Fraught
Elias’s memories of his abduction were shaky and strange. He recalled flashes of his head lolling on a warm hard shoulder, arms spanning his waist, the sound of hooves on dry ground.
Then there was wood beneath his face and the violence of candlelight while his head pounded, screamed for darkness. The strangeness of the smell of another’s home.
The next time he brushed with the surface, Elias got the impression that he was naked and was being touched without his permission. He struggled against it, but he was too far from the surface. It felt like running in a dream: desperate and ineffective as his body lay still.
When he’d finally been allowed to wake . . . it didn’t feel like the few other times he had fallen into darkness after eating the wrong thing. That felt like being pulled to the surface of a pool with a gasp: unpleasant but natural.
This waking was sharp. Like being roused with a slap. The feeling was so immediately strange that it took a long moment of confusion before the pain arrived.
And when that caressed him, it was . . . incandescent. Distracting.
Elias thumbed through these memories, holding them up to the light like baubles.
The stranger from the tavern was staring down at him, riveted. His beautiful blue eyes shiny and flat at the same time, like a deer in wasting. An animal’s eyes in the face of a man.
There were others, four.
Elias remembered their faces.
Young but older than the stranger himself. None looked alike, so they couldn’t be brothers. All dressed as if they were in attendance at a party.
The one with the softest gaze had dropped his glass of champagne first. They had been . . . not exactly smiling when Elias first woke, but it was clear that they had been expecting something much better than what they had received.
Also, at the height of their panic they had left the stranger to fend for himself. So they were not all close.
Not friends; perhaps they worked together. . . . But it was rare for men of similar ages to be together in trade. Elias himself worked with men of all ages.
Students, then, or recent graduates. The stranger was also not what Elias expected of a professor, either from age or demeanor, but there was much Elias did not know about universities. The stranger could very well be.
Either way, Elias hated them all.
If he had seen anything like what had been done to himself, he would not have run into the night in fear. He would have rushed to his own side, went to get the authorities, or sought the help of his neighbors for justice.
At best the witnesses were cowards, at worst accomplices.