The second my eyelashes meshed, I heard it.
A keening lament resonated down the corridor, a dirge wailed past inhuman vocal cords, fueled by so much anguish the fine hairs lifted down my arms.
Checking the digital projection on my nightstand, I noted the hour and flopped onto my back. Relief spread in butterfly kisses across my clammy skin, my muscles relaxing one by one as it sank in all was well.
These days I found comfort in routine, and the woman next door shattered with the precision of an atomic clock at two a.m. Tonight’s melodic rendition was different than her usual gut-wrenching sobs, but the unending anguish in her cries struck the same chord as always, and I didn’t mind. I counted on her misery to help me escape my own night terrors unscathed.
Word around the ward was Bianca Parsons had snapped one night and killed her mate. The pregnancy hormones must have cranked the guilt up through the roof if that was true. I might have asked one of the orderlies, but I hadn’t spoken out loud in months, not since the day I woke to these white walls enclosing me, and I wasn’t curious enough about the warg’s circumstances to break that silence.
We all harbored our own personal demons. I wasn’t about to poke someone else’s with a stick. That’s what the shrinks got paid to do.
The yellow beam of a flashlight swept down the line of my body as the guard spotlighted me, watching for the even rise and fall of my chest. This was another ritual, one that used to bring me peace. When the patients got riled up, the guards performed bed checks. I liked knowing help was on the other side of that locked door for the asking. That wasn’t the issue. No, the problem was the temptation to ask one particular guard for the kind of help that would get us both in Mariana Trench-deep trouble.
Pretending sleep, I waited until the light extinguished to let my tense limbs go slack. Except I couldn’t relax for the prickling certainty I was being watched. I rolled over and studied the narrow window cut into the door facing the hallway.
Officer Lam stood there as if waiting for my acknowledgment.
The unforgiving line of his jaw was gentled by the amused smile hooking his full lips up at one corner. Busted. He had caught my gaze skating over his high cheekbones, tracing the curves of the reflective aviator sunglasses he wore no matter the hour. Fingertips dancing over my thigh, I imagined the feel of that same jaw beneath them. A flush rode my skin as I nestled deeper under the covers.
The soft crackle of the intercom whispered through the room. “You’re up late, Pinks.”
A burst of irritation flared at his nickname for me, and I ended up biting my cheek to hold on to my silence. The vibrant pink dye had faded from my hair, and the natural blonde roots showed against my scalp. I was a washed-out echo of the spirited changeling mermaid I once was. So why must he insist on reminding me of how much I had lost?
The silent treatment worked on the doctors and orderlies, the other patients, but apparently not on guards who were too pretty for their own good. Rather than give Lam the pleasure of being the first to goad me into speaking, I answered his taunt inside the safety of my own head. “The name is Harlow.”
“You’re always so feisty around two a.m.,” he teased, his butterscotch voice thick with a Southern drawl. “Wonder why that is? Low tide make you cranky?”
I narrowed my eyes to threatening slits. “Bite me.”
Silver light spilled onto his cheeks, under his shades, as if his eyes were lit from within. “Don’t issue invitations you don’t want answered, Pinks.”
Beads of cold sweat popped down my spine as I grasped that he had answered my unspoken taunt.
“Get out of my head.” Stomach roiling, I shoved upright in bed and clasped a hand over my mouth to keep from retching. “Get out. Get out. Get out.”
That’s what he had done. Charybdis. The psychotic fae serial killer had shattered my mental shields with laughable ease then stepped inside me, made himself at home in my mind and used my body as his own personal marionette.
Never again.
Never again.
“I overstepped my bounds,” came his staticky response. “I apologize. Still friends?”
Befriend the guy picking through my head like my thoughts were a buffet served up for his browsing pleasure? “Not hardly.”
“What was that?” He leaned forward and cupped his ear. “We are still friends? Good.” He grinned at my clenched jaw, and it did strange things to my lower stomach. Nausea probably. Too bad I didn’t have any crackers. He rapped the glass with his knuckles, the gesture reminding me of a kid tapping the side of an aquarium to capture a fish’s attention. “Get some rest.”
Yeah. Wouldn’t want to miss another fun-filled night of gazing at the speckled ceiling until patterns emerged. Homesick for the life I had before him, I imagined those dots as endless stars glittering in the night-sky fabric unspooling into infinity above the Atlantic Ocean.
A soft click, not unlike the intercom activating, caught my attention.
The eerie sensation from earlier redoubled, and I shifted onto my side.
A thready breath panted through the speaker, and I broke my vow of silence on a terrified whimper.
Not real. Not real. Not real.
He was dead. Dead.
I must be dreaming. This had to be another nightmare.
Wake up. Wake up. Wake up.
“Hello?” The weak rasp that was my voice cracked on the second syllable. I swallowed to wet my parched throat and tried again. “Is anyone there?”
The knob turned in slow increments, and I watched, hands fisted in my sheets, until it clicked open.
I swiped my tongue across chapped lips. “Officer Lam?”
Curled into a tight ball, I tucked my knees under my chin and angled my toes downward, away from the edge of the bed and any monsters that might lurk beneath. Minutes ticked past until my muscles quivered from the fear stringing them taut, until my elbows ached from being locked in place, until panic loosened its grip on my throat because I had forgotten how to breathe anyway, and still no boogeyman strolled through the doorway wearing a flesh-eating grin.
Unfurling my limbs, I scraped together the courage to stand and cross the room. The door swung open under my hand, and I popped my head out into the hall, half-expecting Officer Lam to be yanking my chain or to hear the clip-clop that announced the night orderly’s arrival on the scene.
Not so much as a shadow flickered in the dim corridor.
A peculiar tugging sensation low in my gut drew my toes flush with the threshold. Compelled forward, feet moving without my permission, I took one step and then another until I stood outside my room. The urge to turn back twitched in my calves, but that same undefinable need kept me placing one foot in front of the other.
Murmured conversation drifted to my ears, both orderlies’ voices familiar. I fumbled for an excuse but got a mouthful of nothing. Lucky for me, their footsteps receded, leaving me torn between following the pull in my middle or heeding my common sense.
Turns out I don’t have much common sense.
Stomach in knots, I turned left and explored a hallway delineated by faded blue lines painted onto the floor. Each door I passed revealed a patient ID plaque in a matching hue. For all the times I had noted the names on similar ones in the women’s dorm, it had never occurred to me that those were a whisper-soft pink. The washed-out color matched the rest of the institution’s monochromatic scheme so well, I hadn’t given it a second thought until now.
A smarter woman, one with fewer pills floating in her stomach, might have noticed patients were being subtly color-coded by sex, from our pajamas to daywear to nametags, but a smarter woman also wouldn’t have ventured this far from her room in the dead of night.
Low lights and blacked-out windows told me this must be the diurnal men’s ward. A jolt of unease had me backing up a step. I did not want to run into one of these guys if my lock hadn’t been the only malfunctioning one, but that same gut-deep summons I was helpless to resist had me padding forw
ard when I noticed a beam of light slicing the hallway in two.
Bam.
I jumped a mile high and scrambled across the hall when a hulking monster with silver-black wings flung himself at the window of the door beside me, pounding his fists on the glass and screaming muffled obscenities.
I clutched at my chest, like that might keep my heart from ricocheting around in my rib cage. I rocked back on my heels, tempted to bolt, but then flattened the balls of my feet on the tile and forced my gaze past the crazed beast to the room down from his. That door should not be open at this hour. Then again, neither should mine. What did it mean?
I drifted forward, skirting the winged creature, carried as if through a dream, and pressed my palm against the chill metal door to ease it wider.
The sharp bite of copper stung my nostrils, and my stomach revolted. I retched where I stood, but all I managed was a few dry heaves. As much as I wanted to run, I might as well have strapped concrete blocks to my feet. Through the crack, I spied a dark-skinned hand, the fingers uncurled and unmoving, and the urge returned full force, nudging me past my comfort zone.
Crimson handprints smeared across the tile floors and walls. Brownish-red flecks speckled the ceiling in a wide arc. The man sprawled facedown in a pool of his own blood, his head wrenched to one side, a hole the size of my fist punched through his ribs near his spine.
Bile soured the back of my throat, and the primal core of my brain pleaded with me to run, run, run. Certain that help had arrived too late for this man, I still couldn’t leave without knowing for sure he was past saving. I had been used and discarded by evil once, too, and I would never leave another to suffer as I had, alone and broken.
“Help,” I cried in a voice rusty with disuse. “Someone help me.”
The winged man in the room next door mocked me, his antics waking the others who picked up the cry, spreading it throughout the ward. Good. That much racket ought to bring help running.
Swallowing convulsively, I entered the abattoir on silent feet, picking my way to his side. Blood, so much blood. Memories of him, of what he had done, of what I helped him do, pinged around my skull. Dizzy under the weight of that nightmare collage, I wobbled, and my foot shot out from under me. I fell and cracked my tailbone hard enough to rattle my teeth, and the cooling liquid seeped into my clothes. I could have reached out my toe and poked the corpse if I wanted, and he was dead. One look at the film developing over his eyes confirmed his soul had departed this world.
Kicking out my legs to gain traction, I smeared crimson skid marks as I backpedaled toward the door. I cried out for help again, but my voice came out hoarse. No one would hear me over the patients’ steady chanting anyway.
Like sharks smelling blood spilled in the water, the men were a chaotic frenzy of aggression.
Once I got my slick feet under me, I backed out of the room, unable to tear my eyes away from the gruesome tableau. Instead of the cool metal door I expected to bump into, I collided with a warm wall of flesh and gulped down a scream. Strong arms enfolded me, his cherry-vanilla scent pulsing hot in the air.
Officer Lam.
Though he had never laid a finger on me until this moment, I knew with bone-deep certainty who held me. The heat from his front radiated through my thin top to thaw my chilled back, and I didn’t put up a fight. I sank against him, grateful to lean on someone else’s strength.
“Calm down, Pinks.” He linked his elegant fingers around my slender wrists and locked them at my navel in a hold that protected us both. “It’s all right.”
“Th-th-that man,” I stuttered. “He’s dead.”
“That tends to happen when your heart gets ripped out through your spine,” he murmured, voice grim. From his vantage point, he saw it all. The blood. The body. Me. “What are you doing all the way down here?”
Turning my head brushed our cheeks together. His was as smooth as silk, and the scent of his skin intoxicated this close. Officer Lam was most definitely fae, and the ones who came equipped with lures like his enticing aroma tended to be the dangerous, lead-you-to-your-doom-with-a-smile-on-your-face kind.
“Someone opened my door.” I strung the words together. “I started walking and found…him.”
“Hmm.” The sound rumbled through his chest into mine. “We’ll check security footage and see what’s what.” Unwilling to relinquish his hold on me, he turned his face toward the radio clipped onto his shoulder and used his chin to press the button. “We have a situation in east wing M dorm, room forty-two. Request backup and medical assistance.”
The slow cadence of his voice soothed me enough that when he finished with dispatch, I managed to ask, “Who did this?”
“I don’t mean to alarm you, Pinks.” His thumbs stroked the tender insides of my wrists as he murmured a restraining Word to bind them together. “But from here…it looks like you did.”
Chapter 2
Waking up proved hard to do thanks to the nightshift nurse’s crap bedside manner. She had wasted no time with pleasantries and stunned me with a mild paralytic spell meant to subdue me, seeing as how I had become suspect numero uno in a murder case. Go me. That whole innocent-until-proven-guilty thing must only happen in the movies.
As my body came back online, muted conversation parted the fog shrouding my brain.
“…kept her the longest of all his victims…”
“…she survived…”
“…mind is fractured…”
A tiny frown knitted my brow, a minor victory, but my lips weighed a hundred pounds each and refused to shape any words. At least the internal struggle helped focus my mind and unclog my ears.
“You believe her capable of such butchery?”
“As you said, she survived. Now might be a good time to wonder how.”
The accusation shot white-hot fury through my veins. The blaze incinerated the drugging cobwebs strung through my mind, and I moaned, the closest to words I could articulate until my mouth recalled how to move. They wanted me to talk? Well, I was ready to defend myself.
“She’s waking.” A gentle hand touched my arm. “We should finish this discussion in my office.”
Both speakers were long gone before I got my eyelids unstuck. Not that voice recognition mattered. There were two psychiatrists on staff who handled the diurnal women’s dorms, Dr. Cruse, whose voice came out glacial even while being polite, and Dr. Davies, whose warmth tempered her coworker’s chill. I pegged them as a carefully selected good cop and bad cop who played their roles—and off each other—beautifully.
“Well, well.” Officer Lam shoved through the door and strolled right up to my bedside with an arm tucked behind his back. “Who do we have here?”
I flattened my lips in a mulish line and blanked my mind.
“Nah-ah.” He clicked his tongue. “No take-backs. You can talk. You proved that last night.”
Ungluing my mouth took more effort than I would have thought. “What are you doing here?”
“This badge says I’m a security officer.” He brandished his hidden arm with a flourish, presenting me with a single peony the color my hair used to be. “Consider yourself secured.”
“So…” I scrunched up my nose. “You’re babysitting me.”
“As long as you don’t expect me to braid your hair, attend doll tea parties or read you a bedtime story…” He shrugged. “Sure. Call it what you like.”
I cocked an eyebrow at him. “Just how crazy do you think I am?”
“Just how stupid do you think I am?” He attempted to mirror my expression, but his eyebrows stalled out in the middle of his forehead. “I’m a man, not an idiot. I also won’t guess your age or weight, just in case you’re tempted to ask.”
A startled laugh escaped me. “Pretty flower.” I flexed my hands and discovered they were bound to the bedrail. “I’d take it from you but…”
“Nice voice.” Leaning over, he tucked the bloom behind my ear. “And nice try. I’m not letting you out of those without authori
zation.”
“Spoilsport,” I huffed, noticing a frilly petal had fallen onto my chest. “The shape looks familiar.”
The picture of innocence stood before me. “Oh?”
“Aren’t those flowers grown in the front garden?”
“Hmm.” He squinted his eyes as if deep in thought. “Maybe.”
“Won’t you get in trouble for picking one?”
“Nope.” His eyebrows managed a teensy wiggle. “Trust me when I tell you no one will notice a thing.”
“You are a peculiar man,” I decided.
“I’ll take that as a compliment.” He claimed a chair that had been pushed against one of the walls and dragged it beside my bed. “You’re not so bad yourself, Pinks.”
The lighthearted banter was a kind effort on his part, but I had parried with him long enough. “Do they think I’m responsible for that man’s death?”
“No.” The wide lenses of his aviator shades reflected my pale face back at me. “Most folks on staff aren’t too torn up over it either. Victor Tulane killed three of his wives and would have killed the fourth if their teenage son hadn’t knocked him unconscious with a well-aimed kick.” At my questioning glance, he explained, “The kid took after his mother, a centaur.”
And to think I had pitied Victor. I bet his surviving wife kicked up her hooves when she received notification as his next-of-kin.
“His attorney claimed the kick caused brain damage. A few months later, Victor was ruled unfit to stand trial and sentenced to life at Edelweiss. He was kept heavily sedated because of his violent tendencies. Whoever took him down wouldn’t have had to fight hard to keep him that way.”
News the victim had earned his death wilted my head on my neck like the heavy blossom he had snitched for me. “So I’m not in trouble?”
“Trouble is relative.” A chuckle shook his shoulders. “You exited your room and left your ward. Unauthorized strolls are not taken lightly. You’ll be kept under close observation after that, I’m sure.”
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