by Stella Hart
A bevy of women marched out to meet them, and each man knelt and held out his left wrist. Over the next half hour—the longest, most boring half hour of my life—the women tattooed something on the men’s wrists, presumably some sort of Crown and Dagger symbol.
Finally, they were done, and Tobias stepped out onto the stage. “Welcome to the second level, brothers! And now for everyone’s favorite portion of the evening—virgo sacrificium.”
My blood ran cold. I knew what that meant. Virgin sacrifice.
A young woman in a white dress not too dissimilar to mine was quickly dragged out to the stone slab in the middle of the auditorium. She was kicking and screaming, begging to be freed. Mascara had run down her face in teary rivulets, staining her cheeks black.
“Please! Someone help me!” she cried as three burly men bound her wrists above her head and held her down on the altar.
My heart raced. She seemed genuinely terrified. What if this wasn’t just part of the show? What if they were really going to kill this crying girl?
My anxiety inched up further as Tobias stepped down from the stage and pulled an enormous dagger out of his black robes. It glinted in the orange glow of the fiery torches, and my nerves hummed with fear as he held it poised over the girl’s chest.
“No!” she screamed. “Please!”
A chant rose from the crowd, getting louder with each moment as Tobias slowly stepped around the slab, still holding the dagger right above the girl.
Then he plunged it down, right into her chest.
I almost screamed, but then I saw a grin spread across the young woman’s face, and she sat up on the altar and waved to the crowd. I breathed a heavy sigh of relief. It was a trick knife; she was fine. This was just part of the strange carnival of events.
The girl began to shimmy her hips and tease the men in the crowd by slowly taking off her dress, exposing her bare, heaving breasts below. I suppressed the urge to roll my eyes. No matter how rich or classy men pretended to be, they still went wild for strippers.
Naked servers with golden skin and trays of drinks streamed out from somewhere behind us, slinking into the theatre toward the crowds of robed men. They were swinging their hips seductively and smiling as the men’s greedy eyes lingered on their firm asses.
I nearly rolled my eyes again as I saw the brand-new second-level members being led away by yet more naked women. It looked like Willa and Mellie were both right. These events really were just a bunch of elitist guys getting wasted, doing silly old rituals for no reason and screwing high-class escorts. Just a glorified excuse to party.
Still, the strange, otherworldly goings-on would make an interesting topic for my paper.
A gong sounded about fifteen minutes later. Everyone went quiet and turned to face the stage, and the music and drum beats abruptly ceased as well. The sudden silence was eerie, and I swallowed hard. They all seemed to be looking at me.
The other Grecian-gowned actresses at the back of the stage with me slowly walked away from me, and I turned and watched them leave in confusion. “Wait, where are you going? Are we supposed to leave now?” I whispered urgently to the girl I’d arrived with as she stepped past me.
She kept walking, ignoring me.
I started walking too. Maybe I’d missed the instruction to leave, and I was supposed to follow them all. But as I walked, two red-robed men stepped in front of me, barring my way.
Shit. Someone must’ve figured out that I wasn’t really an actress; that I’d sneaked in here under false pretenses. “Wait,” I said frantically. “I can explain.”
The horn from earlier sounded again, and I heard a rising roar from my right. I turned to face the auditorium again, and my blood froze in my veins. Dozens of masked society members were charging toward the stage. Toward me.
I turned away from the two men barring my way and ran in the other direction, hoping I could get off the stage and escape the theatre on the other side. I had no idea how to get back through the forest, but I could figure it out later.
As I dashed down the stone steps leading off the stage, several of the men caught up, and I yelped as I felt an agonizing pinch in my neck, like I’d been stabbed with a red-hot knitting needle.
“Please, I….” I never got to finish the sentence. Whatever they’d just injected me with was already speeding through my veins and hitting me hard. My body felt boneless and my mind was spiraling into darkness, falling faster and faster with each second that passed.
I dropped like a stone, crumpling to the ground in a puddle of weak, whimpering terror.
The last thing I saw was a man in a sinister bronze mask looking down at me, and then the cold, calming darkness took over. I let it wash me away, far away, and then it finally pulled me under.
8
Tatum
I woke up in a small bed with white sheets, dressed in an unfamiliar sweatshirt and pants. I didn’t know where I was. Or who I was. I couldn’t even remember my name, let alone anything else. All I knew was that I felt sick. Bone-chillingly, gut-wrenchingly, feverishly sick.
Nausea made my insides churn, and I sat up, holding one hand over my mouth. The left side of my neck ached, and I moved my other hand up to delicately touch the skin there. “Ow!”
I pulled my hand away as if I’d been zapped. Even touching my fingertips to the area made it feel like I was gouging a hole in my neck. There had to be a serious bruise there.
I blinked, and a brief vision swam before me: a man with a large hypodermic needle. That was all. I still had no idea what happened to me or where I was.
I looked around, trying to make sense of everything. I was in a tiny box-like room with a gray stone wall running along one side. The rest of the walls were smooth white, and the floor was concrete. The bed was low and narrow, with an air vent high on the wall nearby. A toilet with no lid sat in one corner with a large grate next to it. The room had no windows, only a door to my right, but there was a glass pane on the door with a view of whatever lay beyond.
Letting out a groan, I forced myself up and padded across the room to look through the pane on the door. There was nothing but a hallway with white walls and bright lights. I guess it was nighttime. Other than that, still no clues as to where I was.
The nausea returned in full force, intensifying and robbing me of my strength. I stumbled to the corner of the room, my stomach aching and tightening more with each passing second. I kept swallowing and my throat kept clenching, trying to stop the horrible feeling in my chest, but it all came up a moment later as I crouched over the toilet, spilling out of me as I gasped and retched.
I heard a sound a couple of minutes later as I lay panting on the floor, waiting for the feeling in my guts to subside. I sluggishly rolled my head over to look, only to notice something I missed earlier. There was a slot on the bottom of the door, and someone had just slid a tray inside with a glass of water and a miniature plastic cup filled with green liquid.
I crawled over and gulped down the water, then sniffed the green fluid. Minty. It had to be mouthwash. After gargling with it, I spat it down the large grate near the toilet and crawled back over to the bed, exhausted. I closed my eyes and let sleep claim me.
I woke again an indeterminate amount of time later. A woman in a white outfit was standing over me, her hand pressed against my forehead. Cool, calming. A wave of relief flooded me. I must be in a hospital, and this was a doctor or nurse.
“What happened to me?” I asked in a croaky whisper. “I can’t remember anything.”
She didn’t say anything. Instead, she pulled me up so that I was in a seated position, then stepped over to a metal cart she must’ve brought in while I was still asleep. It was packed with medical equipment and objects: a blood pressure monitor, specimen cups, needles, cotton balls, medical tape, pill bottles.
“What hospital is this?” I asked.
“You aren’t in a hospital,” the woman finally said.
“What? Then where am I?” I asked, panic risin
g in my chest.
She ignored my question and wrapped part of the blood pressure monitor around my arm. After waiting for it to do its thing, she recorded the results on a clipboard.
“Hello?” I said incredulously. “Where the hell am I? What happened to me?”
“Your memory will return soon,” she said tartly. That was all she had to offer.
She conducted various other physical exams on me, touching and rubbing certain spots on my body to feel for any abnormalities or injuries, checking my reflexes, and taking my temperature. She kept muttering things like, ‘good,’ or ‘that’s fine’ and recording the results on the same clipboard. Then she shined a miniature flashlight in my eyes to check my pupils.
I gasped. The light flashing in my eyes had brought something back; a shimmering memory. Men in the woods, burning torches everywhere….
Oh, shit.
It was all flooding back now. I knew who I was. I knew what I’d done.
I was so stupid. So naïve. I actually thought my friends and I were right, and that all the silly conspiracy theories surrounding Crown and Dagger were exactly that—silly conspiracy theories. I thought the society was just a relatively-harmless group of wealthy men who liked to party and honor weird old traditions. I thought they wouldn’t hurt me.
But here I was, clearly in captivity, sore and sickly. They obviously saw me at their ceremony and realized I didn’t belong, and this was my punishment for violating their inner sanctum.
All this for a stupid grade in a stupid class.
I should’ve known better. I should’ve stopped the second I started getting those horrible threatening texts that morning.
“Wait,” I said frantically, scrambling to get off the bed. “This is a mistake. I shouldn’t be here. I didn’t mean anything by it. It was just… I just wanted to write a dumb paper. But I won’t tell anyone, I promise!”
The nurse wrenched me back into a seated position, then told me to stay still as she slipped on some gloves and held up a small needle.
I screamed and tried to fight her off, and she sighed and put the needle down. “These are just routine medical tests. If you keep fighting me, I’ll be forced to give you an orange juice. Is that what you want?”
I stopped shrieking and simply gaped at her. Was she crazy? I’d love an OJ right now.
“I’d actually like a drink, so go ahead,” I said, narrowing my eyes.
She gave me a thin-lipped smile. “You won’t like the orange juice here. It’s what they give the more spirited girls at night to make them sleep instead of screaming the place down all night and bothering the guards. The active ingredient in it is similar to what they injected you with last night. It wipes you out and when you wake up, you have no memories for a while and feel like you got hit by a freight train. Is that what you want?”
I bit my bottom lip and shook my head. “No,” I whispered miserably.
“Good girl. Now stay still.”
She wrapped a tourniquet around my upper arm, then stuck me with the needle. My blood filled the syringe a moment later, and she pulled the needle out and removed the sample, quickly capping it with one hand while applying pressure to the puncture mark on my arm with the other. Then she put a cotton ball and medical tape over it.
I sat back and watched, numb and exhausted. The nurse carefully labeled my blood sample, and then she held out one of the specimen cups. “I need you to urinate in this,” she said sharply.
A raw red flush of humiliation crept up my neck as I trudged over to the toilet and squatted over it, aiming for the specimen jar as much as possible. I filled it, then wiped and flushed. There was nowhere for me to wash my hands.
I swallowed hard and gave the sample to the nurse. “Can you please tell me what’s going to happen to me?” I asked softly. Hopefully I could appeal to her, woman to woman, and she’d give up some information.
No such luck.
“Please,” I said, my voice reaching a higher pitch again. “I have friends and family. They’ll wonder where I am. I can’t just stay here.”
“That’s all been taken care of,” she said. She held up another needle. “I’ll need you to stay still again.”
“Wait, what? What do you mean it’s been taken care of?”
“I said stay still.”
“No!” I backed away from her. “What the hell is in that needle?”
She rolled her eyes. “It’s not poison, if that’s what you’re worried about. It’s just a basic Depo contraceptive shot. Now come here, or I’ll get someone to give you some juice. I think we already established you don’t want that.”
My blood felt like ice in my veins. A contraceptive shot? That was very illuminating. I knew exactly what was going to happen to me now.
Tears burst forth like water from a dam, spilling down my face in warm salty rivulets. The muscles in my chin trembled and I looked toward the horrible nurse, as if blatantly showing my terror and distress might actually soften her attitude.
She simply stared at me, her gray eyes cold and dead inside, like a shark. She didn’t move. I had a feeling she had been through this exact process many times, and she was waiting for me to cry it out and give up.
My eyes kept dripping with tears, drenching my shirt, and soon I was on the ground sobbing as the walls that once held me up and made me strong began to collapse. I was innocent. I didn’t deserve this. All I did was sneak into an event and see some weird stuff. Nothing criminal happened there, just some entertainment, some drinking, and probably some wild sex, so why did it even matter if I witnessed it? I couldn’t get any of them in trouble for it. Surely they would realize that soon and let me go. It was all a mistake.
Despite that belief, I couldn’t stop sobbing, no matter how hard I tried. Try as I might to convince myself otherwise, I knew I was anything but innocent. The guilt that had nestled deep within me for the last year and a half, coiled like a snake, was bubbling up in my throat, and a little voice in the back of my head was whispering, ‘maybe you deserve this.’ I pressed my hand against my mouth, trembling and shaking as the raw emotion spilled forth.
The pain started to come in waves, subsiding for long enough to let me take short recovering breaths before hurling me back into grief again. Finally, there were no more tears, no more gasps, no more begging. I was too tired.
“Are we done with the tantrum?” the nurse said in an acid tone.
I nodded and stayed curled up on the floor, barely lifting my head for the gesture. She crouched down and jabbed the needle in my upper left arm. “There. That wasn’t so hard, was it?”
“Please….” I said in a last-ditch attempt to get help, my voice nothing more than a ragged whisper.
“I’ll get these to the lab for testing. You need to try to get some more rest,” she replied calmly. She didn’t acknowledge my plea for help.
She wheeled the cart to the door and slid some sort of keycard into a slot. A light flashed green as something beeped, and the door swung open. I knew I could try to rush the door and slip out with her and the cart, but I was too exhausted, and besides, I could see a man in black clothes and boots out in the hall. She’d mentioned guards earlier, so he must be one of them.
I wouldn’t make it two steps out that door.
With a defeated sigh, I got back on the bed and closed my eyes, praying that this was all some sort of horrible nightmare. Perhaps I would wake up in my bed tomorrow, and I would go down for breakfast with my friends and laugh about the crazy dream I had. It would be nothing more than a dark memory from the depths of my imagination.
But sleep never came. Even though my muscles ached and my eyelids felt heavy, I couldn’t make it happen. I lay stretched out on the white sheets for what felt like hours, though it could’ve been mere minutes. I had no way to tell.
A scraping noise came from my right again, and my eyes shot to the door. The slot was opening again. I could see hands pushing a tray inside. Food and water.
“Hey!” I sprang off the b
ed and got down on my hands and knees, trying to call through the slot to whoever was on the other side. “Please, you have to help me! I’m not supposed to be here!”
Whoever they were, they completely ignored me. The slot closed, and through the thick glass pane on the door, I saw them rise to their feet and stride away. My shoulders slumping in defeat, I leaned down to pick up the tray and carried it over to the bed.
There was a tall glass of water, some sort of reddish-brown tablet, and a bowl of oatmeal. I gulped down the water, wolfed down the oats, and ignored the tablet. Who the hell knew what was in it?
Then again, the water and oatmeal could be laced with god-knows-what as well. Shit. I didn’t think that through.
The door suddenly swung open again, and I turned my head and lifted my eyes to see a middle-aged man in a dark gray suit enter the room. He closed the door behind him and smiled at me.
My stomach clenched. It was Tobias King.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he said, motioning toward the plate. “But it’s just food. The tablet is just a multivitamin. You’ll only be drugged if you misbehave.”
I leapt to my feet. “What the hell is going on?” I said. “You can’t keep me here like some sort of prisoner. All I did was sneak into a dumb ceremony. That’s not illegal! It was just for a paper, but I don’t have to write it. Just let me go and I promise I’ll never say a word!”
He laughed mirthlessly, a sinister sound that made me want to throw up. “Firstly, the ceremony was on private land, so technically, sneaking into it was illegal. As for your paper… that’s not why you’re here, Tatum.”
Confusion surged through my mind. “I don’t understand.”
He patted the bed. “Sit down.”
“No.”
He shrugged. “Very well. This could take a while, though.”
“I’ll stand,” I said, not wanting to do anything this horrible man commanded me to do.
