by Jessica King
When the marine pulled her out of the car, Ivy stumbled, taking in her surroundings. They were definitely in a thickly forested area. Thick enough that there wouldn’t be any regular trails nearby. The trees were tall, but they weren’t redwoods. Where are you, Ivy? Think!
Her captor grabbed her hands and pulled up, pushing Ivy’s torso forward. “Walk,” she said, and Ivy craned her neck to look forward. A cabin sat in front of her, and Ivy tried to turn to look at the woman behind her. The marine simply pushed on Ivy’s hands, and she had to turn forward, catching herself under stumbling legs until she regained her balance.
“Sorry, I didn’t have time to clean,” the woman said, opening the door. The outside of the house looked small, but the inside made the place seem tiny. One opened door revealed a bedroom, another revealed a bathroom, and the main part of the house was a combined living and kitchen space with no furniture except a single chair and a kitchen table. Ivy eyed scalpels on a paper towel on the kitchen counter. Beneath the only chair in the center of the space was a dark red stain that had been quickly scrubbed so as to only smear the blood and rub it into the carpet instead of actually clean it. Ivy could see stains all across the carpet, though they were hardly noticeable next to the one beneath the chair.
She thought about how Edward Thorne was a man who wouldn’t have been a serial killer without the Kingsmen. “You were a serial killer before the Kingsmen,” Ivy whispered.
“Pretty good one,” the woman said. “I wish I felt bad about it, to be honest. But I’ve always been fascinated by the human body.” She pushed Ivy toward the chair, moved it over about two feet, and pointed the gun at the chair. Ivy sat, still feeling off-kilter from the drugs trying to make their way out of her blood. The woman set down the gun and pulled a zip tie from her pocket. If both of her legs were zip-tied to the chair …
Ivy jumped up and sprinted for the door. The floor tilted, but she focused on the door handle. She’d find a way to open the door, even with her hands behind her, she would. She had to.
A horrible, blasting feeling went through the back of her shoulder.
“Wish you hadn't done that,” the marine said, already behind her. She pressed a finger right next to the bullet hole.
As far as she knew, this was the second time a piece of her body had been on fire today, and this fire was much, much worse. Her eyes pricked with involuntary tears, but the pain was so strong she didn’t have it in her to allow herself the release of crying. The woman pinched around Ivy’s wound until she was back in the chair, her legs zip-tied three times each to the leg chairs, her bound arms behind her.
“Lucky I was going to be a doctor,” the woman said. She prodded around the wound, and Ivy tasted blood as she gritted her teeth to keep from screaming. “It’s in there all right,” she said. The woman walked to the fireplace and picked up a bottle of whiskey. “Don’t have any anesthetic,” she said. “So, let’s go with this.”
Aware of the drugs still in her system, Ivy nearly declined the offer, but the fear of pain won out. When the lip of the bottle pressed her mouth, Ivy took several deep swigs from the bottle, ignoring the prickle in her nose and the sting in her throat.
“Hope you metabolize fast.” The voice was now in the kitchen, and Ivy could hear water running.
Ivy’s vision felt blurred, her brain not taking pictures as fast as her eyes were feeding them to her.
“Do not move,” the marine said behind her shoulder.
Ivy felt every movement of the knife, even as her vision went dark. Getting shot was better than this, she thought briefly. She heard the woman say, “Got him!” right before her consciousness slipped away.
Friday, March 17, 2017, Time Unknown
Ivy woke to the sound of gunshots. Her vision was clear, and her shoulder ached with a fury she’d never known, and the marine who had shot her was in front of her with a gun. Had she shot her again? Ivy looked all over her body. Surely, she would have felt it?
The gun fired again, and Ivy heard the bullet whiz past her face. Again, again, again. Ivy flinched over and over, wishing she could stop the involuntary reaction. She did fine at shooting ranges, but there was something about being able to see the end of the barrel that made it impossible for her not to blink with every shot. Each time she heard the gun discharge, she waited for the instant pain, but then she’d hear the shot hit a part of the wall behind her. A bullet hit the floor right next to Ivy’s heel, and she screamed. She vaguely registered that the floor beneath the carpet must be wood, the way the bullet flew right through.
“Whoo! Close,” the woman muttered, reloading the gun.
Ivy noticed that the dark bloodstain was gone. Just a patch of slightly darker yellow was left behind. The smell of bleach burned her nostrils.
“You have my attention!” Ivy shouted at her. “What do you want?”
The woman raised her eyebrows. “Never been yelled at by one of you while I was holding a gun,” she said. “Good for you.” She fired the gun again, and it whizzed past her left side. Ivy swallowed, trying to shove down the energy singing through every part of her, panicking at the fact that she couldn’t move any part of her body except her head.
“What do you want?” Ivy said, quieter this time. “You haven’t killed me, so you must want something.”
“Unless I’m some sort of sicko who likes to draw it out.” The woman winked.
Ivy said nothing, her eyes flickering to the scalpels in the kitchen. “Want to do those first?” she asked. She sounded delighted and clapped her hands together once. “I’m getting much better at it.”
She crossed the room in front of Ivy, grabbing one of the scalpels and putting on a pair of plastic gloves. “I’m not much of an artist, and I used to start at the top, which was dumb.” She sat down next to Ivy’s boot, a mere inch away from the still-drying bloodstain. She rolled Ivy’s pant leg up above her knee. “Do you have a specific design you like?”
Ivy stared at the blade.
“Oh, I can do ivy if you want, Mary,” she said.
There was a strange glow in her eyes that made Ivy want to throw up right in her face, but there was nothing in her stomach to throw up. How long had she been here?
“My name is Ivy.”
“Your name is Mary. We could get this over with if you start by admitting that.” The woman held the scalpel like a pencil and leaned so that she wouldn’t need to undo the zip ties. Ivy didn’t feel the blade at first; it was so sharp. Didn’t even see the blood for a second, but when she lifted the blade to start another incision, bright red spilled from her leg. “Ivy is like a five-pointed leaf, right?” she asked. “And then it has those symmetrical veins?”
The woman’s gloves were quickly becoming covered in blood, but she didn’t shy away from the first leaf, pulling the blade down through the center of it and connecting it to two new lines, the leaf’s veins. “That will look nice,” she said.
Ivy’s leg was stinging with it now. She started in on the next leaf, and Ivy tried to hold in a whimper. It came out through her nose instead, and the knife dug in farther. She started to count the seconds, ticking off minutes in her mind. It took the woman over two hours to draw ivy leaves all the way up her shin and calf to her knee. The floor beneath her foot had turned speckled with blood, and the moisture of it had soaked her sock and the sole of her boot. Her entire leg was covered in sickly, sparkling red.
“If you’re here long enough, it’ll scar, and we’ll be able to really see the design.”
Ivy caught each word through the pain. “How do I stay here for a long time?” Her words rasped as she tried to breathe through the deep stinging in her leg. She flexed the muscles in her calf, testing how deep the cuts went. The movement only served to make her wince and press more blood to the surface of her skin.
“By having new information,” the woman said.
“You’re just going to continue to torture me?”
“I don’t call it torture,” the woman said. She smiled
, “I call it an interrogation. That’s what the CIA says.”
“They have stricter rules than they used to,” Ivy said.
“They didn’t have rules about cutting tattoos into prisoners. So, I didn’t break their rules with you. Anyway, I know their new rules—it can’t have a long-term effect on the person, or else it’s illegal torture. But you’re probably going to be dead in a few days, so it’ll be impossible for you to have long-term negative effects anyway. She shot the gun three times, once on either side of Ivy, and once above her.
It startled Ivy, and she sat up tall in her chair, remaining motionless in case the woman took another shot. She didn’t.
“You didn’t lose enough blood to pass out, so don’t try to pretend with me,” she said. She took a large gauze and began to sop up the blood on Ivy’s leg. “So, let’s play,” she said. “Where did your mother get her powers?”
“She was a practicing witch, but she didn’t have powers,” Ivy said. The woman wrapped her hand around Ivy’s calf and squeezed. “How were you both able to be alive at the same time if you are both reincarnations of Mary Caste?”
Ivy remained silent, and it didn’t take long for the woman to give in to the temptation of digging her nails into the delicate cuts of her leg. Ivy cringed, and she felt the warmth of fresh blood leaking from where the woman had cut severely close to her shin bone, by far the most painful part of the carving ordeal.
“Where is the L.A. coven’s new location?” the woman asked, and Ivy spat at the woman in front of her. “I’ll skin you,” ex-marine said. “I’ve done it before, and I can do I again, would you like that?”
Ivy’s head swam with blood loss, with panic. Her head dipped, another impending pass out on the brink.
“Nope, wake up,” the cold gun barrel pushed her chin up, and Ivy stared into the cold eyes of the woman across from her.
Another bullet in the ground next to her.
“Keep shooting,” Ivy said. “Maybe you’ll run out before you can get to me.”
“Unlikely,” she said. “I don’t think you quite understand my repertoire.” She had a box next to her now, and she fished out scissors and cut away Ivy’s sleeve. The remainder of it fell to her wrist, a thick, fabric bracelet. “Let’s give you a matching design here.”
“You realize I will die if you cut certain arteries on my arm, right?” Ivy asked. “If you are trying to torture me, killing me won’t be very effective.”
The woman’s eyes went cold. “Remember what I said about planning to become a doctor? I know where those are.”
Ivy swallowed. If she got the woman talking, maybe she’d find some pity for her. “What did you do instead?”
The woman didn’t flinch. “Family couldn’t afford the rest of medical school. I needed to bring in income, not spend eight more years of school for them or put myself in that much debt, for that matter.” She cut into the skin just above Ivy’s wrist, and Ivy bit down against it, her knuckles turning white. “I’m built well. I joined the Marines. Made money my family needed. Tried out to be a SEAL. Didn’t make it.”
“Oh?”
“They don’t love the asthmatic, I guess,” she said.
“I—I’m sorry to hear that,” Ivy said.
“I don’t do rapport,” the would-be SEAL said. “I’ve been apparently tested and labeled as a psychopath, so you don’t need to put your energy toward that.”
“If you don’t have emotions, why did you help your family?” Ivy asked.
“It wasn’t practical to pursue a degree I couldn’t afford,” the woman said, speaking slowly as she concentrated on her work. Ivy had taken to sucking in short breaths and releasing them quickly. She kept her focus on the face of the marine—a bit older than herself, with brown hair that had premature gray strands. She could still see the bright red from the corner of her eye. “Families are good for things.” Ivy felt each individual curve of the knife, the canvas of her skin shredding beneath the blade. “If I feel like I need to blend in for a while, I go visit them.”
“You mean if police ever got too close to finding you.”
She didn’t respond, lost in her work, but Ivy took it as a yes.
“Who told you that you were a psychopath?”
“My therapist,” the woman said. She’d worked her way up to Ivy’s shoulder. She tried to keep the muscles relaxed, memories of childhood shots coming back to her, but it was difficult beneath the sharp sting. Her head swooped for a moment. Her leg had stopped bleeding profusely, but not being able to elevate it was not helping her, and now with the bleeding from her arm, she was bound to lose consciousness eventually.
“You might want to see a new therapist,” Ivy said. “Someone could help you stop … doing this to people,” she said, using her nose to nod down to the woman’s handiwork.
“I don’t particularly want to stop,” the woman said. “I’ve gotten so much better.”
Ivy flinched away from a hard slice of the knife and hissed at the disruption of her shoulder wound on the other side.
“Stop fidgeting,” the marine said, making a clean slash across her cheekbone.
Ivy pressed her lips together to keep from screaming. It didn’t hurt so much as it made her want to cry, to sob to know that she was with someone who would carve her until she bled to death. She no longer trusted her voice and remained quiet while her shoulder blossomed into bloody ivy.
The blood from her cheekbone touched her dry lips, warm and wet, and she tried to ignore the metal tang of it as her tongue caught the drops that made it through. She balled her fists, but that only left her with the now bloody sleeve of her shirt clutched in her fingers.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Friday, March 17, 2017, 3:15 p.m.
“I don’t know what to do without getting labeled as a WIP myself,” Mason said, dropping his head into his hands. “And they don’t miss their targets.” He momentarily thought of Aline Rousseau, who had seemed unbothered so far since he’d joined the Kingsmen. But that could likely be chalked up to her intense security team; he had a chihuahua and a goldfish.
“How do you think you rank in this group that’s organizing things?”
Mason shrugged. “I don’t know at all. I can’t seem to pick up a good pulse. Archer is most definitely our leader now, even though I thought our leader would be Zombie.” He stared into the lights reflecting off his professor’s polished desk. Being a Kingsmen had left him with too many sleepless nights. He felt worn to the bone.
“Why is that?” Wilkins leaned back in his chair, tenting his fingers in front of his face.
“We think he might be the King, but that he’s not telling us,” Mason said. “He organized this whole plan for these mass shootings, and I just wish—”
“You wished you would have thought to place yourself as the possible King.”
Mason nodded. “Yeah.” He fidgeted with one of Wilkins’ many paperweights. “But, I mean, if Archer actually is the King, then that would have very well have gotten me killed on the spot, right?” He picked at a stray piece of material on the chair.
“Hard to say,” Wilkins said. “Perhaps it would be helpful to the real King to have a poser around.”
Mason considered this. “Maybe, but he doesn’t seem like the type of guy to let other people call the shots. If people knew who he was, then there would need to be an established second person who was a right-hand man. If that guy says anything, wouldn’t they start following him?”
“But right now, a good enough actor could consider themselves the right-hand man and everyone would follow them.” Wilkins gave him a pointed look.
“I could do something like that,” Mason said. “But I couldn’t pull it off if Archer’s the King. And I just don’t know if I have the time. If I’m going to save people from these mass shootings, maybe I should just go public.”
“I suppose you have a few things to figure out then,” Wilkins said.
“And one of them is going to need to be a fantastic d
isguise.”
+++
Friday, Marcy 17, 2017, Time Unknown
Ivy couldn’t tell which was worse. How thirsty she had become, or how horribly she needed to go to the restroom. She’d pleaded with the woman in front of her for both.
A water bottle sat a mere three feet in front of her. Ivy wished there was a single window without blackout curtains. She had no idea how long she’d been here. No idea if it were dark or light outside.
“I need information about why you and your mother were both able to be Mary Caste reincarnations living at the same time,” her captor said. “How are you able to manage to live in two bodies at once?”
Ivy moved her tongue across the top of her mouth. She was still making saliva, so she should be fine. Her eyes darted to the water bottle. Stop being weak, Ivy.
Ivy locked eyes with the woman seated crisscross on the floor across from her chair. “I’m not a witch,” Ivy said. “For the millionth time, we are not sharing a spirit. I don’t have magic that splits into two people. I am a normal human.”
The woman cocked the gun with one hand and shot. The bullet went between the legs of the chair, and Ivy’s bound legs reacted but didn’t move. Her heartbeat was a tiny drum in her feet, exceptionally loud in the one covered in now-sticky, flaking blood. Her captor had cleaned off her shin and arm so they could see her handiwork below. It didn’t look so much like ivy wrapping around her limbs as much as it did like a child had gone over Ivy’s skin with a red marker. When hydrogen peroxide turned each tiny cut white, she’d screamed.
“What about the new location of the L.A. coven?”
“I don’t know.”
“I know you know that one, Mary.” The woman stood and walked over to Ivy, and she hated that her limbs begged to shake against their confining ties. The gun tapped against her gunshot wound and an explosion of pain burst in the back of Ivy’s head.