by H. D. Gordon
I’d been in a room just like this before, whenever I’d committed some infraction. This was where the Peace Broker’s interrogations took place.
I tried to move, and noticed for the first time that I was bound to a chair with iron chains, which was no doubt why I felt queasy. Fae hate iron. With the addition of the blow I’d sustained to the back of the head, it was no wonder my vision was blurry.
The door to the room opened, and I lifted my head, refusing to show these bastards weakness.
My heart paused, my throat going tight. How many years had it been since I’d seen Cynthia Shay, the Peace Brokers second in command, and the female who was responsible for doling out punishment whenever one of the soldiers stepped out of line?
Shay, the female who’d broken three of my fingers when I’d been only six years old, for stealing an extra treat from the mess hall. Shay, who’d made me stand in the center of the training ring for two days wearing nothing but my undergarments and a sign that read PIGGY when I came in three pounds over weigh-in the previous day. Here was the female who had made me who I was, more so than perhaps any other soul in all the realms, for better or for worse.
I was not the hateful type, but it was safe to say I hated Cynthia Shay.
With pale white skin and blond hair pulled back into a severe bun, Shay was the kind of female you’d expect to see sitting behind a desk in the human world. She was thin, and wore Broker black, a pantsuit with a red lapel.
But her appearance didn’t fool me. Shay was a Shapeshifter, one of the most powerful supernatural creatures on record, for the fact that she could take any form she wanted. This stern-faced young blond woman she chose was what she used for her students, but she could just as easily have been a horned and scaled devil.
No matter what physical form she chose, it didn’t matter.
Because auras never lied.
“Ari,” Shay purred coming to a stop before me, reaching out and grazing my cheek with the tips of her manicured nails, like the caress of a long lost lover. “It’s been so long, my dear.”
I strained against my restraints, not making the conscious decision to do so, my body acting of its own accord, as if the horrors she’d put me through—us all through—were stored in my muscle memory.
This only made her smile, straight white teeth peeking out behind red lips.
“Welcome home,” she said.
Chapter Fourteen
I tried to remember my training.
The things she’d taught me.
How to keep calm under pressure. How to elevate mind above body. Breathe. I settled with reminding myself to just breathe.
The short heels of her sensible shoes clicked on the linoleum as she made a slow circle around me. My eyes followed her, like a mouse watching a cat. She held a clipboard in her hands, flipping through the pages.
“Aria Fae,” she read, “Excommunicated twenty three months ago for interfering with cross-realm matters, stripped of rank and relieved of title…. You were the top of your class once, Ari.” A click of her tongue. “Such a shame. I took such care raising you.”
“You abused me,” I corrected. “The same as you abuse every child here.”
I had to clench my teeth to keep from flinching when red flashed through her aura, bringing back a dozen or more suppressed memories. But Shay’s harsh face remained impassive. Only Empaths would know the roiling sea of hate and rage that was Cynthia Shay, which was part of the reason Nick and I had bonded so fiercely as children. We knew what she really was. We’d always known.
“That’s very ungrateful,” Shay said, still making her slow circle around me. She paused behind me, bending at the waist so that she could speak close to my ear. The scent of her breath—caffeine and spearmint—brought back a new wave of memories, making me cringe. “I made you, Masked Maiden,” she snarled. “Every thing you are is because of me.”
It was ironic, because I’d spent the majority of my life trying to please this female, always thinking about making her proud before every decision I’d made. Now, I just wanted to be free of these iron chains so that I could punch her straight white teeth out.
I said nothing more. That was indeed something she’d taught me. When captured by the enemy, keep your damn mouth shut.
Shay came to a stop in front of me, a grin pulling up her red lips. “Ah, that’s my girl,” she said. “Finally remembering your training.”
I met her cold gray gaze, said nothing.
“Tight lipped, eh?” she said. “Let’s see what we can do about that.”
I’d stopped screaming hours ago, days ago. Who knew how long it had been? Time was irrelevant. There was only pain and the person delivering it.
No, there was only pain.
“All of this can stop,” said a voice. “Just tell me where they went. Where they took the book. It’s that easy, sweetheart.”
I recoiled away from the voice. My eyes were swollen shut, and I couldn’t tell which way was up. At this point, I couldn’t even remember whom the hell she was talking about, what book to which she was referring. Pain was the only thing I knew.
A snort of derision. The opening and closing of a door. And then silence. The darkness took me. I was grateful. The pain couldn’t reach me there.
But it found me again soon enough. Now I did hear screaming. Was it coming from me? There was no way to know. My body didn’t feel like my own. It was screaming in places I hadn’t known could communicate.
The same questions, over and over again. I had no answers.
Something pricked the crook of my arm. I wanted to jerk away, but didn’t have the energy. A cold and tingling sensation started there and spread outwards. It took me a long while to realize it was an IV. They’d put an IV in me. To keep me alive.
It took me even longer to recall who “they” even were.
Peace Brokers.
Then I was gone again.
When I awoke once more, I was more aware. I wished that I were not.
It hurt, but I was able to open my eyes. I flinched when I saw Cynthia Shay sitting in front of me. She mumbled some gentle words, tucked my hair behind my ear, and put a straw to my lips.
“Drink, darling,” she purred.
I was so thirsty. I tried to capture the straw with my lips, and couldn’t for several seconds. At last, I got a hold, and the cold water burned my throat going down.
“Good,” she said. “Very good.”
I dozed in and out, and she cared for me. I started to think I loved her. I would love anyone who’d put an end to the agony.
This rang an alarm bell in my head, but it was too far off, too distant.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
For a while, I couldn’t remember it. “Aria,” I said at last, but my voice came out a croak. I didn’t recognize it.
“Yes, you’re Aria,” she agreed. “And who are you?”
The answer was automatic. “I’m a Peace Broker, an operative of the highest order. Guardian of the realms of immortals and men.”
I could hear a smile in her voice. This was the right answer. “And what does a good guardian do?”
“We put duty above all else, and in doing so, maintain the balance of the world.”
How many times had I uttered these words? Why did they feel so programmed? As if someone had pushed a button and set my voice box to play.
“The realm needs you now, soldier,” she said. “Will you help?”
“Yes.”
“A book was stolen, a forbidden book. Where would the people who’ve stolen it have taken it?”
Like a computer, my mind went in search of the information. Where was the book?
What book?
Wait.
Names came back to me first, and with them, remnants of my right mind.
Sam. Thomas…Nick, Vivian…Matt….
I wasn’t aware of when, but my eyes had slipped shut again. I peeled them open now with great effort. Looked the gray-eyed bitch in the face.
“Fuck off,” I said.
I was rewarded with a hard slap across the face. My neck wrenched to the side. I spat blood onto the linoleum. It dribbled down my chin. Darkness stole me again.
The sound of the door opening greeted me upon awaking. I kept my eyes closed. Waited.
“She won’t talk,” mumbled Shay.
Someone beside her sniffed once, grunted.
The door closed again.
When Shay entered again an indeterminable amount of time later, I was untied.
I slipped from the chair and onto the hard floor. I blinked up at her. “Why?” I asked.
She smiled down her straight nose at me. “Because you’re already dead anyway,” she said.
I was carried out of the building, loaded into a car, and tossed out onto a gravel path.
I wasn’t sure how long I lay there.
When I grasped onto consciousness for more than a few seconds, I was still lying on the gravel. The sun was beaming down on me. I couldn’t stand, so I rolled to the side, seeing green in that direction and hoping for the cover of trees.
Somehow, through scooting and crawling, I made it to the trees. The effort was massive, the pain blinding. My mouth was dry as sand, but my nose was too swollen to breathe through. In the distance, I heard the rumble of engines, people driving cars, but they were too far away to do any good.
I tried to lift my head. It took three times before I was able to hold it up enough to learn anything.
I was at the edge of a small wood. Ten feet to my left was a gravel road, not a car in sight. Fields of corn rolled on in the other three directions, glittering gold in the sunlight. I heard a harsh caw, and flipped over onto my back with a grunt to see a scavenger circling overhead.
I tried to sit up. Couldn’t.
I crawled a little deeper under the canopy of trees, thanking the Gods for the reprieve from the sun and that wretched bird. The trees welcomed me.
I placed my hand at the base of one, and its aura reacted immediately. Like recognizing like.
The tree said, “You’re hurt, my child.”
I said, “Yes.”
“Would you like to take from me?” it asked.
“Would you mind?”
“Not at all.”
I curled closer to its trunk. I dug my fingers into the earth at its feet. I breathed in the fresh green scent of it. I let the tree heal me, offering some of its life energy to replace my own.
I lay there for hours, days. When a light rain came through, I opened my mouth and drank from the sky. A thick leaf from the tree cupped the water and tipped it toward my mouth. I drank until my belly ached.
This was something I hadn’t done since I was a child living in the Fae Forest, where the plants were a lot more sentient than those in the human realm. The memory came back to me now. I’d been only three, maybe four, and had climbed a tall Bur burra tree, trying to keep up with the Forest children. I’d placed my foot wrong on one branch, and down I had gone. I’d struck several other branches before plummeting to the pink fog covered ground.
I’d lain there crying and hurt, and no one had responded to those cries. No one, save for the trees.
“Come, child,” they had said. “Come and we will heal you.”
That had been the only time in my life that I’d experienced anything like I was now, and even then, I’d never been sure if the voice of the trees had been real, or just in my head. I’d told my mother about it when I’d returned to her a few hours later. She’d cried and hugged me, blessing the trees.
“Did it really happen?” I’d asked her some years later, when I’d been returning for holiday from the Peace Brokers. “Did the trees speak to me? Did they heal me?”
My mother had smiled. “Do you believe they did?” she’d asked.
I’d nodded.
“All Fae can speak with the trees in some sense,” she’d told me. “We can read their auras the same as we could read that of any other living thing. There are stories—very, very old stories, about certain Fae who claimed the trees spoke to them, not just through auras, but through words. Some people believe those stories, and that those with that special ability exist, and some people do not. So, like all things, I suppose it’s just a matter of what you believe.”
As a child, I had thought this was a nonsense answer, and I had not remembered this interaction until just now. I’d never heard the trees speak again, and certainly not in a realm outside the Fae Forest, so I’d just pushed it to the back of my memory.
“Am I only hearing you in my mind?” I asked the tree, speaking the words mostly in my mind, though I was feeling better already. “Am I only imagining you? Are you real?”
“I’m as real as you, I suppose,” said the tree.
I curled closer, like a child to a mother’s breast.
“But are you speaking to me? Am I really hearing your voice?”
“What do you believe?” asked the tree.
I sputtered a weak laugh. “What does it matter what I believe?”
“Oh, dear child,” the tree answered, and it sounded sad, and that made me sad. “It matters. What you believe is perhaps the only thing that matters.”
Chapter Fifteen
I tapped on the window, looking down at the ground far below and wondering if climbing the building hadn’t been foolish considering my condition.
Dr. Rosemary Reid sat behind her desk, typing on a keyboard. She nearly fell out of her chair when she saw me. Then, she stood and pushed open the window letting into her office.
“Aria,” she said, “you scared the crap out of me.”
Then she took in my condition. Sighed. Offered me a hand as I climbed into the room.
Fell into the room, more like.
“Good God, what happened? Thomas has been out of his mind searching for you.”
“I was captured,” I said. “Interrogated.”
Dr. Reid’s mouth snapped shut. She shook her head. “Sit down,” she said. “Let me have a look at you.”
As I did so, I caught sight of the calendar on her desk. A small gasp escaped me before I could stop it.
“What?” Dr. Reid asked.
“What day is it?”
“November 23rd.”
My heart skipped three whole beats in my chest. Six weeks. I’d been gone for six weeks.
“How…” the words trailed off. I did the math in my head.
The last words Cynthia Shay had spoken to me before they’d released me came back in a rush.
“Why?” I’d asked her.
“Because you’re already dead, anyway,” Shay had said.
I’d thought she’d meant my physical condition. She’d been talking about my deal with Saleos.
Because of course those bastards knew about my deal with the Demon.
Six weeks.
I’d been gone six damn weeks.
I sat silently as Dr. Reid fixed me up. She looked up at me through thick blond lashes. “I should call Thomas,” she said. “He’ll be so relieved. I’ve never seen him…. He’s not been well in your absence.”
She reached for the phone. I caught her hand. “I’ll go to him next,” I said. “I promise. I just need…a minute to…”
I didn’t finish. Couldn’t finish. Dr. Reid nodded, dropping her hand and returning to her task of cleaning my wounds and patching me up. Once she was finished, I stood.
“Wait,” she said, going over to a closet in her office. She pulled out a pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt with the hospital’s logo printed on them, and handed them to me. I looked down at my clothes to see that they were ripped and bloodied, and smelled rather ripe now that I was paying attention.
She stood in silent observation as I changed.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “And thank you.”
Dr. Reid breathed heavily through her nose, and I read in her aura that she was conflicted. “Can I tell you the truth, Aria?” she asked.
I hated when people prefaced stuff like that, but
it wasn’t like I could deny her when she helped heal me every time I came crawling through her office window. I nodded.
“I’ve spent these last six weeks cursing your name,” she said, the words accompanied by a short humorless laugh. “I’ve never seen my brother as distraught as he has been, as worried…as hopeless. I wished he’d never met you. I swore I hated you.”
Ouch. She may as well have slapped me. I could see her point, though. I nodded, swallowing.
Dr. Reid continued, “I know that’s selfish of me, but I hate to see him hurting the way he is, and loving you…with what you do…it’s just always been bound to hurt him, you know? An inevitable outcome. I’m his sister. I just wanted to protect him.”
“I understand,” I said.
And I did. But that didn’t mean the words didn’t sting.
“I know you do good. I know that. I know that you’re…special. Not like other humans. I know you’re strong, and he’s strong, too, but these past six weeks….” she sighed, shook her head.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and moved toward the window. I couldn’t hear anymore. I just couldn’t.
“Me too,” Dr. Reid replied, her words following me out into the night.
I stood in the shadows of the building adjacent my apartment.
Thomas was in there. I could sense his aura, but I couldn’t make my feet move toward him. His sister’s words kept playing in my head.
She’d been harsh, but she hadn’t been wrong. I couldn’t be mad at her for that.
The person I was mad at was myself. I’d made this mess I was in.
I allowed myself a few more seconds, took a deep breath, and headed in.
When I reached Thomas’s door, I stood there for several moments, my hands paused in a fist, unable to make myself knock.
Shaking my head, I rapped my knuckles on the wood a couple times. I had to knock twice more, harder, before there was any response.
From the other side, I heard a curse, and then a crash, and then, finally, shambling footsteps.
The door swung open.
