“Where are we?” I asked Luce, figuring it was as good a place to start as any.
He heard me but just shook his head. “Although you are my revered guest, I am certain you will understand my hesitation in revealing our whereabouts. It is highly confidential and very few know our specific location.”
I looked around us again at all the white houses, which suddenly looked like giants’ teeth. “You mean that the people who live here don’t even know where ‘here’ is?”
He nodded. “That is exactly what I mean.”
I shook my head. “Then everyone is being held captive?”
Luce chuckled lightly and then tsked me as if I were completely clueless. “Of course not. They are all here of their own free will.” I was about to ask another question, but he shushed me with a shake of his head. “We will have ample opportunity to answer your questions, my Queen,” he said, and I couldn’t tell if he was patronizing me or not. “In the meantime, if you would allow me, may I use this opportunity to take you on a tour?”
I nodded, figuring I needed to buy myself as much time as I could while gaining as much knowledge about the Lurkers as possible.
Jolie! It was Rand’s voice in my head.
Rand. I said his name and relaxed as relief began welling up inside me. I’d been worried that our mental telepathy wouldn’t work here—wherever here was.
Where are you? he asked.
We can’t communicate like this, I thought in return, all too aware that Luce could probably listen to my thoughts. I’m in the Lurker camp and I’m afraid our conversations are being overheard.
Are you okay? he asked, his voice quaking. God, just tell me you’re okay, and as soon as I get my hands on those fucking bastards—
I am for now. Rely on our bond, Rand, I said. I wasn’t sure if it would be possible for us to relay information without actual communication, but it was all I could think of at the moment.
“What does this tour entail?” I asked Luce, hoping to draw his attention away from what was going on in my head.
He nodded as he led me through the last alcove of cookie-cutter houses and we stepped onto a dirt pathway. It led down a small hill, with massive pines on either side of us. I felt like I was on a tour of a retirement village or something. It just had that sterile sort of feel to it.
“I will explain about my kind—our kind,” he finished, offering me a quick smile.
I will find you, Rand persisted. Do you have any idea where you are?
No. I swallowed hard, eyeing Luce to see if he could sense that I was conversing with Rand. But he didn’t divert his attention from the trail ahead, so I figured my secret was safe. Well, I hoped it was anyway.
Rand, we can’t continue talking like this because there’s a good chance someone can overhear us, I stressed again. I will try contacting you again when I’m able, I finished.
I didn’t hear his voice again, so I figured he’d gotten the message. I took a deep breath, feeling the sudden need to cry, but I squelched it. I needed all of my wits about me—I couldn’t give in to emotions that would do me no good. I had to be my own wall of fortitude and courage, because I was determined to take this one step at a time—I was going to survive.
“You are most highly esteemed by our people,” Luce continued as he smiled sincerely at me. “They have longed for a leader, and now you have finally returned to fulfill your destiny.”
“It seems like you’re doing a fine job of leading them,” I responded, wondering where all this “leader” business was going.
He nodded and pursed his lips. “I need a front-runner, Jolie. I need someone to exist between me and my people.”
“You’re saying you need an assistant?” I asked, and laughed shallowly.
“No,” he said, irritated. “You were meant to return to us, to take your rightful place as figurehead for our people. Well, you and one other.”
“One other?”
He shook his head. “You will meet her in time. For now, it is important for you to understand that you are here for a reason and I shall act as your guide.”
So he was basically the male counterpart of Mercedes. Although where Mercedes was absolutely honest about her intentions for me to be Queen, somehow I didn’t get the same feeling from Luce. It was almost as if he was making up this “leader” stuff just because I was already a Queen. Sort of like offering me a job while knowing I wouldn’t want to be demoted in title or status.
Not knowing what to make of the whole leader business, I said nothing. I could see that the path we were on led to a two-story white building that looked like a white box with a few gray windows. There was no one around, and everything was completely silent, almost as if we were on a set of some sort. “Where is everyone?” I asked.
He smiled. “Keeping busy, no doubt. Each person has his or her own duty.”
I said nothing else, trying to shake the feeling that I had somehow wandered into an old Twilight Zone episode. “Are you the only elder?” I asked abruptly.
He smiled at that. “No, but I am the elder who possesses magic.” Otherwise known as a witch, I told myself, almost wanting to smile.
“And let me guess, there’s also an elder who represents those who possess … fangs?” I said.
Luce chuckled, then nodded. “Though here, their teeth are not their best attribute. We value their exceptional speed and strength.”
“What do you call them?”
“Daywalkers,” he finished.
“And yourselves?”
“We are the Elementals,” he said, and I was reminded of how he’d called himself an Elemental earlier.
“So there are two elders, you and the Daywalker one?” I summed up.
Luce nodded. “Nairn, yes. I will introduce you to her in time.” I wasn’t sure why, but I swallowed hard, under Luce’s intense gaze. “In time?” I asked.
“She does not interact well with strangers,” he finished.
I nodded, filing this information away for future use. Although, I had to wonder if there would ever be a future, since I had no idea what Luce’s intentions were. I had to guess, though, that I wasn’t on the “to die” list, since he could have exterminated me long ago if that were the case. And that thought did bring me some relief.
Reaching the white building with the gray windows, Luce held the door open for me. I walked in and he followed me. “This is our hospital,” he said, looking around with obvious pride. Women in nurse uniforms passed by in an apparent rush, while patients hobbled around. It was a small waiting room with plastic chairs lining each wall. On the far side there was a registration area, where a woman in blue scrubs was smiling at us.
“My elder,” she said as she bowed her head to address Luce.
It was the first time we’d come across any other Lurkers, and I couldn’t help but gulp. While Luce pretty much looked how you’d imagine a centuries-old elder would look, the rest of the people in this hospital looked exactly like that—people. They just seemed so nondescript, so unthreatening in their busyness.
As I watched the scene before me, a nurse wheeled a handsome young patient past us. Both of them smiled up at Luce, dipping their heads with obvious reverence. They eyed me with surprise, probably since I was a stranger. But I couldn’t say my mind was wholly focused on them. Instead, my eyes darted around the room, taking in each of the patients as something occurred to me.
“All of the patients here are young men,” I said, not even realizing I’d said it out loud.
Luce nodded then and sighed. “You are quite observant, and your observation brings me to a touchy subject.”
He led me down a long corridor, the white tiles of the floor and the twitching of the overhead fluorescent lights about as “hospital” as you could get. We stopped in front of an elevator and he hit the call key. He didn’t say anything as we rode up to the second floor, and neither did I.
When the elevator doors opened, he offered his arm again and I took it, letting him lead me do
wn another long corridor. He paused at a nurse’s station just outside a door. I peeked through the window and noticed a bunch of beds, but that was really all I could make out.
“How are they?” Luce asked the nurse on duty, a stout woman with a manly face.
She smiled at him, dropping her head, just as the others had. Then she looked at me, wearing the wary expression of a watchdog.
“She is one of us,” Luce answered. I felt a chill flow through me at the thought, but I said nothing.
“They are not doing well,” she answered. Ignoring me, she added, “As usual.”
Luce just nodded and dropped his attention to my arm, which was still looped through his. The nurse stood up, opened the door for us, and we walked inside.
There were twelve beds, each separated by a brightly colored curtain. Lying on each of them were young men who couldn’t have been older than twenty-five. Most appeared to be sleeping, their eyes closed. The one closest to us, though, was wide-awake, his eyes blazing with fear.
“It is going to be all right, my young one,” Luce said to him as he leaned over and patted the boy’s shoulder encouragingly.
The boy didn’t respond—he just continued staring at Luce with wide, terrified eyes. His cheeks were sunken, his face so hollow you could see the shadow of his cheekbones. His skin had a grayish tinge to it and he had the overall look of someone who’d been starved.
“He cannot respond,” Luce said, sighing deeply as he shook his head in apparent pity.
“What’s wrong with them?” I asked, realizing that each of the young men in the room seemed to have the same deathly pallor and withered frames.
“It is the curse of the male Daywalkers,” Luce said, then turned his old gray eyes on me. “They never live past their twenty-first birthdays.”
And then it all became clear—why Luce was so determined to have me, why he’d come up with this ridiculous notion that I was meant to rule his people. He wanted me to reanimate them. It suddenly also made complete sense why the Lurkers so rarely attacked us—their best soldiers were dying. They had larger numbers than us, but their numbers were steadily dwindling.
“But the Elementals don’t have this problem?” I asked, trying to understand exactly what the situation was.
Luce shook his head. “No, but we are cursed with our own issues.”
“Such as?” I asked, figuring I had nothing to lose. I had to admit that I was surprised he’d told me this much so far. He seemed to place a blind trust in me, which was something I hadn’t imagined a seasoned elder would ever do. It made me more wary of him than ever, because it was clear that he didn’t intend to let me go. As far as he was concerned, I was one of his people.
“The Elementals rarely bear males,” he finished.
I almost wanted to laugh, but it wasn’t really funny, given my position in all of this. “Somehow you found out about my gift,” I said softly. “You want me to reanimate your dead.”
Luce faced me again and his gaze was fervent, searching. “You were always one of us, child,” he said. “Your gift was supposed to be ours, not that of the usurpers.”
I wanted to yell at him and accuse him of lying, but I held my temper, figuring it was better to play along and make him think I was buying this. “How are you so sure that they won’t just die again as soon as I reanimate them?”
Luce nodded as if he’d already considered this same question. “I am not so sure, as you say. But we will not know until we try, will we?” I didn’t say anything, so he continued. “And that brings me to our next subject.”
I glanced up at him in surprise, but he said nothing more. He turned to face the nurse who was busily tending to the boy on the cot in front of us. “Where is Number 134?” he asked the woman.
“Number 134” must be one of the patients, and I didn’t like the fact that he was just a number to Luce—I glanced down at the row of cots and noticed that one was empty.
“We lost him a mere hour or so ago,” the woman answered, her face a mask of indifference.
“Is he in the morgue?” Luce continued.
She nodded, and he turned on his heel, heading for the hallway. I kept up with him. “Let me guess, we’re off to the morgue?” I asked.
Luce didn’t acknowledge my question, just kept his eyes trained forward as we reached the elevator. When it arrived, he held the door for me again and clicked the button that looked like it would take us down to the basement or, in this case, the morgue.
“I need to know, Jolie,” he started, and turned to face me, his eyes yearning. “I need to know if you can help them.”
I gulped down an acid response and wondered if I should reveal my gift—if I should reanimate one of their dead Daywalkers. If I did, Luce would never let me go. ’Course, if I didn’t or couldn’t, he might use it as an excuse to kill me. In this case, I figured it would be better to prove useful, better to be considered an arrow in his quiver than something that needed to be taken out with the trash.
“We are in the process of searching for the missing gene in the Daywalkers,” he continued, holding the door for me once we reached the bottom floor of the hospital. I walked outside and waited for him to take the lead again.
“Missing gene?” I repeated.
“Yes, once we can identify that gene, we can cure the Daywalkers of this horrible illness.”
“Then you believe that the sickness they succumb to is a problem with their DNA?” I asked as we walked down a dimly lit corridor, then paused outside two double doors with MORGUE painted in black across them.
Luce nodded. “Yes, quite so.”
I took a deep breath, suddenly feeling winded and nauseous. But I didn’t want to cure myself, since I was still worried he might somehow detect my magic, figuring out that I was pregnant. Who knew? Maybe he was already aware of the fact; but because he hadn’t mentioned it, I didn’t think he was.
He pushed through the double doors, and I immediately spotted the covered body on top of a steel hospital cart. I felt myself swallow hard. What if I couldn’t reanimate the Daywalker? What if my powers were completely useless? I mean, at this point I was convinced that Luce’s whole line about me being Queen or leader of his people was a bunch of BS, because he and Nairn were obviously their leaders. Really, he only wanted me for my ability, and if I no longer had that ability … I would become a liability—especially now that he’d explained top secret stuff to me and given me a tour of his camp.
I realized then that if I didn’t reanimate this deceased Daywalker, I might as well take his place.
I have to do this. I have to succeed.
He lifted the white sheet from over the boy’s face and I felt myself recoil. I’d never seen a dead body up close and personal before. Sure, I’d watched people die on the battlefield of Culloden when Rand’s forces had gone up against Bella’s, but this was different. This was way too close for comfort.
But I had a job to do, and damn it all, I was going to do it. I said nothing—I just approached the Daywalker and tried to calm my frantic heart. I glanced up at Luce, who nodded at me, signifying that I should give it a shot. Turning back to the still form before me, I placed my hands on either side of the corpse’s face, reflexively wanting to pull my hands away because he was so cold to the touch. But I forced myself to stay put and closed my eyes, begging my abilities to deliver themselves.
And that was when I was whisked into a parallel plane—a place that existed between the present and the past.
I was standing in the middle of the hospital wing that I’d just left, and as I glanced down the row of cots, I noticed that each of them was occupied, including number 134. I walked down the row and paused just beside his cot, knowing I would need to wait until the moment when life no longer pulsed through him. But this was the tough part because when the cause of death wasn’t traumatic and obvious, it was hard to figure out when to step in. But I’d done it before and I would do it again.
I leaned down until I could detect the fai
nt rise and fall of the boy’s chest, could feel his shallow breaths against my cheek. I closed my eyes, and at the very second when I couldn’t feel his breath any longer, I opened my eyes and placed my hands on his shoulders.
I jolted as I came out of my trance, nearly falling backward in my shock. Righting myself against the counter, I glanced around and saw that I was back in the morgue. Luce was staring at me with surprise. The moment of reckoning was on me. It felt like ages passed as I turned my neck in the direction of the still form lying on the cot.
The boy was blinking wide as his chest rose with the breath of life.
That evening, Luce showed me to my “guesthouse,” which was really my prison cell. I mean, I wasn’t dumb, I could see through this whole charade. I served a purpose—that’s all there was to it. But the good news was that because I was useful, he had no plans to kill me … not yet anyway. I had to imagine, though, that the Lurkers were going to continue pushing for the extinction of the creatures of the Underworld, and my next bit of business with Luce was to find out why. But I was leaving that until tomorrow. For now, I was exhausted and had other plans in mind.
My guesthouse was one of the nondescript white buildings I’d observed when Luce gave me his tour. I was at the end of one of the dirt lanes, titled “A Street.” Inside, it looked about as inviting as a cheap motel room—white walls, dark brown carpeting, and lighter brown linoleum in the kitchen and entryway. The furniture was all a lackluster off-white and included two sofas, a bed, a coffee table, and a kitchen table with two matching chairs.
“As these are guest provisions, you will not find food in the refrigerator,” Luce said as soon as he’d unlocked the front door and ushered me into the living room. He then smiled apologetically. “We will provide you with your three daily meals.”
I glanced around the dreary accommodations and smiled with faux gratitude, reminding myself that it was important to act subservient. “Does the water work, at least?” I asked, thinking that nothing sounded better than a shower.
Luce nodded and then bowed slightly. “Please sleep well. We have much to do tomorrow.” I glanced at him questioningly and he added, “I am eager to introduce you to Nairn.”
Something Witchy This Way Comes: A Jolie Wilkins Novel Page 15
