Count On Me

by Abigail Graham

  Kristoff says little while we fly, taking the time to review a bunch of documents, both paper and on a computer. When he takes my hand I curl my fingers around his palm as I stare out the window. I feel the way I felt when we would come home from a trip to the beach when I was little, an overwhelming and continuously growing sense of dread and fatigue as the fun world of the boardwalk and ocean and rides and candy faded back into a dreamworld and the dreary prospect of going to school next month or next week or tomorrow would float back to the forefront of my mind.

  “You’re very quiet,” he says to me. “That is unlike you.”

  “I know. I’m just thinking.”

  “Tell me what you are thinking.”

  “I don’t know.”

  He laughs. “I am not surprised. You’re always bouncing from one thought to another to another, never still.”

  I don’t say much else until we land. I grip the arms of the seat hard, and squeeze his hand as the plane tips back and begins circling in to land. I tense and grit my teeth when the tires touch the runway, and shake for a moment afterward.

  I don’t like flying, I’ve decided.

  I wait as the plane taxis around and comes to a stop. A stairway rolls up, and the crew open the door. New York air, stifling hot and humid and with that strong scent, comes flooding into the cabin. My prince stands up and offers me his hand and we walk down together.

  My stomach does a back flip when the first flash goes off. It takes me a moment to realize why I’m being photographed and I stand there with a dumb, dull stare on my face, until I shake myself out of it and walk down with him, along a freaking red carpet to a limousine.

  Hi, Mom, I’m on TV.

  I’m a little concerned about what happens next. I haven’t really been told.

  Once we’re alone again in the car, he turns to me.

  “We’re here. What would you like to do?”

  “Do I have to choose now?”

  “No, of course not. I only ask what you want to do with your day. You can come with me. I’m told your parents are here, expecting to see you.”

  I haven’t spoken to them yet. Day after day passed and I always had something to do, some reason not to. I twine my fingers nervously and try to figure out what the hell I should do with myself.

  “I need to see them. I want to go home, to my home, but I want you to go with me. Can we do that?”

  “Ask what you will of me and it is yours, you know that.”

  I smile weakly, trying to choke down the rising nausea in my stomach. I wrap my arms around myself and curl up, staring out the windows.

  The city can be so amazing, but I’m not feeling it today. At all.

  “They’re here,” I say.

  “Yes. The State Department brought them here and requests that you be allowed to see them. They speak to me as if you are a prisoner.”

  I sigh. “They don’t know you like I do.”

  “No,” he says, squeezing my hand. “What do you wish to do? I can send them away.”

  “No, I’ll meet them here, where we’re staying.”

  “I’ll have my people nearby. The Americans may try to take you. By force.”

  I swallow, hard. “I don’t want anyone to be hurt over me.”

  “Then make it clear to them you are no prisoner…if you intend to return, that is. I will not force you now. I have business to attend to after we arrive. I’ll send word to the Americans that you wish to see your family.”

  I nod.

  We enter the hotel through a private entrance. It jars me to see good ol’ fashioned American cops, NYPD no less, holding back crowds of people at the far end of the alley. I lift my skirts like I’ve been wearing a poofy dress every day of my life, to keep the hem out of the muck water behind the hotel.

  Once inside we’re escorted to an upper floor. We have it all to ourselves, and the security detail that arrived ahead of time. I see Americans mingling with Kosztylans. It’s easy to pick out the Americans. They’re all in suits with those things in their ears. The Kosztylans wear uniforms, sharp black ones that give them a morbid but authoritative air. The blonde-haired guard I saw before is among them.

  I have my own room. I feel a pang of guilt when I realize it. I head inside and sit in the sitting room. It’s a huge suite, but I’m too exhausted and depressed to pay much attention to the details. I’m sure it’s nice. There’s trim and stuff and a big bed and I have a nice bathroom with a fancy shower.

  “I want to go home,” I tell no one in particular.

  The knock comes at the door an hour later. I’ve been sitting near the door the entire time.

  It’s that blonde guard woman.

  “My lady, your party has arrived. His grace has secured a private room on the third floor. If you would follow me, please.”

  Sighing, I follow her to the elevator and stand straight as it carries me down. I feel like I’m sinking into the earth’s crust. The sense of dread grows as I fall.

  I furrow my brows when we pass the third floor.

  “Hey, wait,” I say, “What’s…”

  I feel something hard jab into my back. It feels like a gun.

  “Shut up.”

  I freeze.

  Oh, oh God, no, please no.

  The door opens and she nudges me forward, into the basement of the hotel. Oh God, I’m being kidnapped. I move slowly and deliberately, flexing my hands at my side. The gun in my back feels like it wants to go off, like the bullet is urgent to smash into my back, crack bone, and tear flesh.

  I tremble and stop moving when she tugs on my arm.

  “This is her, take her.”

  Two men yank my arms painfully behind my back. When I cry out from the twist of my shoulders, they backhand me across the face and my split lip wells with blood. I spit some on the floor and go quiet as they pull zip ties and stiff cords that feel like wires around my wrists and then my elbows.

  Then a thick, rough sack pulls down over my face and steals the world away. I can barely breathe, and in few heartbeats it becomes stifling hot inside the sack. Pushed forward with a gun in my back, I stumble to an unknown destination in the dark, my feet scuffing over rough concrete ground.

  “Who are you?” I say quietly.

  “Shut up,” she says, though I can hear the smirk in her voice.

  “Are you the Resistance?”

  “Shut up, you stupid American whore.”

  “Please, you have to let me go.”

  The gun jabs hard into my back. I stifle a cry of pain.

  “Why should I do that?”

  “I don’t want him to hurt you.”

  “You don’t want him to hurt us?”

  She laughs, but she doesn’t know how serious I am. I mean it. When he finds out about this he’ll kill them all.

  Oh God.

  I know why they did it now, why they waited. Oh sure, snatching me from the castle would have been difficult, but this same woman has been in and out a dozen times, I’ve seen her everywhere. They could have grabbed me anytime they wanted.

  They waited until right now because he doesn’t know if I’m coming back. I stifle a sob and tears well in my eyes. Not like this, please. He’ll think I left him. He’ll think I abandoned him.

  As they sit me down on a thin seat—I think they’re putting me in a van—I do something I have not truly done for a long time. Not with intent. Out of panic or fatigue, without sincerity or thought. Very deliberately, silently, I pray.

  Please, God. Don’t let him think I abandoned him. Gentle the rage in his heart. If you do not find it within your divine plan to guide him to me as you did before, then I beg of you at least, do not let this be the end of the man he could become. I beg of you, if this is the end you mean for me, give him a better one. Help him. Help him. Help him.

  I must have said the last part aloud.

  “What are you saying, whore?”

  “Nothing.”

  It’s the woman who hits me. Not a slap, a punch. It kn
ocks me off the seat onto the floor and my mouth wells up with blood, throbbing. The world spins, poked through with bright pinpricks of light. She drags me up by the arms and punches me in the stomach, and I double over in agony, spitting blood on the inside of the black sack they’ve put over my head.

  “I take it back,” I growl, “I can’t wait for him to find you.”

  I’m a teacher. Not a saint.

  “You say that as if he’d harm me,” she says, her trilling accented voice like honey. “He had his chance.”

  My head pops up. Bloody cloth clings to my lips. “Good God, you’re her, aren’t you? You’re Cassandra.”

  “No. I am,” a third voice intones. She must have been waiting in the van.

  “I first thought to take you when we drew him away from the castle a few days ago, but there are too many loyalists, we never would have made it past the inner courtyard. Even in the hell he’s built there are still some fiercely loyal to him.”

  “He told me about you. Don’t try to play a man-of-the-people card with me. You made him kill his brother.”

  “A pity. I thought my Kristien would rule after Kristoff’s untimely death, but like a romantic idiot he insisted on dueling his brother for the crown and my hand. My hand, can you imagine something so foolish? Of course you can, look how you’ve taken to those ludicrous dresses.”

  “Are you going to kill me?”

  “Yes, I am. Intimately and slowly. I will do things to you that your pretty little mind cannot even imagine. That carnival-show torture chamber in the castle will seem like a dream to you. You’ll beg me to take you there.”

  I take a deep breath, coughing from the stink of my own blood in my face. “Why? Because he loves me and not you?”

  She sighs. I hear the swish of fabric as she crosses her legs. “Are you such a romantic fool as to think that matters? Of course there is an element of quid pro quo at play here. He questioned my lover, so I will show his the same courtesy. I hope he’s gotten a whelp on you. I’ll keep you alive long enough to carve it out and make you eat it.”

  I blink a few times. “Your lover, what?”

  It hits me. Of course. “Brad.”

  “That is not his name. I admit I have a certain fondness for the idiot, he has a nice prick. He thinks he is using me and like all men he thinks the gash between our legs means our brains have leaked out. He relates to me all sorts of plans, all sorts of information. I use him. I reached out to the authorities, and I offered them something they could not refuse in return for backing my insurgency.”

  “The armor,” I breathe. “You want the armor.”

  “I have a suit of my own. That pretty cut on your beloved’s chest, do you think his brother gave him that? Kristien didn’t last thirty seconds against him. I put that scar there, and he gave me none in return. I would have had him, had the Phoenix Guard not run me off. What I need is the advanced prototype, the one he wears, and you will bring it to me.”

  “Me?”

  She laughs. “Yes, you. Oh, believe me, nothing would please me more than to let him think you’ve abandoned him. Six months or a year, I think, after he’s fully vented his rage on your precious people… Then I would send him the tape, show him what I have done to you. Let him see that your love was true and you begged for him to the end. Oh, and you will beg. I will have to satisfy myself with eviscerating you after I’ve killed him and pried that damned armor off his corpse.”

  I press my throbbing lips shut.

  She keeps talking.

  “Once he’s gone and I have the suit, the Americans think it will be theirs… And I will give them one, an older model, while I ramp up the production line under the mountain. With both brothers dead and the suit under my control, the castle will be mine. My resistance will don those suits and spread out in every direction like a steel tide, rolling over every foe. Solkovia will be first. I will put every man and woman and child to the sword, for your sake. I will kill the girl children first. I think this will please you.”

  “You’re insane.”

  She laughs softly, and mirthlessly, to herself. “So you think, I am sure. What is insane is to wield power such as that and not use it. Dear Kristoff argued with me for hours and hours, oh no we mustn’t, oh one man cannot rule all the world, oh if we try we will be utterly destroyed and my people will suffer for it. He has a kind heart, in his way. It’s a shame that defect did not pass over the heir and to the second son. Had Kristien been born first, the world would bow under a black iron yoke and I would be its queen. I will finish what their fathers started. I will ensure you are alive to see it before you beg me for death.”

  Oh my God.

  She’s fucking nuts.

  I can hear the seat creak as she sits back. “We need only to make the proper arrangements.”

  I swallow. “Arrangements?”

  “You’ll see. I have something very, very special in mind for you. A prince needs a grand exit from the stage, don’t you think?”

  She turns and barks an order in Kosztylan.

  I don’t know what to do. I’m not a spy or a secret agent. Maybe I should be paying attention to the turns or trying to count the stoplights, get some handle on where I am.

  Not that it would help. I’ve been here exactly once and we didn’t get out of the car. Manhattan is not, as they say, my jam.

  Oh God, I’m going to die.

  Painfully, apparently.

  The best thing I can do for now is sit quietly, I think. Listen, think, and pray. I pray hard, as if it’ll do me any good. I pinch my eyes shut and plead.

  The ride takes a long time. An hour, more. When we finally stop and the van door slides open (my spy skills have improved to the point where I can tell it’s a van, because it has a sliding door), the smell of rust and stale air rushes through the burlap, flavored by the crusty iron stink of blood. I’m not sure if it’s soaked into the sack, or just in the air.

  “Don’t move, or we’ll break your arms,” she says, standing in front of me. “That will make this vastly more unpleasant for you.”

  I go halfway limp, sagging a little as they unbind my arms, only to close handcuffs around my wrists…and force them over my head. I hear a metallic scraping sound, and then a great mechanical noise, some kind of engine revving up.

  Oh God.

  Something pulls at the chain binding my wrists, and the cuffs click tighter, cutting off circulation to my hands. My fingers begin to tingle as my toes come up off the floor. I hang there and she gives me a little push, amusing herself by swinging me forward and back.

  Then it lifts me up. The cuffs dig into the flesh of my wrists, and I have no choice but to hang there and whimper as the pain grows, and grows, and grows. I feel the world swinging past under my feet, until I finally come to a stop, instinctively trying to put my feet down.

  She’s behind me, I can feel her.

  The sack comes off. She yanked it over my head. I’m hanging over a void between two ends of a retracted walkway, something beneath me. There’s a camera aimed at me, held by one of her men.

  “Look down,” she says.

  I glance back. Cassandra bears a faint resemblance to the blonde-haired guard. They might be kin. She’s taller and leaner, her hair knotted back severely behind her head. Her eyes are green and hard.

  I swallow, hard, and tilt my head down. It’s agony with my arms forced over my head. It feels like they’re going to pull out of their sockets.

  When my gaze falls to the floor beneath I see… a machine. Rows and rows of wheels, with big studs jutting out that form interlocking metal teeth.

  “It’s an industrial shredder,” Cassandra says, stroking my hair. “The shape of the blades gives it an amusing nickname: They call it the muffin monster.”

  “W-what—”

  “I told you I was going to kill you slowly. On that count I was truthful. It will probably take at least a minute for you to die, though I doubt you will make it much past the machine shredding your feet and c
alves; when it grips your femurs and tears your legs off and breaks your cuffs or sucks you in, death will come mercifully quick. Or it would, should I say, except that I will slow the machine to its lowest setting so it takes minutes to devour you alive, ripping you into pieces no bigger than my finger. I want you alive long enough to feel it rip out your entrails before you finally die.”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  She shrugs. “You stole my place. Turn it on! Let’s see if her prince can find her in time to say good-bye before he has to pick her teeth out of the machine!”

  Beneath me, the shredder churns to life. It sounds low and throaty at first but quickly picks up the pace, spinning faster and faster until the blades become a blur. My shoe slips off my foot and tumbles into space, hits the blades with a small whump, and vanishes in a puff of fabric slivers and stuffing.

  God, if you’re going to lead him to me like I asked, now would be a very good time.

  Cassandra descends a gantry to the factory floor, checking her watch, and with no more concern than turning on the lights, pushes the button that starts lowering me from the crane and feeding me into the machine. At the rate I’m going it’ll be about a minute before my feet touch the blades. I have to save my strength, hold them up.

  I turn to my side and watch her draw a drop cloth off a crate.

  Inside is one of those damned armor suits. She taps something on the side and it unfolds with a mechanical sound, and she backs up to it, stepping one foot and then the other into stirrups before pushing herself into it. The plates fold around her and close with a hiss of air and she steps forward, massive boots thudding on the ground.

  Her armor is white. It would be, wouldn’t it.

  She unsheathes one of those massive swords and she waits.

  “He probably won’t make it in time,” her voice booms across the floor. “He’s going to find a pile of ground meat before I gut him.”

  As I grow closer to the machine I can feel the air from the moving blades and start jerking my legs up. I cry out when I feel my wrist slip. Too much movement and the hook will give and I’ll just fall in and be torn apart all at once. I wonder if that’s the last thing I’ll feel, being ripped to shreds by this machine. The blades spin hungrily, almost like they’re reaching for me, eager for blood.