by D. N. Hoxa
“Miss Vaughn, this is only for your protection. I give you my word that no harm will come to you while you’re with me, do you understand? You are not under arrest or being charged with any crime. I’m simply taking you in for questioning,” Terrin said.
But the way he said it, it left a lot of questions in my mind. “To the police station?” I asked. If he was taking me to the police station, that would be a little easier to handle.
“To a station,” he said and grabbed my arm. “Let’s go.”
Biting my tongue again to keep from crying didn’t help. Tears all over my face. He was going to take me to a station. What the hell kind of station? A station where people like Red Tie killed others for fun?
A splitting headache turned my thoughts to a blur in seconds. Once we were outside, I blinked a thousand times in hopes I’d be able to see someone—anyone who could help me. The real police.
But the police cars were far away, down the street, all four of them with their blue and red lights on. And Terrin’s car, a black Range Rover, was parked right at the entrance of the club. How convenient.
If I called out really loudly, would the police officers hear me? Would they come to help me?
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Terrin said as if he’d read my mind before he pushed me into the passenger seat.
“Where are you taking me?” I asked when he got in the car, too, and pressed the button that turned the ignition on. I didn’t care that my voice broke. He could already tell I was scared. There was nothing wrong with being scared, as long as you didn’t let it consume you completely. That’s what Luke said.
“Get some sleep, Miss Vaughn. It’s going to be a long ride.”
***
It really was a long ride. After three hours of driving roads I’d never seen before with a stranger who was possibly going to kill me soon, the car finally stopped moving.
The sun was barely starting to rise, turning the sky a beautiful mixture of orange and purple. It enabled me to see very little, but the building in front of which Terrin had parked his car couldn’t be missed. It was a house made of raw stone, like ones you see in movies. It had three towers and wooden windowpanes, and the large front yard was full of other cars, too. It certainly didn’t look like a station. The fact that the building and the parking lot was surrounded by trees on both sides didn’t help me calm the beating of my heart that wanted to soar out of my chest every second.
I’d asked Terrin—if that was even his real name—where he was taking me ten times in the car. I’d begged him to speak to me three other times. But he refused to even open his mouth. Now, I felt weak. Helpless. Just the thought of Luke in a hospital somewhere all alone made me want to pass out.
Holding my head up was getting harder by the second. When Terrin pulled me out of his car and guided me to the light wooden door that seemed to be the entrance to the stone building, I had no choice but to let him. My hands were cuffed behind my back and no matter how hard I tried to break free, I only succeeded in making a mess out of my wrists. They hurt, burned, and felt like, if I tried to pull them loose one more time, my hands were going to fall off.
The wooden door led us to a narrow hallway with a high ceiling. At least in there, there were lights every few steps. Lights, but nothing to see, except white walls and at the end of the hallway, two doors on either side of it, and a staircase in the middle.
Without a word, Terrin took me behind the staircase.
“If you let me go now, I swear to you I will not tell anyone about this,” I said for one last time. It wasn’t going to work, I already knew that, but I tried anyway. For Luke’s sake.
Just like I suspected, Terrin didn’t stop. He just tightened his fingers around my arm and dragged me around the stairway, which blocked the elevator doors on the other side of it from being seen until you were right in front of them.
I thought about screaming for help, but what good would that do? This was his territory and if anybody was even here and they could hear me, they’d just come to his aid and laugh in my face.
So, I kept my mouth shut and watched him press the button to call the elevator. The gun was underneath his jacket, which he’d unbuttoned while driving. If I could turn around and fall on top of him at just the right angle…
Who the hell was I kidding? I didn’t know how to do any of this. I didn’t know how to get a gun from a man’s pants. I’d never fought anyone in my life, not for lack of trying, but because Luke was always there to stop me, and to punch whoever was pissing me off at the time. He took all the fun for himself and left me with none. It was just the way he was.
Our diary, an old leather notebook we found among my parents’ things, was named Luke & Nova Vs. The World. We’d named it that because it had always been us against the world from day one. And whenever The Big Bad World took its piece of us, we wrote it there as a way of coping. It was all we had. All we knew. All that kept us grounded and made us hope, when everything continued to whither around us.
And we also wrote what the other had done to make it right.
But the name of the diary was wrong. From all the diary entries we’d made, Luke had come to my rescue ninety percent of the time. He was always there to catch all my tears, to make me laugh, to call me on my bullshit—even yell at me when I was being an asshole. We should have named the diary Nova Vaughn Vs. The World. It would have been much more fitting.
Unfortunately, the diary, sitting inside my bag that was somehow still around my torso, didn’t matter anymore when the doors of the elevators opened and Terrin pushed me inside the car. It was the longest one I’d ever seen—though very narrow. It would fit thirty people easily—but wait, that’s not all. There was another set of doors on the other side. And Terrin pushed me toward them.
Were we even moving? I couldn’t tell, and there was no screen to show us on which floor we were or where we were going.
I didn’t have to wait long, though. The doors opened with a low whoosh.
That was the moment my life changed forever.
Chapter Three
The strong light made me want to put my hands in front of my face to shield my eyes from it. Since my arms were cuffed behind my back, I had to take it all in with a squint. At first, I saw nothing but light. It took more than a few blinks to get my eyes to adjust to the change, but when they did, I don’t think I blinked again for at least the next five minutes.
The corridor stretched long before us. Crisp white tiles on the floor. Windows on the sides.
Walking wasn’t something my body knew how to do in those moments, so Terrin had to pull me by the arm while I looked around me.
We were on some sort of a bridge, I figured, and on both sides of it, through the windows, I could see two large, square spaces, set entirely in wood panels—floor, walls, ceiling—and with no windows or doors that I could see. Stuff that looked like boxing gear was sprawled all over the floor.
But that wasn’t what left me breathless and unblinking. It was the people in the room that did that.
Could I even say people?
I’ll tell you why I ask:
To my left, there was a girl with black hair cut close to her chin. She wore leather from the neck down. She also had a sword in her hand, and she was spinning on air like gravity meant nothing to her body.
Next to her was a man, shirtless and barefoot, his large muscles perfectly visible, and he was hitting a black boxing bag with his fists. Not entirely unusual, except the boxing bag moved like it was made out of paper. It slid from where the man was standing and all the way to the other end of the room. Then, he ran, spun once on air, and kicked it with the tips of his toes. The leather broke. Sand spilled out. The man grinned proudly.
Not five feet away was another man, this one dressed in a plain green shirt and jeans. He sat on the ground cross legged, and he held his hands in front of his chest. Like I said, I didn’t blink, so I saw the split second the smoke began to come out of the palms of his hands an
d fly straight for another boxing bag. There was no tear. There was no sand spilling all over. When the grey smoke faded, the boxing bag was just…not there anymore.
On the other side of the bridge I was on, there were five people that I could see, except I didn’t get to look at any of them, except one.
He was shirtless, too. And barefoot. His hair was cut close to his head, and an earring shone on his nose. His jeans hung low on his hips, so that when he put one foot back and squatted a bit, I was sure they’d fall completely off. They didn’t.
The man closed his eyes. He was far away but I could swear I saw exactly how his chest moved when he took a deep breath. Slowly, gracefully like he was in a dance, he raised his right arm over his head then brought it forward, then did the same with his left. His hands were folded, one above the other. And on the palm of his left hand burned a single orange flame.
No way could I take my eyes off him for long enough to look at the others, because the small flame in his hand began to grow and grow, until it swallowed all his fingers and continued up his arm. I wanted to scream so badly, to tell him to shake the damn fire off. He was going to scorch himself!
But the man didn’t look in pain. On the contrary. He looked in pure bliss.
We were at the end of the bridge, right in front of another set of white doors, when I stopped walking. I couldn’t bear the thought of not seeing him holding flames in his hands for even a second. It was all I wanted to look at for the rest of my life. It was magical.
When his head moved up a bit, my heart skipped a beat. Then, his eyes fell right on mine.
Maybe it was the fire burning on the skin of his arm, dancing to some silent melody, but his eyes looked orange, too. They were big and wide, and they held mine until Terrin grabbed me by the shoulders and pushed me through the door.
I lost sight of it all, but I was still unable to breathe. My brain was beginning to shut down. My eyes had seen too many things that just couldn’t be real, and a reboot of my thoughts was in order to try and figure out what the hell was going on.
But I couldn’t let that happen because Terrin still had me by the arm and he was guiding me deeper into the whitest room I’d ever seen. It stretched to our left and six crisp white tables and chairs were in it. Papers on the tables. Computer screens, two on each. They even had staplers, which were white, too.
The people sitting behind four desks—two were empty—looked normal. Or maybe my brain just wouldn’t allow me to see any of those things I saw minutes before?
I had no time to double check. Terrin opened a door and took me in front of three others. He then pushed me to the one in the middle. Finally, a room that wasn’t white. It was grey instead.
“Please sit down and wait. I won’t be long,” Terrin said.
“Wait? Wait for—” but he’d already closed the door behind him.
It was an interrogation room he took me to. I’d seen it a lot of times in movies. It had a table, four chairs, except there was no window made of bulletproof, one way glass on the wall through which people watched you, and there were no cameras at the corners. There was, however, some sort of a sphere placed right in the middle of the table. It was completely black and it almost looked like it was made out of liquid, but ask me if I dared to touch it and find out. The handcuffs weren’t the only thing stopping me.
Trying the door to see if Terrin had locked it was hard because my hands were tied behind me, and it was useless, but I had to do something. And when I did confirm that it was locked, I went and sat down on one of the chairs. My knees were shaking badly, and I didn’t want all my strength to leave me now.
Closing my eyes, I pictured Luke’s face. He always gave me strength when he spoke to me, so that’s what I imagined.
You’ll be fine. Probably just a misunderstanding. It will all be over before you know it, and we’ll be on our way to Vegas, he said.
Luke was right. Yes, we’d be fine. We’d be gone before nightfall. We’d start our new life away from all this madness and we’d never look back again.
I felt the smile that stretched my lips. It warmed me enough so that my fingertips didn’t feel like they were going to fall off any second now. And just as I began to relax a little, the door opened.
I jumped to my feet even before I saw who it was.
Unfortunately for me, it wasn’t Terrin.
“Who are you?” I asked the strangers. Two men and one woman.
Both men wore dark suits, much like Terrin’s, and one of them had a black hat on, too. They were tall, but they lacked muscle. And the woman wore a suit, too, only she had a skirt on instead of pants. Her colorless eyes behind the glasses took me in, in a way that only women can do. I’d been the subject of stares like that while bartending before. This time wasn’t any better.
“Miss Vaughn, my name is Henry Ross, and these are my colleagues, Vincent Foster and Naomi Cruz. We’re with the Senior Order,” the man in the middle said, while the other—Vincent Foster—put his yellow pad on the table and began to write something down. Naomi Cruz just folded her arms in front of her chest and stepped back, pushing her dark hair behind her shoulder with a shake of her head.
“Listen, this is just a big misunderstanding, okay? That guy Terrin brought me here without right. I didn’t do anything wrong. Can you please just let me go?” The words had been at the tip of my tongue, it seemed.
“Nobody said you did something wrong, Miss Vaughn,” Henry Ross said, smiling a little to show me his yellowing teeth.
“Oh, really? Is that why Terrin cuffed me?” They could see my arms behind my back, couldn’t they?
Raising his brows, which were so long they fell all over his thick lashes, Ross nodded at Foster. Without word, Foster left his pen on top of his pad and walked behind me.
I didn’t hear the key. I didn’t feel his skin on mine. I didn’t even feel him grabbing the cuffs, but a blink later, and my hands were free.
When Foster walked in front of me again, the cuffs he’d just taken off me were not in his hands.
I shook my head to clear my thoughts. Stop looking into things, I repeated at least five times until I was able to look at them again. Foster sat down and wrote something else on his pad, but Ross and Cruz continued to stand. It only served to make me even more uncomfortable.
“Like I said, we are with the Senior Order. Officer Terrin brought you in because of a shooting that happened tonight in Richland, if I’m not mistaken,” Ross said.
“You’re not, but like I said, this is just a misunderstanding. I didn’t do anything.” I’d say it again and again, so many times they would have no choice but to listen to me.
“The Senior Order would like for you to make your official statement right away, Miss Vaughn,” said Ross, as if he hadn’t heard a single word I said.
“What the hell is the Senior Order? And I already made my official statement to Terrin!” I hissed. The blood in my veins was at a boiling point. I was slowly losing it, no matter that I was trying to hide that fact from myself. If these people didn’t let me go soon, I had no idea what the fuck I was going to do.
“The Senior Order of Magic, Miss Vaughn,” Ross said, then turned to look at Naomi Cruz with his brows raised in suspicion.
“Yes, Terrin did mention her lack of knowledge,” Cruz finally said. Her voice said that she was bored out of her mind, but her eyes told a different story.
“Hold on, just a second. The Senior Order of Magic? Are you fucking with me? Because now is not the time. My cousin is in a hospital, in a coma, and I need to get to him, right now.” If they wanted that in writing, all they had to do was give me Foster’s pad.
Then, suddenly, Ross sighed loudly and lowered his head.
“I can do this, if you want,” Cruz said, though she didn’t look like she would be happy about it.
“Do what?” I asked, but neither of them even looked at me.
“No, I’m fine. I just didn’t expect a Forger when they called me in,” Ross said.
The panic made me laugh. When the screeching sound came out of my lips, they did look at me. They looked at me like I was the one who’d lost her mind.
“Listen, I’m begging you, please let me go. Please. I have to go to my cousin. He’s all alone, and if he wakes up—”
“Your cousin is not going to wake up, Miss Vaughn,” Cruz cut me off.
Without realizing it, I’d jumped to my feet. “Excuse me?”
“I said, Luke Vaughn is not going to wake up.”
Fire, like the one spreading in the arms of that man I saw before, burned my whole body. “Fuck you, Miss Cruz. You don’t know anything about Luke.” Luke was a fighter. He was going to wake up because even in a coma, he’d know I was alone. He’d know I couldn’t do life by myself.
“Please take your seat. There is a lot you need to hear before you jump to any conclusion,” Ross said, waving for me to sit down. I did, only because I wasn’t sure for how much longer my legs were going to hold me.
“I don’t know who you people are or what you want from me, but all I want is to get out of here. Just let me go, and you won’t ever have to see me again.” I’d go to the other side of the world to make sure of it, too. Together with Luke.
“I’m afraid we can’t allow that. It’s standard procedure to deal with a Forger properly, Miss Vaughn. You will be free to leave once we’ve gone through everything together,” Ross said. When he closed his eyes to take a deep breath, I noticed the dark bags under his eyes. It was obvious he hadn’t slept at all, and I was the reason for it. It occurred to me that he didn’t want to be there any more than I did, which could potentially turn the cards in my favor.
“So, I listen to whatever you’re going to tell me, and then I’m free to go?” I asked, just to make sure I’d heard them right. If that were the case, then this was easier than I thought it would be. But…maybe too easy?