The woman was coming for me. Dr. Evers’s mother. Somehow she’d discovered my stash of spell books, or maybe someone else had seen me cast that spell. I didn’t know how she knew, but she was coming for me.
My mind ran through a list of the spells I knew how to cast. Glamours and lights were nothing right now. I was getting good at lifting and moving objects with my mind, but our room was bare of everything except our beds. I could move them to block the door, but that was just a temporary solution.
There was only one way out of this room, and eventually, she would get in.
Besides, if I could cast a little bit of magic with my limited memories of the past, I could only imagine what powers this woman possessed. She’d turned actual human beings into dolls, for God’s sake. She could probably kill me with a flick of her wrist.
“Mother, wait. I can still do this,” Dr. Evers said, her voice carrying down the hall. “I can still turn her to our side. I need more time.”
“Your time is up,” the woman shouted. “You failed me like my daughters always fail me. Why can’t I just have one talented and devoted daughter like my sisters? Why?”
“I’m sorry,” Dr. Evers said. “Please.”
A green light flashed across the small window in the doorway, and Dr. Evers screamed.
I stood and stared at the door, waiting for it to open. I was trapped in here with no way out. That door was the only escape route, but the sound of footsteps was so close. I wasn’t sure I’d have time.
Still, I had to try. I couldn’t sit in here and wait. I should have run the second I heard those shoes against the tile floor.
I lifted my palm into the air and focused on the lock. I twisted my hand to the left and the lock clicked open. I gripped the doorknob with my magic and turned hard, yanking the door open.
“Harper, don’t,” Nora said. “They’ll kill you.”
“Then at least I will die fighting,” I said.
I ran from the room, my bare feet slapping against the cold tiles. I only took a second to glance toward the woman, to check and see how far away she was, and then I ran in the opposite direction. She had been only two doors down from our room, but the moment she saw me, she began to run, too.
“Nurses, stop her,” the woman shouted.
Two nurses stood up from their desk at the end of the hallway and blocked my path. Their hands glowed with green, pulsing light, but I didn’t stop. I would rather face them than whatever the woman behind me had in mind.
I had never tried to move anything heavier than a book or a candle with my magic, but it was the only defense I could think of. I brought both hands in front of my body and focused on the two nurses as I ran toward them. I imagined my power wrapping around them like a giant hand, and when I could feel their energy clearly touching my own, I jerked my arms to the left.
Both women lifted off the floor and crashed into the wall just as I reached them.
I jumped over them and kept running.
Patients were never allowed to go past the nurse’s station into this area of the building, but I had been down here a handful of times in the past week or so when I’d been exploring the asylum with my new ability.
I ran through the floor plan in my mind, my heart pumping so hard my lungs hurt.
Right down this hallway, and then left. Another right would take me to a stairwell that went up to the second floor. If I could make it to the middle of that second-floor-hallway, there was a large window there I could smash through. I could jump. It was the only way.
I grabbed the edge of the wall as I hurled my body to the right and down the next corridor. The sound of the witch’s shoes against the tile was fading. She was too slow. I could do this.
I turned left and ran, pushing myself harder. I had worked to strengthen my body, and it was going to pay off. I just had to keep running.
When I made it to the T at the end of the hall, I dared a glance behind me. No one was there. Not a single nurse. Not the woman in heels. No one. Had I lost them?
I shook my head and continued on to the stairwell, pulling the door open and racing up the steps. They wouldn’t stop until they’d found me. I just had to make it to that window. A two-story drop would hurt, but it wouldn’t kill me. If I could get out of here, I could run for help.
Outside, there had been other houses along this street. I could run to one of them and bang on the door until they let me in. I’d tell them to call the police, and then I would be safe.
My lungs burned, and a headache pounded in my skull, but I didn’t slow down. I made it to the top of the stairs and ran down the hallway toward the window.
But just as the light from a passing car on the street below came into view, a streak of green shot through the air. I lifted my hands to shield my face, and the green arrow shimmered for a moment on some invisible barrier and slid down to the ground.
I opened my eyes wide, my lips parting as I struggled to catch my breath.
I had no idea how I’d done it, but I’d created a shield to protect myself. I could taste the bitter poison from the arrow on the back of my tongue, as if I’d somehow absorbed a part of the magic into myself.
I squinted through the half-darkness, trying to see where the spell had come from, but I didn’t see any movement. I ran forward and was just steps from the window when another arrow shot toward me. I lifted my hands again, but just as the arrow hit my shield, a net of glowing green rope fell from the ceiling, knocking me to the ground.
I struggled against it, but the rope seemed to constrict itself, forming to my body and wrapping me in a tight ball. I tried to think of any magic that could save me from this, but I was out of ideas. The rope grew tighter the more I struggled, bending me forward at an awkward angle.
I sat very still, trying to breathe and think. There had to be something I could do. Anything.
But when I heard the familiar click of the woman’s heels on the floor, I knew it was over. She would kill me for what I had done.
A tear rolled down my cheek as the woman crouched beside me.
“Do you have any idea what kind of mess you’ve caused for me tonight?” she asked. “There isn’t a girl on your wing who didn’t see and hear everything. It will take me weeks to purge this memory from their brains. Weeks.”
She sighed and stood up, motioning to Dr. Evers, who had followed close behind her.
“At least your traps were useful tonight,” she said. “That’s one thing you did right for a change.”
“Thank you, Mother.”
I closed my eyes. Traps. Dammit. Why didn’t I think of that as a possibility?
My spectral presence wouldn’t have set them off, but in my physical form, I had tripped the traps and delivered myself right to them.
The witch crouched again, staring at me with her emerald-green eyes. “I tried,” she said. “I tried to save you and make you mine. You would have been my crowning achievement. A half-demon, half-human princess? The murderer of my conceited sister on my side. Fighting for me. Loyal only to me.”
I turned my head toward her. Half-demon? Princess? She couldn’t be talking about me. But something clicked inside my mind, a memory so close to the edge, it nearly sang to me. My father—the man with the impossibly silver eyes—had been king once. A demon king. Was that right?
She slapped her hands across her thighs.
“It would have changed everything for me,” she said. “But you just couldn’t let go of him, could you? You couldn’t be forced to forget him.”
She shook her head and sighed.
“And now he has my precious girl. My Isabella,” she said. “We had the perfect trap set for him, and he still captured her. He’s on his way right now, if you must know.”
I gasped and searched her face, trying to see if she was telling me the truth. Jackson was on his way here to me?
“Don’t look so hopeful,” she said. “As soon as he walks through my door, I’ll kill him and anyone dumb enough to follow him. But first,
I have something very special in store for you.”
She placed her hand on the net of green rope, and it disappeared, finally allowing me to sit up and draw a full breath. The woman grabbed my hair and lifted me from the ground, her grip brutal. She nodded to her daughter, and Dr. Evers took something from her pocket. A solid black stone hanging from a string. She placed it around my neck, and my body tensed as pain forked through my chest, spreading quickly down my arms and legs.
I screamed, and the woman laughed.
“As disappointed as I am to lose you as a potential daughter,” she said, “you’re going to be a great addition to my collection. After I drain all the power from you, of course. I can’t have you figuring out how to cast, and besides, I can use this power for decades to keep me alive. It’s a wonderful gift you’re giving me, Harper.”
“What are you going to do to me?” I asked, wincing through the pain. The stone was drawing energy from my body, sucking through my chest like a straw.
She leaned close to my ear, almost kissing it.
“I couldn’t break your mind,” she said. “So now, I’m going to take it from you.”
This Is Who You Are
One of the nurses raced forward with a gurney, and lowered me onto it. She secured leather straps around my wrists and ankles, but it was useless to struggle now. It was over. I’d done everything I could, but they were stronger than I was. I was outnumbered.
They wheeled me down the hall and down two flights of stairs, lifting the gurney with magic when they needed to. I knew the route they were taking, even if I couldn’t lift my head to see it clearly.
They were taking me down to the basement.
I’d seen the room where they performed the procedure, as they called it. It was next door to where they had shocked my mind and body. I’d seen the tools they used, and they were crude and terrifying.
I closed my eyes and pictured the ice pick instrument, with its worn wooden handle and pointed steel spear. I pictured the hammer that lay next to it on the surgical tray.
In a few weeks, would they wheel me out into the courtyard to sit in the sun? Would the others look at me in fear, vowing never to speak out against the torture they all knew was happening here?
Or would she dress me up in pink bows and stretch me out on her window seat?
I had so wanted to be an inspiration. A hero. I’d wanted to destroy this place and save them all, but I’d been a fool. I should have kept my head down and waited. Jackson was on his way, and by the time he arrived, it would already be too late for me. I wouldn’t even know him anymore.
Tears slid down the side of my face as they wheeled me toward the room. It was much colder down here in the basement, and I shivered in my thin nightgown.
All the hours I’d spent down here practicing had been for nothing, and I wanted to scream. Why had Brooke even brought me down here? I was no one special. I was nothing. Whoever I had once been was gone, and anything I had left of that girl who had been brave enough to kill this witch’s sister was about to be taken from me.
I couldn’t bear it. It wasn’t fair.
I deserved better than this. Every girl in this institution deserved better than this, but what could I do? I was strapped to this gurney and only minutes away from having an ice pick shoved into my brain. The black stone around my neck was drawing my energy into it, leaving me even weaker than I’d been when I first woke up here.
I was going to die. Maybe not in body, but in mind and spirit. And I never even had the chance to say good-bye to the people I loved most.
Mary Anne. Jackson. There had to be others, too, and I longed to remember them. Just this once before they were stolen from me forever.
A door opened and the nurses pushed me through a narrow doorway to the operating room.
“Where are my instruments?” Dr. Evers said. She rushed by me in a panic, throwing open every cabinet in the room. “They’re not here. Where are they?”
I tried to lift my head from the gurney, but the pain of the stone forced my head back down.
“Find them,” the woman said. “Now.”
“Someone get Melody,” Dr. Evers said. “She was supposed to lay them out for me. I sent her down here twenty minutes ago.”
The door to the room opened again, and the nurse gasped.
“What are you girls doing down here?” she asked. “Get back to your rooms. This doesn’t concern you.”
“I’m afraid it does,” Brooke said.
Tears flowed from my eyes. Brooke had come? She had risked her life for me?
I struggled against the restraints, but it was no use. They were too tight, fastened with metal buckles in three places.
Dr. Evers and her mother shared a look of concern and anger, and then ran toward the door, both of them shouting for the girls to return to their rooms or be punished for disobeying the rules of this institution.
Someone else stepped into the room, and I craned my neck to see. Nurse Melody rushed to my side. She wrapped her hand in a white towel and flipped the black stone over. Warmth flowed into my body as my power returned. She had somehow reversed its effects.
“Thank you,” I said as she went to work on the buckles that held my wrists and ankles to the gurney.
“You have to fight, Harper,” she said, out of breath and glancing toward the door. “You have to remember who you are. What you’re capable of.”
“I can’t,” I said. “I’ve been trying for months, but the memories are locked away somewhere. I don’t know what to do.”
She released my left arm and went to work on my ankle, but her hands were trembling. They kept slipping.
“I don’t know how to tell you to fight against the magic,” she said. “But that’s all it is. Magic. You have to be stronger than the spells she cast against you. You have to open your heart.”
She released the straps holding my left ankle and moved to the next.
“Those girls out there, most of them barely have the strength to cast the simplest spells,” she said. “They aren’t like you. Priestess Evers will kill them in a heartbeat if she wants to. We need you.”
“Priestess Evers?” I asked.
“The emerald priestess,” she said. “Dr. Evers’s mother. She’s the one who runs this place. She runs everything here. She’s the one who kidnapped you and brought you to this place. Don’t you remember her at all?”
I closed my eyes, picturing the woman’s face. I could see her now, standing above me, her body covered in blood as she ripped a chain from my neck and threw it against the wall.
My mother’s necklace. My engagement locket.
She dragged me up the stairs and down a hall filled with doorways. I remembered.
The door flew open and the emerald priestess stepped into the room, her eyes wild and her magic glowing a dark emerald-green all around her. In her hands, she held an ice pick-shaped instrument and a hammer.
“I’ll do it myself if I have to,” she said.
She slammed the door behind her and locked it with a wave of her wrist. She jerked her gaze from one side of the room to the other, and the heavy cabinets scraped across the floor to block the doorway.
One side of my body was free of restraints, but the other was still strapped to the gurney.
Melody ripped the hem of my dress, tearing a single long strip of fabric away. She quickly wrapped it around my wrist and tied it off, placing both hands on top of it.
“This is who you are,” she said, her eyes shining with tears. “You’re the kind of person who doesn’t give up, no matter how bad it seems. You’re the girl who fights with her whole heart. You’re the girl who believes that anyone can change the world if she stands up for what’s right.”
A glowing green arrow pierced Melody’s chest, and blood spattered from her lips and onto my white nightgown. Blood covered the front of her nurse’s uniform, and she fell to the floor, unmoving. She had sacrificed her own life for mine.
Priestess Evers set the instrum
ents on the surgical table and went to work securing the straps again, pulling them even tighter this time.
I stretched my fingertips and touched the edge of the torn fabric Melody had tied around my wrist. It was so familiar. A symbol of defiance, even in the darkest moments.
I closed my eyes, shutting out the sounds of struggle behind the door. Forgetting the instruments on the table. I went deep into myself, to the core of what made me who I was. I tapped into that running river of strength that lived inside of me. I breathed new life into it, drawing from the earth beneath the basement floor. I could feel the trees blowing in the wind outside and the birds soaring high above the streets.
I drew my strength from life. From hope.
I fought against the poison that ran through my veins, and I reached inside my own heart. Because the mind may be where we kept our memories, but the heart was where we kept our souls. Every event in my life—my greatest sorrows and my happiest moments—were imprinted on my soul. They were a part of me. They had created me and turned me into the woman I was.
I drew on their strength and focused on their truth.
And suddenly, I remembered everything.
A Woman With No Heart
My eyes snapped open. The steel tip of the ice pick hovered just above my right eye. The priestess leaned over me, hatred seeping from her pores.
I understood now what this woman was capable of. I knew what she had done to me. To thousands.
I grabbed the ice pick with my mind and ripped it from her hands. It hit the wall behind her, and she gasped. I wrapped my magic around her and threw her across the room, her body landing at an awkward angle on the floor.
I focused on the metal buckles of the restraints, unhooking each of them simultaneously and threading the leather straps through them. I pulled my arms free just as the priestess regained her footing and gathered a new spell in her hands.
I breathed in, connecting to my power. Wind whipped my hair around my face, and I moved my hands in a circle in front of me as I slipped off the gurney to stand on my own two feet.
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