Tethered to the World: A Phantom Touched Novel

by Brutger, Stacey

  * * *

  Annora came to consciousness slowly, her head throbbing so painfully, concentration was difficult. When she sat up, she discovered she was lying on a narrow army cot, a scratchy green blanket covering her legs. She gingerly leaned forward, cradling her head, noting the dried blood smeared on the pillowcase.

  She threw her legs over the edge of the cot, struggling to swallow as bile rose at the back of her throat, the room spinning wildly around her.

  “You should take it easy. Reserve your strength. They’ll be coming for you soon.”

  Her head jerked up at the soft tone, and she cursed when her vision doubled, before she finally was able to focus on the only other occupant of the room.

  Terrance.

  He was still bruised and banged up from having a car practically run him over. She expected to find him full of drugs, but he had none of the aggressive symptoms. So if he didn’t do it for the drugs…

  “Why?” The question emerged as a croak, her throat feeling like she’d swallowed splinters.

  “Here.” He pressed a glass into her hand. “Sip slowly.”

  She wanted to toss it back in his face, but she didn’t have the energy. The cool glass dampened her palm, making her mouth water. “Why should I trust you?”

  Only when he was sure that she had the glass did he shrug and straighten. “You shouldn’t. You shouldn’t trust anyone here.”

  He backed away, unable to meet her eyes, like he was ashamed for the part he played in her kidnapping. “I didn’t have a choice. For what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”

  Before she could say anything else, he opened the door and left.

  Seconds later, the locks clicked.

  The room was small, more of a closet, its walls a dingy white. The dust on the floor was so thick, she knew they didn’t use the space often. She glanced at the water, hesitated for a few moments, then downed it. If they wanted to drug her, they could’ve just injected her with something while she was unconscious.

  More than a few minutes later the pounding in her head receded enough for her to think straight. And the silence was deafening. She unconsciously reached for the guys, but she couldn’t hear anything past the loud thump of her heartbeat echoing in her head.

  She gingerly probed the wound, wincing at the sharp pain when her light touch threatened to split open her skull. She tried to bury it, push past it, but she knew this feeling…her skull was fractured. Until her brain unscrambled, her abilities—including the ability to heal—would work only sporadically.

  She needed to conserve her strength. The longer she went without forcing the issue, the better the chance her powers would return in time for her to save herself.

  She’d been locked away and drugged enough times that she’d developed a process. First step was to examine the extent of her injuries and confirm if she was able to function. Check. The next was to investigate her surroundings and search for weaknesses. The thought of moving made her grit her teeth, but she didn’t have a choice. The longer she waited, the lower her chances of survival.

  She gripped the edges of the cot, then pushed herself upright, fighting to stay conscious as the room spun wildly. When she wobbled precariously, she leaned heavily against the wall for balance, then spread her fingers against the rotted surface, the urge to ghost through it and escape curled through her.

  One thing stopped her.

  She couldn’t ghost through solid rock for more than a few seconds.

  She could return to the room if it proved too thick, but passing through so much solid matter would leave her weakened and disoriented when she needed to remain focused.

  But that didn’t mean she couldn’t ghost through the door.

  The darkness churned sluggishly, as if it didn’t understand her command. She’d almost given up when the fog slowly wrapped around her, pulling her into the afterworld. To her surprise, the world didn’t look much different.

  Hell had already come to earth.

  The world around her flickered in and out of existence, a warning that she didn’t have much time. Shadows shifted in the corner of the room, and she stumbled back, only to see Edgar charge toward her.

  Tears prickled the backs of her eyes.

  He would always come for her, no matter how much abuse he took from her uncle, he never abandoned her, and she’d never been more grateful.

  When he jumped and landed on her chest, she tripped over her own feet and fell backwards through the door. The metal snagged on her bones for a few seconds before she was rudely dumped into the hall, her body taking form as she struggled to remain upright.

  Thankfully, the hall was empty.

  She would’ve breathed a sigh of relief if she had any breath left. She cuddled Edgar to her chest, his worried chatter frantic as he crawled up her shoulder and curled around her neck. She cuddled him for a few seconds, needing the connection, then pulled her hair out of her ponytail to hide his presence, and studied her surroundings.

  The hall was dark and narrow, possibly an abandoned building if the crumbling drywall was any indication. There were only two other doors besides the one she left, the passage disappearing around the corner and into darkness.

  Annora headed down the hall, but only made it a few feet before she halted.

  She couldn’t leave.

  Innocent kids were being held there against their will, murdered to create a recreational drug for a tyrant who wanted to rule them all. The smart thing to do would be to get help, but instinct warned that she would never get out alive on her own.

  Annora turned on her heel and backtracked, pausing by the first door, her hand hovering over the knob. Edgar hissed, curling tighter around her, and her hair lifted on the back of her neck. She slowly pulled away, curling her fingers into a fist and carefully eased down the hall.

  As she neared the next door, the feeling faded.

  She carefully wrapped her fingers around the doorknob, the cold metal biting into her skin as she eased open the door. Inside was a large room, the ceiling a black, gaping maw. The walls were torn down to studs, the place reeking of urine and excrement. There were about a dozen cots set up around the room, white netting dropping down from the ceiling, cocooning the beds.

  She stood frozen, unable to make herself investigate what lay underneath the netting.

  A cluttered desk stood by the door, vials, papers and books haphazardly covering the surface. One name popped out at her—Stanley Barnes—her uncle. She lunged forward, snatching up the pages, quickly scanning the document.

  Which happened to be a contract.

  He had been selling an elixir to the wolves for the past eight months for a tidy sum of twenty-five thousand dollars a vial. Hands shaking, she dropped the letter and scurried around the desk, a deep pit opening up in her stomach.

  She stopped short when she saw the small fridge. Her skin began to prickle, her mouth dry, as she reached for the handle, afraid she already knew what she would find.

  And she was right.

  Inside the fridge were four familiar vials—each containing her blood—a reminder of her time with her uncle and his bi-weekly blood draw that left her weak and depleted for days.

  She snatched them up, then smashed them against the floor, taking pleasure in the way they shattered. She quickly flipped through the desk, halting abruptly when her hand burned when it came into contact with an old sheet of paper tucked away from the rest.

  The page was thick and crumbling along the edges, the sheet obviously hundreds of years old. The writing contained more images than words, but the longer she stared at the page, the more her stomach pitched.

  She wasn’t sure how, but she knew what she held was a dangerous spell that would wreak havoc in the supernatural community—and beyond, if it got into the wrong hands. She folded the page, unwilling to leave it behind, and shoved it in her back pocket.

  She straightened slowly, then turned toward the beds, her bones aching with the knowledge of what she was likely to find.
She shuffled forward, then flung open the dingy white netting to see a near-desiccated body lying on a thin mattress, his wrists and ankles shackled to the bedframe. The corpse was practically naked but for a loincloth, the rest of its body covered with butterflies from the afterworld, the powdery, bioluminescent blue color nearly saturating their black wings.

  Edgar peered out behind the curtain of her hair to observe the body, then curled up to go back to sleep, as if he’d seen the disturbing sight many times before.

  The corpse wheezed with each breath, his chest creaking as he moved. His skin looked raw, half-rotten flesh showing where the parasites repeatedly bit into him. A putrid smell rose from the remains, mixed with the almost-too-sweet scent of flowers that came from the butterflies, the combination nauseating, and she realized the smell was a paralytic.

  Watching their soul being consumed in the afterworld was one thing, but witnessing the flesh being literally devoured chilled her to the bone. She called the darkness, waving her hand over the butterflies, watching them vanish in a cloud of dust particles.

  A groan tore from the corpse, his eyes cracked open, and she nearly stumbled away in horror. “Are you strong enough to heal?” She fiddled with the clamps holding him down, glancing around the rest of the beds, sickened to realize that at least a dozen or so more were suffering a similar fate. “The others…”

  “Go…” It was a rasp, barely above a whisper.

  The clamp clicked open, and she swallowed hard as the near-skeletal hand began to move, his skin seeming to sag off his body. She backed away, shaking herself free of the horror and headed for the next bed. It would be sooner rather than later before they found her missing and came looking.

  The bodies were not so far gone in the next eight beds, the shifters conscious of the horrors happening to them, able to feel their flesh slowly disintegrate but helpless to do anything. A few of them were wolves, but the remaining were a series of other species.

  Two of the bodies were dead, the butterflies fully formed, their wings slowly flapping as if in a food coma.

  There were three more beds left when she flung open the next curtain and almost recoiled when she saw Vicki’s prone body. She looked in worse shape than the others, her body beaten and abused, her deterioration faster.

  And she realized it was because Vicki wasn’t as strong as the others, the drugs she loved so much having already weakened her system.

  “Coming…to…gloat?” The question was a rasp as Vicki struggled for breath.

  It shook Annora out of her paralysis, and she called the darkness, banishing the butterflies in a cloud of smoke. The action was draining, her head thrumming in time with her heartbeat, and she knew she didn’t have much strength left. She reached for the shackles with shaky fingers when the guy from the first bed shuffled over next to her.

  “Go. Finish the rest.” The words seemed to exhaust him, but he was already looking better than he had been ten minutes ago…which wasn’t saying much. His skin was beginning to heal, looked less likely to slough off when he moved, but his skinny frame was seventy pounds too light, his body so bony it was a miracle that he could even move. She’d swear she could actually hear him creaking as he nudged her aside.

  When she went to the last three beds, she discovered it was already too late.

  The bodies on the beds were nothing more than fleshy skeletons, their skin seeming to peel off their bones to pool around them, barely clinging to the bodies anymore. Their eyes were wide in pure terror, no longer able to close them and block out the horror, their mouths open on a silent scream. She banished the last of the butterflies, then slowly closed the netting behind her, blocking out the gruesome sight.

  Only a few of the shifters showed even a hint of healing—the strongest of the alphas—while the rest looked barely able to hold themselves upright. If it came to a fight, they’d be slaughtered.

  “How are you able to do that?” Vicki was seated at the side of her bed, panting as if the small effort required to remain upright exhausted her.

  The last thing Annora wanted to do was admit anything to them, and the true extent of her mother’s warning struck home. She could never be friends with these people. They would always see her as a threat or a potential victim to exploit. “You’re a wolf…I am not.” She pulled out the sheet out of her back pocket and held it up. “I banished the parasites back to where they belonged.”

  The first guy she rescued swallowed hard. “They etched some kind of design on our bodies with a nasty mixture that seemed to summon those insects. Every few days they would harvest the butterflies, grind them into powder for their drug, and start the process all over again, just so some asshole can feel good for a few hours.”

  As if exhausted by his speech, he slumped on the bed behind him. She glanced at the seven survivors with no clue how to get them out of this mess alive.

  Before they had a chance to say more, the door was thrown open. Taylor stood in the doorway, a few of his pack members behind him. He blanched when he saw the others were out of bed, a tendril of terror nearly dousing the anger in his eyes. “What did you do?”

  Chapter Twenty-three

  “How the fuck could we have lost her?” Camden paced the kitchen, gripping the back of his neck, unable to face the others.

  He was supposed to be the leader, but he was fucking useless.

  He had no clue how to get her back.

  The instant the connection broke, the light went out of his world. The crushing weight of being alone again robbed him of breath. He tore out of the house, barely aware of the guys a second behind him. He charged through the forest, dread tearing through him because, he knew if he didn’t catch her in time, it was likely he would never see her again.

  Not acceptable.

  They searched for an hour before giving up. Her trail led to a pool of blood, then her scent vanished.

  There was no sense searching farther.

  They’d taken her.

  The doorbell rang, drawing him back to the present, and he turned to see Director Greenwood had entered without waiting for a response. “Erickson is gone, his office cleared of files. He’s not coming back.”

  Greenwood looked like he’d aged ten years, and Camden realized the old man considered Annora one of his own—and he didn’t believe they were going to get her back.

  She burst into their life, a breath of fresh air to a drowning man, and managed to burrow a place for herself in all their hearts without even trying.

  The Director’s doubt firmed Camden’s resolve to get her back, and he straightened and faced the others. “The wolves won’t kill her right away. We have time to get her back.” He whirled to face the Director. “Where would Erickson and the wolves go?”

  Xander punched the fridge once, twice, denting the metal, the fine feathers in his hair standing on end, his human form barely able to hold back the gryphon as he lost hope. Mason was so devastated about losing Annora on his watch that he was barely able to function. Logan, fortunately, was in warrior mode, and nothing could persuade him they wouldn’t get her back.

  “We’ll go through his finances and records,” Rufus volunteered, but shook his head. “But it will take days, if not weeks to track them all down. I have assembled the other teams, each of them volunteering to help search.”

  The guys fell silent, going still as the truth settled over them.

  No one else thought they would get her back.

  Panic and despair nearly gutted him, but Camden shook his head.

  That outcome was completely unacceptable.

  He would never stop searching for her.

  It was the scrape of wood on the floor that made everyone whirl just in time to see her dammed ferrets jump up on the chair, then the counter, before pawing the air.

  Everything inside him froze, and he remembered that, while they looked like animals, they were from Annora’s afterworld. For the first time, hope lodged itself in his chest. “Do you know how to find her?”

&
nbsp; The ferrets nodded in unison, and excitement shot through him as he leapt the distance between them.

  She was alive.

  And they were his only clue to getting her back.

  “She had to have been hit hard. She wouldn’t have let herself be taken without a fight.” Logan and the other guys came over to surround the ferrets. “They must have knocked her out so she wouldn’t ghost them.”

  Mason nodded, the first signs of life coming back to his eyes. “The blow could’ve knocked her out cold, kicking the connection offline.”

  “Then why hasn’t she contacted us since?” Xander asked with a growl.

  “Either she hasn’t regained consciousness or…” Camden swallowed hard, forcing himself to finish his sentence. “Or she’s injured, a blow hard enough to prevent her from reaching out.”

  A muscle jumped in Xander’s jaw, barely managing to maintain control over his beast.

  Camden very much dreaded what would happen if they didn’t get Annora back. He wasn’t sure any of them would ever recover.

  Camden turned toward the ferrets, his heart thundering in his chest, the shaft of hope nearly painful as he hunched down. “What do we need to do?”

  The ferrets ran forward, each standing in front of one of the guys. Then the furry little animals charged forward and bit each one of them.

  “Son of a bitch.” Camden jerked back, the rest of the guys clutching their injuries, but none of them protested. When he was about to ask what the hell that was supposed to accomplish, he felt the familiar trickle of darkness he associated with Annora sweep through his mind, but instead of Annora, this was darker, more menacing, and his eyes widened in understanding.

  “You’re her stalker, aren’t you?” he narrowed his gaze at the little vermin. “The one hunting her in the afterworld.” The ferrets all turned and seemed to glare at him. He wasn’t sure how it was possible, or what they wanted with her, but that was a problem for another day. While he sure as fuck didn’t trust them, he knew one thing…they would do anything to keep Annora safe.