by Aja James
The therapist bent down and met the little girl’s wide blue eyes with her own intensely dark ones.
“Hello, my dear,” she said with a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes despite its breathtaking beauty. “I have been looking forward to making your acquaintance.”
Holding the woman’s unblinking gaze, Annie shrank back a little against Clara’s skirts.
Sometimes, beauty could be extremely intimidating, like the allure of the deadliest flowers. But more than that, the therapist had a hypnotic intensity about her from which both Clara and Annie instinctively recoiled, like fingers held too close to an unpredictable flame.
“Do have a seat, please,” Dr. Marion invited, gesturing to a group of four cushy armchairs arranged in an intimate conversational circle.
All three sat, joined by a fourth person, the Asian woman who’d led them to the office.
“This is my assistant, Wanda,” Dr. Marion explained. “She’s an expert in Eastern medicine and acupuncture, which could come in handy as we expand the treatment.”
Clara shook herself out of her awe-induced reverie and interjected, “We’re just here for a consultation session. We haven’t decided whether we want to proceed with any sort of treatment yet.”
Dr. Marion merely smiled that icy, humorless smile.
“Shall we begin?”
Thus ensued half an hour of Q&A as Dr. Marion asked various questions about Annie’s condition and past history, and Clara did her best to answer them.
Truth be told, Clara really didn’t know that much beyond what the Little Flower Orphanage’s records documented, and those records were sparse at best. She shared what she observed about Annie’s behavior, the girl’s likes and dislikes, her love of art and how she communicated through her art.
When they’d exhausted everything Clara knew, the therapist turned to Annie with an unblinking stare.
“My dear girl,” she began softly, hypnotically, “you’ve had a hard time of it, haven’t you? What do you do when you’re sad or frightened?”
Annie gestured with her right hand in a drawing motion.
“You draw,” Dr. Marion accurately deduced and shared eye contact with Clara to acknowledge her earlier observation.
“What do you like to draw?”
“She draws parks a lot,” Clara answered for her. “Very close depictions of Central Park, in fact. And she draws people.”
Dr. Marion kept her gaze focused on Annie, though she credited Clara’s words with her next query, “Do you draw your friends and family, Annie? Do you draw Clara? Who else do you like to draw?”
Annie pantomimed someone tall and big with long hair by gesturing articulately with her hands.
“She also draws my…friend, Eli,” Clara answered.
Dr. Marion shifted her intense dark gaze to Clara.
“Eli, is it? He must be an important figure in yours and Annie’s life. Was he not available to attend this session with you?”
Clara squirmed a little in her seat. She was still shy talking to others about Eli, especially strangers. This love she had was so new, their time together so brief, intense though it had been, that she wanted to protect it, keep him to herself for a while longer.
“He’s otherwise occupied.”
“I noticed that you didn’t list him as your emergency contact, but a woman named Jaimie Lin,” Dr. Marion quickly glanced at the clipboard of forms Clara had filled out. “Yet he is obviously close to you and Annie.”
“I don’t see how—” Clara began, becoming wary of the persistent questions.
Dr. Marion smiled. “I just wanted to be sure you could reach him in case we have the need in future sessions. Where is he now?”
“At home,” Clara answered tersely, more than ready to move on.
The therapist’s smile spread wider, as if she liked that answer. She turned back to Annie with the full force of her undivided attention.
“Do you ever draw your parents, Annie? Maybe in your house with you?”
Hesitantly, Annie nodded. The more she held the doctor’s stare, the shallower her breaths became.
“Were you drawing when they came? Those shadows that took your parents away?”
Clara tensed on the edge of her seat, alarm chasing down her spine.
“Wait, what?”
But Dr. Marion ignored her.
“Do you remember wanting to scream, but you couldn’t find your voice no matter how you tried?”
“That’s enough. I think we should lea—”
Clara abruptly broke off as ice flooded her veins, paralyzing every muscle.
Frantically, she rolled her eyeballs to the left and saw that two thread-thin acupuncture needles were sticking out of her shoulder. Perhaps there were more that she couldn’t see. All she knew was that she could no longer speak or move!
Annie swung to look at Clara, but Dr. Marion gripped her chin, forcing her to maintain eye contact.
“I want you to focus on that feeling of helplessness and despair,” the deadly beauty murmured in that hypnotic voice.
“Remember how you hated yourself afterwards, not being able to call for help. Maybe if you screamed, someone would have come to your parents’ rescue. If you screamed, those murderous shadows wouldn’t have gotten away.”
Annie was all but hyperventilating at this point, immobilized by fear and the therapist’s mesmerizing eyes.
Still, she made no sound, save the gusty breaths that she huffed in and out.
Dr. Marion looked to the Asian woman who was out of range of Clara’s sight.
“Can’t you just stick some needles in her and make her talk?” she said with a hint of impatience, the veneer of professional civility falling away like a broken mask.
The Asian woman answered, “The needles won’t work. They can only manipulate the physical. That girl’s problem is psychological. There is nothing wrong with her voice box.”
Dr. Marion refocused on Annie and gripped her chin tightly.
“Listen to me carefully, Annie. This is important.”
Her opaque dark eyes drilled into Annie’s saucer-sized blue ones the way spilled black oil swallowed the clear blue sea.
“What if those nasty shadows were to come back, Annie? What if this time, they took away your new Mommy, Clara, and her friend, Eli? What if this time, their deaths aren’t quick like your parents, but slow and agonizing, painting the walls with red, red blood?”
Annie’s wide blue eyes overflowed with unchecked tears, her whole body shaking uncontrollably.
“You know what death is, don’t you, my sweet? You’ll never see them again if they die. Would you scream then, Annie dear? If your voice could end their torture and stop their pain? Would you scream as loud as you can if only the sound of your voice could save them? Let me hear it now, my sweet little girl.”
Dr. Marion’s lips curled in a ghastly smile as she commanded:
“Open your mouth and scream.”
*** *** *** ***
It was just past sundown when Eli awoke, though most of him wanted to continue sleeping.
He’d had the most incredible dream in the most beautiful place, so lush and vibrant he couldn’t even have imagined it. He’d traveled far and wide across seven continents in his long existence, seen the ugliest and the most gorgeous bounty the earth had to offer, but the paradise in his dream—in the dream Clara had first brought him into—had been magical. Other-worldly. There was no other way to describe it.
In the dream, he’d been with Clara, endlessly making love, as if they were the only two entities in creation, and the pleasure to be found in each other’s bodies was their purpose, their entire reason for being. Even when they slept, they were inextricably entwined together, his sex pulsing deeply within her womb, her blood dancing within his veins.
Even now, awake in the real world, Eli felt as if he’d left part of himself behind with the Clara of his dreams. He felt…
Mated.
Truly, utterly, incontro
vertibly Mated.
And it was nothing like the time so very long ago when he’d marked his heart with Anunit’s blood. He’d pledged his loyalty voluntarily, but his blood had always felt sluggish under her command, as if it had been moving through his veins against its will.
Now, he felt so light he floated, and there was a fiery brilliance inside of him that warmed every part of his heart and soul.
Eli closed his eyes to quickly sense check his surroundings, seeking out Clara and Annie’s signatures from the energy in the air.
He was alone in the apartment, though his females had left only a couple of hours ago, for their heat and scent still lingered.
On the breakfast table he found a note: Eli, I’m taking Annie to the psychotherapist for a free consult. We’ll be back by dinner. Love and infinite kisses, Clara.
Involuntarily, a smile of pure joy spread his lips. He daren’t believe it, but by some miracle he didn’t deserve, Clara loved him. This beautiful, passionate, wonderful faerie loved him.
He felt it with every particle of his being even though he still didn’t understand it. But he vowed to do everything in his power to deserve it from this day forward.
While he waited for his females, he wandered idly around the apartment, for the first time paying attention to the eclectic décor, accented perfectly by Clara’s artwork. She’d decorated the pastel drawing Annie had done of the three of them standing on a bridge in Central Park with a hand-made frame and hung it on the wall beside their shared bed. On the opposite wall were two of the charcoal sketches Clara had done of Eli, also framed and displayed only within their private nook.
Downstairs, various earlier works of Clara’s were on display, as if the studio was her own personal gallery. Sculptures and pottery, carvings and metal works, lined the waist-level shelves of art supplies that wound around the studio walls. On the walls above the shelves were paintings and sketches in various media, some framed, some left bare.
There was a clear common theme despite the different styles of art—all of Clara’s works were bold and vibrant, bursting with life. Even in her subtler efforts, there was an underlying passion and joy, just waiting to be released.
Eli stopped in front of a wall in the back of the studio that could only be lit by a secondary switch. All of the drawings and paintings were portraits. And all of the portraits were of him and Annie. Including the one of him that he’d ripped apart.
She’d pieced it together but left the imperfection of the jagged edges and painted around and over the sketch so that his image blended into the surrounding greenery, the lush paradise in his dream. The fragmentation of the drawing looked like it had been done on purpose, as if each piece represented a part of him, and the fact that the artist so lovingly rendered the pieces together conveyed how she loved each and every part. Even his darkness, his weakness, his bleakness and pain.
All of him.
Eli stared at the drawing for long, long moments, simply absorbing its beauty, reeling from its impact.
What do you see when you look at me?
He looked at the drawing through Clara’s eyes. He saw a male who was lost but seeking, wary but hopeful. Searching for meaning, for a place of his own, where he mattered, where he belonged.
She’d captured all of it in the lines and shadows of his face, the way his eyes shone with tears of vulnerability, fierceness, passion, and hope. It was as if she’d taken the pieces of his jagged soul and made it whole again, renewed with purpose and life, as it never had been before.
And finally, he understood it.
Love.
Unconditional and everlasting.
She’d broken and remade him with her love.
Eli.
He tensed at the faint whisper in his mind, pulling him out of his epiphany.
Eli, we need you. Find us.
Save us!
Eli’s eyes darkened as his fangs punched through his gums in a growling hiss.
Clara and Annie were in danger.
*** *** *** ***
What nightmare had she been transported into? Clara thought with rising panic as she sat paralyzed in a chair, though she could see and hear the surreal scene unfolding before her.
The last memory she had was of Annie opening her mouth to scream. She didn’t recall hearing it; she’d lost consciousness before it happened. When she awoke, she was sitting in this chair, unbound, but unable to move no matter how she tried. She could only shift her eyes to take in a limited view of her surroundings.
She was in some sort of hangar, cavernous but brightly lit by overhead halogen lights. There were long rows of stainless steel tables that ran the length of the space, heaped with artillery and firearms that Clara had no knowledge of besides the fact that they looked extremely lethal and Matrix-esque. Not just handguns but a variety of assault rifles and machine guns. And there was so much of it that it looked like a military armory in the middle of an ongoing war.
What the hell was going on? And why had she and Annie been kidnapped and plopped in the middle of this?
Annie!
Frantically, she shifted her eyeballs to and fro, trying to find her little girl.
As if her thoughts conjured them, Annie walked into view, her hand held firmly by Dr. Marion.
“Here we are, darling Annie,” the woman, whom Clara was certain by now was no real doctor, said in that eerily haunting voice, ushering the girl to a digital control box of some sort for a machine assembly outfitted over one of the long tables.
“Just put your hand here, that’s it. And step up to the screen, look right at the light. Now say the words I told you earlier. That’s all you have to do before going home with Mommy.”
Annie put her hand on the display and looked into the light, but when she opened her mouth to speak, no sound came out.
She opened and closed her mouth, trying as hard as she could to utter the words, but only the whistles of her heaving breaths could be heard.
The beautiful bitch let out a sigh of exasperation and walked over to stand in front of Clara, dragging Annie along with her. She pulled the little girl in front of her and clamped both hands on Annie’s shoulders.
Clara widened her eyes threateningly at the woman’s hands, conveying without words that there’d be hell to pay if she hurt Annie.
“Don’t worry, Ms. Scott,” the fake therapist said in that melodious, genderless voice, “I have no intention of hurting our dear little Annie. But I’m afraid you might not be so fortunate. If threats can’t make her speak, perhaps I need to make the danger more palpable.”
Suddenly, Clara felt another presence behind her chair, out of sight. Something cold and metallic touched the side of her face, and from the horror-stricken look on Annie’s face, Clara knew she was in trouble.
Her breath froze in her throat when she felt the metal dig into her cheek, cutting a narrow line into her skin. A fiery pain bloomed across her face as blood oozed and trickled down her chin.
Annie was gulping with silent sobs, her big blue eyes overflowing with tears. Clara tried to hold her gaze to send her comfort and reassurance, but she was doing everything she could to not let the fear and pain cloud her eyes.
Be brave, Annie, she silently sent the message in her mind, while trying to take her own advice. She’d never been so frightened in her entire life.
“Come now, little Annie,” the woman coaxed, crouching low and holding Annie tightly, whispering beside her ear. “You don’t want that big bad shadow to keep hurting your beloved Clara, do you? Such a pretty face to mar with scars. That one he just made will heal properly in no time, but I can’t vouch for others. All you have to do to stop the shadow is say the words I taught you. Come on, you know how.”
Annie’s lips formed the words, but still no sounds came out.
Clara felt the sharp metal digging into her shoulder now, and a searing pain racked her whole body as the metal pressed deeper into her flesh, touching bone.
She squeezed her eyes shut as
she screamed in her mind. She tried to focus on something safe, something to give her courage, but the pain was so acute and her heart was pounding so hard she grew short of breath.
Vaguely, she heard the sound of Annie’s voice as she finally cried aloud. Abruptly, the metal was pulled out of her, and the pain receded into a manageable throb.
Her awareness receded as well, and with the last tendrils of consciousness, she called out in her mind—
Eli…Eli, we need you. Find us.
Save us!
Chapter Seventeen
The warrior followed his Master’s instructions to the letter. Apparently, time was of the essence.
Only a couple of days had passed since the Pure Ones discovered him MIA. But given that they’d experienced this before with one of their own, and the consequences of not moving fast enough led to many casualties in the ensuing attack, the Master wanted him to infiltrate the Shield before anyone would be the wiser.
With the help of the new “tech support,” the warrior disabled the necessary security cameras within and without the skyscraper in which the Shield was hidden in plain sight, so that he was free to move without detection. The feed was rerouted to a pre-recording on a circular loop that gave him seven minutes to complete his mission.
The warrior rode on the roof of the elevator to the level below that which housed the private quarters of the Dozen, the Pure Queen Sophia’s inner circle. Once the elevator stopped, he deftly climbed the steel cables to the floor above and entered an empty corridor.
Stealthily and purposefully, he made his way to his target’s location, the layout of the Shield’s interior as familiar as the back of his hand. His heightened senses enabled him to avoid unwelcome encounters even before the tech in his ear piece could alert him. Soon, he was in front of the chamber he sought, easily opening it with a wave of his hand over the digital lock.
Each member of the Pure Queen’s advisors, the Circlet, and personal guards, the Elite, could open all doors within the Shield as part of the security protocol, and whoever opened which door was recorded in their system archives automatically.
