When I reopened my eyes, I was just in time to see Nero clumsily spring from his chair, buckle under his own weight, but catch himself on the nightstand. His skin was loose and hanging like when we’d first arrived here, with the yellowing, sickening tone reappearing.
Nero clambered to the post and batted at the buttons to turn it off, but my hand caught his wrist before he was able to do so.
I found myself as surprised as he, but I didn’t let that stop me from clamping down on his wrist and pulling him from the machine. I pulled at my other wrist to secure my grip on him, and the shackle fell limply to the mattress.
Pull!
I pulled Nero on top of me, and he clawed the air for the box on the post, its light still shining brightly. My arms were entwined in his, pinning them behind his back. He flopped and thrashed like a fish on land, but I refused to yield. The barbs dug deeper into my chest, but it didn’t matter anymore. The pain was fading. I could feel them biting, but they no longer hurt. And they were biting him, too.
Nero screamed and tried to pull away from the teeth digging into his bound arms and back.
“How are you doing this?” Nero choked out. He struggled to remove the needle from his arm, but no matter how he jostled and kicked, he couldn’t reach or knock it free.
And his struggling lessened as my grip strengthened.
“You’ve seen what I can do and you thought you could hold me?” I yelled in his ear.
He shook his head like he was trying to escape my voice.
Euphoria consumed me, entering and ravaging my body in the best possible way. All my fear dissipated. All my rage was focused on the flailing body bound to me with strength I’d only dreamt about.
“You can’t kill me! You’ll only kill yourself!” Nero pleaded.
“How did you answer my pleas?” I asked sharply.
“You have to believe me!” Nero’s body was slowing, draining…dying.
“Like trusting you before did me a lot of good?”
“You’re not one of them.”
“Who? A wolf among sheep?” I mused, never feeling so confident in my life. “Maybe I am.”
Nero’s hanging skin turned from yellow to green. His fighting became nonexistent. His breathing slowed. When I released his arms from my grip, his body rolled off the bed, wrapping in the tube and yanking the needle from my shoulder.
I winced as my inward flowing of strength ceased, but it didn’t matter—I felt an assuredness I’d never felt before. I thought of Jeremy taking down Sasha and Greg in the quad while I lied helpless and bleeding against the lockers. I now knew what that kind of confidence felt like. And I was hungry for more.
I rose through the barbed wire binding and slipped my feet through the shackles to sit up on the edge of the bed. Stretching my limbs and cracking my back and neck never felt so good. There was so much blood on and around me, but it had the air of not being mine.
Nero moved like that dying fish having been out of water for too long, powerless and waiting for someone to push him back in. But I had no intention of doing that.
I stood up, stepped over his writhing body, and knelt down beside him. He had finally pulled the needle free from his arm.
“How does it feel?” I asked. I felt nothing for the pitiful creature on the floor. He was one of the sheep.
I scooped him into my able arms and dropped him on the bed. He landed on the rows of barbed wire and grunted, but it was barely audible. He was barely hanging on, causing no need for the shackles.
The machine was still on and I looked at it quizzically. I felt the need—the pull—for more, and I took it.
I stabbed the first needle into his arm and the second into mine. After a moment, the euphoria returned. I collapsed into the chair beside the nightstand and felt the extra life flowing into me. Any lingering pain was extinguished.
I unwound the bandage covering my right hand and found a shiny indent in the skin from where the doctor in the asylum had cut away the tattoo. There was still a hint of an outline where the ink had bled into the deep layers of my skin. The large scar looked like it had been there for years and reminded me of the scar on my stomach from where I had been stabbed with the screwdriver.
I removed the bandage around my leg where the cage apparatus had been and found similar puncture scars beneath the dried blood. My ankle felt as strong as it had ever been. I looked at the silver dots around my wrists and ankles from the barbed wire and I’m sure I had lines across my stomach and chest with the same dotted patterns. I was covered in scars, but I was healed. I’d healed myself somehow.
Looking across the room to the dresser, I willed Frolics to me and he came obediently. He didn’t fall from the dresser, but floated to my outstretched hand. I held the small stuffed animal protectively and promised I wouldn’t leave him behind.
I glanced over at Nero, and he was lying completely still on the bed. The euphoric feeling faded. The tube was emptying. I had taken everything from him. And I was still alive. I removed the needle from my arm and let it fall to the floor. Placing Frolics on the nightstand, I rose to take a better look at Nero.
His eyes were fixed on the ceiling. I ran a hand over them and pulled the needle from his arm.
I was free to leave.
The bathroom light turned on.
I walked in and looked around. Again, there was no one. A half filled bucket of water still sat in the sink. And then I caught the vision of myself in the mirror. The boy staring back was a true reflection of myself, but there was a little extra glint in my eyes like someone else was looking through them as well. Besides all the dried blood and the matted mess of hair, I didn’t resemble someone who had been incarcerated and tortured for the last week—I resembled someone who’d just awoken from the best sleep of his life.
I pulled my stained, no longer pale green shirt up and over my head and tossed it haphazardly on the floor. Just as I had suspected, rows of silver scars stretched across my chest and stomach. I ran a hand over them, still not convinced they were real. There was no pain. They didn’t feel like anything.
The toilet beside me flushed, and when I looked over, I saw the translucent figure of a woman buttoning up her jeans. She walked right over to where I was standing, causing me to take a step back. She washed her hands and checked her makeup in the mirror before turning around and flipping off the light. I took another step back as she walked toward and then through me.
When she had turned the faucet handles to wash her hands, I’d seen phantom handles move, but the real ones before me remained stationary. The same went for the light switch. I flipped the light switch to the on position, but nothing happened. I remained standing in darkness.
I shook my head, trying to understand what I’d seen, but I needed to find Desiree and couldn’t linger in my thoughts for too long. She was waiting for me.
I went to Nero’s closet, and as I had hoped, I found it full of clothes. I was ready to replace my scrubs with real clothes, and decided on dark jeans and a black cotton V-necked shirt. I replaced my dirty socks with clean ones and black dress shoes. Inside one of the dirty socks was the razor I’d taken from the cell in the asylum and I threw it on the floor with the socks. The blade reminded me too much of my last image of Anna—a reminder I didn’t want to continue carrying with me.
I was overcome with a compelling need to look as good as I felt and went back to the bathroom to style my hair. When I turned the faucet handles, no water came out, so I used the water in the bucket. Combing my wet hair with my fingers, I gave my reflection a wide grin, which looked rather sinister in the shadows of the bathroom.
As I collected Frolics from the nightstand, I noticed the bed was empty except for the fallen rows of barbed wire. Nero was gone. I took a cautious look around to make sure he wasn’t waiting to jump out at me from some corner of the room. The machine was still running, with the tubes hanging limply to the floor and small puddles of blood forming around the fallen needles.
I hated this
machine more than the cage used on my leg. Gripping the post in one hand, I threw it over the bed and across the room. It clanged against the window and bounced off as the glass deflected, but didn’t break. I took one more look around the room, spit on the bed, and stormed out.
In the living room, I was immediately drawn to the phantom woman I had seen in the bathroom. She was cutting vegetables for a salad, and opening a phantom door in the refrigerator to store the remaining food. I watched her as I walked over and opened the refrigerator—the real refrigerator—and found it empty, the light inside refusing to illuminate. Frustrated, I slammed it shut and stood for a moment beside the woman as she worked. I was finally hungry, but there was nothing here to eat. There was only the phantom food.
I swung my arm at the translucent bowl the woman was using to mix her salad, and it flew into her stomach and fell to the floor. Vegetables and dressing splattered all over the woman, cabinets, and tile floor.
I was almost as surprised at what I’d done as she was at her food attacking her. She cautiously backed out of the kitchen, not taking her eyes off the possessed bowl laying upside-down on the floor.
“Tish?” the woman said softly.
I looked around, expecting to see the woman’s mirror standing behind me or sitting in the living room. But the phantom woman and I seemed to be alone.
When no one answered her, the woman knelt before her ruined meal and began cleaning up.
Now it was my turn to back out of the kitchen, and as I examined the living room more closely, I saw the top of a head of blonde hair behind the far couch. I approached and found who the woman had presumably been calling for, Tish, huddled against the wall. She refused to look me in the eyes, focused solely on her knees, and rocked her body like a traumatized child.
“Are you Tish?” I asked.
“You’re one of them, aren’t you?” she whispered.
“One of whom?”
She slowly tilted her head up to meet my gaze, her eyes shining with not yet fallen tears. “A Lorne.”
“What if I am?”
“Please don’t kill me, Mr. Lorne.”
Her expression was desperate and pitiful. A tear finally broke free from her eye and rolled over her flushed cheek.
I pointed to the phantom woman in the kitchen. “What would happen to her if I did?”
Tish broke away from my unflinching gaze and shook her head with heavy anguish.
“What happened to Nero?”
“You don’t know?”
I let out a low growl. “Enlighten me, Mirror!” I yelled, and I was reminded of how Alexandria had spoken to Nero.
Tish clasped her hands over her ears and screamed, shaking her head more violently then before.
“Tish?” the woman from the kitchen called again.
I had an urge to kick her out of her tantrum, but fought it, and drew back instead. “I don’t have time for this,” I said under my breath.
Tish screamed like a banshee until I was out of the apartment, and I could still hear her halfway down the hall.
A phantom man exited his apartment and walked past me. I followed him to the elevator and we descended the building together. He was unaware that I was even there, standing in the elevator with the comfort of being alone, doing little things only done when no one was looking. I laughed out loud and threw a hand over my mouth, but he didn’t hear me, either.
I used my idle time to connect with Anna, but I couldn’t find her voice. I couldn’t feel her at all. Recalling my last hazy memory of her, I scolded myself for entertaining the thought that she might be dead. There was so much blood. I desperately wanted to know that she was all right—but I was receiving nothing.
When I exited the building and turned onto the sidewalk, I saw a sea of phantoms filling the city as far as I could see. Before I knew it, I was among them, drowning in them as they passed through me. Mysterious faces everywhere looked off into the distance, all going about their days with no notice that I was there. I spun around, waiting for at least one person to crash into me and knock me to the ground. But it didn’t happen. The further I looked through the incoming surge of phantoms, the more they created a wall that I could not see through. I was lost in the bodies and needed to focus on Desiree’s voice to stay above water.
And when I found her voice again and pictured her in a room similar to where I had been held, the phantoms disappeared. I stood nearly alone on the sidewalk. Mirrors out in the city revealed themselves, but they were only a fraction of the phantoms who’d kept them covered. The cars continued to pass by, with their darkly tinted windows making it impossible to see the drivers inside.
When it was just me and the mirrors, I noticed how they were all looking at me, but not like when Nero had first brought me into the city. The hunger in their eyes had been replaced by fear, reminding me of Tish huddled in the corner of her apartment.
I stood and watched them all for a moment, feeling a creeping bit of fear myself, and then continued onward. No one approached me. No one reached out to me like before. They all kept their distance, giving me a wide berth as I passed. I stared at each mirror I passed straight in the eyes, never the first to break away.
Desiree’s voice beckoned me and somehow gave me an invisible path to follow. I could feel her getting closer even though I didn’t know where I was or where I was going. I turned down new streets to the sound of her voice in my head, following a knowing deep in my being that I was heading straight for her. I wasn’t following a map or GPS that could get me lost or cause me to backtrack. I was being pulled to her like a magnet—absolute and unyielding.
I didn’t know if she could feel me, too—if she knew I was coming. In her drained and weakened state, I highly doubted it, but I tried to will my soothing voice to her anyway.
After a few miles of my magnetic pull through the city—the reflection of Provex City—I stood before the entrance of Lorne Tower once again. Desiree was somewhere inside. Thinking of the last time I was here with Jeremy, my legs were trying to keep me from taking the needed step forward. I knew it was not really the same building—well, technically it was, but the people I was hiding from would not be on this side of the line. All I’d have to contend with here would be more mirrors. And the way they seemed to view me now would allow me to just walk in and out, or so I hoped.
Desiree’s voice softened and I knew I had to move. I took a deep breath, squeezed Frolics for extra support, and entered the ominous building. The vaulted-ceilinged lobby looked just how I remembered it, but without the pedestrian traffic or employees offering polite greetings. My footfalls echoed throughout the lavish cave as I made my way for the elevators, then stopped, and approached the stairwell. I felt that Desiree wasn’t on too high a floor and I didn’t want to mess with elevators that I couldn’t control.
I bounded up the stairs with energy and anticipation unequal to any previous time in my life. About fifteen floors up, I stopped at the door leading into the floor’s main hallway. I couldn’t hear her anymore, but I could feel her presence, stronger than ever. She was definitely here. Probably asleep—or that surreal consciousness between sleeping and waking, not being able to escape the pain. I never wanted to feel that again and I wanted nothing more than to release Desiree from the horrors still so vivid in my head that I feared closing my eyes, paranoid I’d be transported back there and what I was experiencing now was nothing more than a derisory dream.
I was led to a door halfway down the hall and passed through like it wasn’t even there. The apartment was empty. All the lights were off and the curtains drawn. Fear of an ambush was gone and I boldly announced myself—like a true Lorne would do.
“Desiree!”
Muffled sounds and movement came from a hallway off the living room. I ventured forward and stopped at the only opaque door in the hall and knew Desiree was on the other side. I tried my best to prepare myself for what I was about to see—but after what I’d seen with Anna, I figured I was desensitized enough.
I looked down at the scar covering a quarter of my hand and it twitched with a mind of its own. It was still a wolf to me and it was alive.
I stepped through the door, met by the most beautiful Desiree I could have ever imagined. She was even more beautiful than the woman on the monorail. The sight of her stopped me cold, but I had to remember what stood before me was not Desiree—but a monster.
She took one look at me and dashed for the far corner of the room with a growl I couldn’t have expected from the feminine body.
And then I saw her.
28
Leaving Reid
Desiree was huddled on the floor in the far corner of the bedroom. Light shined into the room from the window stretching across most of the wall.
“Desiree,” I choked out at just above a whisper, incapable of anything more.
Her mirror scrambled to her, hurtling the bed and collapsing beside her prisoner. She threw two protective arms around Desiree.
“No, no, no! You can’t have her!” the mirror cried. “She’s mine!”
I approached slowly, not knowing what the mirror would do to me, or Desiree, if she were cornered. In passing a low-standing dresser, I set Frolics down for safekeeping.
I only knew it was Desiree from seeing her mirror. My actual friend was unrecognizable in a white straightjacket and white leather mask enveloping her head entirely. The tips of her wavy russet hair escaped through the bottom of the mask, with only holes for her mouth and nose, and a zipper starting at the top and running down the back. A long chain extended from a leather collar around her neck to a thick wooden bedpost. She was out as far as she could go. Her arms were lost in the straightjacket and folded around her body, presumably buckled in back, which now had her mirror’s arms folded tightly over them. The jacket was also tied between her legs, which were bare and bruised. Desiree shook in the hold of her mirror, not strong enough to break away, but protesting with what strength she had left.
SUSY Asylum Page 33
