I rejoiced when the world ended. I wasn’t sure why. In this place, it always came back. Reality was always there, waiting for me, watching for me from the corner of the room like a demon hell-bent on sewing nightmares. It got to the point where when I opened my eyes again, only to see the harsh fluorescents of the interrogation room still shining above me, it was all I could do to keep from breaking down into tears.
The worst part was that no matter how badly things were going for me, I knew for a fact that they were worse for Gabriel. I knew because they had us locked in cells that were separated not by concrete walls, but by bulletproof glass. I could see what they did to him, and even worse, I could feel it, thanks to my connection as his Mate.
I felt every cold touch, every broken bone, and bleeding wound. I felt them shatter his kneecaps while he lay strapped to a table and I felt the agony multiply tenfold when his body healed the damage in minutes.
They had him manacled to a wall by a collar, and they brought him his meals inside dog bowls while on the other side of the glass, my captors allowed me to eat from fine china. The first few days he refused to eat. It was only after they started severing limbs just to watch them regenerate that his body finally broke down and cried out for sustenance.
I remember watching him look at me first. The shame that twisted his gut and turned the food into ash in his mouth, even as he continued to shovel it in with his hands. That day, I refused my meals. And the day after that, and the one after that. Instead, I went into a corner of my cell and turned my back on the proceedings going on the other side of the wall. I sat there, staring at gray concrete, body rocking while it danced to the echoes of Gabriel’s pain. I didn’t have to see to know what was going on. We both knew that. But he seemed able to handle the experiments a little better when he knew that my eyes weren’t upon him.
The sad part about it all? It wasn’t the werewolf hunters who were in charge of him. The agents had told me that the werewolf hunters couldn’t be trusted with him. Something about them not taking his health into consideration.
They weren’t hurting him for fun. At least, I didn’t think so. It was all to get results. To see how fast he could run, how fast he could shift, how much damage he could take before his wolf came screaming to the forefront.
They were gathering data about Weres, and Gabriel had been chosen as their guinea pig. Agents Liam and Benson listened to suggestions from Marcus and Jessica, but didn’t allow either of them to step through the door of his cell.
So they visited me instead.
In a nutshell? We didn’t get along. I found myself bruised and bloody on more than one occasion, and whenever I sat in my cell, nursing a bloody nose or cracked rib, Gabriel would sing for me.
Not in the traditional sense. We couldn’t hear one another through the glass, but, thanks to the link between us, I could feel his words rather than hear them. They appeared to me like pictures in my head. His singing wasn’t done in the language of men, but in the language of wolves. I came to learn that even the slightest nuance could change the meaning of a particular call.
It wasn’t all about dominance, but also about your intent. The emotion that you put behind your voice before you raised it to the sky. To Gabriel, the howls he sent to me along our bond sounded like words, but all I saw were dark winter nights and towering pines, as he sung in that way that only a Were can do.
Sometimes, when I craved the sight of him, I would stand before the glass wall, hands on either side of my head, and watch him. Trapped by his collar, he’d crouch there in his own cell in the darkness, the only sign of life the glow of his eyes through the heavy veil of the night.
On those nights, I could feel his mind race. Images would tumble through my brain faster than I could make sense of, but eventually I caught up. Eventually, I trained myself to see the stories he was mindlessly telling me, over and over in a bid to keep himself sane.
He was showing me the Wild Hunt. Teaching me of the mad Fae and bloodthirsty hounds they’d trained. I learned that each of the hounds had a gift. A talent. Something the Sidhe would give their wolves when they were particularly pleased with them. Gabriel had originally belonged to the Master of the Hunt, which was why he’d been charged to lead the group on the nights they wished to run down their chosen prey.
I learned that others in the hunting party knew him as Ghost. He showed me how he could fade away, disappear like smoke only to reappear leagues from where he’d started. How it had been his duty to cloak the presence of the Wild Hunt on the nights that they ran so that they could disappear and reappear wherever they liked. Riding from the very skies like a host of rebel angels or all the riders of the apocalypse.
The most important information I learned, was that Gabriel had to avoid the full use of his power, because giving in to that part of himself would only call the Sidhe down on all of our heads. To me it explained why he hadn’t already escaped from this place, but not why he hadn’t gotten away while he still could have.
In his memories I saw Specters sucking the life from the innocent, the guilty begging for their souls, and all around him, me, us were the faces of screaming children.
Gabriel…Gabriel couldn’t stay here. With every day that he spent chained to that wall, he lost another piece of himself. Another piece he’s spent thousands of years trying to build after he’d escaped from the Sidhe. Eventually, the last of what made Gabriel human and real would disappear all together and then the Huntsmen and the Feds would have exactly what they’d been expecting when they’d captured him.
A monster.