by Helen Scott
For some reason, he wanted to save the warehouse with the shuttered windows for last. He wouldn’t admit it aloud, but things like that creeped him out. Maybe it was spending too much time in the Underworld, but all he wanted was wide-open spaces where nature was right outside his door, not that he was willing to give up his modern comforts, though.
They jogged up to the side of the building and tried to peer in the windows, but they were either frosted over or the glass had a pattern to it, like bathroom windows that were designed so no one could clearly see inside.
“Should we go in?” Imogen whispered, clearly as on edge by the whole situation as he was.
“I think so. I don’t want to call Alec away from Ellie if this is a dead end.”
“Agreed.”
They slid along to the door that seemed to be the entrance to the elevator. Ben counted to five, timing his breath so he forced himself to breathe slow and easy before he depressed the handle and pushed on the door. It opened without a sound, and he prayed there wasn’t a silent alarm going off somewhere. Moving through the cracked door, he found the elevator on his left and an empty, brightly lit, and well-appointed hallway on his right. It ran parallel to the front of the warehouse, so the wall on his right was the outer wall of the building. He’d guess that somewhere on one side of the building were loading bays, but this wall was solid all the way down.
There were decorations throughout, but nothing ostentatious, just enough to make it not feel like a repurposed warehouse. Some plants in vases on tables here, some paintings there. When combined with the painted walls and carpeted floors, it almost seemed like they’d stepped into a doctor’s office more than anything else.
Ben silently moved along the hallway, waiting for someone to come rushing down to attack them at any moment. No one seemed to be coming, though, so he kept pushing forward. Finally, there was an opening in the interior wall. He peeked around the corner and found a sitting area that seemed to be a waiting room almost, but there was a kitchenette on one side and a door going off each wall, one of which was ajar. He moved quickly to the open door and peeked his head around. It was an almost military-looking bedroom, just a couple cots that accommodated a single mattress, with a gun-metal gray locker to the left of each bed.
Now that he knew this door led to the bedroom, he was willing to bet that the door on the opposite side led to a bathroom. Imogen had been waiting in the sitting area, keeping watch while he looked into the room. As he passed her, he whispered what he’d found. She nodded, but her eyes remained watchful, not focusing on him, which he appreciated. Cracking open the other door, he found his instincts were correct. That left one remaining door. It had to lead to the rest of the warehouse on this floor. Otherwise, they’d have to take the elevator upstairs, and that made him more than a little uncomfortable. Trapped in a box with no idea who was waiting for him when the doors opened? No, thanks.
He nodded at Imogen to follow him toward the last door. Cracking it open, he didn’t see anyone around, so he slid through, only opening the door wide enough for him to move to the side and through the opening, with Imogen following behind him.
“What the hell?” She whispered his exact thoughts.
As they looked around and got a clear picture of what was going on, his stomach turned. They were surrounded by what seemed to be jail cells, only not the steel bars kind. That would have been too common for what he’d seen of this place so far. No, these prison cells were secured with some kind of glass. They carefully walked down to the edge of the first cells, only to find them empty. The spaces were larger than he’d anticipated, with a bed similar to what he’d seen in the other bedroom, along with their own bathroom facilities, a cabinet, a stocked bookshelf, and a table and chair.
Ben looked further down the row of cells and saw faces peering out at him. One thought ran through his mind. What the hell had they just stumbled into?
Chapter 18
Ellie struggled in the strange binding that the Cailleach had put her in. Tight beams of light held her arms and legs in place as the old crone looked at the necklace, which now lay in the palm of her hand instead of around Ellie’s neck. She could feel the wounds slowly returning, her back splitting open again gash by gash. There was nothing pleasant about the situation she was in, and she was about to give up, to resign herself to death in this strange land, which she knew was imminent without her necklace, when the woman spoke.
“You realize I’m doing this for your own good, yes? You have the power to extricate yourself from this situation and to heal yourself. You just need to fully use it, to fully accept yourself as you are instead of wishing you were different, or your situation was different. We cannot change our core nature. We are who we are. All we can change is how we react to ourselves and the stimuli around us.”
“You’re a wee bit bonkers, aren’t ye?” She couldn’t help the venom in her tone. This woman was killing her and was giving her a speech about acceptance? She wanted to flail and scream and lash out, but she knew the more she moved, the more the wounds would open and the more she would bleed.
“Nay, there you’re wrong, lass. There’s nothing wrong with me. I’m just your older self, or even older women you’ve bonded with, trying to help you become who you were meant to be. It’s what we all have been trying to do all our lives,” she said, gesturing to Rae and Granddad.
“How dare you speak for them! If she is really my mother and that is really Granddad, then they would never hurt me the way you are.” She risked a glance at her grandfather, only to find pity with a tinge of disappointment etched on his face in the lines that bracketed his mouth and creased his forehead.
“You’re still but a child in my eyes, and it’s time to grow up.”
Ellie frantically glanced around, wishing for someone, anyone who could help her escape these lunatics. Her eyes caught on something. There was a man standing at the edge of the trees, watching. He walked forward, and as the light hit his face, she realized it was her father, Callum. The man had never been much to her while she was growing up, and she’d never really seemed to miss him after he died, which was something that had made her feel guilty for years until she realized why. He’d never been around. She’d never bonded with him. He was just the man who sometimes visited her mother. When she was old enough to really understand what had happened when her parents died, she realized that he was the reason her mother had died.
He’d been driving through a storm after having a few too many rounds at the pub, and the car went off the side of the road into a ditch and smashed into a tree. If he hadn’t been driving or drinking, or if he’d just left her mother alone, then she would have grown up with at least one parent. She’d spent some time going to therapy in college, something she’d never really told anyone about, but she’d finally realized that the guilt and anger that had simmered inside her for years was unhealthy. The one thing that had stuck with her was to try and not constantly pose what-if questions to herself. It didn’t matter whether her father had been drinking that night, because he had. There was no other option. The action and events after it had already happened, and she just needed to accept them.
One of the biggest things she’d struggled with was realizing that her parents loved each other so completely, and the only reason they hadn’t been together was because of her, because her father hadn’t been ready to have kids. As she watched him approach, she realized he looked exactly the same as he did in her memory, or from photos she’d seen of them together, like he’d been frozen in time.
When Rae saw him, everything about being in Purgatory melted away, and she saw her mother, as she’d often seen her in her mind’s eye, as a young, vivacious woman. She radiated happiness as she ran toward him, tackling him with her embrace. He smiled and kissed her hard on the mouth, his hands in her hair. Guilt and anger rolled in Ellie’s stomach all over again. She repeated two of the phrases she’d used since therapy to push her irrational emotions to the side. Their separation was not her fault. She had
no control over the fact that she’d been born, and couldn’t be blamed for her father’s reaction.
Callum turned, as though he was going to head back into the trees to wherever he had come from, but Rae tugged at his hand. She wanted to stay with Ellie, but once again, Callum was forcing her to choose. Her mother looked at her, hanging there in beams of light like an animal caught in a trap, and her eyebrows drew together, her mouth turning down as the familiar look of pity she’d seen on her grandfather’s face now took up residence on her mother’s.
A knot formed in Ellie’s stomach. Her mother was going to leave her again, and this time, it was her choice. She watched as Rae leaned in and whispered something in Callum’s ear before she let go of his hand and walked toward her. She could feel the blood dripping down her back under her cloak, and the faint sound of it landing on the snow reached her ear in the silence that followed her mother coming to stand in front of her.
She couldn’t hear anything except the sound of her own breath and her blood dripping below her. Everything had gone silent, seemed almost frozen in place, as though the Cailleach’s power had finally overwhelmed the area around them.
“Oh, Ellie.” Her mother reached up and brushed some of her dirty, tangled hair further away from her face. “You are grown up, no matter what she says, but you haven’t accepted who you are or the life that has been given to you. Do that, and everything will change. Good luck, little one.” Rae whispered the last part, and her voice cracked with emotion as she said goodbye.
Callum waited patiently for Rae to return to him, and when she did, he beatifically smiled down at her, pressing a soft kiss to her forehead before he led her away from the small group that remained. As they disappeared into the tree line, Ellie struggled with the sea of emotions that rose inside her. There was nothing she could have done to make her mother stay if the woman didn’t want to, but that didn’t mean it hurt any less to watch her walk away.
The Cailleach stood in front of her once more. “Your necklace is over there,” she said, gesturing to the stone slab that sat above the snow. “All you need to do is break these bonds and reach it, that’s it.”
“Yeah, super simple.” Her snarl was back in full force.
“Tis something you’ll need to be doin’ by yourself, though, so we’ll be off and leaving you to it.”
“We?” she whispered, looking at Granddad, who was watching her captor.
When she looked back at the old hag who stood before her, the woman had changed and wasn’t an old hag anymore. She was young and beautiful. Pale blonde hair cascaded over her shoulders, her hunched back had straightened, and two clear blue eyes looked up at her. Even her owl looked different. Instead of the pure snowy white it had been, the bird was now covered in dark specks at the end of its feathers. The Cailleach shook her hood away from her face and watched as Ellie took in all the changes. Her crepey skin was now smooth and tight, and there was a light behind her eyes that hadn’t been there before.
She glanced back at her grandfather and found a younger man standing there. He still looked like her grandfather, but the floppy salt-and-pepper hair that she was so used to was now a perfectly styled rich chestnut brown, and the creases on his face that she’d grown to associate with his smile or his concentrating frown were gone. Even his constantly clean-shaven jaw was now covered in a dark goatee.
Suddenly, it hit her.
Ellie looked back at the Cailleach and saw the face of her grandmother staring back at her, admittedly a very young version of it, but it was still her grandmother.
A moment later, Granddad was there, taking her hand with tears in his eyes. “We’ve got a lot to catch up on,” he said, looking at his beautiful wife. They turned and, hand in hand, began to walk away.
Ellie screamed in grief and frustration, “Don’t leave me!”
They turned and looked back at her, both wearing similar expressions, ones they’d worn when she’d been a child and thrown a temper tantrum. “Ye are a MacLeod with fae blood runnin’ through your veins. Ye can do this and so much more. Besides, we have never left ye, not once. We’re a part of you, Ellie. Always have been, always will be. All the love and encouragement you need from us is already inside you. You just have to reach for it. Now, be the fantastic woman I watched ye grow into.” Granddad smiled one last time, his eyes shining with unshed tears, before he turned and they both faded into the tree line once more.
She was alone.
Again.
Her raven squeezed her shoulder painfully, reminding her of its presence, and the despair that had been slowly rising within her abated slightly. She had to be smart and channel the bravery and intellect her ravens had demonstrated to her again and again. Ellie needed to think and not panic. If she panicked, she would die there.
Vivienne had made poultice after poultice, and all it had done was slow the bleeding when normally, according to her, it would seal the wound. Alec ran his hands through his hair for the umpteenth time and tried not to take his frustrations out on the witch. After all, she was his only hope of getting Ellie back, and right now, his fear of losing her was growing ever more powerful, so he needed Vivienne more than ever.
“We’ll figure it out, Alec,” Vivienne said as she wedged another piece of material into one of the cuts on Ellie’s back, the cuts too big to just pull together as they’d tried at first. The blood had just soaked through, detaching any bandage or material as it went, so she’d started trying to fill the wound with the poultice to get it closer to the source of the bleeding.
“Why would it just stop working?”
The doctor was silent for a moment before responding, as though debating either telling him her thoughts or using the right words to get her point across. “I don’t think it has. I can still feel the magic radiating out of it. The power of the fae realm echoes through her blood. The problem, I think, lies within her mind. Something has happened to make her think it’s no longer working, and the reaction is so strong that it’s making her thoughts become reality on her body.”
“Why would she want this to happen, though?”
“Unless we go in and try and figure out what’s going on in that noggin of hers, I can’t tell you.”
Alec paused and seriously debated his thought processes before asking, “Can we get in somehow? Talk to her? Tell her what’s happening?”
Vivienne nodded. “That’s what I was going to ask for your help with before she started bleeding all over the place.”
“Okay, so what do we need to do?” The idea of invading his fiancée’s mind was unsettling. Even more unsettling was thinking about how Circe had done something similar when she’d taken control of Ellie’s body, twice. Could he do the same thing Circe did to her? Or would this be somehow different? This magic was beyond him, and he’d never been so grateful to have friends like Nivetta and Vivienne.
“Well, I need to redraw my circle, and this time”—she pushed out a breath—“you will need to be inside it with me. I’ll basically send you into a dreamlike state, and I’ll act as a conduit for the two of you. It’s your job to make sure you can communicate the situation with her. I don’t know what you’ll find in there, so I can’t give you any clues as to what is going on.”
“Understood.” Alec rose from the couch and stretched, expecting Vivienne to start working right away.
She didn’t.
Instead, she sighed and looked up at him from her spot on the floor. “I need you to understand how much blood she’s losing. If we don’t get this under control quickly, her mind might not be strong enough to come back. She’s getting weaker minute by minute, so you need to be fast . . . I also need to tell you that if I feel she’s past saving, then I will pull you back regardless of your thoughts on the matter. I will not let you die in your fiancée’s head.”
“If she dies, then I’ll be joining her soon after. She’s my soulmate. The last time we were apart because she left me, I had to be caged because I was dangerous to everyone around me. You
of all people should know what kind of damage having a soulmate and then losing them can do.”
Vivienne’s eyes turned sharp on him. “I know, and I know you can survive it if you want to. Your desire to live has to be greater than the pain, that’s it. I think if you were truly faced with it, your desire to live would win out, just like mine did. You wouldn’t leave your brothers without their greatest weapon.”
Alec blanched at the reminder of his skill. After all the centuries he’d been alive, he still struggled with it. He wanted to suppress it completely, but whenever his anger got the better of him, it would flare to life, ever the devil on his shoulder whispering to him to give in. “Let’s just get this show on the road, before Ellie bleeds out in front of me.” He had to save his love. There was no other choice, because unlike Vivienne, he wasn’t so sure his desire to live would win.
The doctor grabbed her giant container of salt and began redrawing the circle she’d been in before. It was more of a pronounced egg shape than before, with Vivienne sitting by Ellie’s head and Alec by her feet. As she drew up the energies of the earth that she tapped into as a witch, he felt the air change, as though the egg shape changed pressure. His ears popped like he was on an airplane that was taking off. It was not what he’d expected, but then, he’d never been inside a witch’s circle before.
“Lie down with your head by my feet.”
Alec did as she commanded, straightening out as much as he dared since he wasn’t sure she’d drawn the oval long enough to accommodate his size.
“I’m going to touch your forehead. Just so you’re aware, I have an ointment on my hands that will help this go much faster.”
He nodded, having seen her put something on her hands a moment ago. As her hands came up to his head, the smell made him want to gag. It was like sweaty socks, with undertones of mint and lavender, and there was a bitterness to it that stung his eyes. He tried not to cough and wasn’t completely successful.
