Chapter 4
I awoke with my face pressed into the concrete.
It was so hard to rouse myself. My thoughts were a pounding mess right in the center of my skull. It felt as if somebody had replaced my gray matter with a pulsing heart. But slowly, slowly I came around.
Though my muscles ached as if I’d just run 20 marathons in a row, I groaned as I found the strength to push into a seated position.
It took several seconds for my bleary eyes to take in the rest of the room. There was no light on, and the only illumination was a slice coming in from underneath the closed door.
No. No, that wasn’t the only illumination. I yanked my hands up and turned them over. And there I saw the light. The same light that had pulsed over my body, the same light that had driven me to my knees, and the very same light that had knocked me out to begin with.
I jolted so hard that my back slammed up against the wall behind me. My leg also shifted forward and snagged the desk in the room. I hit it with such force that it almost fell over.
Breath shuddering in my chest, I began to cover my mouth with my hand but pulled back when I saw those same strange symbols dancing across my flesh in cold, blue flame.
Just as tears began to streak down my cheeks, I heard something. Breath.
Someone was in the room with me.
“Who’s there? Who’s there?” I demanded in a shaking voice as I pressed myself against the wall with all my might. My shoulders were so locked with tension, it felt as if they would pop out from their joints and fall loosely by my shaking knees.
I heard someone shift. Through the gloom, I saw him: the guy who’d come in just before I’d lost consciousness.
Franklin Saunders.
He’d been standing there on the opposite side of the room, arms crossed, staring at me in the dark. Now he came close enough that I could see his face from the illumination of the marks along my hands.
I shuddered back, pushing so hard against the wall it was as if I were trying to push right through it.
“What… what do you want?”
“What do you want?” he asked in a completely casual, normal tone. Exactly not the kind of tone you would use against a frightened woman who was covered in burning symbols.
I jolted so hard against the wall, the back of my skull slammed into it and I felt a shifting pulse of nausea sweep down my neck and plunge into my back.
Again I went to cover my mouth with my hand, but again I jerked back at the sight of those symbols.
With my stare locked on Franklin’s imposing form, I tried to rub the symbols off my flesh. But they wouldn’t budge. Even when I gouged at them with my nails, they could not be removed.
Franklin stood a half a meter before me, then he casually leaned to the side, shifting his weight against the table as he ticked his head on an angle and looked at me. “You’re a witch, then?”
I had no idea what he’d just said. My desperate gaze sliced off him and locked on that dim line of illumination under the doorway.
I knew I had zero chance against a guy with Franklin’s build. Even with a gun, I doubted I could down him.
My only chance lay out in the corridor among other people.
“They can’t help you,” he said.
I stiffened, a cold slick of sweat drenching my brow and flooding between my shoulders. “What?”
“There’s no one out there anymore. They’ve all gone home.”
“What have you done with them?” My voice shook so badly I could barely understand it.
Franklin chuckled. “Nothing. Like I said, they’ve gone home. It’s 4 o’clock in the morning.”
“4 o’clock?” I repeated in a shaking voice that was little more than breath and desperation. “That’s not possible.”
He gave another unkind chuckle. “You were out for five hours.”
I shook my head, wrenching it from side-to-side. “W-what’s going on here?” I asked through another choked breath, the light along my hands pulsing even brighter like a flame that had just been fed a mound of dry wood.
This time Franklin didn’t chuckle. He pushed off the table, and I heard its legs grate against the marked concrete.
If I’d stiffened before, it was absolutely nothing compared to what my back did now. It felt as if I had become so rigid I’d turned into a carved statue.
I heard the creak of his knees as he shifted down into a kneeling position.
I freaked out. Something within me – the fear that had welled and welled upon waking – it broke. I kicked at him, and my foot rammed into his knee.
It was a good blow, solid. I’d taken a couple of self-defense lessons way back when I’d started waitressing shady gigs. So I knew the kick was strong, just as I knew it caught him right on the tip of the knee. It should send him back no matter his size.
The problem was, it didn’t. It felt like I’d just kicked a mountain.
“Get away from me. Get away from me!” I screamed, voice pitching high. Then I realized something: I should have screamed earlier. “Help, someone help me. Help me, please! I’m being attacked!”
“No one can hear you,” he repeated in that same dull, easy, casual tone as if we were chatting about nothing more important than the weather.
I tried to kick him once more, and even though I connected with his knee again, it just didn’t matter.
I saw his hand reach toward me. I saw it because the light playing across my skin caught the underside of his fingers as they stretched my way.
“No, get away from me,” I began.
I couldn’t push him back. A second later, he latched a hand around my wrist and pulled me forward.
I can’t say the move was violent. He didn’t try to wrench my arm from my shoulder. It wasn’t exactly gentle, either.
No, it was cautious.
He didn’t use his grip to yank me to my feet. Instead, I felt him lean closer as he appeared to appraise the symbols still dancing along my flesh.
I could feel them. Feel them like they were insects burrowing underneath my skin. Insects made of light and fire. Except the fire? It burnt cold.
I’d never felt more frozen in my life. Maybe it was the fear, maybe it was the adrenaline, maybe it was the fact I’d apparently spent the last five hours in this cold room.
Or maybe it was the symbols.
I felt as if my insides had been carved from ice.
“Fortunate,” he muttered to himself. Then, abruptly, he let my hand go.
I hadn’t been supporting it, and it slammed into the concrete with a crack.
Hissing against the pain, I instantly brought my arm up and cradled it against my chest. Then I tipped my head back, way back as I stared at him. He looked even more imposing in this gloom.
“Please, please, just let me go.”
“You don’t deserve to be let go,” he commented.
And that comment was enough to completely extinguish the rest of my hope. Up until that point, it hadn’t been clear what Franklin Saunders was planning.
Now it was.
He reached over, not turning from me, using one of his long, strong arms to pluck something up from the desk. The same book that had Larry McGregor and every crime he’d ever committed written neatly on one of the pages.
Franklin patted a hand down his suit and produced a pen from his pocket. Then he proceeded to open the book and began to write on a fresh new page.
With my heart ramming against my ribs, feeling like it would tear the lining from the flesh and then chip away at the cartilage and bone, I shuddered. “What are you doing? Please, look, whatever you think I’ve done—”
He abruptly finished writing and closed the book with a snap. “I don’t think you’ve done anything. I know what you’ve done,” he concluded in a rumbling tone. It was the kind of strong, punchy tone that would get anyone’s attention. It didn’t just shake through him, but rattled the room.
As for me? It felt like he clutched his hands on my shoulders and threa
tened to ram me into the floor.
“What?” I asked through a rasp.
He made a show of putting his pen back in his pocket, then, leaning against the table once more, he opened the book. “Petty theft at the age of five. You went to the local supermarket and stole an orange.”
“I’m sorry, what?”
“You followed that up with a string of offenses during your teens. Stealing, for you, was how you found yourself away from your family, wasn’t it?”
“What… what are you talking about?”
“It escalated until you stole from family friends. This time, you’d gone too far. This time, they were going to call the police. And they would have if it weren’t for your grandmother. She paid off the debt, smoothed things over, kept you safe.”
“I… I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I stuttered. I was frozen to the spot. The cold in my chest kept sinking further and further through my body until it felt like I would never know warmth again.
It wasn’t just the magical symbols dancing over my hands. It was what he was saying.
He wasn’t making these wild accusations up.
They were true.
The kind of truth I’d swept under the rug. Everyone was foolish in their teens, weren’t they? Everyone made mistakes. You were meant to forget them and move on. Problem was, this guy had a list of every rule I’d broken and crime I’d committed.
I began to submit to the situation. I didn’t surrender, I just stopped, like a bird that had become immobilized by the presence of a predator it could not escape.
The symbols continued to dance across my skin, the cold continued to march through my chest, and Franklin Saunders continued to read through my crimes.
“Who… who are you? How do you know these things?”
“It’s irrelevant. You don’t need to know who I am. All you need to do is pay for what you’ve done.” His voice changed. For the first time, it wasn’t easy anymore. There was no longer any sense of casual calm. No, it was dark. Dark like the room around me.
“Oh god, oh god. What are you going to do? What are you going to do?” I began to speak so quickly I couldn’t draw my breath in fast enough.
“I’m not finished.” He brought up a hand as if I were being impudent for interrupting his speech. “Your petty crimes pale in comparison to what you did tonight,” he said. Again his voice became so dark it made this gloomy room luminescent in comparison.
“Tonight?” I gulped through a shaking breath. “I haven’t done anything. Look, I didn’t mean to find this room, that book, that… box,” I could barely say it. My voice became so twisted on the word box, it was like it had tied knots around my throat.
“Just like you didn’t mean to become distracted by your greed and ignore the plight of a friend? Weren’t you meant to go find a first-aid box for Suzy? Just like you didn’t mean to accept Larry McGregor’s offer for work instead of seeing your grandmother before she died?”
“W-what are you talking about? My grandmother isn’t dead.” Even as I said it, cold dread began to form in my gut like a knot.
“You promised you’d see her tonight. And she held on to the hope you would. But when you backed out once more, it became too much for her. Lilly White, your grandmother’s dead. She died two hours ago.”
It was blow after blow. Relentless. From reading through my crimes, to casually commenting on the fact my grandmother was now dead – just as my chest had become cold, this situation had now turned to ice.
I wasn’t equipped to deal with something like this. I wasn’t the kind of girl who could roll with the punches. I liked a neat, orderly, explainable life. And from the symbols dancing across my skin, to Franklin Saunders’ cold eyes as he stared at me and judged my every crime – none of this was explainable.
I began to breathe harder, my heart pounding with such fury it felt like my chest would explode.
A couple of times as I’d been growing up, I’d hyperventilated. Anxiety. Anxiety caused by a girl who could never grow up and fit the shoes that had been left for her.
If Franklin noticed, he didn’t seem to care. He continued to stare at me, his head on an angle. “What do you say?”
“Sorry?”
“How do you answer for your crimes?”
The fear – the total fear that had seen me riveted to the spot abruptly twisted and turned into a pulse of anger. “Let me go, you bastard. Let me out of here. Someone, anyone, please, help me!”
“There is no one to help you. You have angered the gods, and now you will pay.”
“Angered the gods? You’re crazy. Oh god, you’re mad—”
He let out another distinct chuckle.
“Gods don’t exist. This can’t be happening. It can’t be happening.”
“It is happening. And the symbols on your arms beg to differ – gods do exist.” With that, he returned the book to the table, closed it neatly, then patted his hands down his front, smoothing his jacket.
He reached behind him and produced something from his back pocket.
My attention was riveted on him as I saw a flash of metal.
It was a gun.
Oh god, it was a gun.
Tears ran down my cheeks, bathing my shaking face as I sobbed wildly. “What’s going on? Who are you? Please, if there’s any way—”
He stopped. That flash of metal I’d seen in his hand somehow disappeared. He took a step toward me. I saw him outlined in full this time, even though no one had stepped into the room and handily turned on the lights.
His body… it was almost as if it began to glow. That, or the symbols along my hands and down my arms suddenly became all the brighter.
Stacy had been right, and even though this was a terrible time to pause and note it – Franklin Saunders was impossibly good-looking. With emphasis on the impossible. He just seemed… realer. Even the darkened room behind him seemed to drop off into insignificance compared to him.
It wasn’t just that his body was large, his muscles practically rippling under his tight suit. It was way more than that.
I caught sight of the flash in his eyes. And I do mean flash. For, in an instant, it looked as if his irises turned into torch beams, or someone shoved a candle behind them and lit them up from the inside out.
If I’d shaken before, it was absolutely nothing compared to the convulsions that tore through my body now. My shoulders banged against the wall so quickly and with such a rapid beat, it would have sounded like somebody playing a drum.
“Finish your question,” he demanded, voice gravelly.
“What?”
“Finish your question,” he said once more through a growl.
“What question?”
“You were about to beg me. You were about to ask if there is anything you can do to save your life. Now, finish your question.”
My heart stilled. It wasn’t that I calmed. It was like my heart was about to give up.
I was way beyond terrified now. Way beyond simple fear.
There was a man with glowing eyes staring at me and threatening me in the dark.
I wasn’t stupid enough to pinch myself in case I was dreaming.
This was no dream.
A point that was proven as he took another step toward me, his body once more seeming realer than everything else I had ever seen. Every man, all of them, seemed nothing more than a mere image smeared across reality compared to Franklin Saunders.
“Finish your question,” he growled once more.
My jaw practically unhinged as it opened with a jolt. “Is there… is there….” I couldn’t push it out.
Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t the kind of girl to deny a torturer what they were looking for. The exact opposite, in fact. I didn’t have a backbone. Sure, sometimes I had a loud mouth, but I wasn’t courageous. Never would be.
And yet, despite the fact this guy was ostensibly offering me a lifeline, I couldn’t clutch it. Because I couldn’t push those damn words out of my mouth.
br /> Again he leaned down. I watched him latch two hands onto his pants to pull them taut to offer his knees room as he knelt down beside me. On his haunches, with his arms propped on the top of his legs, he faced me, little more than a ruler’s length from my face. It offered me the perfect perspective as I saw his lips press open once more. “Finish your sentence,” he said, each word a blast of air against my sallow, tear-streaked cheeks.
Something in me snapped. “Is there anything I can do?”
“To save yourself,” he prompted.
“What?”
“Say it,” he bellowed, voice bottoming out with such a resonant clap it was as if a bolt of lightning had shaken through the wall behind me.
I whimpered. “Is there anything I can do… is there anything I can do… to save myself?”
There, I’d said it.
I waited – waited as he continued to assess me. Several times, his luminescent eyes darted down and locked on the symbols still playing across my flesh.
They were brighter than ever. In fact, with every passing second, they became lighter and lighter, the runes moving more frantically like flames being pushed around by darting wind.
Again he reached down and picked up my wrist. Though I stiffened and tried to jerk back, his grip was stronger.
Finally, he let my hand drop. Then he faced me once more. “Yes, Lilly White, there is something you can do to save yourself. To redeem yourself,” he added, voice punching out with a guttural bellow.
I shook back against the wall.
He reached a hand into his pocket. I could see another flash of metal, and as my body locked in rigid fear, preparing me for my end, I watched him pull out… a document.
No… it wasn’t a document; it was a scroll. It couldn’t possibly have fit in his pocket. From end-to-end, the scroll was at least a foot and a half long. It was also one of the strangest objects I’d ever seen. The parchment was yellowed and tattered, and looked like it was hundreds of years old. And the wood that held the scroll in place? It was so delicately carved with intricate runes and symbols, it looked as if it belonged in a museum.
“What… what is that?” There was something so mesmerizing about the scroll that it gave me the distraction I needed to push my question out.
“Your lifeline,” he answered simply. He reached a hand around and drew something from his back pocket again. It was the same flash of metal I’d seen before.
This time as he whipped it out and brought it around, I saw what it was.
It was no gun. It was a knife. A dagger carved with three finger holes and a long, curved blade. Blazing down both sides of the knife were two little channels of light.
“Oh god, please. I said what you wanted me to say. Please—”
“Cut your thumb and seal the scroll,” he demanded as he held the knife out toward me.
I was locked with fright as I trained my gaze on the tip of that flashing dagger.
When I didn’t move, he snatched up my wrist and pressed the knife toward me. He did not, however, pluck up my thumb and slice it clean off with the dagger.
He just waited.
“I’m not going to,” I began.
“You have two options, Lilly White – seal the scroll with your blood and submit to the process of redemption, or pay for your crimes.”
“Who the hell are you?” I began.
He ignored me. “You have two options, Lilly White,” he repeated, voice even darker than before.
I crumpled, shaking as I brought out my hand. He didn’t let me hold the knife – he obviously wasn’t that stupid. Instead, as I winced, he clutched up my hand and sliced the tip of the glowing dagger along my thumb.
I expected to feel pain – a bite of agony twisting down my thumb and hard into my wrist.
… Except I didn’t feel a thing. Not a damn thing. I felt the pressure of the dagger as it was dragged across my thumb, and god knows I saw the blood as it spilled from the wound and trickled down my hand. The pain? It wasn’t there.
“What’s going on?” I demanded once more.
“Seal the scroll,” he said, dropping the dagger to the floor as he clutched the scroll with two hands and pressed it before me.
Instantly, my attention locked on the dagger. It was right there, just by my foot. If I managed to surprise him, shoved him out of the way, I could pluck it up….
“You have no chance against me. Just as you have no chance if you try to escape. Succeed, Lilly White, and you’ll find the world out there is a different place now. One that will never welcome you again. Your only option is this.” He pressed the scroll toward me once more.
For the first time, I looked at it, finally dragging my attention off the dagger next to my foot. And as soon as I looked at the scroll… I… felt something. Right in the center of my chest. Exactly the same position where the knot of cold had rested for the past several months.
It felt like… like a blast of something. A cold wind, a roaring blizzard. It felt as if my chest opened out and my body pulsed with a power that was not mine, that was not human.
“Sign it,” Franklin warned once more.
Drawn in by the scroll, I brought my bleeding thumb up and pressed it against the parchment.
The parchment had been blank, nothing more than cracked cream paper. A second later, as my blood dribbled off my finger and spilled across the page, writing appeared. It appeared from my very blood. I felt a wave of nausea as I watched, horrified.
The same strange symbols that had danced across my flesh now danced across the scroll in shimmering red.
They alone were enough to help me fight against the wave of weakness that shot through my body.
Franklin moved. He shifted back, turned the scroll around, stared at it as if checking something, then rolled it up and pressed it into his pocket.
He pushed back and rose, his knees creaking like old trees under an onslaught from a ferocious gale. “That’s the first smart thing you’ve ever done, Lilly White.”
I was still staring at his pocket, where the massive scroll had just disappeared. Finally, however, I jerked my gaze off it and settled it on his luminescent eyes.
I think I’d noticed them back at the party. How impossibly deep they were. They weren’t like eyes, more like doors, like a fire that would never go out.
“What… what happens now?” I forced myself to ask.
He considered me for several seconds. My paranoid mind told me he was pondering exactly how to carve me up. But rather than lurch down, clutch at the dagger, and press it against my jugular, he shoved his hands into his pockets. He arched his head toward the door. Somehow, the door unlocked. It swung open with an ominous creak as it let the light from the corridor flood into the room.
It was so sudden and so blinding, I jerked, brought a hand up, and protected my eyes.
But once more I saw the symbols dancing across my palm and fingers, charging up my wrists, and playing along my arms. Instinctively, I yanked open the rumpled collar of my shirt and stared down in horror as I saw the symbols were all over my chest, too.
With renewed desperation, I tried to rub them off, even raking at them with my fingernails.
“You will not be able to remove them. They will remain with you for the rest of your life. A constant reminder until the day you achieve your redemption.”
“Redemption?” I asked with a shaking voice.
“Come with me, Lilly White.” He turned hard on his foot and headed toward the door.
I didn’t move. Couldn’t move. It wasn’t just that it felt as if I’d lost a liter of blood to that parchment. I was still practically hyperventilating, sucking in breaths so quickly it was like I had a leaky throat.
I heard Franklin pause on the opposite side of the door. “Come,” he demanded once more, voice low.
I ignored him as I brought a hand up, pressed it over my brow, and blinked hard into my palm. Another wave of nausea struck me, and this time I fell hard against the wall.
I couldn’t… couldn’t slow down my breathing. It was getting faster and faster. I just couldn’t… couldn’t suck in enough air!
I heard him shift, and once more he appeared in the doorway. His large, broad form was outlined by the light filtering in from the corridor. I watched as he crossed his arms. “Calm yourself,” he demanded.
What was the point?
Either I’d died and gone to hell, or….
My mind began to shut down. As I hyperventilated, my thoughts fractured like broken glass swarming through my mind, shredding what remained of my consciousness until I fell back. I slid down the wall and crumpled against the concrete floor for the second time that night.
Before I lost consciousness, I watched Franklin sigh. He walked back into the room, and after a single moment of hesitation, leaned in and picked me up. I felt his arms wrap around me, felt him lift me up with the ease of a man carrying nothing more than light.
He carried me from the room as I crumpled against him.