“Seamus, cut it out. Laughing is excruciating.”
“Well, if you need a distraction, you let me know.”
“Seamus!”
The weird thing was, I totally agreed with him. It might have been the damned mating bond talking, but I couldn’t help but feel like shagging would have been a much better way to spend our time.
“Oddly enough, I agree with you, but man, I hurt so much it cannot possibly be a good idea.”
“To be clear, I’m not touching you with a ten-foot pole until you say you’re all better and excited about sex. I am not into pain, certainly not your pain. I’m not suggesting we do anything. I’m just lamenting the missed opportunity.”
He was silent for a moment.
“And now that I think about it, there’s a good chance that’s the mating bond talking, because honestly, I could have proposed that we write a new treatise on women’s rights or something. I swear my brain wouldn’t normally have jumped to sex.”
“It’s ok, Seamus, this mating bond thing is a jerk…. Besides, it would be kind of difficult to write a treatise on anything right now. For one thing, we don’t have any paper. For another, it’s pitch black in here. For another—”
Before I could finish, the sound of hinges screeching in the distance made both Seamus and me jump. I could tell Seamus jumped because the floor vibrated a bit. The sound of boots on stone rang out down the corridor, then more light flooded our cell.
“What the—”
“Victoria Marmot?” asked a voice in the darkness.
“Who’s asking?”
I mean, because why the fuck not. I had nothing better to do, and talking was one of the few things that didn’t hurt.
“Come to the cell door, please. We’re here to check your injuries.”
The voice was authoritative and masculine, but that did not add to the total fucks I had left to give.
“So, funny story: I’m not lying here for fun, asshole.”
“Get up, please.”
“I can’t, genius. My injuries are such that moving is excruciating, I haven’t even gotten close to trying to stand up without passing out. So, if you are here to look at my injuries, you can come and get it.”
There was silence for a moment, then the light from the cell door passed over me and Seamus. I would have taken the chance to check out Seamus and make sure that he was ok, but I was still blinded by the light that had flashed my way. By the time I could see again, the light was focused elsewhere.
“Neutralize the other one.”
“What? Wait! Don’t hurt him!”
But before I was done talking, I heard the compressed air bang of a tranquilizer gun, a sound I was only familiar with thanks to my summers working in wildlife rescue. I was relieved and upset at the same time. Getting shot with a tranq was, by all accounts, no fun, but at least they hadn’t done anything permanently damaging to him.
The cell door opened, and I tried to move so that I could see whoever was coming in, but the pain of adjusting my position was more than I could take and I almost passed out with the effort.
Before I could do any more, the light was shining in my eyes again and I couldn’t see who was examining me, anyway. A set of hands started gently exploring the skin on my left side, and I couldn’t help but flinch at the touch.
“She looks rough,” said a second voice.
“Silence, Flemens,” said the first voice that had spoken. The hands didn’t waver in their assessment.
“What’s the matter?” I asked. “Don’t like the handiwork of your comrades? This is all courtesy of whichever MOME operatives came to pick me up at my home.”
“Quiet, prisoner. No one asked you to talk.”
“Funnily enough, I talk all the time without permission. You should try it sometime. It’s very freeing. Might loosen that stick up your ass.”
I might have imagined it, but I could have sworn I heard Flemens stifling a chuckle.
“Are you two here to finish the job your colleagues started? Not willing to risk me going to trial and telling the world what a corrupt organization of fascist douchetarts you have here?”
“I told you to be quiet.”
“And I told you to pull the stick out of your ass. Oh wait. No I didn’t. I just implied that. Sorry. Probably too subtle. Let me try that again. You should really pull the stick out of your ass.”
Silence, while the hands continued to gently prod what felt like every bruise I’d ever had in my entire existence come to life at once. The hands were professional and gentle, and I wondered if it was Flemens or StickAss examining me. Whoever it was, he was a consummate professional. I had to give him that. Still, the pain was so intense I had to talk to distract myself.
“So, which of you gentlemen is secretly questioning whether MOME is all that it has always pretended to be?” I asked. “Because I sure could use some help getting the hell out of here, and I don’t particularly like the idea of being executed, or locked away for life, just for trying to defend the people I care about from a douchebag waving a gun around.”
I was rambling, but I figured it couldn’t hurt. After all, MOME seemed incredibly shady as soon as one took a look at it up close. I couldn’t imagine how decent people managed to convince themselves that it was a fine place to work. Then again, maybe I could. People lied to themselves all the time, and I was sure that MOME worked hard to keep up a decent front, even on the inside. How many people even saw the authoritarian bullshit they pulled? Still, these two might have seen some of it, and one of them might even sympathize with me a bit. It couldn’t hurt to push a few buttons.
“I mean, you can’t seriously believe I wound up in this state because I fell down a flight of stairs or something, can you?”
“We were told you came to look like this because you shot one of our colleagues point-blank in the chest, then resisted arrest when they came to apprehend you.”
“Sure, that’s the story they would tell you.”
“Are you saying that you didn’t shoot Schreyer?”
“Is that his name? Schreyer? I definitely shot him, and I meant to shoot him. I didn’t want to kill him, but he left me with very few choices. I don’t consider allowing someone to hold a gun to my best friend’s mom’s temple until they decide to pull the trigger a choice.”
“A MOME operative would never—”
“Shut it, Flemens. You don’t know Schreyer. He would have.”
Well, that was surprising. StickAss was on my side. At least for a half a second.
“And that is enough out of you, Ms. Marmot,” StickAss said, just before I felt a sharp prick in my neck. “You should really rest.”
~~~
When I came to, Seamus was sitting up, his back against a low, wireframe bed that was pushed up against the steel bars separating our cell from the next one over.
It took me a moment to realize how strange it was that I could see him.
“Who turned the lights on?” I asked.
The other strange thing was that I was lying on something soft, or at least, quite a bit softer than whatever I had been lying on for the past few days. And I was on my back, with my head turned to the side to look at Seamus. I turned it towards the ceiling and saw what looked like solid rock.
“Old school,” I muttered, still too startled by finally being able to look at our surroundings to fully put together the strangest thing yet.
I turned my head to look at Seamus again, who was silently staring at his hands.
“Hey! That didn’t hurt. Turning my head didn’t hurt at all!”
I tried sitting up, and found that it was painless and simple. It was slightly more tiring than it ought to have been, but it didn’t hurt at all. Something did feel strange about it, though—my right arm, back, and shoulder felt oddly tight. As though they were wrapped in plastic, or tape, or something. I was too excited about how little everything hurt to worry about it, though.
“Seamus, did those guys fix me up? I feel abo
ut a thousand times better than I did the last time we talked.”
Seamus finally looked up from his hands.
“Yeah, Vic. They did everything they could to heal you, actually. I wasn’t awake for it, after whatever they used to knock me out, but they’ve come back to check on you a few times since then and filled me in a bit.”
He didn’t sound nearly as happy about this as I would have. I mean, damn. I had been worried that I was never going to walk again. The fact that I was no longer in pain, and that I could move all of my limbs easily and well… I was damned near giddy.
“Vic, I’m really sorry,” Seamus said. My eyes snapped to his, and just to be sure he wasn’t about to tell me I was paralyzed or something, I tried to stand up. It worked. My legs held my weight, and no part of me objected to the action of standing. Except for that tight pull across my skin.
“Why are you sorry?” I asked, now bewildered. My body worked. It didn’t even feel as bad as it had after I’d torn my ACL and gotten surgery to replace the damned thing.
“You… umm… shit, why do I have to be the one to tell you this, when it’s those MOME assholes who did this to you? Umm… take a look at your hands.”
I looked down. My feet poked out from lime green pajama pants, which I could only assume were what passed for prison garb in the magical community. My feet looked like they always had. Dark, calloused, not particularly noteworthy in any regard.
I raised my hands up from my sides.
My left hand looked normal. The same caramel skin that had always covered it was there, all five digits present and mobile. Nothing out of the ordinary. My right hand…. Now I could see why Seamus was sorry, although I couldn’t say I was overly concerned. My right hand was covered in bright red scar tissue—the kind that comes from a third-degree burn. It encompassed 90 percent of my hand. Only my pointer finger and thumb appeared to be free of it. I turned my hands over and saw that I was missing three of my fingerprints. The hand moved well enough, aside from that tight feeling, but most of my original skin was gone. I followed the burn to the sleeve of my inmate pajamas and saw that it continued, so I pulled the sleeve up. It kept going.
I flexed my arm. I could feel the tightness all up and down my arm to my shoulder, along my shoulder blade, and back along my right side.
Not even glancing at Seamus, I pulled off the shirt and inspected my arm. The burn was everywhere I could feel tightness. It didn’t cover much of the front of me other than the top of my shoulder. My chest was still my old skin. I tilted my head to look at my side, saw that it barely wrapped around to my rib cage at all, and in doing so I noticed the same tight pull on my neck. I ran my left hand along my neck, up to my ear and cheek. Slick scar all the way. It stopped about halfway up my right cheek.
“Huh,” I said, taking a moment to register it all. “Is it all this same bright red?” I asked.
Seamus nodded, though I barely noticed the motion in my peripheral vision.
“They said it would take on a more natural tone with time. It’s just red because it’s new. They did everything they could to improve the… texture. Or that’s what they told me, anyway.”
I nodded. My left hand was still exploring all the new skin on my right side. It felt strange. Not just because the texture was so different from the rest of my skin, but because the sensation in the skin itself was weird. It felt partially numb, but also some of the feeling transferred to strange places. There were spots where touching the skin there made it feel like I was being touched six inches away, yet in many places the touch felt almost normal, albeit somewhat dulled. I couldn’t stop touching it, but I was starting to get cold. I decided to put the long-sleeved lime green prison shirt back on, although my left hand instantly started exploring the skin of my right hand again.
“I’m so sorry, Vic.”
Seamus sounded sincere. I just laughed.
“This might just be shock talking,” I said, still feeling the skin on my right hand. “But I am so damned thankful that I can still walk that this really doesn’t bother me.”
I took a deep breath as I considered the thought that I would look… different for the rest of my life.
“That may change the more I think about it but, fuck, Seamus. I really thought I was going to be in pain for the rest of my life, and possibly immobile.”
I looked up then, meeting Seamus’ eyes, and he sat down on the bed behind me.
“Is it bad?” I asked, wondering how startling the facial scarring was. I didn’t think I would care, but I’d be a little bit sad if Seamus and Sol didn’t find me attractive anymore.
Seamus took a deep breath.
“You’re still hot as fuck, if that’s what you're asking.”
His smile was so wide, I couldn’t even accuse him of lying.
“Well, I’d like to pretend that I’m above caring what I look like, but I’m not sure I’m that zen. I don’t know how I’ll feel if I’m…”
If I’m what? I thought. Scars weren’t necessarily ugly. They were just jarring, because they were usually a stark difference from what our brains expected to see when we looked at a person, and because they were very obvious signs of physical trauma. They were hard to ignore. I’d never worried about getting scars before. The scar from my knee surgery was a damned badge of honor, and despite my surgeons "suggestions" for keeping it from darkening in the sun, I showed that thing off at every opportunity. I had a few others left behind by various mishaps from childhood, some martial arts training incidents, running into a large metal door once, and I’d never worried about a single one of them. But this…
Burn scars were big, they could cover a lot of area, and they typically didn’t ever heal fully. I mean, turn-back-into-normal-skin-heal… And this one certainly covered a large part of me. By rights, it still should have hurt like a son of a bitch. The healing magic used on me must have been pretty strong, if I was down to friendly red scar tissue at this point. Just judging by the size of the burn, it should have taken weeks to get this far.
“Ugh… whatever,” I sighed. “Surely we have more important things to worry about than whether or not I’m going to have a scar on my cheek for the rest of my life.”
And I would, I realized, even as I said it. I would have a scar on my face forever…
Well, boo-fucking-hoo. I was just going to have to suck it up. I wasn’t blowing smoke when I said I was happy to be fully mobile. The worry that I wouldn’t be able to walk again had been real, and terrifying. The relief I felt at being able to move was like a physical weight being removed from my shoulders and chest. Sure, grieving my non-burned self was probably something it would be healthy to do at some point, but fuck it. Right now I really needed to focus on more important problems. Like how to not get executed for shooting a guy who really deserved it.
Seamus smiled and seemed to be reading my mind. “Right. So, how are we going to get you out of this?”
~~~
Of course, the answer was that we couldn’t get me out of it. Despite five escape attempts and a dozen stunned guards, nothing had gotten me out of the farce of a trial that awaited me. Yet.
It wasn’t that MOME had us outmaneuvered, per se, it was just that they had us locked up where we couldn’t use our magic, and they had finally stopped underestimating me now that I’d shot one of their agents, so the guards had all known how to fight hand to hand, and been armed, and… yeah. We never really stood a chance once they dragged us into that magic-blocking dungeon.
Except, maybe, if I could escape this hellscape and hotfoot it back to Earth without MOME knowing about it. That assumed that I could drag my ass to the top of this canyon without dying in some horrible and unforeseen fashion. Or any fashion, for that matter. Dying would really throw a wrench in my escape plans.
So, I took another deep, sulphur-laden breath, trying not to think about the pain in my hand, or how far I would fall if I missed a hold. Needless to say, I was embracing the "slow is smooth, and smooth is fast" method of climbin
g.
Keepin’ it zen, that’s me. Yep.
Right up until a shrieking squirrel demon leapt at my head, releasing the most terrifying series of squeaks and trills that I’ve ever had the misfortune to hear.
“AHHHHHHHHHH!” I screamed in return, trying desperately to grab onto the hold I’d just inadvertently jerked away from when the squirrel-thing leapt at my head. My first swipe missed, but, luckily, I hadn’t thrown my body too wildly off-balance when I’d let go of the rock face, and had been moving up a portion of the cliff that sloped away from me, rather than towards me, so I had time to correct before I went toppling to my death. I managed to snag the hold I’d let go of on my second swipe, then promptly began cursing everything that had ever lived, but mostly the glowing-eyed, red-skinned, giant-fanged rodent that was now perched in front of my face, squealing with terror. Or maybe I was just terrified and projecting it back on the squirrel. It was hard to know.
“What. Do. You. WANT?!?” I said, trying to keep my own voice as level as possible. On some level I knew that freaking out was not going to help. After all, what creature ever responded well to being screamed at? But that was a difficult to impulse to control, especially after the number of times this creepy-assed gremlin had shown up and scared the hell out of me in the past week.
The only reply I got was, of course, more unintelligible screaming. Which was no surprise, as this creature had yet to produce any other sound in my presence.
I shrugged.
“Buddy, once again, I have no idea what you’re trying to say, but I would really appreciate it if you could stop saying it with… so much volume and… enthusiasm?”
I wiped a fleck of squirrel demon spit from my chin to illustrate this last point.
Unlike everything else I’d ever said to the creature, that last bit seemed to garner some kind of understanding. The creature shifted its ears a bit flatter, cocked its head, and grabbed its own tail (the only part of it that sported any kind of fur) in a way that made me think it might be embarrassed.
Then it opened its mouth and screamed at me again.
Victoria Marmot- The Complete Series Page 27