The dog continued barking, right in my ear.
I covered my mouth so that I didn’t scream.
Her face was bloated, as he had said.
She almost didn’t look human.
A soft whimper left my throat and suddenly the dog stopped barking and instead began to nuzzle his nose into my neck, as though he could sense I needed the comfort.
Marilyn Monroe ran into the room.
“Is everything okay?” Her eyes widened when she saw me at the desk.
“Graham!” she shouted, but her voice was nothing more than a loud whisper and for that I was grateful.
Wiping the tears from my cheeks, I stumbled crossed the room, grabbed my backpack and pushed past her.
Noisy traffic filled my ears as I bolted out of the station and ran down the street, pumping my legs hard, desperate to get as far away as possible from those photos.
After a few minutes I slowed down and stumbled into a dingy looking alley that smelled like urine, and vomited against a wall, my palms above my head pressing against the red bricks for support.
Nothing would ever erase what I’d just seen.
Tears streamed down my face as I whispered a silent apology to the poor dead girl, because I felt bad for the joy that was working its way through all the layers of pain and horror that I felt at seeing those images.
The dead girl was just that. A dead girl. She wasn’t my dead sister.
Which meant that Lauren was alive.
5
The girl with no name
I’m in a bed. A tall guy, young like me I think, with a strong jawline and slightly almond-shaped blue eyes, is pacing back and forth at the foot of my bed, concern darkening the shadows under his eyes. He seems worried, maybe for me, even though I’m sure we’ve never met before. Don’t ask me how I know this, because I don’t have a clue who or where I am. My mind is weirdly blank.
Yawning, I try to push myself up into a sitting position, but as soon as I do, he snaps out of his worry-trance and rushes over to ease me back against the pillows. His hands are large and he’s wearing a military uniform of some kind, the khaki fatigues complimenting his six-foot frame. He has a blond buzz-cut.
Am I in an army barrack of some sort? I ask this, but he doesn’t answer and instead shakes his head.
My body hurts, not just in one place but all over, however it’s my heart that aches the most. It’s as though I’m pining for someone. Who? I don’t know. Everything is just so confusing.
Allowing my head to sink into the softness of the pillow, I reach back into the farthest corner of my brain and try to think of my name but every time I do, random letters appear inside my head and then they are washed away by a wave of confusion.
The guy glances over his shoulder and calls out to someone. “Baba! Ona se probudila.”
I don’t understand a word he is saying. Why don’t I understand? Shouldn’t I know? Where am I? I try to think of where I belong, of my home, of who I am, but it makes my head hurt.
Something stirs in me, a panic, as though I should be somewhere, with someone, and it must show on my face because the guy offers a warm smile and a glass of clear liquid.
“Je si zedna?” he says and I look at the glass and nod. It’s pretty obvious that he’s offering me water.
“Water,” he says, in a thick, Eastern European accent. Something in me likes the sound of his voice. It kinda reminds me of someone. It is deep yet has a soft tone to it, a tone of kindness. My muscles unknot and my body seems to relax when I hear it.
The glass is cool between my clammy fingers and I take a sip, followed by another, until I tip it back and gulp down the lot. The guy nods and smiles as though he’s proud of me for drinking a glass of water, like I’m sick or special or something. How weird.
A tiny woman bustles in. She is dressed in a shapeless black shift dress which hangs off her thin frame but reveals wiry muscles along her forearms. Her round, almost cute face has a “don’t mess with me” look about it. Staring hard at her, I try to think of a name, or some kind of memory which connects me to her, but I get nothing. It’s frustrating and makes me want to leap out of bed and slam my head against the wall repeatedly until I smack some sense into it.
She rests a petite, cool hand against my forehead and comes back a few minutes later with a cup of herbal tea that smells fresh and sweet. I take a sip and it’s loaded with sugar, just the way I like it—at least, the way I think I like it. Perhaps this is my family and I’ve just taken a knock to the head and can’t remember them.
“What happened to me?” I ask.
The man looks at the woman and then back at me. They are so disproportionate in size. She is so small and he is a total giant. I almost crack up laughing.
“You must rest, please,” he says, his voice still so strange to me and yet so soothing.
“Where am I?” I ask, because I need to know.
“On the island, Korcula,” he says. “Do you know the Dalmatian coast of Croatia?”
I nod. But I hardly know anything about Croatia, apart from reading about the “it” party island, Hvar, a few times in the gossip mags. Geography was never my thing in school. Actually no subject had ever really been my thing at school. School for me was all about the social side of things.
I gasp.
That thought stops me in my tracks. I faintly recall busy hallways that I used to walk through, with noisy kids everywhere. A memory, even if it’s a vague one.
He smiles and seems pleased that we are communicating. “My grandmother, she will take care of you, little one.” His use of “little one” warms my insides.
The guy stands. He is so tall and fit and... kind of hot in his uniform.
“Where are you going?” I ask in alarm. He must mean something to me because my heart is just about having an attack at the idea of him leaving.
“I am due back at work. I will take my leave again in two weeks.”
Two weeks?
I nod, as though I know this, when I truly don’t understand.
“Please stay,” I say, and I can hear the tears in my voice. Urgh, I sound so needy. No wonder the guy is going away. Maybe he’s my boyfriend or my husband. Just how old am I anyway?
“Goodbye,” he says, bending down to stroke my cheeks with his thumb. He smells of soap and faintly of aftershave and I breathe in deep.
He draws his hand back and rubs my tears between his fingers. His blue eyes turn dark with sadness. “I am sorry to go, draga.”
More tears flow and I hastily wipe them away with my forearm. I don’t know what “draga” means but somehow I know it means that he cares.
The old woman clucks her tongue and lightly smacks her grandson on the bottom before ushering him out. He’s upset me and she’s clearly not happy about it.
After the door closes behind him, I wish that I’d asked him his name. No, what am I saying? I should have asked him my name.
The woman sits down on the bed for a few seconds and offers me a smile that turns her face into a wrinkled apple, urging me to drink more tea by miming the act. So I finish it and after the woman leaves to make kitchen noises somewhere in the next room, my eyelids become heavy and the tension in my muscles starts to melt and relax.
I sink right into the soft mattress and pillows beneath me and allow my thoughts to wander, to flick through the stream of nameless faces that seem to constantly enter my mind. One, a brown-haired girl with large, dark eyes, two, a man and a woman who stare at me with so much love my heart swells and nearly bursts, and three... damn... my mind turns fuzzy and I can’t remember the last face.
The comforting scent of soup or a stew cooking wafts in from the kitchen and my belly growls.
My hand inches under the bedspread until it rests on my stomach. It’s soft and squishy, like one gigantic stress-ball, while the rest of my body is taut and lean. I can’t help but massage it with my fingers. It feels strange, empty, as though I’m missing something inside of me.
A ch
ild?
Could I be missing a child that I carried inside of me for nine months?
More tears spill down my cheeks, so hot they burn my skin.
I don’t know who I am, but I know that I am empty inside.
6
Robbie
I wrestled Damir to the ground, which was surprisingly easy despite his bulk, and most likely due to the fact that he was laughing hysterically.
“Tell me where the anaesthetic is!”
Damir lay beneath me with his head thrown back and his body jerking with laughter every time the young woman shrieked.
“I’ve run out,” he said, between laughs. “I haven’t left the castle since... since...” The laughter faded and I knew that his thoughts had turned to Lauren.
He gripped me by the shirt collar and tried to yank me down, but I held my ground, so instead he raised his head until we were nose to nose. His breath reeked of sour wine.
“Nothing matters anymore. Don’t you see? Life is not important. No life is. I don’t matter and they don’t matter.” He widened his eyes. “I’m just putting them out of their misery because they don’t matter. Just like you don’t matter. What’s the point of your life, Robbie? Without your sight you’re useless.”
He sighed and removed a hand from my shirt collar to stroke my cheek. I flinched and jerked free from his touch.
“Lovely Rob. You’ve always been a good kid. Liked by all. When Marko found you I was jealous, so jealous I wanted to kill you. Everyone liked beautiful blond little Rob, especially my brother.” He let go of my shirt altogether and fell back against the floor. I winced at the cracking sound his head made against the stone.
“Nobody, not even Sylvia, cares about me anymore. She loves you, you know? She even loved you back then, when you were a kid and she was a woman.” He snorted and struggled to get up. “Sick, stupid, bitch.”
The girl on the table started to cry giant, heaving sobs, bringing me back to the present.
I slammed my fist into Damir’s temple. Hard.
His head slackened to one side and I prayed he was dead. But when I thrust my face up close, a faint breath tickled my nose. He was alive. Damn.
I released him and he slumped to the floor.
The girl’s cries became whimpers as soon as I approached her bedside. When I stroked her sweat-soaked hair away from her face and whispered, “You’re going to be okay,” she silenced all together.
Frantically, I felt around her neck until I located her pulse—weak, but there. The poor girl had passed out with relief or shock or both.
With as much care as I could despite my blurred sight, I rummaged through every drawer and every bench top, sending an assortment of instruments, scalpels, scissors and knifes all over the floor until finally a needle pricked my index finger and I swore. At last I’d found what I was looking for. Right next to it were several rolls of thread, exactly what I needed, and I hurried back to the girl so that I could sew her back up, not as a mermaid, but as the woman she was born to be.
But as I waited for my sight to sharpen so that I could slip the thread through the needle’s eye, frustration burned through my veins. If anything, my sight seemed to get significantly blurrier by the second.
After more than a couple of minutes passed, during which I attempted many times to thread the needle by feel, I realised I couldn’t wait any longer. The girl would bleed to death if I didn’t get her stitched up right now. I’d have to bring her back to my room and ask Lily to do it or at least ask her to thread the needle for me and guide my stitching.
I was useless without sight. Damir, although crazy, was absolutely right.
After wrapping both limbs tightly in bandages to stem the bleeding, I considered my next problem — getting the girl out of the room safely and unseen, so that Damir couldn’t track her down if or when he woke.
I draped her body with the same bloodstained sheet that Damir had covered her legs with. There wasn’t much else to choose from as it seemed every sheet in the lab was stained. Then I carried her limp body out of the room. She was so thin that even with her near-dead weight she was as light as a doll.
The laboratory door slammed shut behind us, the sound echoing down the long corridor and I winced, my back flush against the wall, until I decided it was safe enough to start moving. Though my vision returned at that moment, there was no way I was going to turn back around. Frano Tollin’s lab was the last place this girl needed to see again. I’d do the stitching in my room.
I exhaled and stared down at the girl’s passive face while I walked. She seemed so at peace right now. Long, golden hair hung from a pretty face so similar in features to Lauren, which had most likely been her undoing. I desperately hoped that she would survive this. That this girl would get to live on and not become another victim of Damir’s sick and twisted ways.
Several guards passed me with the girl in my arms, but none of them batted an eyelid, which only served to deepen the sick feeling swirling in the pit of my stomach. Just how many other women had passed them by in this condition, for these men to grow so indifferent to the sight of them? Had they seen the girls who Damir would deem “successfully” operated on? The “mermaids”? And what about all the failed operations? Had Damir been simply dumping their bodies out to sea using the light crystal channels? He knew how to operate the travel chutes. Sylvia now did too.
Not long after Marko was banished she forced me to show her how to operate them. She and Damir had likely trained some of their guards to use the chutes too. Not a wise decision on their behalf.
When Marko was king, he’d guarded that information like his life had depended on it, which it had. He only showed me how to use the chutes because he could trust me with his life, as I’d proven to him time and time again. For Sylvia and Damir to train their guards on how to operate the chutes was to give away the keys to the kingdom. If the wrong person or persons were to use the channels and notify the rest of the world about the existence of Marin, the entire underwater city would come under threat.
“Another dud?” Redkin asked, grinning.
Luckily my hands weren’t free, otherwise I would have punched the smile from his face. I’d had enough of his ugly mug.
Redkin stood before the door to Marko’s room, which had been locked ever since Lauren’s death, the key looped around his belt buckle. Right now Redkin was making as though to undo his belt and remove the key. Probably thought he had another body to dump out to sea. I didn’t like the idea of him knowing how to use the travel chutes and hoped to God that Sylvia hadn’t passed this vital knowledge on to him.
“After his recent success I wouldn’t have thought he’d lose another one,” Redkin said, raising his blond brows in surprise.
The girl stirred and moaned, her body tensing in my arms. Ignoring Redkin, I kicked open my bedroom door. All that mattered to me was keeping this girl alive.
After Marko was banished, Sylvia had “allowed” me the use of my old bedroom, which Miranda herself had used only months ago. I’d refused to return to the cottage after Marko had been banished because I’d made a promise to Miranda to look after her sister and the baby. And though I’d failed with Lauren, I wasn’t going to fail with the baby. As long as little Angelina lived in the castle, so would I.
Of course, the adjoining door to Marko’s room had been locked before I moved in, to prevent my access to the chutes and shuttles. Sylvia had quickly guessed that I planned to send a shuttle to Marko as soon as I was able to.
Lily was there when I entered my room and she stifled a scream when she saw the bleeding girl in my arms.
I gently eased the pale, limp form onto the bed, elevating her legs with pillows, but swore when I saw the amount of fresh blood seeping through the bandages. My fingers sought her pulse—far too weak.
“Towels, Lily, we need lots of towels if we’re to stem the bleeding.”
While Lily rushed to get them, I shouted for a guard other than Redkin, with orders for pain relieving me
dicine.
The girl shivered and I hurried to cover her with blankets and rub her arms, but when I asked her to stay awake she seemed to give up, her head lolling to the side. A cold chill slid down my spine as I pressed my fingers to her neck. Her pulse was barely there.
Damn. I couldn’t lose her.
Lily came back through the door, a bundle of towels beneath each arm. “I’ve got—”
“Quick,” I shouted, my voice hoarse. “Thread this needle then press her wounds together while I stitch them.”
“Which leg?” Lily asked, after she’d threaded the needle and then carefully pressed the length of it against my fingers.
“Any!”
Lily wrapped a folded towel around the girl’s right leg and wrapped it so that her wounds came together. Because of the blood, the wound was bold enough for me to see despite the blurriness of my vision, but I had to use my fingers to feel for the exact place to start stitching. My hands trembled. Though I’d stitched hundreds of wounds together in the past, I’d stitched them together under perfect sight.
“Wait.”
Lily swore. “What is it?”
I released a breath.
“Please, place a wedge of towelling between her teeth. She might wake up and feel the need to bite down on something. It’s going to hurt.”
‘Okay, done.’
You didn’t save Lauren. You let her die.
I sucked in a deep breath and willed my hands to be still. I had to save this girl.
I just had to.
* * *
“Will she be okay?’ Lily raised the blanket and stared at the girl’s bandaged legs for a few seconds before carefully tucking the blanket back around her.
“Yes. But she will suffer with severe pain while she heals. That is, if she heals. The dangers of infection are great. But if the wounds are kept clean and the bandages changed regularly, she just may pull through.”
“He can’t keep hurting girls like this,” Lily whispered, stroking the girl’s golden hair away from her face. “I overheard some of the guards talking about Damir’s mermaids a couple of nights ago, but I didn’t believe them.” She sniffed and wiped her face with her palms. “How stupid of me. I thought Damir was too crazy with grief to be doing this.” She shook her head. “I should have told you what I’d heard and maybe then this girl wouldn’t have had to suffer through all of this.”
Release (The Submerged Sun, #3) Page 5