Hellion_Asylum of Ash

by Jenna Lyn Wright

  She backs away from the refrigerator and hops up onto a stainless steel prep table, swinging her legs back and forth as she continues to gnaw on the meat. “How’d you get out?”

  I keep my front to her as I maneuver around the table and approach the refrigerator. “Distracted guard during the chaos today,” I say and risk a glance inside. I grab the first thing I see, not wanting to take my attention from her for too long. Turns out it’s a hunk of cheese.

  “Chaos?” She circles a bloody finger in front of her eye. “That where you got that?”

  My black eye. I nod and take a bite of the cheese. Cheddar. Could be worse.

  “I can’t believe I missed the action. I mean, I can, since I only run around at night like a big old cliché, but still. I would’ve liked to have seen it.”

  “Every night?” I ask, and she nods.

  “How do you get away with that? Do the guards know? Or are you just that good?” Her easy nature has me relaxing before I realize it’s happened.

  “They’ve seen me sizzle in the sunlight,” she says.

  “So they know! For sure, about…”

  “Things like me? Yeah.” Her almond eyes narrow as she runs her gaze over me. “And things like you, I’m guessing, as you didn’t run out of here screaming bloody murder.” She glances down at her red-stained hand and chuckles to herself. “Bloody. Ha.”

  No point in dancing around it, so I shrug and say, “Gray Carver. I see monsters. I think they’re demons, but nobody gave me a manual for this stuff so I just killed my parents when I realized they had wings and claws and were probably going to murder me like they did my neighbor.”

  She barks out a laugh, then chokes it off immediately and shoots a glance back toward the doors to make sure she hasn’t alerted anyone to our presence. Once she’s satisfied, she turns back to me and says, “Winter Lin. I drink blood and avoid the sun, and I hate this chip in my wrist because I can’t bend people to my will anymore.”

  “You can hypnotize people?”

  “It’s complicated,” she says.

  “How many of us are there?”

  “Not many,” she admits. “I’ve only run into one. I think she’s a witch. At least, that’s the visual stereotype I’m working off of. Long dark hair. Weird green eyes. Witchy vibe is the only way I can describe it.”

  “She’s my roommate. Mad. Madeline. And yeah, apparently she can bring things back from the dead.”

  “Too late for me. Been there, done that.”

  She laughs as my jaw drops.

  We both go tense as there’s a clicking from the hallway outside the cafeteria. Someone’s coming toward us.

  “There’s one more,” I say, remembering my earlier vow. Ducking down, I dig through the refrigerator and find a half-eaten sandwich wrapped in cellophane. It’ll have to do. “A werewolf. At least, that was the indication. She’s the one who punched me.”

  Winter slides off the table and crouches next to me. “This is not at all what I was expecting tonight. I like it.” She nods to the sandwich. “For the road?”

  “For Ruby. She didn’t get dinner either as she was too busy getting dragged out of the cafeteria and moaning about the moon. Wanna come?”

  She tosses the hunk of meat over her shoulder and it hits the tile with a wet slap. “I’m always up for an adventure. What’re they gonna do if they catch me? Kill me?”

  Again, she laughs, and her amusement at her own mortality, or lack thereof, is terrifying. There’s a sharp edge to her words whenever she makes a crack, and I wonder if she resents what she is.

  She nods toward the door. “Let’s go bring a sandwich to a werewolf.”

  5

  “Either this asylum is shockingly understaffed, or they have no idea how good we are at escaping our rooms,” Winter says as we creep along a darkened hallway.

  She’s right. Aside from ducking into a janitor’s closet to avoid a lone guard ten minutes ago, the hallways of the asylum are empty aside from one demon-spotter and one vampire.

  “Do you actually know where solitary confinement is?” I ask.

  “Unfortunately, yes. I had an incident once. A guard may or may not have hemorrhaged.” She glances over her shoulder. “He was fine, eventually. And I got thrown in the hole for, I don’t know, enough nights to leave me ravenous and weak. There’s a teeny little window in there, too, and I had to spend the daylight hours slowly avoiding a square of sun.” Her arm snaps out, and she extends her middle finger and waves it around at the asylum.

  I follow her around a corner, and as we move deeper into the asylum I realize that the state of the building is changing. The walls become more discolored, splotched with water stains and rust. The tiles are cracked and dirty. Cobwebs cling to ceiling corners.

  Ahead, in the darkness, someone is screaming.

  “They don’t throw many people in solitary, so I’m going to go ahead and assume that’s your werewolf howling down there,” Winter says. For the first time tonight, there is a note of fear in her voice.

  “I think so, yeah.” I’m not sure what I was expecting. If she’s really a werewolf, the night of the full moon is probably the absolute worst time to be around her. And if she’s not, well, she’s clearly not in her right mind at the moment.

  “You sure you want to do this?”

  “The more you struggle, the worse it’ll be.” The voice is deep and male and floats to us from somewhere further down the hallway.

  Winter and I glance at each other. We may be in over our heads here. It was one thing when we were sneaking around underneath the noses of the few orderlies and guards. This right here sounds deadly serious.

  “I have to try and help her,” I say, though I have absolutely no idea what I can do.

  “No, you don’t,” Winter counters. “You’ve been here for what? A few days?”

  “Two weeks.”

  “And you’ve known her for about six hours?” She glances past me, down toward the commotion. “You don’t know what they can do to you.”

  “You’re right. I don’t. But I do know that someone like me, like us, is in some sort of trouble down there. If there’s something I can do to help her then I’m going to, because I’d hope she’d do the same for me.”

  Winter blinks at me.

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” she says. “I’ve just never seen anyone in here stand up for anyone else. It’s always about mitigating punishment. Keeping your head down, especially when someone else is getting dragged away, because at least it’s not you this time.” She actually looks ashamed. “Let’s go,” she says and gestures toward solitary.

  We move through the near-darkness, backs to the walls, and I catch a glimpse of the moon through a high window on the wall opposite us. It hangs directly overhead, and I whisper to Winter, “It’s gotta be midnight.”

  “Perfect,” she mouths and pushes me forward.

  Hinges squeak, and a warm glow becomes visible at the far end of the hallway as someone opens a door. There’s nowhere for us to go so we press ourselves against the wall, doing our best to remain hidden.

  “Get your ass back in here!” someone inside the room barks and the figure silhouetted in the doorway hesitates, then disappears back inside. They leave the door open a crack, though, and without needing to check with each other, Winter and I both move quickly to close the gap between us and the room where Ruby’s being held.

  I take the high position, while Winter crouches down, going low, and we both peer around the edge of the open door.

  Ruby is strapped to a table. She writhes and kicks, and the leather and buckles around her ankles and wrists strain as she does her best to pull herself up. “I tell you this will happen,” she growls, “I tell you every time.”

  “That you do, sweetheart,” a male doctor sneers, and holds up a syringe filled with clear liquid. I’ve never seen him before but I hate him already. “And every time, you squirm on this table, and we dope you up, and you behave. Hold her,” he say
s to the orderly, and the woman moves behind Ruby, clamps both hands on her shoulders, and presses down on her to keep her still.

  Winter grabs my ankle, digging her nails into my skin, and I know that she’s as angry as I am, consumed with frustration and helplessness.

  Ruby starts to pant, and her muscles bulge as she fights against her restraints. I wince as the leather cuts into her skin.

  Wait.

  One of her wrists is bloody. The wrist she was scratching at during dinner. The one with the chip in it. The skin there isn’t angry and raw, it’s got a small divot in it that bleeds steadily.

  “She dug her chip out,” I whisper to Winter, and I feel her go still.

  The doctor stoops over her, depressing the plunger on the syringe to send a small squirt of liquid out, releasing any air bubbles. Just want to drug her into oblivion I guess, not kill her.

  Just as he’s about to pierce her skin with the needle, she lets out a roar and twists her body to the side, rebelling against everything that holds her down. The orderly’s grip slips, and she’s thrown off balance.

  “Pin her!” the doctor yells, but he’s too late.

  I watch as the leather strap around her left wrist stretches, turning from brown to white at the weakest spot, cracking and tearing until her arm snaps free with a vicious crack.

  She has her hand on the doctor’s wrist before he can flinch away, and she bends it back and around with a sickening crunch, pulverizing his bones. He screams, high-pitched and terrified, and she twists his arm around to jam the needle into his neck. His eyes roll up into the back of his head, and he drops like a sack of bricks, his skull cracking against the floor.

  “Holy shit,” Winter breathes. I am frozen to the spot. It has taken Ruby all of three seconds to incapacitate her tormenter.

  The orderly stumbles back, hitting a cart carrying surgical supplies. Metal clangs against the tile as the cart hits the ground and sends scalpels and scissors skittering across the floor.

  Now that she has leverage, Ruby sits up and unbuckles her wrist and ankles. Her hair, sweaty and stringy, falls across her face again, but not before I get a glimpse of her eyes. The ice blue of them glows, and her pupil has turned to a vertical slit.

  “Please, no,” the orderly pleads from the ground, bringing her arms up to cover her face.

  “Please no what?” Ruby says, and her voice is a low growl, laced with menace. She reaches down, picks up the doctor by the front of his shirt, and throws him against the far wall.

  The orderly whimpers and dissolves into incoherent mumbling.

  “I’ve told you I needed to be locked up when the moon is like this,” Ruby says, grabbing the doctor’s ankle and dragging him across the ground to lay him in front of the orderly. He leaves a red smear on the dirty tile. “I didn’t need to be injected. Or chipped. Or experimented on.”

  “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry,” the orderly whispers, tears and snot streaming down her face. She can’t take her eyes from the body of her colleague.

  “You’re not sorry for doing it,” Ruby says, crouching down to eye level with the orderly, mere inches from her face. “You’re sorry I got free.”

  With a roar, she plunges her hand down and through the doctor’s rib cage, coating her arm in his blood, and ripping something free from inside. With a triumphant howl, she raises her arm to the sky. She has the doctor’s heart in her hand.

  I clamp a hand over my mouth to stifle a scream, while below me, Winter says, “This is my kinda girl.”

  Ruby tosses the heart over her shoulder and descends on the orderly, whose screams fade to gurgles as Ruby tears her apart. As she moves, her joints seem to crack and bend in odd places, and her skeleton lengthens and stretches. She is something altogether inhuman, and it is horrifying and strangely exhilarating to watch.

  Overwhelmed and overcome, the sandwich slips out of my sweaty hand and hits the floor with a dull thud.

  Ruby freezes. Whips her head around. Fixes me with those too-blue eyes.

  She stands, and she’s taller than she should be. Her arms longer. Fingers tipped with now-bloody claws. She cocks her head like a confused puppy and I can see the dominos falling.

  “Lock me in,” she growls and grips the edge of the table she’d been strapped to moments ago. The muscles in her arms strain as she works to hold herself in place. “Do it!” she screams.

  I cannot move, so Winter jumps into motion, tearing me away from the door and throwing me backward. I hit the wall hard and slump down to sitting as she yanks the door closed and slams a massive deadbolt home just as Ruby throws herself at the door on the other side.

  A terrible shrieking echoes as Ruby runs her claws down the metal, and through the small double-paned window in the center, I can see her bloody jaws snap and snarl. Winter backs up, looking as stunned as I feel.

  “I don’t think she needs our help anymore,” she says, and her voice shakes.

  Ruby is staring at us with those animal eyes, her breath fogging up the window, and though muffled by metal, I can hear her say, “Thank you.”

  6

  We run.

  I have no idea how we make it back to my room undetected. Maybe they don’t patrol the halls while we’re supposed to be sleeping. Maybe the guards have all been called to the massacre in solitary.

  Winter drags me through the empty shadowed halls and we don’t stop until we get to my room. She rips open the door, shoves me inside, and darts in behind me, locking the door behind her.

  “You need to get into bed. Now.” My eyes haven’t fully adjusted to the dark so she’s just a shape in the shadows to me, but I can make out that she’s pointing toward my bed. “Someone’s coming.”

  On shaking legs, I stumble into bed and throw the covers up and over me just as a key scrapes against the lock on the other side of the door.

  Weak light slices in as an orderly marches Mad into the room and shoves her toward the bed like he’s just tossed a bag of garbage to the sidewalk. She collapses onto the mattress. He doesn’t even help her get under the covers.

  He strides back out as she starts to shiver.

  The moment the door is shut and locked, I race to her side.

  “Mad?” Her skin is clammy and feverish. She moans, not fully awake, but not asleep either. In some twilight consciousness.

  “Whatever they gave her is straight poison.” I jump as Winter’s words come from directly behind me. I hadn’t heard her emerge from underneath the bed or wherever she’d been hiding. She’s quiet as a ghost. Or a vampire, I suppose. “She’s sweating it out and I can smell it coming through her pores. Sour. I don’t recognize it, and I’ve been given a lot of stuff over the months.”

  I shake Mad again, and she rouses a bit more. “Is she gonna be okay?”

  Winter is silent for a moment. “Her pulse is strong. So, yes. I think so.”

  Glancing over my shoulder, I say, “I thought the chip dampened your abilities.”

  “It does.” She smiles, and her tiny fangs shine in the moonlight. “Imagine what I’m like without that garbage in my wrist.”

  Mad snaps awake and scrambles away from us, kicking the thin comforter from her bed and slamming her back up against the wall. Her eyes are unfocused and wide with panic.

  “Mad, it’s okay. It’s me. It’s Gray,” I say, sitting back on my heels and holding up my hands in mock surrender.

  She looks from me to Winter and back again, and I watch as recognition slowly works its way through her.

  “I’m here,” she says as if she can’t truly trust what she’s seeing and wants confirmation.

  “Unfortunately,” Winter deadpans.

  I smile. “You’re here, stuck in this place with the rest of us.”

  The tension drains from her in a rush and she slumps forward, bursting into tears.

  “I’m not good with this stuff,” Winter says, and I can hear her shuffle back a few steps. Springs squeak as she takes a seat on my bed.

  I crawl
up next to Mad and pull her into a half hug, doing my best to comfort her. I’m not good with this stuff either, but she’s a wreck and helping her is helping me take my mind off of what happened with Ruby.

  “I know that she’s upset,” Winter says, “but we need to talk about the werewolf down the hallway.”

  Dammit.

  “Werewolf?” Mad sniffles, looking up through watery eyes. “I am hallucinating, aren’t I?”

  “You might be hallucinating,” I admit. “Winter says they gave you some pretty strong stuff. But yeah, there’s a werewolf in here with us.”

  She looks around frantically, and I amend, “In the building. Not our room.”

  Mad dries her eyes with the sleeve of her jumpsuit. “Man, you get tortured for half a day and look at the excitement you miss.”

  She tries to smile, but it doesn’t reach her eyes. I squeeze her arm. “I wasn’t sure if you were coming back,” I admit. “You said you’d never had a roommate for more than thirteen days, and I thought… I was just worried.”

  “So was I,” she says softly. “To be honest, I’m having a hard time coming back to myself, if that makes sense.”

  “It does,” Winter says from across the room. “I’ve had sessions like that. You’re strong, though, I can tell. You’ll push through it.”

  Mad scoots away from the wall, wincing as she moves. I wonder what they’ve done to her, but she doesn’t say anything and I don’t ask. She gazes up at Winter. “I don’t believe we’ve met.”

  “I mostly come out at night, once all of you are already locked away in bed,” Winter says. “It’s kind of my thing. I’m Winter.”

  “She’s a vampire,” I whisper, and Mad’s eyes light up.

  “No shit?”

  “She shits you not,” Winter confirms.

  “So what does that make, now, four of us?” The rest of Mad’s haze is burning away, and I can practically see the wheels start turning. “I knew there had to be more but to have confirmation…” She gestures for Winter to sit on her other side. “Tell me about the werewolf.”