Infused (Book 2 of The Pioneers Saga)

by William Stadler

  The other guard rushed in, cementing her to the floor with a blanket of ice. She couldn’t move. Spirits faded in and out of the spiritual plane, but she couldn’t bring them to the point of fulling surfacing. She writhed forcefully on the ground, but the ice shackled her firmly to the floor.

  The guard kept his hand stretched out towards her while he looked at his friend whom she had killed. His thoughts wondered away from her, and the spirits slowly appeared in the room. The sounds of groans and growls waned. The guard set his attention on her, clenching his fists. The temperature plummeted, and the spirits disappeared again. He gritted his teeth and screamed. “You killed him!”

  He jumped on her and punched her in the jaw. Her head snapped sideways, and her hair tossed across her face. A trickle of blood ran out of her nose. “I’ll kill you good!” the man hollered. He hit her again on the same side. Then he put his hand on her emblem. Lines of ice wriggled up her chest and around her throat.

  He raised his other hand to hit her again. Shauna braced herself for the blow, her emblem pulsed, but the temperature was too low. She had been Dominated. Another thud on her jaw vibrated through her core. More blood leaked out of her nose, and her lip swelled, deepening its color from the pale pink to a dark blue and red. Spirits shifted in and out of appearance, but none of their resurgences were enough to harm the Polarist.

  The man was furious. He picked up his hand again. Shauna’s arms were frozen to the ground. She couldn’t even cover her face, but she would not beg for her life. He hit her again. And again. And again. And again.

  “That’s enough, Xano,” said Raylen as he entered the room. Two guards followed closely behind him. Hydric, his head Receptive, was with him also.

  “Look what she did!” Xano screamed. She just killed him like he was nothing. He hit her again, then he pushed off of her ribs with his knee.

  She grunted as he leaned his weight on her. The side of her face was black and blue. A few open sores spilled blood from them. She spat out more blood, but she could barely move her head, so some of it leaked down her cheek and into her hair.

  “If you kill her,” said Raylen as he fixed his elegant robe around himself, “then we will never get the answers that we need, will we?”

  Xano rushed back to her and hit her again. He spat on her, then he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I don’t care about answers. She deserves to die. That was my brother!” With a screaming grunt he smashed his foot into her chest. Blood leapt from her lips as her lungs shot out what little breath they had in them.

  “Xano, step outside, please,” said Raylen.

  Xano flared his nostrils and looked like he was going to hit Shauna again, but then he thought better of it, not wanting to disappoint Raylen. He stomped through the door and punched the wall on his way out.

  Shauna could hear him sobbing in the hallway. She felt around her mouth with her tongue to find more sores. Her teeth were still in place, but her jaw stung from the pain. The muscles in her jaw ached, and her body shivered from the cold.

  Raylen reached from under his robe and melted the ice that held her to floor. Her sari was soaked wet from the melted ice. “Go and bring her some dry clothes so she can get rid of these rags,” said Raylen to the guards who were with him. “She’s going to need them.”

  The guard brought the clothes, and she changed into them as everyone watched. She turned to the corner so that she wouldn’t be humiliated. The clothes were not what she was used to. They were the thick and heavy clothes that the Polarists wore. She hated the way that the fur made her skin itch, and the fabric was not as free-flowing as her usual garb.

  “There,” said Raylen. “You look more civilized wearing those clothes, and not so...homely like when you covered yourself in those bedsheets.” He smiled and motioned for her to take her seat.

  Shauna hated the clothes, but she was glad for them since they were much warmer. The Perene fur was more protective than her sari. She sat in the chair and positioned her hair to cover her bruises. The black strands clung together over the side of her face, caked together with blood and dirt. She wouldn’t let these captives break her. She crossed her legs and folded her arms, staring at them with a glare that was colder than her cell.

  “So Shauna, are you ready to talk, or are you still going to be as stubborn as you were before?” asked Raylen. He leaned in towards her. “Trust me, I’m not very lenient with spoiled little brats.”

  “Keep talking, and you’ll end up like your friend here,” she said, motioning to the dead body with her head.

  He chuckled and looked at his guards for approval. “I do not think that you’re in a position to make threats. Actually, I’m certain of it.”

  She twisted her lips and spoke sharply. “If you were going to do something to me, you would have already done it.”

  “Don’t mistake my patience for weakness, darling,” he said, edging closer to her.

  “I'm not mistaken. Your weakness is clear to me,” she said. “First you conspire with Wex, then you kill Dena, and now this. How can you even walk upright when you have no spine?”

  Raylen didn’t like her words. Shauna had poked at the scab of his incompetence. His lip trembled and his anger poured out. “You worked with Wex too! Don’t go pointing the finger at me!”

  “I did. But I followed him because I was convinced that what he was doing was right for my people. When I found out what he was really planning, I couldn’t go along with it. You, on the other hand, stayed. You wallowed in the filth right along with him like the blubberous pig that you are.” She kicked her foot and stared at him slyly. “Leave the garbage outside and the rats will come.”

  Infuriated, Raylen sucked in quick gasps of air, backhanding her across her already swollen cheek. He reached his hand out and froze the legs on the wooden chair. “Keep talking and I’ll do to you what I should have done days ago. Now you are going to tell me where the Wanderers are and how they were able to harness the power of the emblems.”

  “I told you, I don’t know.”

  “I find that hard to believe, if not impossible, since you were working with them in Glygen at Dena’s house,” he said.

  “Just because I was there with them doesn’t mean that I was working with them.”

  He waved his hand to silence her. “Cut the facade. I heard you through the floor. I was upstairs, remember? I listened to you crying while Dena was reading your thoughts. Boo-hoo!” he said, as he mocked her. “Life is so hard for me.” He continued his ridicule. “Please. Anyone as well off as you were growing up should have nothing to whine about.”

  Shauna pressed her lips together, panting through her nostrils. The tidal wave of fury rose up within her. Her eyes opened and closed in an ebbing daze as the Hellstate threatened her, but the temperature in the room was still too cold. The Hellstate would have kept the pain from her jaw away, but the spirits were immobilized by the cold.

  Raylen clapped his hands in front of her face. “Snap out of your trance, you disgusting little witch.” He grabbed her chin and stared into her eyes. “Hey. Are you listening to me? Focus, you Spiritualist necropath.”

  Shauna shook her head and fixed her attention on Raylen. Caleb’s voice had kept her from plummeting again. She wished that he were nearby, but he was miles away. “I just don’t know where they are,” Shauna said in a groggy voice.

  “You traveled with them to some place called Juten, or whatever Dena called it when you were at her house, and you mean to tell me that you have no idea?” He threw his hands up in disbelief. “You just hopped in a boat and sailed away?” His fingers crawled through the air like the legs of a spider. “Nonsense.”

  She closed her eyes and exhaled. “Just kill me and get this over with. It’s torturous enough having to listen to you speak.” She apathetically kicked her foot, shaking her head while biting her lip.

  He knuckled his emblem, furious. “I’ll do you one better than that,” he said. “Every day that you decide to withhold
this information from me, I am going to have my guards lower the temperature in this room by four degrees. Lucky for you, I’m a nice guy, and I gave you some warmer clothes than those scraps you were wearing earlier. If you try to bewitch either of the guards, Hydric here will be sure to lower the temperature before you can even blink. Trust me. He’s very good at what he does.”

  “Well, once you’re gone, I’ll just take control of Hydric first,” said Shauna.

  “I thought you might try that,” said Raylen. “That’s why I’ll be taking your cell key with me. Kill them, then you die of starvation — which is only fitting for a witch, might I add.” He jingled the keys in front of her. “I will let the temperature rise to normal. Then you will have around ten days before the temperature becomes too unbearable for you to even breath as it drops well below freezing.” He leaned in towards her and touched his nose against hers. She jerked away. “I hope you take your time in making your decision,” he whispered. With that, he turned and motioned to the guards to follow him out. His robe spun around him as he exited. The guards grabbed the dead man by his feet and dragged him down the hallway.

  A few hours passed, and the warmth returned to the cell. The coldness had gone, and she was sweating underneath the heavy clothes. She didn’t take the clothes off though. She figured that she would enjoy the heat for as long as she could.

  She sat on the floor and performed the Spiritual Anesthetic on her face by pulling the spirits of the life forms from her skin to the surface. She didn’t remove their spirits, or that would have killed the cells. She only wanted the cells to think that they were near death so that the pain would go away. She could have dropped into the Hellstate to subdue the pain, but the Darkened Temptation associated with the Hellstate was too extreme, and she didn’t want to give into the evil.

  Unlike the Triage, Shauna did not let the Hellstate control her. After she spoke with her grandfather, Arthur, she understood that she could resist the darkness if she fought against it. Yet the more that she invited it into her soul, the more challenging the resistance would be for her. The members of the Triage were different. They let the darkness take over them, so retreat from the Hellstate was nearly impossible. Regardless, the pull of the wretchedness was alluring for Shauna, and every moment of every day she had to wrestle against it. Most days...she won.

  She was stuck in this place with no where to go. She had helped Caleb, Sarai, and Gardiv escape when the Polarists came, and she was glad for it. The sacrifice meant something to her. It felt like she was connecting with people in a way that she had rarely ever done. The spirits surfaced around her, waiting for her to connect with them. She communed with them and sent a few of them out to look around for some way for her to escape, but the farther away that traveled from her, the more difficult it was to hear from them.

  A knock on the front entrance door reverberated off the walls of the prison. There was no way to see down the corridor to where the guards were seated, and the front door was near them. She heard one of the guards rustling around in the hallway, scrambling to see who the visitor was.

  She listened, but all she could hear were a few words. Whoever was at the entrance had asked one of the guards to step outside to speak with him privately. Shauna slouched back in her chair, realizing that there was no way to escape.

  “I’ll be back,” said the guard who answered the door. “I’m going pick up supplies from the intersection.”

  “The intersection? What happened?” asked the other guard.

  “Apparently the caravan was attacked by some of the Spiritualists.”

  “Did we catch the witches who were responsible?”

  “They killed them all apparently, but the carts took some pretty bad hits. I’m going to have to bring in the supplies by hand. You stay here and watch the woman.”

  The front door slammed as the guard left, and Shauna heard some mumblings from outside, but she couldn’t hear what was being said.

  She was forced to wait here until she died. Raylen wanted her to tell him where the Wanderers were and how they learned to harness the power of the emblems, but what did she know? She had only been to Juten once, and she couldn’t remember how to get there if she had to. She was not a sailor and sea navigation was something that she was terrible at. All she knew was that they sailed off the east coast of Narwine. As far as how they had harnessed the power of the emblems, she didn’t have the slightest clue to that. How was she going to tell him something that she didn’t know? Besides, even if she did know, she wouldn’t have said anything anyway. Not to him.

  Even though she did not know exactly where Juten was located, she could tell whenever Caleb was there, because his spirit became more serene. There was a subtle peace that eased into Caleb's thoughts. It was more nostalgic than just being in a familiar place and more reminiscent than being in his hometown. It was more like Juten was a place that defined him. She only wished that she felt that connected to a place or even to a person. She could have followed him to Juten if she wanted to find the island, but she would never tell Raylen that. One thing was certain. She would die before she gave up Juten, and she would dwell in the Hellstate before she betrayed Caleb.

  The guards' voices from outside were gone. She couldn’t hear anything — not even the rummaging about of the other guard. Had both of them gone to the intersection? She was sure that she heard the first guard tell the other guard to stay back and watch over the prison.

  As she listened more closely she did hear something. It sounded like the sole of heavy boots dragging over tiny rocks and sand, heels clicking against the stone floor. Each step was on pace and intentional. She heard breathing, like the sound of a man grunting. Slow footsteps eased along outside her cell door.

  A loud crash rang out in her cell. Then another and another. The metal door rattled on the hinges. The man was kicking the door!

  “You’re gonna’ pay for what you did to my brother,” said a man with a sinister voice. He looked in through the grated window on the door. His small rounded nose pushed in between the bars, and the veins in his eyes bulged from his wrath.

  As she breathed, she could see a mist coming from her lips. The man had already lowered the temperature, and she didn’t notice. She tried to remain calm, but she couldn’t stop from trembling. A lump got caught in her throat, and she leapt out of the chair and stumbled back against the cell wall. The chair swung around on the floor, but it didn’t topple over.

  “You thought you was gone’ get away,” said the man, peering through the bars.

  “Just go and leave me alone,” Shauna said. Her voice had lost its usual sternness. Her sassy attitude was nowhere to be found.

  The man clicked his teeth. “Not gonna’ be able to do that.”

  “I didn’t kill him on purpose. He was in my face. I just did what I had to do,” said Shauna, pleading for her life.

  “Did you now?” he asked softly. “Well this is what I have to do!” He screamed and kicked the door.

  Shauna felt the vibrations in her chest. She pulled in spirits from all around but they could only surface with small growls and snarls. The Deficit was too powerful. “Please, just don’t kill me.”

  “I kinda’ like the sound of that,” he said. “Yeah. Get on your knees and beg for your life, then I might consider it.”

  Shauna crouched down against the wall. The room temperature kept dropping. Ice accumulated in the crevices of the cell. The floor glistened as a sheet of frozen liquid drifted across the room. Thin slithers of ice slid up her leg and wrapped around her neck. She grabbed the thread and slung it to the ground, but more formed in its place.

  “I’m not a man who likes to repeat himself.”

  Her jaw quivered from the chill. She put her hands on the floor. The ice cracked underneath her weight.

  “On your knees,” he said.

  She pulled her knees in front of her and interlocked her fingers as if she were pleading, and she couldn’t stop herself from trembling.

&nb
sp; “Now say the words. Let me hear you say, ‘Xano, please sir. Don’t kill me, sir.’” He wrapped his scaly fingers around the bars in the grate on the window of the door, grunting as he breathed.

  “X-xano,” she said with her voice trembling.

  The man smiled waiting for the words that he demanded that she say.

  “Xano,” she could barely make out his name. She started again. “Xano, forgive me if I’m not the one who rips your life from your wretched corpse!” She stood up and screamed. Spirits surfaced around. The moans turned to shrieks. The man stumbled backwards, but the room was too cold. The spirits faded back into the plane.

  The man stepped back up to the door. “That was all the chance you get,” he said. With that, a thick snake-like strand of ice crawled over the floor and entangled itself around her. It spiraled through her legs and up her torso. Then it tightened around her throat. The more she struggled, the thicker the ice became. She clawed at her neck, trying to breathe, but she couldn’t.

  Xano stood at the doorway, watching. She fought for her life, never taking her eyes off him. She couldn’t feel the cold in the room anymore. All she wanted was to breathe again.

  The front entrance door slammed and a man rushed in. “Xano! What are you doing?” The man pushed Xano to the ground and banged his fist on the door. “If she dies, you’ll have to answer to Raylen. Let her go!” the guard yelled.

  “I can’t,” Xano said. “I can’t melt the ice.”

  Shauna fought for more air. Her body screamed for relief, but there was none.

  “Hydric!” the man yelled. “Hydric! Get in here!”

  The lanky man ran from outside to the cell door and stared through the window. “What did you do!” Hydric growled to the guards.

  “It wasn’t me. It was Xano,” said the other guard.

  Hydric reached out and melted the ice almost instantly. Shauna fell to the ground, holding her throat and gasping for air. Her hair collected water from the floor, but she was relieved to be alive.