by Skye Malone
I leaned on it, trying to keep breathing. The burning on my skin was getting worse.
Eleanor opened the door and peeked outside. She checked both directions, waiting for what felt like an eternity before finally nodding to herself. Turning back, she took my arm again.
We shuffled out of the room.
A plush, Persian-style carpet ran down the hallway, leaving space on either side for the hardwood floor to show, and small sconces on the wall provided dim and golden light. With a look to the closed door at the rightmost end of the hall, Eleanor turned us both and then headed for the stairs in the opposite direction.
Breathing was hard, and motion was too. Sweat broke out on my forehead as we passed another bedroom door and, by the time we came to the steps, I’d begun shaking and couldn’t stop.
The stairs stretched below me, ending in an oval of moonlight from the front door’s window that swam in and out of focus on the foyer floor. Drawing a breath, Eleanor shifted my arm on her shoulders and then started down.
My stomach rolled with the descent and I swallowed hard as I gripped the banister. I wouldn’t throw up here. Or at all, if I could help it. But definitely not here.
The first floor arrived.
“Just a bit farther,” Eleanor urged.
It was all I could do to keep putting one foot before the other.
With her free hand, she fumbled open the front door. The cool night air hit me, breaking through the nausea for a moment. I drew a breath in gratefully.
A door opened upstairs.
Eleanor made a tiny, panicked sound. Moving faster, she hurried us outside and looked around frantically.
A car door shut somewhere in the darkness. Eleanor kept going, her breaths coming in short gasps from the effort. Together, we hobbled to the porch steps and started down to the yard.
I heard a cry from the second floor. It sounded like Mom.
My heart climbed my throat. I tried to go faster, though I was shaking so hard it felt like my legs would give out at any moment.
Noah came running toward us.
“Take her, take her,” Eleanor pled in a whisper as he reached us.
He didn’t hesitate. His strong arms scooped me up and held me tight.
Footsteps pounded on the stairs inside.
Noah took off and Eleanor did as well, both of them tearing across the yard for the street.
A car engine started.
Hanging onto Noah as I bounced in his arms, I looked back to see Mom dash from the house. “Stop!” she cried, racing down the porch stairs. “Let go of my daughter!”
Gripping me tighter, Noah jumped the steps from the yard to the street and kept running. Baylie pulled her car up in front of us. Eleanor yanked open the rear door and scrambled inside. Noah pushed me after her and then followed us in.
Baylie hit the gas.
The car sped away, leaving Mom yelling after us in the darkness.
~~~~~
I sat between Eleanor and Noah, shivers wracking me while I fought to keep from throwing up. Heat burned my skin, sinking into my muscles and growing stronger despite the cool night air rushing through the open windows of Baylie’s car.
“What’d they do to her?” Noah demanded. He tugged the back of my hospital gown closed and then wrapped an arm around my shoulders to steady me as Baylie swerved the car past a turn and raced toward the edge of town.
Eleanor didn’t answer. Breathing hard through the pain, I turned my head, finding her in the darkness.
She grimaced. “A while back, Grandpa and some other people started developing a way to help kids who are half and half. They give them drugs, gene therapy, all sorts of experimental stuff. The goal is to repress what the kids are so the need to change won’t ever come.” She glanced to me. “It takes their dehaian side away.”
“But she’s not like that,” Noah argued. “She survived.”
Eleanor nodded. “I-I know. But her parents wanted him to do it anyway. They said there were these, um,” she glanced between Baylie and Noah, “these people after her and if they learned she wasn’t dehaian anymore, they’d leave her alone.”
A breath left Noah and he turned away.
I stared at her.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t want them to, but Grandpa…”
She bit her lip.
My brow furrowing, I dropped my gaze to the ground, staring unseeing at the gray carpet and the few bits of dried leaves and dirt there. Mom and Dad had done this. Wanted this. Mom and Dad…
Had brought me here to take who I was away.
And they’d looked so excited about it. They’d nearly run out the door just to drive here. But why not? Sure, there were the greliarans and the Sylphaen now, but before that there’d been years of hiding what I was because they thought that if the other landwalkers knew, they’d try to turn me dehaian.
It must have been Christmas to find out the opposite could also be true.
And that they could finally get the landwalker daughter they’d always wanted me to be.
Rage quivered through the nausea and the pain, making me shake for a whole new reason.
“So… so did they…”
I swallowed hard, barely able to finish a sentence. Noah’s arm tightened around me.
“It’s a process,” Eleanor answered. “It’s fairly effective from the first treatment, but it still needs boosters over time. Since you just had the one dose…” The worried look strengthened in her eyes. “You might be okay.”
“Might?” Noah growled.
“I-I’m not sure. She’s not like anyone else, and…”
Eleanor trailed off, watching me for a heartbeat before her brow furrowed and she dropped her gaze away.
“And it’s not just that,” she admitted uncomfortably. “Grandpa did other stuff too. He… he’s not a bad person. He’s a genius, really. But he used to be a doctor, and over the years, he saw a couple kids die. He thought Chloe could help him figure out how to make the treatments better. Keep the ocean from hurting half-and-half kids at all. There’s never been someone who’s been able to keep a balance between their dehaian and landwalker sides before. Who’s changed and survived and even come back all this way on land. He just… he didn’t take that the same way I do. He knows our history, but unlike some of the other elders and landwalkers, it’s only stories to him. Things he collects.” She paused. “He and his friends don’t want us to be dehaian. This was just the best chance they’d ever have to study somebody who became one.”
“What did he do?” Noah pressed, his voice dangerously low.
“I-I don’t know. I think he took her blood. Maybe tried other stuff too. He has this laboratory where he created the treatments for those kids, and he had her there for a long time, and on those IVs when they brought her back to the house, so…”
I shivered, my hand clenching on Noah’s arm as memories flashed like camera bulbs in my mind.
“Just please don’t do anything dehaian for a while,” Eleanor begged me.
I didn’t answer. I could see him. Little Harman, hovering over me with those bright lights behind him and a smile on his face.
Lab. He’d had me in a lab, doing this to me while I slept.
I couldn’t breathe. Panic gripped me, demanding I run though there wasn’t anywhere to go. There’d been tubes connected to me. Colored liquids inside them. People in the shadows and voices too muddled for me to understand.
And then he’d noticed I was awake. He’d adjusted something and smiled at me as the world drowned in fog again.
“Chloe.” Noah took my face in his free hand, pulling my gaze up to his. “Focus. Stay with me here.”
I couldn’t respond. His green eyes searched mine, visibly trying to calm me by force of will. And I just couldn’t… my whole body was burning from what they’d done to me… to us…
“Where’s Zeke?” I rasped, turning back to Eleanor.
She he
sitated.
“Eleanor, where’s Zeke!”
“I-it’s Ellie,” she corrected awkwardly. “And I don’t know. They took him when they took you. They didn’t bring him back.”
I stared at her. “Who?”
She shifted uncomfortably. “Your dad and some guys my grandfather works with.”
More shudders wracked me. I wanted to cry from the way they hurt. “Where are they?”
“I-I’m not–”
“Where!” I shouted.
Pain stabbed me like spikes in my midsection and I doubled over, gasping. Noah grabbed me, tugging me back upright. I choked, my head falling back to rest on the top of the seat.
“Baylie, stop!” he called.
The car rocked as Baylie pulled over.
I clenched my hands on Noah’s arm. My bones felt like they were breaking, like my own muscles and skin were crushing them. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t scream, and my stomach kept trying to climb my throat.
Noah threw open the door and hauled me after him as he left the car.
My feet stumbled on the gravel and my legs refused to hold me up. As we reached the scrub grass beside the country highway, my stomach finally won.
Noah got me to the bushes just in time.
Shivers ran through me again as the heaving stopped. His hands on my shoulders, Noah helped me retreat from the ditch and then eased me down onto the edge of the highway. Baylie appeared beside us, a bottle of water in her hand. Quickly, she sank down next to me, pushing the bottle into my grip.
I could barely hold onto it. My hands didn’t want to work and I just couldn’t stop shaking.
“Where’s the nearest hotel?” Noah asked.
I made a noise of protest. We needed to find Zeke.
Everyone ignored me.
“Oak Falls, I think,” Ellie answered.
“Tell Baylie how to get there,” he ordered.
He scooted around, the gravel scraping beneath his shoes as he moved, and then he lifted me again. The world swirled as he turned and carried me back to the car.
My forehead pressed to his shoulder in effort to stop the spinning. Shifting around, Noah lowered me onto the seat, and then pulled me close as he joined me back there.
The door thudded shut behind him. I heard Ellie climb into the passenger seat. The engine started, and then the car bumped off the shoulder and back onto the country highway.
Tears leaked from beneath my closed eyelids, driven by pain and totally out of my control. The quiet sounds of the car felt loud as foghorns in my mind, and my fingers dug into Noah’s chest from the way it all hurt.
But I had to go. The pain didn’t matter, because I couldn’t lose Zeke like this. I couldn’t come this whole way with him only to have some psychotic, smiling monster dissect him. And that was if he didn’t just die, all these thousands of miles from the ocean and here because of me.
I had to go. His family needed him. I needed him.
And somehow, he had to be alright.
Chapter Fourteen
Zeke
Sweat dripped down my back beneath my sodden t-shirt and, stretched out on either side of me, my arms burned from pulling at my restraints. Curved bars of thick steel wrapped over my wrists and pierced through holes in the upright table behind me. My legs were likewise pinned with a single bar, and no matter how hard I tugged, the locks fastening the restraints behind the table’s surface didn’t budge. Boxy devices on chrome stands waited to each side, with cords coiled on top of them or trailing to the floor, while a metal table stood several feet away. Shelves stretched between the legs of the table, with strange jars of liquid arranged on them.
I wasn’t sure how long I’d been here. It felt like hours, but that could be wrong. I’d woken in this place, strapped to this table like I was standing in midair and with a headache that threatened to split my skull. It’d taken a while for whatever Linda had given me to stop dragging me back down into unconsciousness, but eventually the fog cleared.
And brought back the memory of that little bastard jabbing something into Chloe.
My arms yanked at the bars again.
Nothing changed.
I didn’t know what they’d done with her. She wasn’t here. The room was pitch black and the drug had slowed my body’s reactions, but after a minor eternity I’d been able to change my eyes enough to confirm that, at least. Something was going on beyond the door on the opposite side of the room, though. Voices carried through there occasionally, too muffled to understand, but enough to tell me I wasn’t alone.
Sweat stung my eyes and I blinked, shaking my head to drive it away. Stuffy didn’t come close to describing this room. The reek of oil filled the space, along with an earthy scent not quite like dirt. The walls were metal and, after baking in the sun all day, the trapped heat inside them made my lungs feel like they were working overtime just to pull in the air.
That wasn’t the worst of it, though. Not by a long shot. In the past few minutes, a weird, stinging sensation had begun to grow in my body. It was still faint, like a thousand hair-thin needles resting on my skin, but gradually it was getting stronger. I wished I could believe it was just numbness from the restraints or a residual effect of whatever drug I’d been given.
But I remembered this feeling.
The pain of the ocean’s distance was coming back.
And I was trying desperately not to think what that might mean about Chloe, or for me.
Hinges creaked in the darkness. My gaze snapped to the door across the room as it swung open. Light cut through the black and I winced, my eyes adjusting too slowly to keep the glare from hurting.
The little old man paused as he saw the glow fade. “Oh, interesting,” he commented. “I’d hoped to see that.”
With a coffee cup in one hand and a leather briefcase in the other, Harman nudged a switch beside the door. A row of panel lights flickered to blinding life above us. Letting the door shut behind him, he came farther into the room.
Anger sizzled through me. “Where’s Chloe?”
“How did you learn English?” he replied curiously.
My brow furrowed.
“I assume you don’t always speak that,” the old man continued. “I mean, that would just be silly, right? You must have your own language. What is it?”
I blinked, and then pushed my confusion aside. “What have you done with Chloe?”
He studied me as though trying to read something in my face. “Fascinating. Why do you feel the need to portray worry for your thrall? Is it a ploy for sympathy? A tactic to make others see you as human?” He paused, concern flickering over his face. “I would hope you’d have the intelligence to see I won’t fall for that.”
His brow drew down as if the possibility I didn’t troubled him, and then he turned to set down his coffee cup and briefcase.
My hands yanked at the restraints.
“To answer your question – because I want us to get past this so you can answer mine – your thrall is safe. Better than safe, actually, since my associates and I are treating her condition. That was what kept me; I do hope you understand. Amazing girl. So much to study, I simply didn’t know where to begin. Her body handled the treatments admirably, though, and I returned her to my home with her parents a short while ago. She’ll be out until at least tomorrow morning, but when she wakes… well, what we gave her should shake your hold on her quite well. After all, magic may be your people’s province but science is mine, and we’ve long since proven which one is stronger. The treatments will repress those dehaian contaminants in her system and begin to flush them out, and put the young lady well on her way to being her old landwalker self again.”
I stared at him.
“My boy, you honestly didn’t expect her parents to let her remain like that, did you? Magically enslaved to you and driven to become a soulless water creature as well?” He scoffed, and when he said the word ‘water’, he made it sound like a c
urse. “I’ll admit, they wanted to be kinder than I’d have been in their position – insisting I send you back to the ocean even after what you did to their daughter. But those are unscientific minds for you. Shortsighted and emotional. Regardless, it’s incredible the girl survived. I wish we’d had more time to study that, because there’s no telling how many additional clues she could have given us for saving other thralls and half-breeds from death. But the young lady’s mind was at stake. Who knows what damage more time as one of you could have done to her?”
Shaking with tension, my arms strained against the metal bars and I couldn’t take my eyes from him any more than I could wrap my head around what he’d just said. He’d stopped her from being dehaian? It wasn’t possible.
At least, it shouldn’t have been.
“You…”
“I wonder if she’ll remember you when she wakes up,” Harman mused, ignoring me. He shook his head to drive the thought away, and then turned to the table and opened the briefcase. “If she doesn’t, it would be interesting to study why.”
He turned back to me, a glistening pair of scissors in his hand. I tensed, pulling away as he came toward me.
“Don’t move,” he cautioned.
Harman reached out, taking the bottom of my t-shirt and then slicing up through it, cutting it from me. Doing likewise with the sleeves, he tugged the cotton away when he was done. Crossing to the table, he bundled the fabric into a plastic bag, sealed the top, and then scribbled something on the side.
“Just in case it’s scientifically interesting,” he explained as he set the bag down. “Now…”
He headed toward the boxy device on a stand to my left. Drawing up the thickest of the cords from where it dangled next to the machine, he fumbled around on the wall for a moment, trying to plug it in.
The device started to beep. Little lines of red and green ran across the screen on its front.
Ignoring it, Harman pulled a tray on rollers from farther behind me, positioning it at my side. Gauze and rolls of a white material that looked a bit like tape sat on the gleaming silver surface, while scalpels and needles rested on a cloth beside them. Returning to the machine, he took up some of the thinner cords with plastic discs attached to their ends and then came toward me.
