Chapter 25
Two.
“Tell me everything, Two. Everything.” Warden White was talking to me, but—No. No. No fucking way. I flashed my eyes over the scar on the child-sounding woman’s face, oh my god, it was a three. And he’d called her Three, like it was her name.
Which meant—
My world tilted on its axis. Up was down. North was east.
The scar on my face was a fucking brand. My whole life, I’d been walking around… numbered. Catalogued like the cattle once traded at the Greenwood hotel back home.
“I’m going to be sick.” I turned my head to side hoping to limit the mess, but Warden White was already there with a pail beneath my chin.
“There you go, my love, just let it all up.” If I’d been able to move my hands I would have shoved him away. I didn’t want his words of comfort. What I wanted was to disappear, turn invisible, and get rid of the rising tide of disgust and anger that rose in my throat.
The woman-child took the situation as an opportunity to resume her singing, “Two, Two, curious, Two. Taken away from the family you knew.”
I didn’t want this. Any of this. Whatever the hell this was made prison look like an all-inclusive.
“Your loss is felt, but you will be found!” Three was now skipping around her cell, her volume only growing louder. “Happy, content, with belly round!”
They were going to lock me in here. With her. Until they had what they wanted. Until they took my passenger from me.
“Two is the longshot to give us an heir!” Three grabbed onto the cell bars and squeezed as much of her face through as she could manage. “But you know what they say about grey eyes, dark hair!”
Any doubt, any sliver of hope, that I was more than a number disappeared. There was no mistaking it. My eyes. My hair. To them, to the Seal, I was Two. Me, my body, didn’t matter.
The whole of my identity reduced to a number carved into my face.
Maybe that severe woman working with Warden White—Madame—was onto something. The reality of my situation was too much for anyone to face, maybe it would be better for me to be unconscious. On my own terms.
So, for the first time in my life, I shut myself off.
Glazing my eyes over, I didn’t try to make sense of the words as they were spoken. They fell over me, lapsed around me, as I crawled and clawed my way to safety to the recesses of my consciousness. To surround myself in warmth and the protective embrace of the dark.
If I was far enough from reality, whatever the Seal did, whatever they said, wouldn’t hurt.
No one could judge me. I could shield myself, and try to stitch together the fabric of my new reality.
I was just a spectator. My body wasn’t my own.
Decisions were being made for me, and it didn’t matter how much I fought, bucked, or screamed, there was always the potential for things to get worse.
The further I burrowed into my mind, the lighter I felt. I was no longer fighting to get away, to dig, but welcomed by a slow lowering as I ventured deeper and deeper. Darker and darker.
Soon, I graced the bottom of a pitch-black pit. The darkness warm and forgiving, its tendrils of shadow a velvet-wrapped purr against my skin.
Somewhere far above, if I concentrated, I could make out the light of the real world happening around me. The Warden’s words couldn’t reach me. Not unless I wanted them to. I’d be okay here, for as long as I needed to be. Until I thought of a way to unleash my wrath upon my captors and escape.
My laugh echoed and swirled, as if I were at the bottom of a well.
But even the bottom of my pit wasn’t far enough to drown out Three’s singing.
?
The woman I once thought was a child sang and sang:
One, One, marvelous, One.
She’ll be the one, to bear us a son.
One came first, by a minute or two,
But she is a number, both tried and true.
So, place your bets, if you always suspected
Number One was your choice, she’ll do what’s expected!
?
Being at the bottom of my pit, I wasn’t sure how much time passed. If I fell asleep, I’d blessedly woken up back in my welcoming patch of darkness.
A very real part of me knew I was in my mind. The other, less dominant part, however, was worried that if I acknowledged my pit was something I’d made up, the illusion would disappear. So, I hovered between willful ignorance and suspension of disbelief for the sake of my own wellbeing.
I stroked the ground, living, breathing, beneath my fingers.
I was the only one who could look after me.
Jack and Todd wouldn’t know where I was, and they certainly weren’t going to be able to rescue me, with or without the resources of the FBI.
And that was if they were allowed to pursue an investigation into my disappearance.
I was holding out hope that being within a few steps of the FBI building, my capture had been caught on camera.
If it hadn’t… it would look like I ran away.
And Rochan knowing about my passenger would only add to the rumor mill—how I’d acted strange, and stormed out of the FBI building to hide from my fate.
Which would make me look guilty. And Rochan would think—no, she would know—Jack and I crossed the line, even if she didn’t suspect the rest of it, and—
Stop.
Apparently, even in the dark, I still had an enemy. Me.
I’d clawed my way into my pit because I needed to be in control.
There was nothing I could do to change how those on the outside saw my situation.
It would not do to dwell on all the mights and could-bes.
I owed it to myself to care, and give myself safe harbor from the storm hurtling through my life.
I needed to weather it. I needed to survive, and in order to do that I’d need to get out.
But only once I collected enough of myself together to face reality.
Again, my laugh echoed. Even while being held captive, I’d managed to escape. That had to be somewhat of an accomplishment. Both a new high and a new low, I most definitely ignored the whispers rumbling in my pit concerned that I was celebrating my own delusions.
I was. I knew that. I did. But I had to look on the bright side. Or the dark, since it was the dark that comforted me.
?
Somewhere far above, the woman who must not have been that much younger than myself continued to sing:
Two, Two, curious, Two.
Taken away from the family you knew.
Your loss is felt, but you will be found.
Happy, content, with belly round.
Two is the longshot to give us an heir.
But you know what they say about grey eyes, dark hair.
?
I was calm for a time. Comforted by the ink-black silk wrapping around me like a blanket. I maintained my control. Didn’t look too far into Three’s lyrics, or the fact that she was singing about people instead of numbers. I was doing well.
On occasion, I even managed to reflect on the vamp case, which I chose to think of as some sort of accomplishment.
Mulling the details of the case over, I kept myself distracted for as long as I could manage.
But without any new intel to go on, or a way to confirm my suspicions, my thoughts looped, and looped, and looped, prodding and poking at the details hoping to uncover who was responsible for the deaths of the familiars.
A serial killer, like Daemonica, would have been a real possibility, if it weren’t for the fact more than one person had been required to subdue and move the familiars, and that serial killers rarely, if ever, hunted in teams.
No, whoever was responsible for the murders had a sense of reality so distorted they believed vampires existed. Or at the very least, believed they were saving familiars by pumping them full of adrenaline. Which had to have started somewhere. Some inciting incident, had to have fed into the belief.
The mind was capable of many wonderful and frightening things in the name of self-preservation. Survivors of traumatic, and life-or-death, situations rarely came out unscathed. Dissociation was common.
Considering I was sitting at the bottom of my own mentally-constructed pit, I was one to talk.
Whispers reverberated within my pit’s pitch-black walls, seething with all of the thoughts I kept at bay. All of the words I didn’t want to speak. It wouldn’t do me any good to look too far into it anyway.
What if I pulled at the thread that unraveled the illusion of my pit, my safety net?
Everything was fine. Perfectly empty and perfectly nothing. Just what I needed, I could stay here indefinitely. Forever, even.
Until I got lonely.
I’m not sure precisely how long it took for me to realize that I needed companionship besides that offered by the darkness, but it materialized, and was soon a feeling I couldn’t shake.
Loneliness hounded me, surrounded me, filled my lungs, and poured out of me.
I needed to talk to someone, to process everything I’d been forced to swallow.
In the darkness, a figure took form.
I’d really done it now.
“I’m impressed.” It was a man, tall, dark, sharp jaw line, dragging an appreciative hand over the warm shadow walls.
Of course, of all people, Todd had appeared in my pit.
He gave me a familiar once over, before looking at the tunnel of light above us, where reality sat some distance away. “Have the walls started to speak yet?”
“Maybe.” My voice sounded strange, too loud.
He gave a knowing nod, then came and sat next to me. “You need to get out.”
I knew that. I did. But I needed to stay here a bit longer.
“Have I ever lied to you?”
I wasn’t going to grace that with an answer.
“That doesn’t matter, when we both know the truth.”
I was fairly certain Imaginary Todd was reading my mind.
“It’s not reading your mind if I’m part of your imagination.”
He totally was—the jerk. So just for fun… I tried and failed to picture him with hair. Because he said he was bald by choice. The liar.
“Whatever makes you feel better.”
We sat in silence for some time. Me and Imaginary Todd. Even though we didn’t speak, just the steady rise and fall of his breath was enough, the loneliness was somehow less.
What I was doing was dangerous. I wasn’t kidding myself, I’d dissociated from reality, and was having an imaginary conversation. If I ever got out into the real-world, Todd could never learn of this. I’d need to take it to my grave.
“You are going to get out, Delilah.”
“Yeah?” I scoffed. “How?”
“You’ll think of something.”
“So helpful.”
“You already know what to do.”
“And apparently that involved conjuring you up, so clearly I’m doing really well so far.”
A devilish grin graced his features. “Calm down.”
“What?” Anger licked my insides. I was calm. Well, I had been until I was told otherwise. Telling me to calm down, never worked.
“Settle down.”
He had to be kidding me. “I’m chained to a table in some sort of underground lab dissociating from reality and you’re telling me to calm down?”
Todd’s smile grew ten-fold. “Relax.”
I shot to my feet, fury simmering just beneath my skin. “You’re making me angry.”
“Good.” Todd crept into my space. “I need you to get angry.”
The temperature around me rose. “Why? Why can’t I just be fine, and calm, and okay?”
“I need you to fight.” Fuck, even Imaginary Todd knew how to motivate me. “So, stop feeling sorry for yourself and do what you do best.”
There was a crackling, like kindling catching flame. “Like what? Cause trouble? Make everything worse?”
In one swift motion, Todd took hold of my throat and brought his lips to my ear. I couldn’t see his hands, couldn’t hear the words from his lips, yet somehow, I felt them in the very core of my being. “Kick some ass.”
The world around me erupted into flames. The pit that kept me safe and warm when I couldn’t handle any more turned to ash.
Because I was angry. Because I wanted it to. Because I couldn’t be contained.
But even as the world around me burned, I didn’t leave. Not yet.
First, I listened.