my numbered flesh fell away and left the fatty flesh beneath, I dropped the scalpel and closed my eyes.
My huldra thrummed inside me, the sight of my own blood amping up her killer desires, her need for revenge. Goddess, I loved her.
“Thank you, Freyja,” I whispered, waving my hands in front of me while vines grew from my fingers and wound their way up my wrists.
“I see you’re feeling more yourself,” Drosera said before her body came fully into view, as though she stepped out of some unseen existence and into the seen. She stood beside the window, wearing the same animal skin skirt she’d been wearing last time she visited. Her messy hair hung in knots, part of it pulled back with plant roots and twigs.
“They took my eggs,” I uttered, returning my focus to my hands, woozy with the intense pain and loss of blood, but mostly mesmerized by my vines.
“Yes, and we shall burn them down along with this building,” she responded. When that didn’t garner my attention, she added, “You have more eggs.”
I peered up at her. “Do I though?” I asked. “I don’t know how many of mine they took, but huldra only have one daughter each. What if they stole my ability to have my own daughter, Drosera?” Although, they’d taken my mother after she’d had me and kept her for twenty years, so apparently she had more than one egg. But how many more?
I hadn’t realized how much that idea upset me until the rusalka walked closer and placed a hand on my shoulder. “You are experiencing a reality that is not yet yours, again,” she warned. “Think on what is to come, not what has yet to be seen.”
Her words did nothing to calm my racing mind. We couldn’t know the average amount of eggs Wild Women, and huldra in particular, carried; there’d never been scientific studies. The scientific community didn’t even know we existed, outside of Hunter medical professionals and I figured their goal had more to do with how to create a hybrid warrior and less to do with the Wild Women make-up.
Unless.
“Do you think the Hunters know how many eggs we have?” I asked the rusalka. “The ones who’ve done studies on our reproductive systems enough to piece together how to create hybrids?”
Drosera’s sneer shocked me. Very rarely had I seen a rusalka show much of any outward emotion. “They have dissected Wild Women, yes. But studies done on living beings in captivity are always skewed. The body changes in captivity; it reverts to survival mode.”
“So there’s no real way to find out if I can have a daughter,” I said, looking back to my vines, the way they created bracelets along my arm. The wooziness edged away with Drosera’s touch.
“I cannot reveal too much; it is not our way. But do not fear. A daughter will come.” She rubbed my shoulder and I peered up from my vines. “We need to discuss tomorrow. The harpy ancestors have rejected our invitation to take down the descendants of their oppressors.”
“I had no idea having dead Wilds take up arms was even an option,” I remarked.
“They would have been a great asset, but they have declined, and we will continue on,” she said, as though she simply briefed me on a fact and moved on to the next. She looked to my naked and blood-smeared thigh. “Are you able to fight?”
Twenty-Seven
“Yes, I will,” I answered Drosera’s question, meeting her eyes. My huldra stirred in excitement. “I will definitely be able to fight tomorrow.” Even if I had to limp my way to each Hunter and get close enough to shove branches through his heart and vines around his neck, I’d do it.
“Good,” she said, removing her hand from my shoulder. She focusing on the blood stone shawl the women had left folded neatly on the dresser. Drosera ran her dirty fingers across the thing. “The harpy will break this from your body as a signal to begin. We will be waiting in the tree line outside the fencing, hidden from the cameras.”
“How?” I asked. “She’s stuck in a cage when she’s out there.”
“She will call you over, tear this horrid thing from you, and you’ll in turn use your abilities to release her.” Drosera turned and eyed my blank room. “The rogue Hunter has agreed to bring your mother out.”
I sighed with relief. “That was my next question.”
Drosera smiled. “I know.”
Two emotional expressions from a rusalka in one discussion. Must have been a record.
Her smile dropped. “There is something else we must discuss this night.”
“Okay?” I shifted on the bed to rest my back against the headboard and stretch my legs out in front of me.
“Your coterie and Marcus have been reading through the files in your briefcase,” she started.
I knew the one she referred to. After taking down the Washington Hunter complex, I’d started gathering information on the human trafficking cases I thought were connected to the Hunters, Clarisse, and Samuel Woodry—the last bail jumper I’d had the joy of hunting down and taking in before everything went to shit. That briefcase had gone everywhere with me, up until the day I was captured, thankfully. If the Hunter leaders learned how much I knew about their human trafficking operation they’d forego the whole hybrid thing and kill me execution style.
Drosera continued, “They have been adding more to the files and piecing together a case to present to the local police force investigators as well as local and major news stations.”
I stilled. “Marcus is going to out the whole Hunter establishment?”
“He is,” she said. “Along with himself.”
I sat up straighter and hissed as a hot shot of pain ripped through my ab muscles. “But he’s done nothing wrong, why out himself?”
“He says either he reveals himself or another arrested Hunter will reveal him. Also, it will increase his believability.”
“But they’ll know he’s supernatural and run tests on him,” I argued. Every supernatural lived with the hidden, but very real, fear of finding themselves under the knife and microscope of an eager human scientist searching for answers. It had been one way the Hunters were able to control us—their rules were to safeguard us from that exact reality…or so they said.
“We do not know what the humans will do, but he is willing to place himself at risk to save many,” she stated with no inflection of any kind.
“Did you try to talk him out of it?” I asked.
She tilted her head in confusion. “A person’s decision is their own.”
Not when that person is the one I’d chosen to spend my future with, the one able to break through my carefully constructed walls and reach my heart to hold it tenderly to his own. That person’s decision was not his own.
But I doubted Drosera would understand, so I pressed on. “What kind of evidence is Marcus collecting? Other than his own word and the existence of this complex?” Sure, he could have the officials all over the North Carolina Hunters, but what about the others? If they didn’t go after every American Hunter, the Hunters in higher government offices, and in the police force, would make everything Marcus said and found go away. It was one reason Wild Women of the country never went to the police—they knew it’d do more harm to themselves than good. I hoped Marcus wasn’t making the same mistake.
“Heather wore a camera to the coven circle meeting she attended,” Drosera said. “The video shows an undercover Hunter’s woman lying about leaving the sexist confines of religion and embracing the Wiccan ways of female freedom.”
“Uh, that’s not evidence, Drosera.”
“Marcus said the
same. The footage of the woman offering to host the next circle, only for the most devout of witches, at her property, is the damning evidence.”
“True,” I responded in thought. “It shows the missing link, the connection between the online chat group and the circles, how they lure the women in, and how they pick them.” Their evidence would also link Samuel Woodry, seeing as the barista he’d hit on in front of me, who’d also filed a police report of harassment by him, fit the Hunters’ criteria for their trafficking victims. Maybe with this new evidence they’d be able to get Samuel to talk, to share everything he knew about them.
“I know where the victims are being held,” I added.
The woman’s cries from the other side of the door in the underground hallway John and the two Hunters had escorted me through tonight gave me chills just thinking about, just imagining the young woman’s terror and possible future.
“That’s the best evidence. The women themselves can point fingers at the Hunters. I’m sure there’s captured women from each state where there’s a complex who can indict their local Hunter groups. Although,” I said, remembering who exactly we dealt with and how many times they’d escaped legal scrutiny and gone under the radar, “we’ll need all the information we can get to tie everything together and prove it without a reasonable doubt.”
Minutes of silence hung in the room and I waited to hear Drosera’s words in my mind, or the massaging fingers within my skull. “Clarisse would have given solid evidence if we’d promised to change her,” I said. The woman had taken the rap for a group she didn’t even want to be a part of. I could only imagine what she’d do to gain access, or what she believed would be the ability to gain access, to our Wild Women kind.
Drosera’s lip raised to a smirk. A first, from what I’d seen. “Clarisse is gone from here.”
“Did you enjoy her death?” I asked without blame or shame. We’d promised Clarisse she’d get what was coming to her when she least expected it. The rusalki followed through with that promise.
Wild Women Collection Page 68
