Player didn’t feel like there was improvement. He didn’t want to go to the doc’s home, where his wife and child were, either. It was too dangerous, with his mind already spinning his illusions. He could see the bench and table in his mind where he built his bombs. That wasn’t good. It was never good. Not if all those things were lining up. He couldn’t open his eyes no matter how hard he tried to pry his lids apart.
“No.” Zyah’s protest was instant. Player recognized her voice. “That’s not a good idea. He has to stay here.”
Player hadn’t realized she was close. He didn’t want her near him. Not when he wasn’t in control.
“Stay still, Player,” Steele ordered softly. “Let me take care of you.”
Player subsided. He didn’t dare go against Steele when he used his “doctor” voice. In any case, Player wasn’t altogether certain what was really happening. He stayed still and listened, trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together.
“Explain why you think Player would be better off here with you instead of with me in my home,” Steele continued as if nothing had interrupted them.
“I can’t explain it any more than you can explain to me what you’re doing right now,” Zyah said. “Only that I have an absolutely strong reaction against you taking him from here.” She hesitated. “Even when I don’t want him here.” There was honesty in her voice.
Zyah seemed to hesitate again, as if she were trying to decide what to say and how to say it. Player tried to focus on her, but even that small concentration put too much strain on him and pain exploded through him. Steele all but snarled at him, and he made an effort to keep very still and allow his brain to do the same.
Zyah’s voice was decisive when she spoke. “You have a tremendous gift, Steele. I’ve never seen anything like it. I doubt if Player would have survived without you, and I know he’ll need your constant care for a while. Just the last few days have proven that. But I have a strong gift as well, and Player and I are connected in a very elemental way. Your talent works on the brain itself, repairing it. My gift works on the mind. I can only tell you that I believe with everything in me that if you take him away from me, we’ll lose him. Something terrible will happen.”
There was a long silence. Player willed Steele to say no. He couldn’t stay there and endanger Zyah, not when he couldn’t remember much beyond the caterpillar smoking and the lobsters riding the cyclones in the sea. Or the materials for making bombs laid out on the table for him to start work. He couldn’t get past the pounding in his head to pry his eyelids open. Maybe the blood had sealed them shut permanently. He allowed himself to drift on the waves of pain as they rose and fell through his head.
* * *
The next time Player woke, he knew he was alone, but he had no idea where he was. He tried to figure it out, but the pain was too brutal. What had it been this time? What had they done to him? To his body? He couldn’t remember. He didn’t want to. Sweat beaded from his pores. He had no idea of time passing, but he rarely did. The pounding in his head prevented movement and thought. He just let the pain take him wherever it wanted to go.
Player wasn’t like the others. They had useful talents. All of them did, whether they thought so or not. Lana didn’t think she contributed much to their unit, their family—and they’d become one, thanks to Czar. Player knew better. Lana brought them all comfort. When it was at the bleakest hour, when there was no hope, Lana brought them out of the darkness. She found a way. The rest of them all had talents that counted, that contributed to their survival. What did he do for them? He skated the edge of danger all the time. The others just weren’t aware of it as he was.
The knowledge had been growing in him ever since the unfortunate mushroom incident. That had provided endless laughter for his family. Player had laughed with them—on the outside. On the inside, he had grown very scared. He knew something was wrong with his brain, and that something was getting stronger, taking him over.
All of them had been so hungry. They were always hungry. Starving. Freezing cold and hungry. Held down in what they referred to as the dungeon, the basement of the school they all attended, they huddled together in a little pile of shivering bodies, leaking blood from open wounds and trying to stay alive. He wasn’t certain why they bothered trying most of the time, but self-preservation was strong in all of them. Absinthe took turns with his older brother Demyan, or Transporter, reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. They did the voices, and that kept their minds off the ever-present hunger.
Where had that book come from? It hadn’t been in the meager library of books they stole from. He tried to remember. Every time he did, like now, there was an explosion of pain accompanied by a memory of the long table with the pieces of the equipment laid out precisely, the way he always laid out the materials before he began building bombs. Behind him stood Sorbacov with his ever-present pocket watch, while Player hunched naked on the bench, trying to build the bomb fast to avoid the punishment—the whip tearing the flesh from his back if he didn’t beat his last time.
Where had they gotten the book, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which was being read while they shivered with cold and hunger? Player couldn’t remember, but he knew it was important.
Alena had managed to slip outside and make her way into the woods, where she gathered roots, nuts and mushrooms. She brought leaves, berries and cone nodules. She also brought bark and other supplies for their “medicine well.” They had dug a hole and put in it the precious herbs, powders and barks she stole from the instructors or managed to get when she escaped through the narrow crack they’d widened just enough for her to slide through.
She was very small. They weren’t given clothes down in the dungeon, because to their captors, they weren’t human, so they greased her body as best they could, and she slid through the narrow crack and out into the forest in the dead of night to gather what she could to feed them and help Steele treat their wounds.
Alena knew plants, the ones they could eat and the ones that could be used for medicinal purposes. She had a natural instinct for them. Until the mushrooms. She was affectionately called Torch because she could start little fires when she concentrated. Czar had them all working to enhance and perfect their psychic skills—all but Player. Player didn’t seem to have any psychic skills—at least any he’d admitted to the others yet. His was more of a parlor trick.
The pain pounded in his head, mixing with the sound of Absinthe’s voice as he read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Player tried to concentrate on the story. It was wonderful, and he let the images build in his head, the caterpillar floating in the air, smoking, blowing those wonderful rings of smoke. He thought they would be a good thing to have if he could break through the walls of reality and drop those rings of smoke around the necks of the men who had flayed the skin from his body. The men who had beat some poor hapless girl because Player had controlled his body when she had tried so hard to arouse him. He’d been flayed while he aroused her and made her scream when she came. He hadn’t made a sound when the fuckers beat him. But damn. His head was exploding.
Building the nooses from smoke, he crafted them carefully, sent them floating through the air, let them become smaller and smaller. The walls were faded enough so that there was nothing to stop his weapons from seeking their target. The smiling blue caterpillar floated on his little cloud pillow, blowing the rings, his smirk indicating he knew that each ring contained a thin little garrote that would slice through the neck of the men who had so savagely raped and beaten him.
His head was coming apart. Every time he moved, the smoke whirled around him faster and faster and the pounding in his skull got so much worse. He could see pieces of his brain flying out of him as he spun around like the Mad Hatter. The mushrooms. Alena’s mushrooms were making him hallucinate.
Player tried to sit up, but that made things worse, his brain exploding, taking him right out of the dungeon s
o that he was no longer in Wonderland following his caterpillar. He was at a table constructing a bomb unlike any he’d ever seen before. Sorbacov was standing over him, with his inevitable pocket watch, the White Rabbit racing away as if late. Sorbacov peered over his shoulder, watching closely, as Player began to build the bomb with meticulous care.
“Player. Player, stop.” Sorbacov caught at his arm and shook him hard. “Open your eyes and look at me. You have to stop.”
He couldn’t just stop. Not in the middle of putting together such an intricate piece of hardware. He was certain Sorbacov was shaking his arm. And his arm hurt nearly as bad as his head, which was really going to explode the moment the bomb was finished.
“Let go.” He managed to get that out through clenched teeth. The sound of his own voice shocked him. He was hallucinating, sending out his silent smoky nooses to kill the enemy, taking down walls and building intricate bombs he’d never seen before. “Let go, Sorbacov.” He tried his voice again, making it stronger.
“Maestro,” his Torpedo Ink brother corrected. “You’re having a dream.”
The fog cleared. The walls shimmered and disappeared. The table he’d been bent over wavered and vanished along with Sorbacov. Had it really all been an illusion he was building in his head? Making a reality? His fucking head pounded so bad he was afraid he was going to vomit, and it wasn’t his bed or his covers.
Player smelled her, his private dancer. So impossibly beautiful with her dark eyes and long flowing hair and that body of hers built for sin and pleasure. He was in her bedroom. In her home. Her grandmother was close by. Just downstairs. They were both close. Was she real or another one of his fucking illusions he’d made real? He just didn’t know anymore, but he couldn’t take any chances with her life.
“Get me out of here, Maestro. You have to get me out of here.”
He struggled to sit up, but the moment he did, his head exploded. Completely shattered. He actually saw the pieces rushing away from his head like tiny wedges of broken shards of glass. They spun in the air just like in a damn movie, and floated in the air, his brains spilling out like mirror images. Great globs of blood blew into the air and swirled in slow circles.
“Geez, Player, what the fuck is happening?” Maestro whispered. “This isn’t funny.”
“What’s going on in here? You’re going to wake my grandmother.”
Her voice. Soft like a summer breeze. Drifting into the room. Right into the gore of his scattered brains. There was no retrieving the rest of the pieces. It was far too late. Even with Maestro leaping up and trying to stand in front of him, how could he hide an exploding head?
“Leave the room,” Zyah ordered softly. “If you want him to live, you have to leave the room right this minute.”
“Don’t listen to her,” Player said, only nothing came out of his mouth. He couldn’t talk with his brains floating away on the shards of glass. “It’s too dangerous. I’m too dangerous.”
He tried again to shout the warning. No one heard. No one listened or paid attention. He began to build a megaphone in his mind, or what was left of his mind. There was nothing. No brain cells—they had floated away. How could he talk? How could he think to form words? He wasn’t making sense.
Maestro stood in front of him for another few seconds, staring straight into Zyah’s eyes. “You hurt him, I’ll fucking break your neck,” he warned.
“Just get out and save the drama.”
His sweet dancer didn’t sound so sweet when she was throwing Maestro out of her bedroom. Maestro was as intimidating as they came—unless you were looking at Savage or Destroyer. Maybe Reaper, although if Anya was around . . .
“I’m standing right here by the door.”
“Owww.” His eyelids flew open, and he found himself staring into a pair of stormy, turbulent eyes. “Zyah, you have to leave. There’s a bomb. I’m a bomb. It’s going to go off again any minute. You’re not safe. Your grandmother . . .”
Zyah wrapped a wide lavender scarf around his head, covering the long line of stitches Steele had put into his scalp. The scarf was soaked in something that wasn’t in the least soothing and sweet the way his dancer should be. The liquid was some kind of astringent, something that seeped into his open brain and grew hotter and hotter until he was certain flames licked at what remained of his cells.
“Stop being a baby.”
“I can see you have this under control,” Maestro said and deserted him.
Player tried to push Zyah away. “My brain is scattered. Everywhere. In pieces. Can’t you see? Like glass. I’m shattered. Like glass. I’m a bomb.”
She put her head down close to his, hands framing his face, holding him still, looking into his eyes. “I’m a glassblower,” she whispered. “No one is as good as I am at blowing glass. Just stay quiet and let me take care of this. I’ll put you back together.”
“Too dangerous. I have to get away from you.”
She ignored his warning as she began to hum softly, her body swaying as she wrapped a makeshift bandage around his head, pulling more and more of the floating debris that were the scattered pieces of his brain back inside his skull.
He saw the table he’d been using to make the bomb. All the parts were laid out, and they shimmered beneath the glass and her fire. The parts looked different from his usual ones. His tools morphed into a set of tweezers in a variety of sizes, a crimp, a taglia and straight shears.
Zyah took her time, collecting the fragments floating around the room and, with the sound of her song, fitting them together, like a jigsaw puzzle. It should have been soothing, like the first night in her company, but this was anything but. Fire burned through his brain. Hot. Searing. Like the hottest blowtorch imaginable.
Player clenched his teeth and did his best to let the pain wash over him, but the blaze only seemed to grow hotter, licking along every pathway and nerve in his fractured mind. He felt that fire, each separate flame as it glowed through his mind. To really blow glass, the temperature had to be over one thousand Celsius, didn’t it? This felt like well over a thousand degrees.
“Woman.” He attempted to raise his arm and the same thing happened. A wildfire stormed from his head to his shoulder and roared down his bicep to his forearm. “I get that you’re pissed as hell at me. You have every right to be, but aren’t women supposed to have some built-in compassion? Empathy? What the hell?”
“Hell. Exactly. Hot like a fire. A healing one. It will seal all your brains back where they’re supposed to be.” She sounded a little smug, but she kept her voice low. Musical. Her body still moved in that flowing dance, arms out, hands graceful, mesmerizing. Her soothing song continued. Now her feet were moving on the floor, bare feet, calling out to the earth below with a patterned song. “Perhaps with a little help, you’ll learn not to scatter your brains and bombs all over my bedroom.”
She sang the words. Sang them. In that voice of hers, the one that penetrated all the way through the pieces scattered everywhere, pulling them to her as if she were gathering them into a long tube and heating the fragments as she blew air with the notes of her song right into them. She shaped them back into a whole entity with the sheer power of her voice and the movements of her body, generating the intense heat needed from below the ground, drawing it up from the earth with her bare feet.
He was shocked that she had the ability to override his fucked-up psychic gift. It was useless. He was useless. Dangerous. The moment something went haywire, his brain went back to his childhood and the things he’d been taught—none of them good.
“Concentrate on where you are now, Player. You aren’t there. You’re here with me. You aren’t a child locked away in a dungeon.”
He closed his eyes and turned his face away, subsiding on the pillow. It didn’t matter how bad the pain was. How hot the fire. She saw. She shared his mind with him. Even if she only caught glimpses of the boy with
the skin flayed off his back, she saw what had been done to him, and shame washed through his mind. He didn’t want to look at her. He didn’t want her to see him.
She already knew too much. How his brain could build an alternate universe and trap others in it. Hurt them. Worse. Actually kill them. Now she knew what had been done to him when he was a child. No, more than a child. Beyond a child. A teen. She’d seen him building bombs. She knew what he was capable of. He had wanted to court this woman. Find a way to convince her he was worthy of her. That was laughable. What was he thinking? He had absolutely nothing to offer her. Nothing. Because he was nothing. The only fucking thing he had was the ink on his back, and that wouldn’t mean a damn thing to her.
SEVEN
Player should be dead. That was the truth. Had he gone to a hospital, there was no doubt in Zyah’s mind, he would have died. Steele had saved his life—well, if he lived. That was still a question. He wasn’t out of the woods. His club was well aware of it too, especially Steele. His club had no real idea of how dangerous he was. Player knew. In his delirium, when he semi-woke in the middle of the night, he continuously begged whoever was watching over him to take him away.
Steele came every day and worked at healing him. Zyah was astonished at how fast he was healing. The man was a true miracle worker—she said so every day. That didn’t stop Player from feeling pain. Nothing stopped that pain. Nothing took it away. No matter what she did, he felt the pain. When it got to be too much, he woke, and his brain, already in pieces, would go back to his horrific childhood. She knew it was horrific, because she was so connected to him, she shared whatever memory or illusion he was in at the time—and all of them were horrific.
Zyah found herself sitting next to him on the bed, pushing back his damp hair with her fingers, trying not to cry. She didn’t want to think the things he had in his head were true, that any child could have suffered what he had—but that nightmare world was far too detailed. It included every one of his brethren in Torpedo Ink, and they were all children in that same horrible place.
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