Lord sank the needle into Rose’s neck. Something hot and prickly cold by turns raced into her head and down into her chest. Within seconds her vision turned gray and fuzzy at the edges. Whatever this stuff was, it worked fast.
Rose tried to draw wakefulness, but it was no use. No draw could keep her conscious against the tide of fatigue drowning her mind.
Her sister’s face was the last thing Rose saw before the darkness took her. Melody grinned.
“Sweet dreams, Sis.”
28
Resistance
The fear came in waves. Rose tried to fight it. She knew she had no reason to fear David Lord. He wasn’t even in the room. But no amount of telling herself that could break the fear draw. He had her courage, and through it, he robbed her votaries.
She lay on a hospital bed, strapped down at the waist. Had she the wherewithal, she could have broken the leather strap cinched across her lower abdomen. She knew that. But she wasn’t able to touch it.
Merely thinking about the strap made her cringe. She turned her gaze away from it to silence such thoughts. She had a sneaking suspicion David Lord could read her mind. Ludicrous of course…but still.
The woman in the bed next to Rose was insane. Though Mary had been paranoid to the point of near incoherence when Rose first arrived— three days ago?—the woman had been speaking then. She had managed to tell Rose she was from Culver City, California. She owned a small laundromat and dry-cleaning business there. That part, what Rose figured was real, had been stuffed between Mary’s ranting conspiracy theories about who was talking behind her back and who had told Society she charmed her customers. Not much charm, of course. Just enough to keep them coming back.
But that had been three days ago. Lord said some votaries in the fear factory lasted far longer than others. Some withstood the fear for months. Others, Mary among them, cracked within days.
Mary jabbered something. There might have been a word in there, but if so, Rose couldn’t make it out. Mary’s brown hair clung to her sweaty forehead. She rolled her eyes this way and that like a bewildered animal, the whites glistening in the harsh hospital light.
Rose had ceased telling her everything would be okay. Rose didn’t believe that, and saying it did no good.
Mary wailed and thrashed, sometimes laughing, sometimes crying, throughout her every waking hour. The same went for the other patients—votaries—blubbering, screaming, and crying in adjacent rooms. Their sounds of fear never ceased. They echoed along the corridors, a discordant melody of madness Rose couldn’t shut out.
Thomas, the Army nurse who brought them meals and checked their vitals, had said Mary would probably receive a feeding tube in the next day or so if she didn’t start eating again.
Thinking of Thomas made Rose look again at her strap, which in turn sent a claxon of fear screaming through her mind. No thinking about the strap! The strap was fine. It needed nothing from her. She could not improve it in any way. Rose looked away from it, turned her mind elsewhere.
Thomas was nice. He had been an Army nurse for four years now. Someone, Rose figured David Lord for the culprit, had charmed Thomas into seeing his patients as insane domestic terrorists. The details were a little fuzzy, but that was another thing Rose wasn’t supposed to think about. It didn’t matter what Thomas thought of her and Mary and however many others were locked away in this facility, he was a good nurse. He saw to their needs. He treated them well despite his charmed delusions.
Sudden fatigue washed over Rose. Her hands shook under their own weight. She tried to lift them but couldn’t. Lord was drawing strength and speed from her, inducing her to, in turn, draw those attributes from her votaries.
Mary made a gurgling sound, a refutation. She too must have sensed Lord’s draw.
Rose grimaced. With a defiant growl, she resisted drawing from her votaries. She tried with every part of her self-control to deny Lord his demands.
But with that denial, her fear of him grew. Was he so aware of her that he could direct her fear? Surely not. She was just one in his legion of votaries. He couldn’t know that she fought him.
Could he?
The fear increased. Rose began to sweat. She heard voices. These weren’t the inarticulate screams and wails of the mad in surrounding rooms, or even Mary’s yammering. These voices emanated from behind her, beneath her bed, in the closed and locked cabinet next to the sink.
“Anna! Anna, help me!”
Desperately, Rose scanned the room, wide-eyed and frightened. She could never find the child who screamed for her no matter how she searched. She looked and looked but found only crazy Mary gibbering at her.
A whisper brushed Rose’s cheek, making the skin on her neck pucker with gooseflesh. It was the worn and raspy sound of an aged woman pleading for water. She was so thirsty. With the whisper came the scent of fetid breath, like that of a person sick with something catching. Rose flattened herself against her sweat-soaked sheets, unable to escape, shivering in fear.
A nail scratched at the underside of Rose’s mattress. The sound went on and on, running the length of her body from heel to crown and back again. The vibrations sent a greasy tickle racing up her back that made her squirm.
“It’s my mind!” Rose shouted at the sounds—at the empty room. “It’s not real! You’re not real!”
“It’s dark,” said the child in the cabinet.
“I’m thirsty, so thirsty,” said the old woman.
The finger began anew its long traversal of the bed.
Rose drew voice from her votaries and screamed. The titanic sound shook the room, rattling its door in the frame. For a moment, nothing existed outside Rose’s tormented howl. She filled it with all her fear, doubt, and worry. When it finally died, Rose’s lungs felt deflated, and her ears rang. She lay back on the bed, panting, becoming slowly aware of Mary’s panicked wails.
Guilt put a knot in Rose’s stomach. She had added to Mary’s crippling fear. That hadn’t been her intention. “I’m sorry, Mary.”
The other woman ignored Rose. She writhed on her bed, insensate to the world outside her tortured thoughts, a mad invalid of no more use than a battery for her succubus masters.
A battery provided power; it never drew it. But Rose had drawn just now when she screamed. Without thought, and in desperation, she had borrowed voice from her votaries, which meant she could access her powers. That realization sent a blade of shame slicing through her guts. Her votaries were off limits! They no longer belonged to her. They were Lord’s.
And yet.
Rose focused on the strap across her belly. Defying her revulsion, she took it in both hands, her knuckles white with strain. Without much hope, she reached out to her votaries’ strength and speed, beckoning to them like lost pets too long astray. To her surprise, they came readily, filling her limbs with vibrant energy. Though every fiber of her mind told Rose that escape was wrong, to even contemplate it could mean her death, she committed to tearing the strap from its moorings. And she would have done it—she would have!—but no sooner had she drawn than Lord drew in turn, sucking away her power as fast as she could call it. Her strength and speed evaporated. Somewhere, Lord must have been doing battle, perhaps with Matt, perhaps with other friends Rose loved. And though she yearned to cut off the flow, Rose could not help but aid Lord in that fight.
Terror wracked her mind and body. It left her shaking and sweating, her muscles cramped from warring against one another. Despite her best efforts, Rose could not fight it. The fear consumed her.
Time passed. A minute or a year, she didn’t know. Rose knew only the shuddering, jittering horror of Lord’s draw. Somewhere far off, the hospital room door clicked open. Thomas entered. He wore digital camo scrubs with his rank, specialist, embroidered over his name tape and the Army star beneath.
Rose writhed against the strap. Some part of her, a sort of backseat driver in her head, whispered that she had no reason to fear Thomas. He posed no threat. He wasn’t even an incubus.
By the look on his face, he had nothing but concern for his patients.
But that rational part of Rose held no sway over the stark terror suffusing her mind. She screamed and tried to scramble back from him but went nowhere.
“It’s okay!” Thomas held up his clipboard and free hand. “It’s just me. You’re both fine.”
“Don’t hurt me!” Rose shouted. She clawed at the bed with feeble hands. She knew—KNEW—Thomas would strangle her, beat her, give her drugs to make her blood sizzle like meat on a grill. He meant to kill her. Violate her. She lay defenseless before him.
Thomas moved to the upright cabinet in the far corner. He stood before it for a moment, his brow furrowed as if in thought.
“The doctor says I can’t give you a sedative. But I don’t know why. He never explained…” Thomas trailed off, peering at the clipboard in his hands.
“Don’t touch me!” Rose shouted.
“You deserve some sleep.” Thomas fumbled a key from his pocket and tried it on the cabinet’s oversized lock, but his hands were trembling too much to slide it home.
“NO!” Rose shouted. “The little girl’s in there.”
“What little girl?” Thomas asked.
“The one who calls my name. She’s angry with me. She wants to hurt me.”
Mary wailed an incoherent string of syllables filled with fear and regret.
“There’s no one in this cabinet,” Thomas said, but his hands had stopped working the lock. “I’m not supposed to give you anything.”
Rose focused on him. Thomas’s face kept changing. One moment he was a thin twenty-something Army nurse, one whose job increasingly made no sense to him, and the next he was a demon. His skin grew pale, clotting up like oatmeal. His eyes elongated to stretch around the sides of his head, even as the whites turned a brilliant yellow, bright as the noonday sun. Tusks extruded from beneath his upper lip, gleaming white and dripping with greenish poison. His body arched, his back bent, his fingers morphed into claws long as butcher knives.
“No!” Rose shouted, and Thomas flinched. She had to fight the fear. There was no escape—nowhere she could hide from it. She could cower and give in, or she could fight.
But fighting was futile. Hadn’t she learned that already? Was she so stupid she couldn’t take the lesson? She had fought Lord that first day when he had brought her here. She had railed against him and Melody—
Rose jolted as if someone had slapped her.
Melody.
She, too, had infused fear in Rose. She wasn’t the prime figure, she didn’t loom so large as Lord in Rose’s mind, but Melody had her own fear draw on Rose.
A flash of something besides terror hammered through Rose’s distressed mind.
Anger.
It was fleeting, squashed by fear, and yet it had been there. Rose thought again of Melody, of her little sister’s glee at watching Lord break Rose’s spirit. She pictured Melody’s intense stare as Lord drew out Rose’s courage, siphoning it off like gasoline from a wrecked car.
“No!” Rose hurled the word like a grenade, her anger spiking once again.
Thomas bumped into the cabinet behind him. Items rattled inside.
Something joined the anger growing inside Rose’s head: a seed of courage to combat the fear. She seized upon it, drawing more.
Thomas flattened against the cabinet, his face gone bloodless, his eyes wide and rolling. The clipboard slid from his hand to clatter on the floor. “What’s happening? What are you doing to me?”
The phantom sounds that had so terrorized Rose ceased. She heard now only the muted wails of votaries mingled with Thomas’s exhalations and Mary’s incoherent muttering. Strength of will pervaded Rose’s mind, drowning out the fear. For the first time in days, she felt her thoughts coalesce into a sane stream of consciousness. Suddenly, she knew where she was. She knew what she was doing.
“I’m sorry,” Rose said.
Thomas jerked as if she had slapped him. He tried to sidle away but seemed incapable of tearing his gaze from Rose. Sweat beaded his forehead and upper lip. He looked like a rodent pinned by sudden, brilliant light.
Rose drew still more courage from Thomas. It enveloped her like a blanket straight from the dryer—delicious, intoxicating, protective. Her fear of Lord and Melody evaporated under its enveloping heat.
Calm now, in control, Rose drew strength. Her votaries were vast and deep. Lord and Melody hadn’t begun to siphon off even the barest amount of talents from Rose’s fans. With a calm she would not have believed possible seconds before, Rose slid her fingers beneath the strap pinning her to the bed and ripped it in two.
Thomas screamed and fell backward to sprawl on the floor. He searched Rose’s face, eyes skittering about like a couple of brown beetles. His mouth hung open and his brows lifted so high they might have been part of his hairline.
Rose bounded from the bed, barefoot and dressed in a hospital gown. Not that it mattered. She crouched next to Thomas, watching him, her head tilted to one side.
He was a pathetic little thing, shuddering beneath her gaze. She seized his collar, and Thomas’s bladder let loose. The weakling. He screeched but dared not pull away from Rose’s grasp. Smart. If he so much as looked away from her, Rose would crush him like an insect. He disgusted her.
Rose halted.
Aghast, she released Thomas’s collar and scooted back from him till she bumped the railing on her bed. Had she been about to kill a defenseless man? Yes. Worse, she had relished the idea.
Rose swallowed. A stream of fear threatened to seep back into her mind. Lord would be livid if he found her out of bed—if he saw she had broken the precious strap. He would do terrible things to her. So would Melody. They’d—
No.
Rose shook her head, gritted her teeth. No more fear. No more quivering at the mere thought of Lord and Melody. She had spent her life slinking from one town to another because of fear. She had forgone love and friendship because of fear. She had denied herself a real existence because fear had ruled her every decision in life. No more. She needed courage, and she knew where to find it.
Having opened the flow once already, Rose found the courage came more easily a second time. She drew from it—from Thomas—obliterating her fears with a torrent of boldness, bravery, and audacity that spared no room for dread or timidity or much of anything at all.
Rose watched Thomas cower and call for his mother. She should feel something for him, but she didn’t. Or, rather, she did, but no more than she felt for the lamp next to her bed or the floor beneath her feet. A cold, dispassionate sort of calculus clicked along inside her head.
She took stock.
She was drawing Thomas’s courage, something new to her, but not altogether surprising. His courage had led her to that of her votaries like Hansel and Gretel’s bread trail. Now she drew the courage of millions, which more than sufficed to protect her from the fear links placed on her by Lord and Melody.
Good. Right? It certainly seemed so, but at what cost? Rose could feel—not feel?—her loss of empathy for things outside herself just as Matt had described it. Dispassionate realism filled her mind to the exclusion of all else. It felt pure and clean, especially after suffering so many days of terror, but also cold. Even without compassion or empathy, Rose could see that. She cared nothing for Thomas. Breaking his spine would mean no more to her than plucking an apple from a branch or cracking a lobster’s shell for dinner.
But it should.
Rose spared Thomas another look. He writhed and groaned when he saw her focusing on him.
“I’m a psychopath,” she whispered.
“Please don’t,” Thomas cried. “Please, please don’t.”
Were all her votaries acting this way right now? Millions of Drawn fans driven to the brink of fear-induced insanity?
Doubtful. Hopefully, Thomas was either particularly susceptible to the draw or acutely affected due to proximity. If they felt anything, the average Drawn fan likely suffered only the m
ildest discomfort, just as they would feel the tiniest bit sick or weak when she drew healing or strength from them en masse.
It didn’t much matter either way. Rose wasn’t about to relinquish her draw on Thomas, or her legion of fans. She needed them if she had any hope of destroying this fear factory.
Part of her thought she should simply set the building on fire. An inferno would kill the Breathers’ votaries. Many of those votaries were insane like Mary, or at least well on the way to insanity. Fire looked like the quickest way to victory.
“No,” Rose said. She had to think like Rose without the fear draw. Her dispassion wouldn’t last. Eventually, she would relinquish all this courage, leaving some future incarnation of herself to deal with whatever choices she made now. That future emotional self might be traumatized by wanton killing, especially of innocent votaries, some of them likely her family. By protecting them, she protected her future self. And self-preservation seemed logical.
Rose headed for the door. She purposefully did not cave in Thomas’s skull as she passed him. She felt certain future Rose would approve.
With no more fear than a woman entering her home, Rose tried the door but found it locked.
She drew a breath, and with it, strength, speed, and resilience.
Time to do her duty.
29
End Times
An alarm blared to life the instant Rose burst through the doorway. She glanced left and right, braced for attack.
None came.
The hall, lit by bright overhead fluorescents, stood empty. She was in a hospital: wooden doors with plastic file holders affixed to the wall next to them, white Formica floors, beige paint, the sterile scent of industrial cleaners. Strobe lights near the ceiling flashed in time with the alarm. Rose considered ripping the speakers from the wall but dismissed the idea. She had more important things to do.
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