Chapter 6 Magellan
Magellan
Magellan was wrenched back into consciousness by some god-awful smell.
She opened her eyes to find herself staring into the piercing blue ones of the man she’d met before.
They had been outside together in a garden he called “a labyrinth,” which made no sense.
And his name was Liron, but he’d never heard of the institute.
Which made no sense either. Now she was lying on a bed, in a creepy dark room, and he was gazing down at her with an intense scowl on his face.
He was wearing a Halloween costume. A full-blown I paid good money for this costume with leather boots, britches or breeches—whatever they were called—and a tailored waistcoat.
A petite older woman somewhere in her fifties hovered beside him and gazed down at her with a concerned wide-eyed look. She was also in an elaborate costume. Her platinum-blond hair was done up in an intricate twist with perfect corkscrew ringlets that belonged on a doll.
Magellan’s mind was totally blank. How had she gotten from the garden to here?
How had she gotten from the church to the garden?
She couldn’t remember anything. She was seconds away from teetering into a freefall panic when the woman leaned over her with a raised voice and said, “Hello? Can you hear us, dear?” She had a thick accent, but unlike the man’s, hers sounded German, not British. They were probably both fake.
Earlier the man had proclaimed he was an earl with all the gravitas of a Broadway actor in full character.
Truly he had the arrogance part down pat.
He was charismatic, tall and broad shouldered, most likely one of those actors who modeled on the side.
He must have come late to the wedding and sat in the back.
Otherwise she would have remembered him.
Magellan asked the woman, “Are you from the wedding?”
“You see?” The man turned to the woman, raising his hands in exasperation. “She’s befuddled!”
“Rhys, hush. Do be kind.” The woman laid a soothing hand on top of hers. “My dear, you have had a frightening.”
“A fright,” the man corrected her.
Magellan took several long, deep breaths, trying to keep the panic attack at bay. Garesh always said, “You can’t take a deep breath if you’re being chased by a tiger.” Breathing deeply told the body everything was going to be all right.
While the pair watched her with concern, Magellan let out another long breath and inhaled again, and again, as if she were trying to blow up an invisible balloon. She started over, speaking slowly, in case the woman couldn’t understand. “Are we near the church?”
“Zee church?” The woman gave an owl-eyed blink.
The man’s lips pursed in irritation, but he said nothing.
“No, vee are in zee countryside,” the woman answered with a smile, as if that explained everything. “Can you zit up?” She helped Magellan slowly rise.
Magellan winced at the pounding in her head. She had a splitting headache. Had she passed out at the reception?
Had there been a reception after everyone saw the news?
The news.
Then it all came flooding back. The chaos. The desertion. Crystal running off to find the driver. The last thing she remembered was playing Bach on the pipe organ.
The pipe organ! She gasped, remembering the bright light .
. . the sense of falling . . . then everything afterward was blank.
She must have fainted and hit her head on the church floor.
Had she cracked her head open and died? The man had said she hadn’t died, and he’d seemed certain.
Maybe she fainted from not eating enough.
She hadn’t had a full-blown blood sugar attack in years.
Maybe she was in a coma in the hospital and this was all a dream.
“I can’t remember anything,” she said in a daze.
“Oh dear oh dear.” The woman looked to the man. “Rhys, she has had an accident. Did you zee her horse?”
“She was in the labyrinth, Mother. There was no horse.”
“Then maybe zee horse is grazing nearby?”
The man sighed painfully. “I can assure you there was no horse.”
Why were they talking about a horse?
“No need to be testy, darling.” The woman turned back to her. “Vhat is your name?”
“Magellan Brighton. I was playing at the wedding.”
“Are you zee vicar’s daughter?” The woman was frowning now too, looking just as confused. “Is zee vicar married?”
The man tried again. “Do you know how you came to be in the labyrinth?”
“Please.” Magellan was unable to stop the pressure building in her chest. “I can’t remember how any of it happened.”
“Well try.” The man sounded frustrated. “You were found trespassing on our estate.”
“Rhys!” the woman reprimanded him. “Do not be cross.”
Magellan glanced past them to the open doorway to see a laboratory looking straight out of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
The room was filled with beakers, weird gadgets, and strange contraptions, like the set of a play or a movie.
Except the horrid stench wafting in was worse than a city dumpster rotting in the sun.
Her eyes landed on a shelf lined with jars, where she saw a brain in one of them.
An actual brain. Then came the terrifying thought, Had she been drugged and kidnapped?
A heady mix of adrenaline and fear hit her all at once, and she slowly slid off the bed on the other side away from them.
“What are you doing?” the man asked sharply.
“She is standing,” the woman said.
“I can see that, Mother.”
The woman tsked, “You frighten zee poor girl.” She smiled at her. “Don’t be scarred, my sweet.”
Don’t be scarred? Magellan’s eyes widened in alarm. Who talked like that? People who put brains in jars and cosplayed “the earl” in warehouses before they killed their victims.
“Scared, Mother. Scared.” The man pinched the bridge of his nose.
“Do not correct me vhen you are zee one scaring her.”
Magellan needed to get away from these people. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to trespass on your estate.” She backed away toward the door. “I’ll just be going.”
She turned and ran.
At first the man and woman were too surprised to move. Magellan bolted for the door, dashing past dusty rows of smelly experiments, dead worms, and more jars filled with gooey things in formaldehyde.
She heard the woman yell, “Rhys, stop her! Zee guests! Zee guests!”
Magellan threw open the main door, expecting to find a back alley in Lower Manhattan. Not . . . an estate.
A garden extended for acres. A real garden unlike anything she’d ever seen, full of manicured pathways, rosebushes, trickling fountains, marble benches, and Greek statues. Athena and her owl were right beside her.
Crisp air filled her nose, the purist air she’d ever breathed, along with the sweet scent of flowers. In the distance stood a castle. A real castle. And behind it was a forest.
She stopped running so abruptly, the man chasing her barreled into her from behind.
His arms banded around her waist and pulled her back to keep them both from falling forward.
The air left her lungs in a whoosh, and she was dizzy all over again.
Because everything in front of her eyes was wrong.
So wrong. The gardens, the castle, the beauty.
Her brain couldn’t compute the sensory overload.
As the man went to let her go, her body listed forward.
She felt like a puppet whose strings had snapped.
The ground rose up to meet her as her vision faded, and the man caught her in his arms.
“I seem to be making a habit of this,” he grumbled. The other woman reached them, out of breath. He said to her, “We’re not going back in there. It obviously frightened her to death.” He began to walk toward the castle.
Magellan kept her eyes closed. She felt like she was floating, and the two strangers’ voices sounded far away. She was no longer able to deal with reality, whatever reality this was. Because these two people weren’t crazy. She was.
The woman sounded fretful. “I do believe you are vright. Zee poor girl is obviously suffering from amnesia.”
Amnesia? Magellan’s brain settled into a fog.
Either she was experiencing a very vivid dream, or she had died—those were the only two possibilities.
Right now, she was most likely lying unconscious on the balcony floor of St. Paul’s with a traumatic head injury while her brain hallucinated her own Bridgerton Netflix special starring an earl with windswept black hair, ocean-blue eyes, and a mouth made for kissing in every episode.
Now her brain must have concocted her own story as she lay in a hospital bed dying.
She could feel herself drifting off, being pulled under a blanket of sleep.
The woman said, “Take zee back stairwell. Place her in zee room next to mine.”
“We need to keep her out of sight,” the man said. “Let me know when she wakes.”
The last thing Magellan remembered before slipping off to sleep was the man gently taking the wreath of flowers from her hair. Then he touched her hand, and she fleetingly thought it felt like fingers playing the first keys to the beginning of a song.