by Ciara Graves
His brow furrowed. He raised his gaze to the balcony. Whatever he saw there put a new resolve in his eyes and he blasted the floor to the right of my head, catching the tip of my ear and searing it. “You will get up, and you will fight.”
“Or what? You won’t kill me, and you won’t hurt me as badly as you think you will.”
As if to prove me wrong, a third bolt struck to my left, nearly catching my hand. Thank goodness I’d moved it. His eyes glimmered with fury, but beneath it all, I saw hesitation. Just enough to tell me I hadn’t been crazy when I noticed him staring at me with a look of awareness.
“I’m your daughter,” I hissed. “Remember? I am your daughter, and you’re my dad, and you are not going to kill me. But you need to snap out of it! This isn’t you! You should be fighting them, not working for them!”
His lip curled up as he made to strike again, but suddenly, his eyes clouded over, and he gave his head a shake. I sat up, hoping I’d gotten through to him, but then the violet power was back in his gaze, and he shook his head.
“I have no child,” he whispered fiercely.
I tried to keep arguing, but then a bright flash of violet light filled my vision, and I was out.
When my vision cleared, my head was throbbing, and I was rocking back and forth.
My eyes fluttered open. I was facing the floor, arms dangling, as the shaman guard carried me.
“What happened?” I tried to say, but it came out garbled.
“Wouldn’t try to talk,” he said quietly, and a quick glance around revealed we were almost alone, except one other magic-user. “You took a hit to the head.”
My limbs were shaky, and when he set me on my feet outside my door, my legs gave out completely. He caught me before I collapsed and reached around me to open the door. With his help, I made it to the bed and plopped down, holding my face as I recalled the last thing I saw, before there was nothing at all.
“My da—Trevor knocked me out?”
“He did, but it could’ve been much worse.”
“Really? Pretty sure he almost killed me.” My chest ached from more than just his attack. I realized I might not be able to get through to Dad after all. I hated to admit he was lost, and I’d failed, but… “What do you mean it could’ve been worse?”
“You’re conscious, and it’s only been about ten minutes. I’ve seen him attack others the way he did you,” the shaman said, throwing a glance toward the door.
The mage waved him on. He was keeping watch, so we could have an actual conversation.
“Most others wouldn’t have awoken as quickly as you did or been in one piece.” He pointed at my shoulder.
I reached up, remembering I’d been hurt. Both there, and on my ear. But both wounds were healed.
The shaman nodded. “I felt what he did, giving you of his life force to heal you faster.”
I shoved the shoulder of my shirt aside, really studying the wound. “He did that?”
“He did. That last hit was mostly bright flashes of light, no real damage, at least not to you. The floor is a different story.”
The pain in my head was clearing away as was the fog. “What’s your name?”
He hesitated.
I grabbed his hand.
“Please, I would like to stop calling you Bob inside my head.”
He gave me a look.
“I had nothing else to go on.” I managed a chagrinned smile.
He returned the smile for half a second as he mumbled, “Jake.”
“My dad doesn’t have this in his neck as you do,” I whispered. “What did they do to him?”
“Years of torture can do many things to a man. Whatever they did to his mind, he doesn’t seem to remember anything about his life before… At least, until you came, I’d hazard a guess.”
“I need to wake him up. To snap him out of it.” I glanced at my hands as my fingers frosted over.
Jake raised his brow.
I grinned. “What? You think I haven’t been able to call up my powers at all?” I quickly stopped it, not letting it get out of hand for whoever might be monitoring my room with surveillance cameras. “I’m so close to being able to call my staff. And his.” A new burst of hope shot through me. “I have his staff.”
Jake perked up. “Can you summon it?”
“I haven’t been able to get mine yet, but if I have more time, if I can keep convincing them that I’m weaker than I am, I might be able to get it to him.”
If Dad could hold his staff, the focus for his power, if he could grasp it and use it, would that be enough to jar him awake? From what Jake said, there was a part of him that knew who I was and would not hurt me too badly. I could take the beatings if it meant bringing Dad back. And once he was back, the two of us could bust out of here.
“If this works,” I said, barely in a whisper, to Jake, “I want you to come with us. All of you.”
Jake sighed heavily and rubbed his neck where the metal was. “We can’t leave. If we do, they can track us, and I don’t know how to remove this from my neck. We’ll be alright. If you two can escape, you’ll throw off her master plan, give us all a chance to be rescued later.”
“Do you know where we are?”
“Only things I remember are mountains and trees.”
“What?” I frowned.
Greyson said the last thing he remembered was it being hot, which meant I was somewhere completely different. If Chas and the others were looking for me, they might be headed farther south and west than I actually was, which meant their chances of finding me grew slimmer by the day. “I need a freaking map, a way to get back to the outpost in Idaho.”
“I can’t help with that, I’m afraid,” Jake said solemnly.
“No, it’s fine. You’ve done more than enough.” I wanted to try and summon Dad’s staff right away, but if I were to make this plan work, I had to time everything perfectly. “Jake, these people, the Bogards… why are they doing this?”
“Doing what? The experiments?”
“That. The war. All of it. What did we do to them that made them hate us so much?”
“I wish I had answers to give you, but I don’t.”
“Jake,” the mage at the door hissed.
“Whatever you think you can do to bring your father back, better do it sooner than later,” Jake said.
Then he and the mage were gone, locking me in my room for another long evening and night of figuring out how I was going to get out of this mess.
I placed the ice pack to my head two days later and wiped the blood from my face with a clean towel one of the guards threw at me. Dad was already gone, and I was nursing my wounds on the floor, not ready to get up yet.
The last two days had been hard. Every time Dad attacked, my powers pushed to fight back, and I had to argue with myself, so I wouldn’t show what I could do. Which then, of course, distracted me from the fight and I wound up on my ass. Repeatedly.
Resting my head back against the wall, I closed my eyes and wondered if my plan was actually going to work or if I was falling prey to the insanity that currently surrounded me. Part of me said it was all in my head, but I knew when Dad pushed the attack this time, he’d hesitated toward the end.
“You can’t hold out forever,” Tabitha said.
I squinted open one eye enough to see her standing over me, arms crossed, and frowning. “You think so, huh?”
“I know so. Sooner or later, you will break, and your powers will reveal themselves to me. Whatever game you’re playing, you will lose. Even if we have to break every bone in your body. Even if you wind up bleeding out on the floor time and time again, you will show your true power to us.”
“You know your threats all sound the same after a while,” I mumbled, making my lip split open again. The strong metal taste of blood filled my mouth, but I ignored it. “After a while, if you keep threatening people with pain and death, blah blah blah, gets tiring, you know?”
She turned to the guard, and that damned taser came out aga
in.
I braced for it, but he made no move to use it, yet.
“Pain will always yield the same results, once we find the right combination.”
“Sure, whatever you say, psycho.”
Her lip curled in a sneer, and this time the guard bent down and nailed me right in the side.
I screamed at the jolts shocking my body. Then he pulled back, and I was left panting for air.
“What the hell did we ever do to you? Huh?” I yelled at her. “What? You jealous or something? Did some guy break your heart when you were younger? What did we do to make you hate us so much? To turn you into a damned killer.”
The guard raised his hand to hit me again, but Tabitha stopped him, and he obediently backed away. She knelt beside me, reaching out. I patted myself on the back for not flinching away from this monster. I expected her to slap me or something, but instead, she took the ice pack from my hand and moved it. I frowned, wondering what game she was playing when I saw the deep sadness suddenly filled her eyes.
“I was a mother once upon a time,” she whispered.
I failed to hide my look of shock.
“Not all monsters start out as monsters.”
Who was this woman? I found nothing to say, so kept my mouth shut for once.
“I had two children. A boy and a girl. They were smart, loving. We were a happy family.” Her eyes darkened, and she set the ice pack aside, taking the towel from me, and dabbing at the cuts and my bloodied lip. “Then one day, we were at a park, and a man arrived. He was a druid, we saw the marking on his hand. Back then… back then I never feared magic or hated it. That day everything changed.” She lowered her hand and sat back, not seeing me anymore. “He attacked out of nowhere. For no reason. My children… when I woke up in the hospital, our—Simon and my—children… we learned the children didn’t make it.”
My heart plummeted. Did I hate this woman? Absolutely. But damn, she lost her kids. It was shitty. Did it give her an excuse to be a raging bitch though? No, not even close. “They got the guy, right? Caught him and killed him for what he did?”
She shrugged. “We never heard about him again. There was no trial, no chance for closure so we did our best to move on. But we couldn’t. The man who murdered my children just disappeared. Until one day I saw him again. He was walking around, without a care in the world. As if he hadn’t killed countless people.”
“You reported him, right?” I asked confused, not sure how that was possible.
“We tried, called it in, but then the man was gone again, and we were told we’d been seeing things. That we were trying to find a villain in any magic-user.” She hung her head, but there were no tears in her eyes. “A year passed, then two. We found ourselves at a support group for other parents who lost their children.”
If not for the bloody towel she was holding, I would’ve thought this was all a dream, and we were two acquaintances having a sad, but normal conversation.
“While there, we met others like us who had lost their children to incidents of magic. It was there we learned the dark, dirty secret of your society. Your people cover their tracks well. Name after name we tracked down of ones murdered by magic-users, and the culprits just up and disappeared. We had no way of knowing if they were alive or dead. Or locked away. And when we asked, we were turned away, told we were crazy. Conspiracy nuts. Fanatics. So we did the only thing we could think of. Organized protests and started a movement that would change this country.” Her gaze hardened as she tossed the towel back in my lap. “Change it and save it from your kind.”
“Look, not every society is perfect, and clearly the system’s broken,” I said, trying to sound rational even though in the back of my mind I was wondering how any of that could be true.
Would the commanders really cover up these acts of murderers?
“Tabitha, you can’t actually think it’s fair to punish all of us! We can help uncover the truth! We can make this work without killing any more innocents.”
But she stood and brushed her hands down her white coat. “It’s too late for second chances.”
“So you’re going to kill others’ loved ones? For revenge? How is that justice?”
“I am ridding this world of evil,” she snapped. “Of a kind that brings death and destruction. This war will be the end of you all, thanks to you and your father. Once you break, and you will, I promise you that, the battle to end all magic will commence.” She shook her head at me sadly. “You think you and your kind are so clever, but you all failed to see the obvious answer.”
“And what’s that?” I snapped angrily, pushing to my feet so I could stare her down on level terms. “What?”
“Your kind should have stayed in the dark, stayed away from us. Now we will do what is necessary. There are too many of us to take us all out, and we are everywhere.” She moved closer, grasping my chin in her fingers. “We will hunt your type down to extinction, and then at the end of it all, you and your father can die together as a family. Take her to her room!” She shoved me into the guard who grabbed me harshly and tossed me out through the door ahead of him.
Back in my room, I cleaned up my face the best I could, all the while wondering how much of what Tabitha told me was true. No one wanted to believe their government could be capable of something as terrible as covering up the murders of innocents, but she hadn’t sounded crazy when she told me her story. She’d sounded perfectly sane. Upset and angry, but sane.
I had to get back to the outpost and share this information with Moran and the others, figure out if it was true or not. Then we had to find all these others she claimed were everywhere. I assumed she meant they had people inside the government… probably how they’d been able to find magic-users and take them. Was that how they knew about Dad or had it been an accident they found out about him? Mind racing, I paced from one end of the small room to the other, waiting for time to speed up, but it never changed. I was running out of time to get to Dad and make him wake up.
When my dinner arrived, I waited for the guard to leave and lock the door, counted out another five minutes to be sure he was gone, then ducked into the bathroom. I turned the water on, but stayed out of the spray and closed my eyes.
Power welled up within me, pent-up energy from not using it during all this time of fighting against Dad. It needed an outlet, and as I lifted my right hand, I said a little prayer that this would work and snapped my fingers.
“Finally,” I whispered, excited to find my staff back in my hand, the stone glowing and ready.
A familiar voice whispered in my mind, but I ignored her for now and thought of another, snapped my fingers again without thinking, and was suddenly crammed into the shower stall with a very large, half dead wolf.
“Merlin!”
His tongue lolled out of the undead side of his mouth as he nuzzled my leg, thrilled to be here at my side. This was good. My staff and my familiar were within my reach. I leaned my staff against the wall and thought of Dad’s. I snapped my fingers a third time, and it was there in my grip. Now all I had to do was find a way to get it to him. It was not going to be easy, and there was a chance my shitty plan would go terribly wrong… but I had to do something. I looked at Merlin who bobbed his furry head.
“It’s going to get messy,” I told him. “Help me get there? I need to talk to you both. You and her.”
Merlin’s eyes flared blue.
My body relaxed, and then I was floating away from the bathroom. I blinked and found myself standing on the blue path surrounding the violet where the shadow figure stood, tapping her foot impatiently.
“It’s about damned time,” she said. “Well?”
“I have a plan, and I need to make sure we’re all on the same page,” I told her, happy to see the human version of Merlin standing at my side. “I have to get Dad his staff, it’s the only way to get him out of here.”
“Or you could let me take over and drain them all, here and now. And be done with it.”
�
��And what’s to say you get them all, or you don’t kill the wrong person?” I demanded. “Dad had the chance to do the same, but he refused because the risks were too high. The plan is to get him his staff, break the hold over his mind, and then get out of here back to the outpost. If we can reach them, we can come back and save everyone.”
“Getting out won’t be easy,” Merlin warned, “but I’m in the mood to bite a few asses.”
“And you?” I asked the shadow. “I need to know you will follow my lead on this.”
She sighed heavily, then shrugged. “As long as we get out of here and maybe take out a few guards in the process. Then fine, I’ll behave.”
“Just not the magic-users. They’re victims in this, too.”
“Only because they refuse to fight.”
“No, because they choose for the ones they love to live,” I argued. “We do this tomorrow, and I have to be as strong as I possibly can be.”
“We’ve got your back,” Merlin promised. “Get some sleep. You’re going to need it.”
The shadow nodded in agreement and made no other argument.
I let myself slip back to my body in the shower, found Merlin gone, but the staves there. I feared if I sent them away, too, they’d never come back, but there was no way to sneak out of my room with them. I snapped my fingers, and they both disappeared.
“Until tomorrow,” I told myself. “One more day, Dad. Just one more and then we’re out of here.”
Chapter 7
Rori
I walked into the white room where Dad waited for me, my head held high, doing everything I could to not give myself away.
Thinking of Chas and the serious face he always wore, I did the same. Or close enough. The guard stepped back to the door, and a quick look up revealed Tabitha and Simon were there, as well as a handful of other people in white lab coats, guards, and more magic-users.
From their serious looks, it appeared I wasn’t the only one up to something today.
I let out a deep breath to get control of my nerves and shook out my hands.