Hellion_Asylum of Ash

by Jenna Lyn Wright

  “Do you know Ruby Ríos?” I ask.

  Mad blinks in shock. “Her?”

  “She’s pretty vocal about it,” I say, “or at least she was this afternoon.”

  “Yeah, but anyone who’s that loud about anything is usually full of shit and looking for attention. I just figured, you don’t go around screaming about stuff in the cafeteria, or the rec room, unless you want attention.”

  “Or really are insane,” Winter chimes in.

  “Bingo,” Mad says, pointing at her.

  “Well, she’s not insane. She’s a full-on werewolf and there are two dead bodies in solitary to confirm it.”

  “What?” Mad’s eyes are saucers, but she’s not horrified. She’s excited.

  “Yeah,” Winter says, “it was glorious.”

  I realize with a jolt that I have become surprisingly comfortable talking about murder. The night I saw my parents become demons, the night I was dragged screaming from my house drenched in their blood, I’d gone catatonic for forty-eight hours.

  Tonight, I’m sharing a wickedly gleeful moment with a witch and a vampire chatting about the death of two of our captors, and I don’t feel regret or sadness over the killing, or anger that I’m trapped here in this horrid asylum. I feel with bone-deep certainty that I needed to meet Mad and Winter and that there’s just one thing missing: Ruby.

  “We have to help her,” I say. “After tonight, I don’t know what they’re going to do to Ruby.”

  “It’s going to be unbearable, I can tell you that,” Mad says. “They’ve stepped up their, uh, interrogation techniques, and…” Her eyes begin to well again. “I just think we’re in more danger than we thought. And I don’t know why it’s getting worse now, but it is.”

  Winter asks. “I’ve been here nearly two years and I still haven’t figured out what they want from me. From us.”

  Mad’s jaw drops. “Two years?”

  “I mean, I’ve got eternity so I guess it’s not that big of a deal, but yeah,” Winter nods, “seems a little like forever in here.” Sadness flickers over her face, but it’s only a moment and then it’s gone. “And in all that time, in all my sessions, I’m still not sure what they’re looking for.”

  Mad, her voice low and deadly serious, says, “I think they want to figure out what makes us… special, I guess is the word, and eradicate it. And if they can’t, I think they’ll eradicate us.”

  “Why wouldn’t they just kill us?” Winter asks. “I mean, it’s not like anyone’s waiting for me on the outside. I’m alone. And you,” she points at me, “have no family left, right?”

  I nod.

  “And my mom tossed me in here and hasn’t looked back,” Mad says.

  “We’re the forgotten. They could bury us and literally nobody would care.” Winter runs a hand through her short hair, and it sticks up, spiking in all directions.

  “I think we’re too valuable,” I say, and as the words leave my lips I’m certain that I’m right. “You said they want to figure out what makes us special, right Mad?”

  “Right,” she agrees. “I don’t know why they’d interrogate us and test on us if they didn’t.”

  My mind drifts to Ruby. How she told the doctors she always warns them about the full moon and they never help her, only inject her once it gets too dangerous, and the pieces start falling like dominoes for me.

  “These chips in our wrists, I think they don’t just dampen what we can do. What if they’re transmitters? Tiny jump drives?” I turn to Mad. “In your sessions, do they push you to extremes, either mentally or physically? Make you remember things, make you angry, fire up your emotions?”

  “Yeah, to say the least,” she says, and her eyes light up as she picks up what I’m getting at.

  “Same,” Winter says.

  “I’ve been telling the story of my parent’s murder to Dr. Kavanagh every day for the past two weeks. Nothing ever changes, but you know we’re being watched. Monitored. How much do you want to bet that every time our adrenaline spikes, or our anger flares, instead of manifesting as our, uh, abilities, it gets channeled into that chip as data?”

  “Holy shit,” Winter breathes.

  “What would they use it for?” Mad asks.

  “Nothing good,” Winter says, and she gets up to pace. “Those assholes.”

  “In the cafeteria, Ruby begged the guards to lock her up before the full moon, and they wouldn’t. She was agitated. Upset. And when we saw her tonight, she was strapped down. The anxiety she must have been feeling…” I trail off, remembering how desperate she was. “And they didn’t care.”

  “Jokes on them!” Winter yelps, clapping for emphasis. “Because she dug that chip right out of her arm and then dug that prick’s heart right out of his chest.”

  Mad lets out a hysterical giggle. “I’m sorry, that’s not funny.”

  “He deserved it,” Winter says, and she’s ice cold. No way that she and that doctor didn’t have history, and I’m certain from the look in her eyes that he got everything that was coming to him and more.

  “Kavanagh hasn’t pushed me too far. Yet. But it’s coming.” I stand and start to pace, my mind racing. “And with what we saw tonight with Ruby, I’m willing to bet they shift into high gear. Once doctors start dying, experiments tend to wrap up, wouldn’t you think?”

  “Absolutely,” Mad says. “I think the only reason they brought me back here was because of what happened in solitary. Someone came by the room in the middle of our session and they were panicked. I could hear it. They brought me back up here right after.”

  “We need to get out of here,” I say.

  “If we could’ve, we would’ve,” Winter says.

  “We weren’t together before,” I say. “The four of us, once we get Ruby… we could really be something.”

  Hope flickers in Mad’s eyes. “You really think we could get out?”

  She and Winter both look at me expectantly, and I’m as sure of this as I am of anything. “I don’t think we have a choice.”

  7

  I’ve been lying here for hours thinking about the doctor’s heart in Ruby’s hand and the blood on Winter’s mouth and the spark in Mad’s eyes when she told me about her grandmother’s spells. I wonder if I look that way when I talk about my parent’s deaths.

  After what feels like hours, there’s a soft knock on my door. I sit up, frowning. It must be time for my appointment with Doctor Kavanagh, but the orderlies never knock, they just barge in and grab us.

  I open the door and realize the reason for the change. Normally, the orderly is a doughy thirty-something with bloodshot eyes and crumbs in his beard. Our walk is slow, silent, and uneventful in the extreme.

  Today, an angular man has come to get me, with cheekbones that could cut glass and a shock of silver-white hair, despite being no more than mid-twenties. I get the feeling that if he weren’t dressed in his work uniform, he’d be wearing a vest and a watch with a pocket chain.

  It’s a nice change of pace, aside from the fact that he’s a demon.

  Every cell in my body goes on alert when I realize it. I’ve never seen anyone in a position of power in this place that wasn’t a human. The possibility that I’m crazy and seeing things doesn’t cross my mind, not after the friends I’ve made. There’s no way the people in charge would hire a supernatural, not with what they’re putting me and my friends through in here. They must not know what he is. So why is he here?

  I have no choice; I have to go with him.

  “Tomato soup today in the cafeteria,” he says. “Was never my favorite.”

  “And a poor choice in an asylum. Very messy, especially if someone gets agitated.”

  He smirks, flashing his sharp teeth. “If you don’t mind my asking, how long have you been here?”

  “Shouldn’t you know that?”

  He shrugs, as if embarrassed. “It’s my second day.”

  He’s lying.

  “Two weeks,” I admit.

  He nods as if
that means something to him, or I’ve helped him solve a piece of a puzzle. We’re just about to reach Kavanagh’s office when he says, “What did you think of the little scene last night?”

  Faint alarm bells begin to ring in the back of my skull. He can only mean Ruby. I glance over at him, plastering a look of confusion on my face, and reply, “What scene?”

  “The incident with Miss Ríos.”

  My heart thuds like a hammer and I’m sure he can hear it over the squeak of his shoes on the freshly-polished tile. He’s working hard to maintain an air of calm, but his black eyes are intense, two bottomless voids and they bore into me, digging for answers that I don’t want to give.

  “Oh, you mean this,” I say and point to my black eye. “That was intense. I mean, I was just sitting there, trying to eat my delicious potato substance, and out of nowhere I get a fist in the face and my lunch splattered on the wall.”

  He slows, and I have no choice but to slow down with him. We’re not supposed to go anywhere alone. Not that that’s stopped me, but it’d seem a bit blatant now.

  “I mean the massacre in solitary last night.”

  My stomach drops and the hair stands up on the back of my neck. A demon I’ve never seen before shows up at my door the night after Mad, Winter, and I plan to break out of here with Ruby… It can’t be a coincidence. He knows about us, somehow.

  There’s no point in lying, so I play a hunch.

  “I think they got what they deserved, and I think you think so, too.”

  He barks out a laugh of surprise, and the sound echoes in the otherwise empty hallway. “Now that I was not expecting.”

  “I’m not going to insult you by lying to you. I’ve had the same orderly walk me to my appointments every day for the past two weeks. Suddenly today, I have you instead. And you clearly know what I’ve been up to. Every other mindless drone in this place takes every opportunity to punish us, yet you haven’t marched me down to the office to jam a needle in my arm, or force a pill down my throat.” I watch him for a reaction, but he remains unreadable. “You might not be on my side, but you’re clearly not on theirs, and that’s good enough for me. For now.”

  “For now?” He’s genuinely amused. He shakes his head and runs a hand through that striking white hair. “I like you.”

  Now that’s not what I was expecting. Flustered, I blurt out, “You’re here for a reason. So what is it?”

  He simply gazes down at me as the corners of his lips curl. “To take you to your appointment, of course. And here we are,” he says, gesturing to a door that seems to have materialized in front of us. I’d been so wrapped up in trying to figure out his angle that I hadn’t even realized we’d arrived.

  “I’ll be seeing you, Gray.”

  ***

  Even on a good day, Doctor Kavanagh is the last person I want to see.

  Today is not a good day.

  I’m running on no sleep, still keyed up by the violence I’ve witnessed, and furious about the state in which they returned Mad to our room last night. Kavanagh and the people she works with are ghouls, making their living torturing people like me and my friends, and they deserve to end up like Ruby’s doctor.

  Winter had stayed in our room until almost dawn. As the sky outside our window had lightened with the first pink streaks, she’d glanced down at her wrist at an imaginary watch and said, “It’s about that time, ladies. What’s the plan?”

  The plan is that I have no plan. Not yet. And my time would be better spent plotting in my cell than telling my sad story for the fifteenth time, but here we are.

  “Why don’t we talk about your mother?” Dr. Kavanagh leans forward and clicks the end of her pen, holding it poised over the notebook on her lap.

  “I’d prefer not to.”

  “And yet,” she says, “we have to do things we’d prefer not to all the time. It’s called being an adult.”

  “There’s your first mistake. I’m seventeen,” I hiss.

  At this point, I believe that we’re both barely tolerating each other.

  “Humor me, and I’ll knock ten minutes off your session.”

  Sold.

  ***

  My father was dead at my feet. His claws had retracted, his eyes shifted from obsidian back to their natural warm brown. His blood still spilled from his body, though he was long past feeling his wounds.

  I should have been paralyzed by fear. Crushed by the weight of the million questions I should’ve had running through my head. Instead, only one thought screamed and ricocheted through the adrenaline-spiked haze: where was my mother?

  When I’d gone to bed, she’d been reading in bed next to my father. Their room had been empty just moments ago, but there were doors that had been closed upstairs that I hadn’t bothered to check behind. Why would I? Slow dread crept through me as I realized she had to be up there, somewhere, hiding.

  I raced out of the kitchen, tracking crimson from the cracked linoleum onto the creaking hardwood floor of our living room.

  If he’d hurt her…

  I ran up the stairs, the thick carpet muffling my ascent, and turned to face the upstairs hallway.

  She was there, waiting for me.

  She was not my mother anymore.

  “I knew this day would come,” the creature’s voice was like broken glass. It was not the voice of the woman who sang me lullabies when I was small and scared. Not the voice of the woman who cheered for me at my soccer game that afternoon.

  “Come here, Gray,” the thing that was not my mother said, and held out an arm, beckoning me toward her with one razor-sharp claw. “Don’t make me chase you.”

  ***

  “And you killed her, too,” Dr. Kavanagh says, watching me keenly for any reaction.

  “You already know that,” I say. “Why do people keep asking me questions that they already know the answers to?”

  “What people?”

  “Just…” I wave her off because no way am I giving her anything. “People.”

  “Have you made friends here?”

  “No,” I say, and I’m afraid I’ve answered too quickly. But maybe I can work that to my advantage because while I’d been recounting my story to Kavanagh, I’d been working through a kernel of an idea in my head.

  Why not take a page from Ruby’s playbook, and maybe find her in the process?

  I pop up out of my chair and begin to pace. “I’d like to go back to my room now.”

  “Our session isn’t up. Please sit down, Gray.”

  “No. I’m tired of this. Of repeating myself. Why am I here?”

  “You know why you’re here,” she replies. “You’re a danger to others, and possibly yourself. You’re being evaluated…”

  The more I move the better I feel, and I let the momentum carry me.

  “Let me out,” I say.

  “That’s not going to happen,” Kavanagh replies, and she glances over her shoulder toward the far wall, where I’m certain others have been watching each and every one of our sessions.

  “Let me out!” And just because it’s so damn fun to act as unhinged as they believe me to be, I pick up a vase full of fake flowers from the table next to my chair and fling it against the wall.

  The sound of shattering glass is like a starter’s pistol, and two orderlies burst into the room as if they’d been anxiously waiting to get tagged in from the other side of the door.

  “The syringe,” Kavanagh says. “We won’t be getting further today.” And it’s not with annoyance, but with satisfaction that she says, “We got what we needed.”

  More data for them, I’m sure. There’s nothing I can do about that. I get on the balls of my feet, bouncing, ready for them to come at me, and I smile in a way that I hope makes me look just to the left of normal. One of the orderlies actually looks worried and I mentally pat myself on the back. The other, though, looks like he lives for this, and he tackles me to the ground with as much effort as it would take to swat a fly.

  As he jams the
needle full of sedative into my neck and depresses the plunger, sending the liquid searing through my veins, the last thought that flits through my quickly-darkening mind is that I really need to learn how to fight.

  8

  My world is pain.

  I am strapped to a cold metal table, the skin of my wrists is red and raw underneath my restraints. My muscles ache, my mind is fogged, and my voice is hoarse and ragged.

  The bright lights overhead blind me to the faces of my captors, but in the end, what does it matter? I know who’s running the show. Her face will be burned into my mind for the rest of my life.

  Kavanagh.

  I awoke some time ago, shivering and sweating. Someone was pulling a needle from the crook of my arm, and the injection site still stings like wasp venom.

  “Let me out,” I say, and the words are slow to tumble from my mouth.

  A rhythmic clicking sound punctures the haze, and someone steps into the light, allowing me to see their face. It’s Kavanagh, and she’s clicking her nails against a clipboard. “That didn’t work upstairs, and it’s not going to work now.”

  She moves to the side of my table and peers down at me. “That was quite the outburst. A new development.”

  “I like to keep people on their toes,” I croak, and try a smile. My lips are dry and cracked, and the skin pulls painfully.

  “No, that’s not it,” she replies, and she is clearly done with my shit. “What were you hoping to accomplish up there?”

  I simply turn away from her. My head is throbbing and maybe if I’m uncooperative enough, they’ll inject me with something that will knock me out for a month.

  She leans over and grabs my face and yanks my head to face her, her nails digging into my cheeks hard enough that I feel a trickle of blood slide past my ear and into my hair. “That’s not how this works. I ask, you answer.”

  “Did you know you have a demon working for you?”

  She lets go of me as if I’ve burned her. “What did you say?”