by Andra Leigh
This seemed to amuse both Laleita and Neith.
“Cyan noticed you,” Neith offered through his own gruff, almost hoarse, chuckle.
“Oh… That’s um. I preferred my Witch theory,” she muttered, shoving some pie into her mouth. “It was okay that I was up there, then?”
Neith gave a noncommittal shrug. “As long as you don’t start dancing around up there, twirling flaming ribbons and chanting loudly, you should be fine.”
“What if I didn’t set the ribbons on fire?” Eliscity asked innocently, stabbing her fork into a lettuce leaf.
“The dance would suffer,” Neith said solemnly.
Eliscity snorted. Neith had been the family member that had surprised her the most. Her first impression of him had been of a kind grandpapa type man. While he was that, he was also quick witted and cheeky. When he joked with her like this she forgot the years between them. He made her feel like his equal, while somehow remaining her elder. It was a strange, precarious balance that he walked easily.
“What is your Witchy thing, then?” Eliscity asked, turning to Laleita.
“I…”
Eliscity could see her struggling to find the right words.
“I can offer people a way into their own minds.”
Eliscity thought about this vague explanation for a moment, trying to find a different follow up question from ‘what the Bloods does that mean?’. In the end she decided she didn’t want to know what it meant. She knew enough about her mind to understand she in no way wanted to be offered a way into it.
“So, it’s nothing to do with seeing the future then?” she asked, needing to make sure.
“No. Sorry.” A sad whimsy flashed through Laleita’s eyes.
“Sorry?” Eliscity parroted back as a question.
“You were hoping for some answers? On what may lie ahead?”
“I – no. No, definitely not,” Eliscity said, horrified at the thought. She’d had enough of that from Juliette. The thought of more ominous and ambiguous nonsensical predictions that would come to heartbreaking fruitions didn’t strike her as appealing.
“Then what?” Laleita asked with a curious frown.
“I didn’t really mean anything by it. Certainly wasn’t hoping for anything. I was just making sure.”
“Of what?”
“Of – ” Eliscity started, only to wither under the Witch’s penetrating pale-eyed stare. Clearly the obvious ‘making sure my hunch on you not seeing the future’ line wasn’t going to satisfy Laleita. Sitting close to her on the sofa, she could see the flecks of white in her milky blue irises. They had a piercing intensity that made Eliscity feel like she was having her mind read.
“I knew a Witch at the Clinic,” she admitted.
“The woman you escaped with?” Neith asked, obviously dredging up something Jinx had told them in his explanation of how she came to be here.
“Yeah.”
“She saw the future?” The quiet desire that emanated from Laleita’s soft voice was startling.
Eliscity hesitated. “I guess so.”
Her vague response hung in the air, punctuated only by the rowdy exchanges from the Triplets across the Playground.
Letting her fork clatter to the plate, she gave a one shouldered shrug. Yes, Juliette had known things. Eliscity suspected she had known more than she ever let on to in her own mind-addled way, but those things had never seemed to be coherent. At least, her method of conveying these known things had never been coherent. Perhaps they had been clear as day in her mind, though under the Clinic’s tampering, she had become unable to speak lucidly about them. Or perhaps, she had never seen the future, but rather had made the future by speaking.
And while, either way, she couldn’t deny Juliette had had an ability regarding the future, Eliscity didn’t want to verify Laleita’s question, like doing so would in some way make the insanity the Clinic had caused Juliette – was still causing her – justified. She didn’t want that justified.
She also didn’t want to dwell on everything that was Juliette and their mutual madness.
Claiming exhaustion, she extracted herself from the conversation and made her way up a level. But rather than going to bed she navigated her way to the large communal bathhouse.
Raiden was leaving as she entered. His nose was swollen, his eyes rimmed in purple bruises. He looked utterly dejected and Eliscity suspected this had more to do with losing the fight than having his nose broken. He offered her a wincing nod as a greeting, his breathing laboured beneath the swelling. She returned the gesture with a gentle pat of his arm and he lumbered off toward his room.
A fine mist of steam hung in the bathroom. There were five baths, each housed in their own private partition with a low wooden bench. Making her way over to the well that tapped into the water tunnels below, she started the repetitive task of pulling water up and tipping it into one of the deep tubs.
The well was a rather convenient thing to have in a bathhouse which would otherwise present a laborious journey of carrying water through flights of stairs and corridors, just to fill a bath. It was a convenience only available because this section of the level was not over the Playground.
She thought another well in the kitchen area of the Playground wouldn’t go amiss, but assumed the lowest level of the underground Manor was directly below it, providing an obstacle.
Once the tub was filled she increased the air to the elemental flame nestled under it and waited for it to start the slow heating of the water.
The Triplets had certainly made life in the underground levels of the Manor easier. They’d been rescued less than two years ago and Eliscity didn’t want to think how much more challenging the now simple things of light and heat had been before then. According to Neith they had used lanterns and many, many hand-lit candles. It had also been easier to have cold baths.
When the flame had warmed the water enough to not be classified as ‘ice cold’, she stripped off and stepped into the tub. She couldn’t stop the shiver that ran up her spine. The water wasn’t ice cold but it was still rather chilly. She had learnt that for the best, uninterrupted soaking time possible, she had to get in as soon as she could stand the temperature. The flame that warmed the water could be lowered or increased to maintain the heat, but this involved getting in and out of the bath to negotiate with the fire. Rather than bother with this, Eliscity got in quickly and remained in until she could no longer stand the growing temperature. Of course, there was always the chance she would fall asleep in the bath and be boiled alive. Though she figured if she was dense enough to do that, she deserved to die in such a ridiculous way.
Reclining back slowly, the water encased her. The bathhouse’s partitions didn’t reach to the top so she could see the entire stretch of the roof. The ceiling had thin chimneys tunnelling to the surface, ventilating the warm, damp room. After a moment of staring she realised the chimneys were arranged in the same pattern as the strange metal artwork she had seen in the courtyard earlier today and suddenly made sense of the pipes. Given a use, she found she could forgive the ugly structure sitting on the Manor’s surface.
She liked baths. She’d even liked them at the Clinic. There they had been cold, lacking in privacy and used to scrub the sediment of her torture off. But that hadn’t stopped her enjoying the sensation of being both held up and submerged beneath the water. She found it relaxing and would often imagine she was floating under the open sky. A sunny day with fluffy white clouds. Starry nights echoing with the hoots of owls. Dark clouds blooming, rain pouring. She had envisioned every type of sky. This time she pictured a simple, warm summers afternoon. A radiant roof of blue and swirling wind that picked up her hair and danced it around her face. The only sound would be of leaves fluttering and the distant chatter of birds.
The water wrapped around her like arms holding her up, its warming breath tickling her neck.
“Let’s just stay here for the rest of our lives,” a deep voice whispered in her ear.
&
nbsp; Eliscity gasped, water filled her throat and she launched out of the tub, coughing and spluttering. Wildly searching for the speaker, she finally realised she wasn’t going to find him.
There was no one there.
Her hallucination was talking to her again. Wonderful.
Dripping a puddle of water around her, she wondered how her imagination found the capacity to sound so attractive. It wasn’t like Jinx’s smooth, flowing tone. Or Casamir’s rough growl. Or the rapid crescendo of the Triplets’ vocations. It was somehow both husky and silky at the same time. While her heart thudded erratically from the sudden intrusion of the hallucination, her stomach fluttered because of the qualities within the voice. It filled her with a nervous excitement she couldn’t justify. The butterfly wings tickled her insides, spreading from her stomach to the tips of her fingers and toes, before dispersing into nothing as the after effects of the hallucination faded away. How could a pretend voice hold such an influence over her?
A creaking noise followed by a light thud interrupted her thoughts. Footsteps padded softly into the bathroom. Wrapping a towel around herself, she gave up on the rest of her bath.
●
Agony.
Biting and metallic.
She was in agony.
Blinding agony.
It wouldn’t settle.
It wouldn’t stop.
Why wouldn’t it stop!
She couldn’t scream. Oh, how she wished she could scream. But her body was locked in spasm, shuddering from the inside out.
She couldn’t move, couldn’t run – couldn’t escape.
She was theirs to play with.
She was in a room of nightmares – of terror and pain. Of her deepest fears.
Thick chains came out of the walls. They met in the middle to hold her by the wrists and hips. They cuffed around her flesh, tight and sharp, their inductors piercing her pale skin with their pointed tip. They sat in her veins, her blood pumping around the thin rods.
They let the lightning in.
It snapped and bit inside her, shocking into her heart. Spasms racked her body, twisting her insides and jamming her skeleton into a rigid stance.
The tang of blood and metal stung her eyes, seeping into her mouth and up her nose.
Stars exploded and dark spots ruptured across her vision at once.
Her breath hitched and grabbed in her chest with each pulse of lightning. The hot metal around her wrists burnt and tore at her flesh, the inductors tugging at her veins.
She was a toy. A toy with cruel and merciless owners. She could see their faces. Beneath the growing shadows and blinking lights in front of her eyes, they were there.
Watching.
Writing.
Smiling.
Their bodies were draped in crimson, a stain hanging from their shoulders. It was just a colour, bold and stationary. Then it dripped, sliding from their bodies and pooling at their feet in a sticky, slippery mess.
Lightning jolted through her as blood dripped from her owners. They didn’t seem to notice or care. They only had eyes for her.
Everything was dripping.
She fought against her bonds, desperate for it to stop. For it all to stop.
The stone floor was a sea of red. And it was climbing – up her legs, past her hips, snaking over her throat and toward her lips. Her jaw couldn’t close, the lightning wouldn’t let it. The blood, bitter and tart, seeped into her mouth, bleeding past her teeth to pour down her throat.
She gagged on the thick liquid as spasms continued to ripple through her body. It was drowning her, submerging her innards in scarlet.
Her throat flooded.
Lightning flashed in her veins.
She was drowning.
Choking.
Dying.
And she just wanted to scream.
Eliscity awoke suddenly, twisted in her sheets, a strangled cry on her lips.
Realising she was safe in bed at Vance Manor and not cuffed into metal chains she gave a frustrated sigh, tossing her blankets off.
While normal people were having nightmares about being chased by made up monsters, she was dreaming of her time at the Clinic.
She rarely dreamed of her Bloodings. It was the Borning procedure that haunted her nights. For while the Bloodings process was painful, with their deep injections of Fae blood into her spine, ribs and pelvis, it was nothing compared to the immediate torture of the Borning procedure. Cold, thin metal rods had been inserted into her wrists and pelvis, cuffed in place by tight, wide bands. Chains strung between the bands and the walls had held her taut. She never found out how they harnessed the lightning that was conducted through the metal. It had been something that she had always wondered, sometimes as a method of distraction, other times out of boredom. She supposed she could now ask Cyan, but found the answer no long mattered. The lightning’s purpose had been to shock her blood, more specifically the Fae lineage lying dormant in her blood. She had been tortured just to awaken the Bloods in her. Every moment had been excruciating.
Then she had escaped the Clinic and in absence of the chains and lightning, that room had taken over her nightmares. It always played out like it had in reality. Chains holding her still, lightning coursing through her body and her doctors standing before her, observing the procedure. Then the doctors’ red coats would start dripping blood and that’s where the nightmare’s basis in reality ended. The blood from the coats would climb her body and pour into her mouth. Even upon waking, the taste of it lingered on her tongue.
Swinging her legs out of bed, she pushed to her feet. She wouldn’t be getting back to sleep without getting rid of the taste in her mouth. Rubbing her sleepy eyes she made her way through the labyrinth of corridors toward the closest spiralling staircase. Descending the level she froze as a hoarse cough echoed across the Playground.
Neith was in the kitchen, his body buckled under the force of his hacking breaths. Eliscity felt a cold panic sweep through her at the sight of the old man looking older than he should. His hands shook. Body trembled. Pink blotches blossomed over chalk white skin.
“Neith?”
Neith gave a small start as her sleep-clogged voice whispered across the Playground. Finding her on the bottom step of the stairwell, he shot her a tired smile she couldn’t return before coughing again.
“You’re sick.” It wasn’t a question, but an observation. One that wrenched at her heart.
Wiping a quivering hand over his mouth he gave a husky chuckle. “Aren’t we all?”
Eliscity thought about the sickness that Cyan said came with Bloodings and almost nodded. But only three of the Family had been Blooded. Jinx, Raiden and Neith had the right handed insignia. The other five were Borns. “No. Just some,” she replied. “And none but you are struggling to breathe in the middle of the night.”
“Raiden and his broken nose may disagree.”
“That’s true,” she conceded. “Is there anything I can do?” She moved into the Playground, closing the gap between them in a hope to be near enough to grab him if he fell suddenly.
“No, my dear,” Neith said, his kind eyes calm and sure. “It’ll pass. What are you doing up on this fine, elemental lit night?”
Remembering her reason for coming down to the Playground she grabbed one of the many flasks of water that were filled in the water tunnels and stored in the kitchen and swallowed a mouthful.
Thinking of the medicine Jinx had stolen during their initial meeting, she asked. “Is there anything you can take for the cough? And the pain?”
“Technically, yes. Jinx keeps us well stocked. It doesn’t seem to matter to him that they don’t cure or necessarily even work half the time. If there’s a chance it may help he’s there, getting as many vials and pills and… as possible. He only managed to get around two weeks worth last trip, so needed to make an earlier trip for more.”
Eliscity thought about the bag crammed to the top with medicine and wondered how that could only last two weeks. How si
ck was Neith? Was it only him going through Jinx’s spoils of theft or were there other Family members? Was this what her own future had in store for her? Would the sickness of her Bloodings one day catch up with her too and she’d be left to rely on Jinx to bring her something – anything – to dull the pain of the incurable.
“Well now I feel like a fool,” she mumbled as she helped Neith over to one of the sofa’s and took a seat across from him.
“Why’s that?” the man wheezed.
“I may have been thinking some mean, angry things about him since he left. And while nothing you’ve said detracts from the reasons I’m angry they do kind of inflate his, I don’t know, goodness,” she huffed. “It’s easier to hate someone when we aren’t given reasons to like them.”
Neith gave a careful, rasping laugh. “Unfortunately once you get that reason, it doesn’t matter how much it hurt when they broke your nose… They’re family.”
Eliscity eyed the bump and slight angle of his nose. “Please tell me Casamir’s not responsible for breaking your nose too.”
“No, Raiden’s the only one with that accomplishment to his name.”
“A regular accomplishment, I hear,” Eliscity guffawed, taking another swig from the flask.
Neith inclined his head gingerly. “High achiever, that one.”
Stifling a yawn, Eliscity banished any thought of returning to bed at that moment. While Neith’s coughing had eased somewhat, she still didn’t like the tremors that moved through his body or the rosy splotches painted on his pale flesh.
Tucking her feet under herself, she looked around the cavernous room and imagined spending the rest of her life in it. “Is it true you’ve never left the Manor?” she asked after a minute of silence.
“I’ve been here…” Neith’s kind eyes clouded with thought, “almost 37 years.”
The first question that popped into Eliscity’s head was ‘how’, but chose instead to ask, “Why?”
“After the Clinic, I never had a reason to leave here.”
“Not one?” Eliscity stressed. “What about… do you remember your life, er, before.”
Neith gave a slow nod. “I grew up in the Cursain Valley.”