“I’m not concerned about whether you like me or not, Greta. I’m going to get Jake.”
“He’s gone, don’t you get it? You screwed it up, and now he’s gone!” Fanny screamed at me.
“Don’t you think I know that, Fanny? Don’t you think I want to be struck dead where I stand because of the guilt I feel here? I don’t care what you or Greta or anyone else thinks right now. I’m going to go get Jake. He deserves to at least be with us and not locked up somewhere for all eternity.”
Fanny shut up and didn’t counter. At last, she said, “Go get him, then, if you can.”
Not that I needed her blessing, but I was glad to have it. She may hate my guts for the rest of our lives, but it was nice to hear her agree with me if only one last time.
“Sure, go get your little crazy friend,” Ciardha said. “When you see him, it will only increase your anger, your hatred, your rage toward me. Go! Go get him, and bring him back so all three of you can see the shell of the boy that was once the brains of your operation. I’ll eat your renewed rage for dessert!”
Don’t take the bait, Emily. Keep your cool. Go get Jake.
Soon I was in the Umbra Perdita conveyance system, ripped and pulled to the breaking point. Then I was spit out like a wad of chew, out onto the hard ground of a stark, grey, dimly lit hallway full of large, metal doors. Spit out into a place filled with screams, loud off-key singing and the ranting and raving of an institution filled with lunatics.
One of those lunatics was my friend, Jake.
20
I walked slowly to the door directly in front of me. Each new saga in the Umbra Perdita brought an even higher level of fear. Just when I thought I’d been as scared as I could ever be, something happened to show me that there was always another level of terror.
I was afraid to look in the small window of that door. Afraid to see what I thought I would see.
I got to the door and put my hand to it. Jake, are you in there? I knew he wouldn’t answer me back, even if he wasn’t lobotomized, but I couldn’t help but try to reach him.
I had to stand on tiptoe a bit to look in the window. I drew a breath and tipped myself up and looked in.
There, inside, someone lay on a narrow bed, curled up with his back to me. The room was completely bare save for a urinal in the wall, a small, high window near the ceiling, and the narrow metal bed painted grey, as were the walls. The floor was industrial linoleum in another shade of grey. Even if you weren’t nuts when you came to a place like that, you soon would be.
I tried the door, but of course, it was locked. Without my dagger to become what I wanted it, I was lost on how I could get inside. All I had left was my body, spirit and mind. All three of which felt damaged and broken.
My body was so weak, I knew I didn’t have it in me to kick the door down. And spirit. My Anam. My soul was a shattered mirror. The ground was practically littered with its shards. And my mind was blown to oblivion. I no longer felt the mental focus required to interact with the molecules of that dark place, to ask their cooperation and dissolve the door before me. I wasn’t sure I had the power left even to levitate a spoon anymore, let alone pick a lock with my mind.
I slumped to the floor, buried my head in my hands, and let the tears fall. Big, fat blubbering tears. My shoulders heaved with my sobs.
All my life, I’d wanted nothing more than to be connected – to belong. To be loved.
I’d walked a path, trying to move beyond being Freak Girl. And every step I’d taken had moved me ever further from what I sought.
Love. Acceptance. Connection. I’d had it all – could have had it all. If only I’d allowed it. If only I’d have opened my heart to them. To Fanny. To my dad. To Jake.
Jake. He’d always offered me what I’d wanted. His arms were always open. And I’d scorned him.
I can’t save him.
“We are as if separated by a pane of glass,” I heard a low, throaty voice say.
I wiped my eyes on my bare arms and looked for the source of the words.
Draicha stood over me, still dressed in spotless black from head to toe.
“Draicha. Thank the Goddess you’re here. You have to help me. My friend – Jake – he’s in here. I have to get him out.
“I do not have to do anything.”
“Of course not. I apologize. I forgot my manners. It’s just that I’m so tired. I want to give up and allow myself to go …”
“But what of your friends?”
“I know … I know. But what can I do? I’ve lost the dagger. I’m shattered, Draicha. I’m powerless.”
“I thought you were a daughter of Brighid, a keeper of her flame?”
“I was – I am. But my fire’s gone out.”
“Have you lost the torc?”
The torc. I’d forgotten about it.
I felt my upper right arm with my left hand. It was still there. Still fused with me. The mark of the Priestess. The object I’d paraded with such pride the night we entered this forsaken place.
The torc. Touching it, I felt a surge of heat travel from my fingers up my arm.
“Forged by faerie hands at the dawn of time, imbued with powerful magic,” Hindergog had said.
“’Tis but an illusion,” Draicha said. “As if separated by a pane of glass.”
Then he was gone.
Maybe Draicha was the illusion, a figment of my weary, terrified mind.
“As if separated by a pane of glass.”
I stood, sucked the snot dripping out of my nose back in, and took a deep breath.
“Mostly empty space,” I heard Madame Wong say in my mind.
You can do this.
I stepped back from the door that blocked my path to Jake. I closed my eyes, emptied my mind, and breathed just like Madame Wong had taught me.
I reached my hands out toward the steel door, sensing the molecules within. I saw the empty spaces in my mind. I pictured them cold and frozen.
I heard a cracking sound as the door turned colder and colder, the tiny particles and all the space in between frozen. The door was now brittle and fragile. Easy to shatter.
Then there was a loud crash as if a million shards of crystal had fallen to the floor.
The once steel door lay in a pile of broken glass. My path to Jake now free of obstacle.
But my feet wouldn’t move. I was frozen in place, unable to go to him, unable to face his nightmare that had become my own.
An alarm began to sound. The door must have been equipped with an alarm, and when I shattered the door, I triggered it.
My heart was a runaway train in my chest. Adrenaline pushed my feet across the floor. The loud screaming alarm didn’t even faze Jake. He lay still, unmoving, curled in a ball.
My hand reached out slowly, shaking, afraid to touch him. You have to.
“Jake?” I whispered as my hand touched his arm. There was no response. Goddammit, he’s dead.
“Jake?” I yelled now, and I grabbed him by both shoulders and swung him around to me.
In that moment, I wished he was dead.
As his body swung around, this is what I saw. His head had been shaved, and there was a scar on both temples, each about two inches long. There also was a scar in the middle of his forehead. He still wore his glasses, but they were bent, and one of the lenses was cracked. Inside those glasses were two dim, blue eyes, vacant, staring and glazed over. His mouth was open, and his tongue lolled, a little pool of drool that had piled up ran out of the side of his mouth as I shook him.
“Jake! Jake, it’s me, Emily. We have to go. Jake!”
He didn’t register me at all. He was alive – I could feel that he was warm, and his eyes occasionally blinked, the drool still pooled up in his gaping mouth. But my Jake – my best friend – the guy who once crushed on me – that Jake was gone. In my hands, I held an empty shell of the guy that had once been my best friend.
“Jake,” I cried as I held him to me. “What have they done to you?”
Over the sound of the alarm, I heard footsteps fast approaching. It sounded like a whole herd of orderlies running down the hall.
“Hey, who are you?” a large orderly dressed in a white shirt and white pants said. He had a syringe in his hand at the ready. There were at least two more bunched up in the hall behind him. I couldn’t see beyond that.
I didn’t answer but continued to hold Jake in my arms.
“He asked who you were and how’d you get in here?”
“Step away from the patient,” a deep voice said. The orderlies parted to allow what appeared to be a doctor in. He was dressed in a white coat, with a shirt and tie beneath.
“I’m not leaving him. What did you do? What have you done to him?”
“Standard procedure for the criminally insane. He was psychotic. We put him out of his misery.”
“He wasn’t psychotic, and you know it,” I snarled back.
“Looks like she’s a psycho too, Doc,” one of the orderlies said.
“Perhaps she is,” he replied.
I could see the writing on the wall. I had to get us the hell out of there, or they were going to do to me what they’d done to Jake. And if that happened, Ciardha would torture and probably kill Greta and Fanny just for shits and giggles. I felt like fighting about as much as I felt like being drawn and quartered, but I’d rather go out fighting than end up a vegetable like Jake. I had the torc. I was still a Priestess. I wasn’t going to go quietly.
“I’m not crazy,” I said as I flew through the air toward the doctor. “But maybe I am a little mad,” I said as I landed a flying kick right to his chest, sending him backward into the orderlies bunched behind him in the hall.
“Get her!” the doctor yelled to the orderlies as he grabbed his chest, reeling from the kick.
I did a somersault through the air, over their heads, and landed in the hall. All I could think to do was run, so I did. I ran down the hall, came to a door and pushed it open, only to find myself in another hall.
Which way do I go? I took a guess and turned right, running with all I had, the sound of the orderlies running after me, their keys jingling as they ran.
I came to the end of that hall and another set of doors. I pushed on the lever, but it didn’t open. I looked down, and that’s when I noticed the chain wrapped around the handles.
They were on my heels. I had no time to turn the chain to glass. No time to try a mental lock pick. I turned to face them, and they stopped dead in their tracks. I gave them my fiercest warrior look, an attempt to put fear into them. It worked for about a nanosecond, but then I saw that they weren’t running away. These three fellas were used to dealing with the criminally insane. They weren’t scared off by a teenage girl looking meanly at them.
“Not going to back off? Okay then, have it your way,” I said. I took to the air again, stepping on their heads as I flew over them. I meant to run down the hall to the other end, hoping the doors at that end were open, but as I landed, one of the guys grabbed me by the hem of my vest and whipped me backward, hard.
I thrust my elbow out, caught flesh and heard, “Oomph,” but the hand didn’t let go of me. I felt another set of hands try to grab for mine. I thrust wildly, flinging my body this way and that. One of the burly guys had me about the waist and fear began to set in. Deep, dark, engulfing terror.
As the fear took over, I found myself out of control of my body. My elegant flying through the air was gone. My graceful kicks and punches – the moves I’d learned from Madame Wong – history. I was just a mess of flailing arms and kicking legs.
“Let me go!” I screamed.
“Stop squirming and it will hurt less,” one of them said.
“Hold still or this may end up going someplace you’re not gonna like,” another said. I looked up in time to see a needle coming toward me, aiming for my arm.
“Nooo!” I screamed.
The sound of my own scream seemed to hang in the air an unnaturally long time as everything went black.
21
When I woke, I was sitting up in a hard, wooden chair. My wrists were strapped onto the arms of the seat, my legs bound to the chair legs. There was a strap across my chest as well, making it impossible to move my body.
I blinked my eyes, and the room began to come into focus. I was in a small room that could hold two, maybe three people in addition to me in this torture chair. There were no windows, and the only light in the room came from a single fixture with one light bulb hanging from the ceiling. That single bulb spread a small cone of light down from it, leaving most of the room in darkness.
To my right was a small surgical table with only two instruments on it. One had a wood handle and was a medieval-looking hand drill. The other looked like a miniature fireplace poker with a pointy hook on one end. Seeing the implements of my intended torture made the panic rise in my belly. I broke out in a cold sweat and strained against the straps that held me, but there was no give.
As best I could tell, I was alone in the room. All I could think was that I had to escape before I met the same fate as Jake. I couldn’t save him, but I had to try to save myself so that I could get back to the arena and try to help Fanny and Greta.
I pulled and pulled as hard as I could on the wrist restraints, but it was a no go. I yanked my legs, hard, and twisted my hips to try to wriggle free, but there was zero give in the straps. Other than my head, I couldn’t move anything more than a little bit and not enough to get free. I would have gnawed my way through the leather restraints with my teeth if I could just get my head to my wrist. But with my chest strapped down too, it was impossible.
“You are thinking like an ordinary human, not a Priestess of the Order of Brighid,” I heard a voice say.
“Who’s there?” I whispered into the dark.
No answer. I strained to see in the near black of the room, but I saw no one.
Maybe I’m hearing voices. Maybe I’m going crazy for real.
Figment of my imagination or not, the voice had a point.
Concentrate, Emily, I told myself.
I focused my attention on my right wrist restraint, talking to the particles in the strap, asking them to open and set my wrist free. At first, there was a slight jiggle of the leather then nothing. My head fell to my chest with exhaustion. I feared the drain on my energy would send me back into the blackness.
I started to feel myself fade into the dark when I heard the voice again. “You’re a Priestess of the Order of Brighid. Use what you’ve learned.”
“But I’m so tired,” I whined. “I can’t do this. I don’t have enough energy left.”
“Tired is a state of your mind – your material mind. Your Anam does not know tired. Your Anam has all the energy you could ever need.”
“But I don’t know how to be one with Akasha anymore. I’ve forgotten how to transcend my body. I’m too tired to try.”
“You have not forgotten. Once you know it, you never forget. You have merely given up. You’ve lost faith, that is all. It’s a choice, you know.”
“Madame Wong? Is that you?”
There was no answer, but I saw a figure step into the cone of light coming from the ceiling. And in the light stood The Dark Man. Draicha.
“Draicha! Oh, thank the Goddess you’re here!”
“Do you have the energy now? Do you have the will to transcend your bonds?”
“I’ll try.”
“There is no try, only do.”
I nodded my head. This being has to be Madam Wong. I don’t know how she got here, but these words are hers. It just has to be. And knowing that she had come, somehow, in whatever form she could take, and help me – knowing that gave me strength.
“There is one who can help, you know.”
“Who? All of my friends are either dead, vegetized, or being held in Ciardha’s prison. There’s no one to help me.”
“No one? Isn’t there one who, like yourself, can transcend the boundaries of space and time? One who has never forsake
n you. One, perhaps, who taught you of a river.”
“Brighid.” The man was silent, but I knew that Brighid was who he meant.
“But how can she help me here? This is Ciardha’s realm.”
“Yes, but it is a realm of Brighid’s own making.”
“But once a being is in, they can’t get out. Even if I could call her here, she’d be trapped just like me.”
“As I said to you before, this may be a trap only for Ciardha, not others. Besides, it is a prison of her own making. Don’t you think that she knows the way to escape her own prison?”
He had a point.
“But I did call to her – back in the arena. I prayed to her with all my might – prayed harder than I’ve ever prayed for anything – prayed for her to save Owen. But she didn’t answer my prayer, and Owen is dead. She has forsaken me.” Fresh tears came to my eyes as I thought about Owen’s lifeless body in my arms.
“One may never know the reason why a prayer to the Goddess goes unanswered. She has her reasons. And an unanswered prayer does not mean that you are forsaken.”
Our conversation was interrupted by the sound of feet coming down the hall outside the room. I had a feeling Draicha would vanish when they came in.
“Draicha, how do I call to her? How do I ask the Goddess to come to my aid?”
“You simply ask her. You are a Priestess of the Order of Brighid. You wear the torc. She will come to you. But remember, the Goddess enjoys her formalities. How you ask her matters.”
“How I ask? That’s just it – I don’t know how to ask. Help me, Draicha, hurry before it’s too late.”
“Remember Hindergog’s words.”
Remember Hindergog’s words? What words does he mean?
At that moment, the doctor entered the room, and as I feared, Draicha vanished into thin air.
Two burly orderlies followed the doctor in and took their place on either side of me. The doctor got within a foot of me and bent down, his face almost touching mine. I could smell his breath, a combination of halitosis and cigar smoke. My stomach lurched at the odor. As he looked in my eyes with his steely blue ones, he smiled wide.
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