Lydia was strapped to a table.
The top half of the platform she was on was ratcheted to pivot upward. Leather straps held her legs down, and another one was tied around her ribcage. Her right arm had a cuff around the wrist. The belts, dark brown and untreated leather, were pulled tight around her.
Lydia’s left arm was strapped to a leather upholstered platform that kept it lifted and off to the side. It seemed her forearm was the focus of attention. A leather belt was tied around her wrist and her elbow, holding it lashed firmly to the removable armrest. The whole table looked like an assembly from the late nineteenth century.
Her bandages were removed, and the man was standing next to her, hunched slightly over her arm as if he had been in the middle of something.
The strange fuzzy feeling in her mind fled and was quickly replaced with adrenaline. Lydia thrashed and realized the straps kept her securely tied to the table. “Let me go!” she cried and began to struggle harder, kicking and yanking on the restraints as hard as she could manage.
“I suppose you were right,” a female voice said from her other side. “I concede that the ties are indeed necessary.”
The man sighed and reached toward a table that was out of her direct field of view. When his hand returned in front of her, he was holding a syringe. Just like the table, it was horribly dated looking, a metal case around a glass container, with two large circles for his fingers.
“No!” Lydia cried and froze. “No, stop!” she shouted. “Please, don’t,” she begged the man. “I—I’ll stop struggling.”
The man paused and eyed Lydia scrupulously, arching one dubious eyebrow. “If you continue to fuss, I have no qualms about rendering you unconscious. It matters not to me either way,” he warned.
It felt safer to be awake, even if she was helpless. “I’ll behave,” she promised.
“For now,” the man said incredulously.
“Darling…” the female voice said again, and Lydia didn’t dare glance away from the man looming over her arm with a syringe loaded with god-knew-what to see who else was in the room.
The man sighed. “Very well,” he conceded and put the syringe back down on the metal table with a clink.
Lydia let out the breath she had been holding and watched as the man eyed her warily. He looked as though he expected Lydia to begin thrashing around again at any moment. It wasn’t that she wasn’t tempted. But it was clear it would take her far longer to get loose of the straps he was using to tie her down than it would for him to knock her out.
Besides, something felt weird. Off. Detached and out of sync again. Like Lydia’s head was stuffed with cotton, or as though she were a little drunk. It felt like laughing gas at the dentist. “Did you drug me?” She was both offended and curious all at the same time.
“Of course. I cannot have you bashing about while I work. And I assumed,” he paused as he pointedly cast a glance off somewhere else into the room, “correctly so, that you would be terrified of where you now find yourself.” Lydia realized the man had a vaguely British accent. He was human—or at least had been at one point. His yellow-colored eye put his current status in serious question.
“I think I have a good reason to be terrified,” Lydia replied.
“Perhaps. But, that notwithstanding, I have a task to perform,” the masked man retorted. “I ask that you do your best to keep still.” He went to fiddling with something on the table next to him, pulling something out of a container and wiping it down.
“Are you going to hurt me?”
“If I were planning such, I hardly would care if you struggled,” he pointed out like she was a fool. “As the case may be, I am attempting to avoid causing you undue injury. Now,” he looked at her with a vaguely beleaguered expression, “if I may have a moment’s peace?”
“Buddy, don’t get huffy with me because I’m somehow annoying you.” Lydia didn’t quite know where she got the nerve to be so spunky with him. Maybe it was the drugs he had given her. “I was abducted by monsters, and I’m strapped to a fucking table. Sorry if my confusion is an inconvenience.”
A woman laughed from the other side of the room. “Oh, Maverick. The young lady has your number already, I see.”
The man—Maverick—sighed and turned to his table. He was mixing things together from various jars into what looked like salve. “Pardon me for wishing to be allowed a moment to focus before I go to work,” he grumbled half-heartedly under his breath.
“Yes, yes, no one appreciates your plight,” the female voice responded, chiding him, if somehow doing so with a profoundly affectionate air. Lydia turned to find the source, but they were standing behind her at the moment.
She was in a laboratory of some kind. A nice one, even if it had more business being a printed illustration in a history textbook than in the real world. Hardwood walls gleamed a polished mahogany tone in the amber light from the lamps on the walls. They were shrouded in glass, and it was hard to tell if they were gas or electricity. Or magic. Magic was totally a viable option now, apparently.
Two walls of the room were dominated by bookcases, and several of the shelves were taken over not by books, but with brass gadgetry and jars with contents she couldn’t make sense of. It looked like a laboratory from the nineteenth century, somewhere in one of Harvard’s older buildings. Everything was cast in warm tones of wood, brass, copper, and glowing amber light.
Shit. What the hell was happening to her? She kept snapping back to that every few seconds as she realized she had no idea where she was, who was sitting there next to her, and no sense of what was actually going on. Or why she was here. Or—wait.
“Wait…work?” She finally caught up with what he had said. Maverick had said “before going to work.” Man, that had taken her a really, really long time. The drugs he had given her must have been something pretty damn strong.
“I am attempting to repair that which someone decided was a prudent course of action,” the man said as he looked down at the wound on her arm. His tone was still empty and yet somehow judgmental in his certainty. “Although the butcher appears to have had more experience working with a pig’s carcass than a living body.”
“Hey!” Lydia bristled at the insult.
Maverick looked up at her. A brown eyebrow—the visible one—raised slightly in surprise. “You did this to yourself?”
“Yeah.” She did her best to glare at him. Damn, those drugs were good. She should be screaming her head off, but instead, she was getting defensive. “And I’m a leftie, so I was using my off hand, so step off, buddy.”
“Hm,” was his reply. He looked back down to Lydia’s arm and resumed whatever he had been doing before she woke up, which appeared to be picking gauze out of the wound, one stray piece of cotton at a time. The bits of string pulled on her skin as her body had tried to heal around the offending items.
That should have hurt. Yanking the little cotton cords out of her skin should have at least stung. Lydia realized she couldn’t feel her arm. Not at all. She wiggled her fingers and was happy at least she had control of it. But what he was doing should have felt like something. Maverick must have used local anesthetic or something of the kind. But what kind of local anesthetic worked like that, she had no clue.
“You must forgive him,” the woman said again. She also had an accent, which wasn’t British, but something else instead. Lydia couldn’t quite place it, but it sounded almost Eastern European. “That is his reaction when he is mildly impressed.”
The woman finally walked to where Lydia could see her. She had long brown hair in a careful braid coiled at the base of her neck. She wore a dress that looked like it dated to somewhere in the eighteenth century if it had gone to a fetish convention along the way. Straps and strange archaic appliques were added on top of a complicated, corseted dress with many layers.
She too wore a mask. This one covered the entire right side of her face, save for her jawline, leaving her whole mouth exposed. Her lips were full and painted
a deep purple to match her mask, which offset the deep gray tones of her dress. Purple was apparently the motif with these two.
“Did I interrupt you two on the way to a masquerade ball?” The thought immediately came to Lydia’s mind.
The woman’s features bloomed into a broader smile, and what she could see of her face creased in a warm and kind expression. Piteous, maybe, but benign. “I am afraid not.”
“I don’t get what’s going on,” Lydia admitted woefully. “Where am I? Who are you people? What the hell is happening?” she said in the exact order they came to her.
The woman laughed. It wasn’t a cruel laugh, but it was as sympathetic as her expression. “Oh, my dear, I am sorry. This must all be so much to take in.”
“That isn’t an answer to literally anything I asked,” Lydia said before a thought finally came to her drug-addled mind, followed quickly by worry. “Is Nick okay?”
“Who?” the woman asked.
“The guy who came here with me.”
“I am sure he is fine and with the others,” Maverick said, muttering and clearly focused on his task. “We do not harm those we take, contrary to your current belief.”
“Oh,” was all Lydia could muster. “He’s my friend. I’m just worried about him.”
“That is commendable, but I assure you, he is well,” the woman interjected for Maverick.
Lydia had a million questions. “Where’d the big guy go?” She turned to look around the room to see if she had missed anyone else looming in a corner. Like, y’know, a man in a suit of armor the size of a small tank.
The odd woman walked up to stand close to Lydia’s other side, so she didn’t need to twist her head around to look at her. “I am Aria. The gentleman with the poor bedside manners is my husband Maverick. Lord Edu deposited you into our care when he realized you were injured.”
“I do not have poor bedside manners.” Maverick raised his head slightly from where he was still hunched over her arm. “I am merely focusing on the task at hand. It has been some time since I have had to play nursemaid, I might remind you.”
“Oh, great, you’re out of practice? That’s fantastic,” Lydia snapped. “What the hell is going on?”
Panic rose in her chest again as everything came crashing back all at once, every bit of fear and confusion buzzing up like a swarm of angry bees. Each thought riled up the next until they were swirling around each other in a self-perpetuating cycle.
“Calm yourself,” Aria said to her gently and placed her hand on Lydia’s shoulder. “We mean you no harm. You are safe here. Lord Edu was concerned you may scar or become infected. He wished us to tend to your wound to ensure otherwise.”
Deep breath. Whatever was going on, panic wouldn’t help. Lydia tried to repeat her mantra from her EMT days. Panic later. Deal with this first. Panic later.
Lydia rested her head back against the reclined surface of the table, let out a sigh, and ran through the realization once more to try and solidify it, to try to get it through her own dense, panic-stricken mind. Aria was right; neither of them was hurting her. In fact, Maverick had numbed her arm. The only damage she had on her person was what she had done to herself, and they were trying to fix it.
Hell, from what she could gather, the only reason she was strapped to the table was to keep her from panicking and struggling. “I’m sorry. I just don’t know what’s going on. In one day, I woke up with a tattoo I didn’t get, and I’ve been attacked and chased and abducted. And waking up here, like this, is not okay.”
“I know,” Aria said consolingly and ran her hand along Lydia’s shoulder, petting her like she might a family member. There was an odd, sincere sympathy there. “There is much to understand all at once. There is nothing to apologize for.”
Maverick was now taking some salve out of a jar and wiping it on the exposed wound with a swab. The circular incision she had made in her arm looked like a bad third-degree burn at this point. Lydia couldn’t help but watch, fascinated, the drug in her system still making everything seem slightly out of sync and fluffy.
Finally, she looked back over at Aria. “Can you please answer some of my questions?” Maybe she could try again, this time with a more polite and less panicky approach.
“It is not that I do not wish to tell you, but I do not know how best to explain it all without causing you more undue worry.” She looked almost embarrassed. “Soon, you will be back in the care of the Priest. Talk to him. He has far more…experience in these matters than I.”
“The Priest?” Lydia asked.
“You met him, I believe. Lord Edu brought him to Earth to help retrieve you and your friend. His name is Lyon, although we all tend to refer to him as the Priest, somewhat pejoratively, I am afraid.” Aria smiled down at her. “Lord Edu believed a more considerate approach may succeed where he had failed.” Aria leaned in slightly and lowered her voice—as if someone might hear. “Did you truly kill Lord Edu?”
“Well, no, since he’s not dead,” Lydia said quietly, really feeling like she was missing something major. “I swear I did, though.” A hundred thoughts and questions tried to pile out of her mind all at once and got stuck in the doorjamb of her brain and couldn’t get anywhere useful. Finally, one of them managed to squeeze out of the crowd with a pop. “You said Edu brought him to Earth. That means I’m no longer on Earth…?”
Aria sighed sadly and looked over at Maverick, who glanced up from his work with a scolding expression of I-told-you-so. Aria gritted her teeth for a moment before looking down at her. She was quite beautiful, even with the eerie mask.
“No, my dear,” she said with all the expression of a woman who wondered if she had just hit the detonate button on the armed bomb. “This is not Earth.”
Lydia could scream—could panic, fight, thrash—beg for freedom, throw up or cry. Maybe it was the drugs, or she was just exhausted and tired of being afraid. But something in her fell flat at the news and gave up trying to condone and understand everything that she had seen and heard so far.
This wasn’t Earth anymore.
Really, she had no reason to doubt them after everything she’d been through. No reason to think the strange and flat hole through space she had witnessed wasn’t actually just that. A gate to another place. It felt so ludicrous, she almost wanted to laugh, but she was too tired to even muster that.
Instead, she laid her head back against the incline of the table and stared up at the ceiling. It had a beautiful chandelier up there, with lights upon winding brass arms, burning to resemble candles. The classical fixture was attached into a ceiling medallion whose curling acanthus leaves looked twisted and warped. Too pointed and angular—like the writing on her arm. Like the writing on their masks.
“I want to go home,” she admitted to them, feeling small and hopeless. Feeling as childish against what was happening as the statement belied.
“I promise you, in a few days, if not shorter, this will be your home. You will be at peace with all that has happened. You will see this world as a new opportunity. I vow it,” Aria pledged to her adamantly.
Lydia raised her head to ask a question but found herself interrupted.
“A point of advice,” Maverick said, and she turned her head to watch him as he was now gesturing at the wound in her arm with the back end of a Q-tip. “Living tissue does not separate like dead tissue. It is clear to me that is with what you are accustomed to working. The dead skin comes away from the matter underneath quite cleanly.” Talk about a change of subject. The man had the air of a professor, and suddenly she felt like she was back in med school. “What you see here, the blistering of the dermis, is due to the trauma you caused when you, as far as I can tell, yanked the skin off.”
“Look,” Lydia responded, getting defensive again at his judgmental tone. She could latch onto that, at least. Everything else was too big, too insane. But arguing with a man and explaining to him exactly how impressive her home surgery was, considering the circumstances, was easy. “I did th
e best I could with what I had.”
“Which was what, precisely?” he asked, once more incredulous.
“My hobby knife and a pair of forceps. And that’s it. And yes, fine, I work on dead people. I’m a forensic autopsy tech. What do you want from me?” That really was the motto of the past day.
“Hm,” he said, making that mildly impressed noise Aria had pointed out to her earlier. “That must have been immensely painful.”
Lydia laughed at the understatement. “Yeah. I woke up on my floor.”
Maverick shook his head, but there was a faint smile on his features. His one visible yellow eye was looking at her somewhat bemused, if still somehow also managing to look like a college professor. “Well, as you can see,” he gestured to her other arm, where the small backward N with the swirl had reappeared, “the effort was sadly wasted.”
“I had to try.”
“You are not the first,” Maverick said with an idle shrug. “I do not recommend trying again.”
“Noted,” Lydia said with a breath and leaned back against the table again. “Good job changing the subject.”
“It is a gift,” Maverick commented dryly.
Lydia had to laugh again. If that was his attempt at a joke, she didn’t honestly know, but she found it funny. Then again, Lydia found humor in the worst of things. She worked in a glorified morgue, after all.
“Goodness me, Maverick. Note the calendar, for someone has finally arrived who understands your humor.” Aria had taken her hand off Lydia’s shoulder at some point—and she hadn’t noticed, damn drugs—and had wandered over to a bookcase to start leafing through books.
“It was not a jest,” Maverick responded, deadpan, as he began to wrap up the wound on her arm. “I will inform Lord Edu you are ready to join the others.” He picked up the syringe on the table, the one he had threatened her with earlier.
King Of Flames (The Masks of Under Book 1) Page 7