The only pale skin she could see was at the barest parts of his temples or the underside of his chin and his neck. Long black hair pooled around his head on a silk pillow.
His hands were folded over his chest. One in a glove—black like the rest of what he was wearing—the other clad in a metal gauntlet, looking like the claw of some great beast. It shone in the light, detailing the intricate etchings that ran over the surface. The tips of the fingers ended in wicked, painfully sharp-looking claws.
It took her a long moment to realize his chest was rising and falling a slow, deep pattern. This man wasn’t dead—he was asleep.
Lydia swallowed thickly.
She should run.
She should turn and run.
This man was obviously not someone to be tangled with. He was a monster, lying in repose, ready to strike. Lydia knew it. But something about him made her unable to look away. Made her too curious to bolt, somehow drawn in by him.
Lydia was dreaming, she reminded herself. This was only a nightmare. Just the convoluted mess of her subconscious mind, summoning up this bizarre man in a strange crypt.
It was that false sense of safety that led her to reach her hand slowly down to touch his smooth metal mask.
She should have known better.
Just before her fingers touched the surface, the clawed hand snapped around her wrist. It clamped down around her like a steel trap.
Lydia screamed.
***
Light reflecting off a glass cylinder filled with bubbling liquid was the first thing she found herself looking at. The movement was fascinating, the constant, repetitive rise of bubbles drifting upward before disappearing. It was both lulling her into, and drawing her out of, an unconscious state.
It all felt like a dream. Even more so than wherever Lydia just was a second ago. It was easy to believe that was true, looking at that tube of glass with the bubbling liquid. Why was it she felt like she was in some sort of medical lab? What was it about the smell in her nose that reminded her of a hospital?
Lydia remembered a hole in space. Maybe she had been hallucinating that and the rest of her awful day. Maybe she had a brain tumor or scarlet fever. Really, which way would she rather have it? That this was real or fake?
The sharp smell in the air reminded her of sterilizers and rubbing alcohol. The scent woke her up. She must have passed out again the moment she had closed her eyes.
“Ah. Good evening,” said a man’s voice, one she didn’t recognize. It took a long time for her to manage to lift her head and even longer to realize what it was she was looking at.
The man in front of her looked like a nightmare straight out of one of her favorite movies. He was wearing a mask, but not a normal medical or surgical mask. This one looked more like something you’d wear to a masquerade ball. It covered maybe the top thirty percent of his face, covering one eye down to his cheekbone, then crossing up over the bridge of his nose and then up to his hairline, leaving his other eye exposed. There was nothing visible through the single eye hole of the mask, exactly like the man in her dream a moment ago. The surface of the mask was a dark purple matte-painted finish, with more of those strange symbols and writing, etched in black.
The one eye she could see was a sharp and unnatural yellow. What she could see of his face was handsome, but austere. Aloof and unapproachable. Thin lips were pressed into the expression of a man who was wondering exactly how hard she was about to make his life.
He wore a white linen smock, and it was spattered with liquids of various colors. Luckily, none of it looked like fresh blood. For the moment, anyway. Anything was fair game at this point. But that, sadly, was not the worst of it. The man, nightmarish as he might be, wasn’t what was making the recently recurring and familiar feeling of terror rise in her chest.
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 yo
ur 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 tim
e 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.
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