by Kallysten
She set down the glass he’d declined on the table and offered him her hand. He didn’t take it quite yet, and addressed both her and Petro instead.
“You have to decide on a starting point, think of it in as much details as you can, and I’ll nudge you forward until I see everything I need.”
“Just that night, right?” Petro asked with an edge to his words. “Just so we’re clear, you don’t have an all-access pass to my thoughts.”
“Yes, yes,” Chris said impatiently. “Believe it or not, I don’t care all that much about your life. Although your old neighbor does seem to have a lot of questions.”
Petro frowned at that, but Hazel brought them back on track.
“How about when we first stepped into the compound?” she said, her brow furrowed in concentration. “Right after Sammy blew up the doors?”
“All right,” Petro said. “I remember.”
Chris finally took Hazel’s still proffered hand, then held out the other to Petro, who took it with a sigh of resignation. Chris closed his eyes and reached out toward both of their minds at once, finding the common points of the memories each of them was thinking about, then pushing them forward as easily as though he’d pressed the ‘play’ button on a remote. He distantly heard Hazel gasp, heard Petro say, “You didn’t say I’d be able to see her memories of it,” but he was too focused on what he was doing to reply or explain.
The jail they walked through was very different from the one where he’d been held. While his jail had been as bright and sterile as a hospital, this one was dark, with walls of old, bare bricks and linoleum floors that showed their age. He watched the scene unfold like a movie, although he felt like he was in the midst of the action and not merely on the side.
The squad swept in, six soldiers clad in black with guns at the ready, guns that they used without hesitation when they came up to the guards. No uniforms here, no discipline or formal training—even without the woman in charge of the squad spitting out a disdainful, “Vigilantes,” Chris would have recognized them as such. Then again, the UIPP had started as a group of volunteer vigilantes too, until the government had made it its official branch to ‘investigate’ paras.
The squad walked on to a corridor of closed doors, three of which had pieces of paper taped to them. The first door had a name stuck right by the small square window that allowed to look in: Selena. Beneath that, a schedule showed the entire month, with a time penciled on most of the days.
“Selena,” Petro read. “And the last time she got drugged was…” He touched the schedule with a fingertip. “Nine this morning. Let’s go, then. Kaboom?”
There were no electronic keys on these cell doors, but ‘Kaboom,’ as the lanky young man who approached the door seemed to be nicknamed, could apparently produce small, localized explosions. He blew away the lock, and in went Hazel and another woman.
They approached Selena slowly, clearly trying not to scare her, but they needn’t have bothered. Lying on a mattress set straight on the floor, Selena watched them enter through dazed eyes, a thin trail of saliva falling past her slightly parted lips. Whatever drugs she’d been given, she was clearly out of it. The two women helped her up and out of the cell, while the rest of the group continued onward.
The second cell held Elle, who was in the same drugged up state but looked in even worse shape that Selena, her ribs too prominent under the thin, ragged tee-shirt that was all she wore.
The last cell was Marigold’s. Her schedule had not been penciled in for today, and when Kaboom opened the door, they heard a distinct growl coming from inside. They walked in gingerly, only to find a woman clad in torn rags pressed to the far corner of the room.
Her matted hair fell over her shoulders and her body was covered in a multitude of scratches and bruises, including on her wrists and at her throat. Blood was dried up in long trails on her thighs. She showed her teeth at them as she growled again, and her eyes gleamed with fire. She looked all but feral.
“We’re here to help you,” Petro said in a gentle voice. “To get you out of here. Away from these monsters.”
But when he took another step forward, she growled again, looking left and right as though trying to figure out how to escape.
“We don’t have time for this,” the woman in charge said behind Petro. “Tranq her, we’ll have to sort it out when we’re back in Sanctuary.”
Chris, his heart aching for the woman in front of him, could do nothing but watch as Petro holstered the gun he held in his right hand and drew instead the smaller, lighter one that had been strapped to his thigh.
He aimed, shot, and struck Marigold in the shoulder with a dart in the time of a second or two. She wrenched the dart free, but whatever drug it held must be fast acting because even as she looked at the dart in her hand she started wavering. Petro rushed forward and caught her before she could fall to the dirty floor of her cell.
Chris continued watching as the squad carried the three women out, but he couldn’t glean any more information. He was about to pull back from both Hazel’s and Petro’s minds when the latter projected toward him, Wait. There’s something else I think you should see. It happened after we arrived in Sanctuary.
His focus on his memories changed, as did Hazel’s, and the scene jumped to the same airfield where Chris had arrived days earlier in the same jet from which the squad and the freed women were disembarking. Marigold was walking, though she still looked somewhat out of it and a squad member—Leah, Hazel’s memories informed him—was helping her down the ramp.
At the very moment she touched the ground, Marigold’s eyes opened wider and she shook off Leah’s hand. Now looking perfectly alert if feral once more, she shifted in the blink of an eye to her dragon form—a gray beast with red wings, its body large but almost skeletal. She started beating her wings at once, clearly keen on flying away, but her right wing looked damaged or wounded and she didn’t manage to take flight.
The next few seconds were very disorienting to Chris as physical sensations exploded through both Hazel’s and Petro’s memories. It took him a few seconds to realize that they had both shifted to their dragon forms. As such, they were both larger than Marigold. No communication passed between them, and yet they seemed to act in concert.
Hazel remained where she was, shielding the people on the tarmac from Marigold, should she try to breathe fire at them, while Petro stalked forward. What ensued was a mock battle of dominance, the likes of which Chris had never heard of, let alone imagined.
Petro’s dragon spread out his wings and roared, crowding Marigold and forcing her to retreat. She tried to posture back, but her broken wing wouldn’t unfold properly and her own roar was drowned out by Petro’s. After a minute or two of standoff, she shifted back until she was standing on the tarmac in her human body, naked and shivering.
The memories started fading. Chris released Petro’s and Hazel’s hands. Feeling a little unsteady, he plopped down on the bench and stared at the ground in front of him. Dandelions and a few blades of grass pushed their way in between fine, smooth rocks.
“She was docile after that,” Hazel said softly, “but she was in her own world. Never said a word. She hasn’t shifted again since that day as far as we know.”
This time, when she offered Chris the glass of lemonade in which the ice cubes had all but melted away, Chris accepted it. He drank the glass in one go, wishing the entire time that it was alcohol instead.
“So?” Petro said, a little gruffly. “Found anything you can use?”
“I’m not sure,” Chris replied, “but anything might be the key.”
“What are you going to do now?” Hazel asked.
Chris let out a long sigh. “Go home, for one thing. Think about what you two showed me, and what I saw in her mind. And tomorrow… tomorrow I’ll enter her mind again. And take things from there.”
He wished he’d had a better plan, but it was useless to deny it: this trip down memory lane had confirmed his fears, but it ha
dn’t given him anything concrete to work with.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The world was burning.
The world had been burning for so long, surely there should have been nothing left but ashes by now. And yet, it kept on burning, raging flames surrounding Marigold as far as she could see.
She wasn’t afraid of the flames. No dragon was. Instead, they made her feel safe as she curled in their midst, her broken wing extended at her side, the other one wrapped protectively around the only thing that mattered anymore in this burning world: a sleeping child.
If she hadn’t been scared of waking her, Marigold would have roared out to the skies, joining her anger to that of the flames. The monsters had come and torn everything apart, and she’d been utterly unable to stop them. They’d taken everything from her, her freedom first, then her wings, her dignity, and finally her mind, until she was too weak to keep fighting anymore.
But she had to keep fighting, didn’t she? She had to at least try. That was why she kept the child here, with her, right in the middle of a circle of fire where they couldn’t get to her, even though she knew it wasn’t good for her. Sometimes the child couldn’t bear the heat anymore, and she tried to run. The monsters always drove her back to the safety of Marigold’s wings.
The circle of flames never wavered, never broke, and yet suddenly a man was there, right within the flames but as far from Marigold as he could be. As she focused her attention on him, she vaguely recognized him. He’d been here before. He hadn’t hurt her like all the others, and he hadn’t tried to get to the child, but she knew better than to trust any of them.
In that horrible place where she wasn’t allowed to spread her wings, one of them had pretended to be her friend. He’d sneaked in bites of food, a piece of clothing, offered a few smiles and gentle words—and then he’d taken payment from her for what he believed she owed him for his ‘kindness.’ When he couldn’t hold her down by himself, he’d called in his friends, and soon there had been too many hands holding her.
He’d spat on her, after. Called her a dirty animal. Marigold had managed to hold her tears back until after he’d closed the door once again.
Whatever this man wanted to offer, whatever payment he aimed to extract, she knew better now than to trust him for even a second.
She stood between him and the girl, roaring out a warning for him to stay away from her. In the other place, Marigold hadn’t been able to protect her. She’d been torn from her arms, taken away to who knew where, but here at least she could protect her the way she ought to.
The thought should have comforted her, and yet it troubled her. She wasn’t too sure what the difference was between here and the other place. Sometimes, she felt like she could almost understand, could almost figure out how here wasn’t what she thought it was, but the knowledge always faded before she could truly grasp it.
When he took another small step toward her, she growled a warning. He continued to advance, so she breathed out a jet of fire straight at him. He did stop then, but the fire didn’t seem to bother him in the least. It was as though it couldn’t touch him at all. Looking closer, she realized that something like a bubble of light surrounded him.
She breathed fire at him again, harder and longer, but rather than breaking apart, the bubble slowly expanded. Soon, it was sliding over Marigold’s body, soft and cool like silk. It grew and grew until it was larger than the circle of fire… and then the flames vanished.
Fear leaped inside Marigold’s heart. Without the fire, the monsters would come. They’d attack, and try to take the child—try to take Marigold once more. They always did.
Except…
There were no monsters anywhere that she could see. Only the bubble of light. And within it, all that was left was a meadow with soft-looking grass, a small pond, trees, fields, like a little circle of paradise. She couldn’t remember ever seeing something so beautiful before, and she was so shocked she forgot to even rage at the man as he came closer still and sat on a rock near her.
“Hello, Marigold,” he said in a warm, kind voice. “I’m Chris. I’m here to help you, if you’ll only let me.”
Help her? She scoffed inwardly. She’d heard that before. The monsters who’d taken her, they’d said they wanted to help, at first. And their idea of help had been to try to tear her dragon out of her, to stop her from ever shifting again. She didn’t need or want that kind of help.
As the man kept talking those treacherous words of peace, she watched him closely, even sniffed him, but there was no scent clinging to him. No realness. Was he even there? Or was he just another monster trying to trick her?
The thought was unbearable. She’d failed before, but not again. She lashed out at him, her talons extended and slashing him from one side to the other. He disappeared. The meadow disappeared with him. She was alone once more, guarding a trembling child in a burning world. The monsters were approaching. She breathed out, long and strong, and brought the circle of flames back around her. Laying her head down, she keened—though she couldn’t have explained what it was exactly she was mourning.
*
As pain shot through him, Chris released Marigold’s hand, jolted out of the connection he shared with her. He touched his face with careful fingers, expecting to find blood and his skin slashed to ribbons—how could it not be when Marigold had lashed out at him with talons so wickedly sharp?
Only when he found no blood and mere scratches did it dawn on him that those talons existed in their joined minds. Of course they couldn’t hurt him in the real world.
But then…
He tugged the blanket a little higher over Marigold’s half-reclined form, covering her hands, then he left the room. He’d intended to step into the bathroom to have a look at his face, but Kit was in the hallway and she did a double take when she saw him.
“What happened to you?” she asked, raising a hand toward his face though failing to make contact with him. Her eyebrows raised suddenly. “Did she do that?”
Chris first instinct was to reply with a negative because Marigold had attacked him in their minds, not in the real world… but she must have lashed out in the real world too, he soon realized. The scratches had not simply appeared out of nowhere.
“She must have, yes,” he said with a small shrug. “She attacked me in her thoughts, but she must have scratched me for real at the same time.”
“So, she moved of her own accord?” Kit said, her eyebrows arched up again. “I’m sorry it was to hurt you, but I can’t make her pick up a simple spoon to feed herself or help when I’m getting her dressed. Seems like good news to me that she moved at all.” After a brief pause she added, “There’s a couple places where it looks like she broke the skin. I’d dab on a bit of antiseptic if I were you.”
She led him to the bathroom, pulling a small tube from the medicine cabinet before she stepped out of the tiny room to give him some space. Mechanically unscrewing the cap from the tube, Chris took a good look at himself in the mirror above the sink. Three parallel lines marked his left cheek, going diagonally from his temple to the corner of his mouth. They were only red lines on his skin, but as Kit had said a couple of places were bleeding faintly. Even as he dutifully dabbed antiseptic on his cheekbone with a finger, he doubted the ‘scar’ would last more than a few days. He’d certainly given himself worse cuts when shaving.
Leaning against the door jamb with her arms crossed, Kit asked, “Can I ask what you did exactly to make her mad enough that she’d react like this?”
Chris thought back of the few moments he’d spent in Marigold’s mind.
“I tried changing her surroundings,” he said, speaking as much to himself as to her. “I pushed my will against hers, straight on. And next thing I knew, she was lashing out.”
“Looks to me like she won that battle of wills,” Kit said dryly.
Chris didn’t reply. No need to. Marigold had won, there was no denying it. The stinging in his cheek, as mild as it may be, was proof enou
gh of that. And to think he’d been so concerned about forcing himself into her thoughts without her consent… She might seem out of her mind, but maybe the opposite was true: she was more present in her own mind than she was in the actual world. It was her reality right now. And Chris might do well to remember that.
“So, is it a good thing or a bad thing that she’s so strong?” Kit asked. “It has to be good, right? If she’s up for a fight, it means she really is in there, not just… gone.”
He couldn’t help but glance at her right then. The expression on her face reflected the same wary hope he’d heard in her voice. She’d been Marigold’s caretaker for almost a year, he reminded himself. How long had it taken her to start doubting Marigold would ever get better?
As much as he would have liked to reassure her, he didn’t feel like lying, to her or to himself. He put the tube of antiseptic away and washed his hands as he replied.
“I don’t know. Maybe it means she’s in there, yes. Or maybe it means she’s set up so firmly in her own mind that there’s little I can do to get her out of it. I really have no idea.”
“What next, then?” she asked, somewhat deflated.
Chris didn’t have an answer for that question either.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Although summer was in full bloom, the weather wasn’t as hot and muggy as Chris was used to. Back home, he’d have been running on a treadmill at this time of year, but here he could keep jogging outside—a good thing, as he did some of his best thinking while running.
Another advantage was that jogging by the side of the road allowed him to pick wildflowers along the way, one or two at a time, so that he’d have a bouquet by the time he reached the cottage for today’s session with Marigold. He tried not to think about the fact that she probably wouldn’t notice or acknowledge the flowers in any way.