Inside of her. It was inside of her now and whatever it was meant to do, she wasn’t going to be able to stop it. She might have figured out a way to try, or at least to ask some questions about just what the hell was going on, anyway, but she was getting so tired. So goddamned tired! She wanted to keep her eyes open, but there was no way. She simply wasn’t strong enough. All of the sleep she had missed since she was a child seemed to be coming upon her all at one time and she wasn’t strong enough to keep it down and out of her way.
Her eyelids grew heavier, heavy in a way that made Megan imagine little bricks tied to the lashes and pulling them down with the confidence of one who knew that he was absolutely going to get his way. And so she slipped into an uneasy sleep or if she was in the mood to be really brutally honest, passed out, blissfully unaware of what was happening to her for the time being.
The last thing she remembered was hearing the two men bicker like brothers or old, old friends. They were both talking now, she thought passively, both talking just fine. Maybe it was because she wasn’t watching or looking anymore. Maybe the poor guy was just shy, in which case perhaps breaking into women’s apartments in the middle of the night wasn’t really the best line of work for him, after all.
He seemed perfectly vocal with her on the way out, though. Didn’t seem to be having any issues at all. At least not with his ability to speak, which wasn’t to say that he didn’t have any issues.
“What the fuck, man? Why’d you blow so much?!” That was the first man, the one who had seemed to find himself exceedingly charming when he had talked to her. He had lost all of his sound of pompous self-assurance in a real hurry.
“Would you have like to do it instead? I was under the impression that you weren’t so confident in your mastery of the powder elixirs. If I’m mistaken, then by all means, you can handle it the next time.”
“No!” the first man interjected quickly, even Megan in her stupor able to detect that there was real fear in his response, “No, that’s not what I was saying. I just want to make sure that we get this shit right, that’s all. You know what’ll happen if we don’t. You know how the boss feels about mistakes.”
“Of course I do. Doesn’t tolerate them. I’m the last man on the face of this earth who needs a reminder on that one. You’d do well to remember that when you question my methods.”
“Shit. Shit, Gordon, I forgot. I’m sorry, man, that was tasteless of me. I just want to get this right. If we bring this little bitch to the boss in anything less than pristine condition, well, I don’t even want to think about what’s going to happen to us.”
“No,” the formerly mute man growled low in his throat, “you don’t. So we better not fuck it up then, wouldn’t you say?”
Later, Megan would think that there was undoubtedly more to the conversation than that, but she would never know exactly what it was. That was about the time she went from being on her way out to all of the way out and there was nothing left but deeply rooted dreams that felt like more than that, up until the magpie woman brought her back to life (because what was sleep if not some small bridge between life and the afterlife?). She had gone from that to this, this process of her rude awakening, and she had zero idea what had happened in the interim.
“You wanna give me a hint, magpie lady? Feel like helping a girl out?”
But apparently the magpie woman had said everything she was interested in saying and, for the moment, she was content to stay silent. Of course. Things would have been too damned easy if the little fairy godmother inside of her head decided to do a little voice-over and lead her through her current predicament and straight away from her captors. If there was one thing Megan had learned, it was that things rarely came easily. At least not for her.
“Thanks for nothing,” she muttered moving her fingertips gingerly to her temples and rubbing experimentally. God, if she had ever thought she had suffered a headache before, she had been wrong. Sickeningly wrong. This was a headache. What she had now was the kind of headache that made a person wish she could just lay down and die.
It was the kind that started in the base of her skull and crept up like a thief in the night, moving along so swiftly that even the follicles of her hair hurt before settling with happy little thudding movements in her temples.
Thump, thump, thumping so raucous that waves of nausea wracked her body and she moved to all fours, her hair hanging in her face and sure that she was going to vomit everywhere. Her mouth filled with a metal flavored saliva and no amount of swallowing did her any good. She spat, unladylike but what the hell, it wasn’t like there was anyone there to watch her (not that she was aware of) and that taste was making the sick feeling SO much worse.
She spat again, once, twice, and squinted in the gloomy light. Was that blood in her saliva? Was she bleeding? But no, on closer inspection she saw that it wasn’t blood but some of that purple dust. Just how much of that shit had she taken in? It must be the reason for her headache, she couldn’t think of anything else that could have caused such an unnatural kind of pain to vibrate through her skull.
Thinking about that, about how those two fuckers had blown some weird stuff in her face and now she was on her hands and knees while she decided whether or not to sick up her insides, made her all of the sudden blindingly angry.
As a rule, Megan tried to avoid getting really wrapped up in any kind of emotion but in this instance it actually felt like it was helping. The anger had a kind of a focusing effect and Megan imagined that it was even reducing the feeling of her pain. If that was the case, then bring on the anger. As far as she was concerned this was a time when it was warranted and if it was going to help her get out of this, then she was going to roll with those particular punches.
After the gut-wrenching sickness started to dissipate some, Megan sat back on her heels and looked around her. It was the first time she really thought to do it and the first thing she noticed was how very dark it was. Megan was a girl who liked the dark, but something about this dark made her feel uneasy. It wasn’t a normal darkness. It felt like the complete absence of light, like somebody had managed a trick so that light would never touch it again.
“Shut up, Megan, you’re being an idiot.”
She tried to tell herself that she was still trying to shake herself loose of her dream, but she knew that wasn’t the case. It was getting harder and harder to convince herself that things around her were still at least kind of normal when it was so clear that they weren’t; they weren’t at all.
She groped around in front of her, not sure whether she wanted to find something to hold onto or not, and found nothing. She wanted desperately to pull herself up to a standing position but she felt so unsteady that she wasn’t sure she could manage it.
And to make matters worse, she was starting to feel terribly confused and disoriented. It was getting darker, and rapidly. There weren’t any windows and no light had been switched from on to off and yet she was still sure that it was getting darker. Only a moment ago she had been able to see the worrisome purple tint to her spit and now she couldn’t see anything at all.
The small amount of light that had been there when she had woken up was gone and now the air around her felt like it was starting to change as well. It was growing thinner. It had less substance to it and each breath she took in was harder than the last. It was like being inside of a vacuum and all of the air was being sucked out.
Soon she would suffocate, she would gasp her last breath in this strange dark room and never know why she had been brought there in the first place.
“Is that what you want, my sweet little magpie?”
“Who are you?!” she screamed, coming unhinged and feeling like she had actually gone crazy. “What do you want?! I don’t understand what you want from me!”
The voice went silent again, waited for her to calm down. She knew it was only more evidence of her having gone stark raving mad in the process of coming awake again, but she got the impression that the voice did
n’t respond to anger or rash thinking.
She was only going to be able to communicate with it (with yourself, the rational part of her brain hissed, you’re only talking to yourself and you know it!) if she could get herself calmed down. Whether that sounded crazy or not, she knew it was true and so she stopped, concentrated on the sound of her breathing and nothing else.
She wasn’t exactly a practitioner of meditation and these weren’t the most restful conditions she had ever found herself in, but they weren’t the worst either and she had a funny feeling that she was going to be able to do it. She wasn’t really sure what “it” was, but she believed that she could achieve it. Breath in, breath out, nothing but the sound of that air.
“Is that what you want, magpie? For it all to come to an end?”
“No,” she replied softly, really nothing more than a whimper, “no, it’s not what I want at all. I want to get out of here.”
“And what do you need? What must you have to find your way?”
Whether the voice was inside of her head or really belonged to another person, she didn’t really care. She didn’t care, at least not at the moment, because it was working and that was all she needed. She could feel her body being washed over with a wave of almost eerie calm. If such a thing could really happen, she could feel, could hear, the cells in her body becoming still. They became as still as a person’s insides could possibly become without shutting off completely and the weight of her body ceased to exist to her as she was consumed with the most lovely feeling of light.
Her head shot back, her mouth all but unhinged as if she was going to be sick but what came out instead was a monumental amount of light. It was light unlike anything she had ever seen or felt and she wanted nothing more than to let it consume her, on and on and forever and ever, amen.
She could hear a faint humming sound from deep inside of herself and she thought that it must be the magpie woman, singing her praises at her little bird’s success. When the light finally began to dwindle, she opened her eyes slowly and saw that the oppressive darkness was gone. It wasn’t exactly as bright as the sun but it was a light that she could manage and the suffocating feeling was gone.
That darkness had almost swallowed her up, but the voice had come to her in her time of need and shown her the way out. For a moment, she was elated, giddy like a kid who had just learned a new, very neat trick. She stood slowly, still a little nervous about potential after effects of the powder she had inhaled, and it was only then that she began to shake.
She was safe from the darkness, at least for the moment, but at what cost? What in God’s name had she just done? That light hadn’t come from anywhere but inside of her. She was the source and the idea of that made her feel like she was going to come unglued all over again.
“Bravo, sweetheart. That was really quite impressive. That’s exactly what I wanted to see. What we wanted to do.”
Megan’s head snapped to her left, the direction she was certain the voice was coming from, and saw nothing but a brick wall. Her trembling became more acute and in a minute she was going to collapse again, the little amount of strength she had amassed leaching out of her like so much sweat.
“Other side, chickadee,” the voice laughed meanly as she whirled around to her right side. “I’m very sneaky when I want to be. You put on a very good show, you know that? Very good. Much better than I would have expected for somebody with zero information about what she is and a recent dosing of forget-me-nots. Top notch. Boss is going to be pleased. Boss is going to be beyond pleased.”
He might as well have been speaking another language, this man speaking to her, and the way he appeared to have entered her cell of captivity wasn’t helping matters at all. At first she couldn’t see him when she looked to her right side either and she thought that somebody must be using a speaker system to play some kind of a messed-up game with her. But then, as she watched in amazement, Megan watched the man from her apartment, the one who had done all of the talking, walk through one of the brick walls and right up beside her. She jumped backwards, afraid that if she touched him she would burst into flames or something, and he laughed.
Giggled, more like it. It was a truly bizarre sound coming from a grown man like him, and when she looked at him she saw that the giggle wasn’t the only thing about him that was strange. She hadn’t noticed it back in her apartment because her attention had been divided between him, the silent observer, and the pile of violet dust in his hand, but something about this guy (what had his name been? Gordon?) didn’t look quite right. At least not for your average, run of the mill middle aged man.
In part, it was because it was difficult to say if he was middle aged at all. He looked like he could have been ten or one hundred, like he had all of those ages cycling through him at the exact same time. Then of course, there was the fact that she had just watched him walk through a wall. That wasn’t something you saw every day and she should have been totally and completely freaked out by it.
Except that she had just let out a wall of white light from a mouth that had always been perfectly normal before, at least to her knowledge, so the parameters for normal were a little bit lenient at the moment.
And to top it all off was his outfit. It wasn’t exactly out of a movie or a box of costumes or anything like that, but it wasn’t exactly normal. It looked like it was a combination of pieces of things from a multitude of decades which came together to look not quite the way it should have. He grinned a devilish little grin and then had the audacity to shoot her a cocky wink on top of it.
“Checking out my threads, are ya? I like to keep things unique, you know? Like to wear little reminders of the different times I’ve traveled through. I’m not so much a fan of the clothes you guys choose in these times.”
“In these times? What the hell are you talking about? What, do you think you can time travel or something? Because you know that’s nuts, right? Like the kind of nuts that gets you locked up if you mention it to the wrong people.”
The man whose name she believed was Gordon (no, little magpie, not believe, you know it; listen to what you know if you want to make the right choices) made a disappointed clucking sound with his tongue and shook his head.
“Dearie, I would have expected more from you. After all, you just harnessed the light, didn’t you? Saw me do my walking through the wall trick. What does it take for you to believe?”
“Well, for starters, I don’t have a clue where I am. You two assholes came into my home and blew some crap in my face that, apparently, knocked me out cold. You stuck me in some dark, dank place and then waltzed through a wall and you want me to believe? Believe in what? I don’t have any idea what it is you’re looking for, but you’re definitely looking in the wrong place.”
Sometimes Megan’s temper got the best of her and this was one of those times. She cringed a little, expecting that this strange man would be pissed off, but what he actually did was rather shocking. He laughed. He laughed and started clapping his hands together and she could see that he was at least as delighted by her outburst as he had been by anything else that had transpired between the two of them in their short amount of time together.
She was surprised enough by his reaction that she actually laughed a little bit, but it wasn’t because she was happy. It was just that this was shaping up to be one hell of a strange twenty-four hours.
“Goddamn, you’re a little spitfire, aren’t ya? You’re actually exactly what we’re looking for, although you don’t know it yet. And for the record, this isn’t the worst place in the world to be held. Have you even bothered to look around you, or too busy playing with your light show?”
She hadn’t, in fact, and she was tempted to tell him exactly where he could shove it for even suggesting that she could have had time for a tour with all of the shit she had been put through. But instead, she looked around her and, for a second, really was kind of delighted.
She was in a wine cellar. It was massive, with row after ro
w of barrels extending so far that she could not see their end. Megan thought that she was being held in some dank little dungeon and she couldn’t have been further from the truth.
She’d always wanted to visit a wine cellar, it had been on her bucket list, but they definitely didn’t have any in New Orleans. New Orleans was a city with an impressive amount of moisture and a propensity to flood, and cellars in any form weren’t a good idea.
So she couldn’t still be in her city, but what did that mean? She felt both afraid and charged with a hyperactive sort of energy at the same time and when she looked back at Gordon, he was watching her with a knowing smile.
“Pretty neat, huh? Now come on, I can tell you’re wanting to know just where in the hell we are without you even having to ask. I’d say it’s about time to go and meet the boss man, wouldn’t you?”
She didn’t have a chance to answer him before he was on the move and she was following. She didn’t know whether it was the right move or not, but it felt like the only move. She traipsed up the stairs, still feeling very, very tired, and saw that those stairs led directly up into a dark hallway, which in turn led to a massive kitchen that looked nothing like any kitchen she had ever seen. It looked like something straight out of Downton Abbey and she could feel Gordon looking at her and grinning that big goofy grin.
Saved By Blood (The By Blood Vampire Series Book 3) Page 12
