Chapter 12 He Who Shared My Bread Has Turned Against Me
I can still taste the bitter tea on my tongue.
A touch of drafty air drags me out of a waterlogged state.
And for the briefest of moments, I have forgotten I exist at all.
The floating sensation is followed by drowning, spinning, falling, choking…
Can’t breathe.
Bitter taste.
Can’t breathe.
My survival instincts flicker on groggily, and I drudge myself out of the weighted fever dream, breaking through an invisible lake of deep sleep to tilt my head to the side, and allow a river of sour contents to spew from my parted mouth.
The splash hits the floor followed by a groan that must be my own because my numb chest tingles and vibrates from the effort.
Are my eyes open? Closed?
Am I on a boat? Am I alive?
Floating, spinning, falling, tilting off the side of the earth and…
My mouth gapes open as more of my stomach is emptied. This time, the thick splatter echoes against walls. A floor. A ceiling.
I breathe in through my nose, filling my lungs with a stale smell, like wet earth trapped in a moldy box. It’s familiar yet warped and off-putting. A cold, fungal breath that rises from the walls and whispers, You don’t belong here.
No, I don’t. Where am I?
The vile rank of my own vomit wafts back up to my face. I roll my head back to center, recognizing the feel of a creaky mattress under my head. What the hell?
Against the blanket of sleep that holds down my eyelids, I blink slowly to try and wake myself up. It’s like wading through a pool of sludge. I blink again, unsure if I’m actually doing it or just imagining I am.
Pitch black. No difference if my eyes are closed or not.
I could have my hand in front of my face and see nothing. An absence of light, of space. As if the visceral darkness has a set of teeth, and it’s grinning at me for being blind and helpless and now scared.
Because I can’t wave my hand in front of my face. Even if I tried. Something scrapes against my wrists as I try to tug my left hand free.
The daunting sound of my own breath is too loud, too human, too isolated.
“Hello?” I whisper with a burning dry throat and mouth.
The silence that follows stretches wide across the still atmosphere, abundant with the possibility of movement. Of another heartbeat.
“This must be hell.” A deep, groggy voice punctures the smothering blackness.
The desire to flinch recoils as I recognize the man behind the sound.
“Niklaus.” I exhale. My tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth. I need water.
“Are your wrists bound?”
I take a deep breath in, then tug my arms in toward my chest, straining against the resistance keeping them splayed on either side of the mattress. A material cuffing my wrists, tough and smooth? Not metal but not rope either. Maybe leather?
I nod in response to his question.
Silence.
He can’t see me. Stupid.
“Yes.”
His breath is calm and patient, yet tense as we sit and think.
“I didn’t travel,” I blurt out in a whisper. At least, I don’t think I did. “There are feelings I get when it happens. It didn’t. I just—”
“Blacked out.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
Niklaus’s calming breaths continue.
“Oh god…do you think Uncle Niles is okay? We must have been attacked…”
“No one attacked us, Spitfire,” Niklaus says spitefully.
My pupils strain to catch even a speckle of light, returning some sanity back to my brain. He’s just an isolated voice in this gloomy, chilled atmosphere. Maybe this is hell.
“Then…” I narrow my eyes. “What’s going on? You know something.”
He doesn’t respond for what feels like several minutes. I wonder if I’m hallucinating his voice so my brain can cope with the isolation.
“Are you the—”
“Has your mother ever told you about my dad’s past?” he asks quietly.
I relax my head against the firm mattress. “Like their time in the prison?”
“No.”
“Then no.”
“He was an asylum patient, Spitfire.” Embarrassment. I don’t think I’ve ever heard Niklaus Demechnef embarrassed in our whole lives.
“For what?”
“He was undergoing Mind Phantom experiments. I think it caused him to abduct people.”
Oh shit.
“No…” I do remember Krimson mentioning Uncle Niles being subjected to these experiments at one point.
“How are you positioned right now?” he asks.
“Uhh—” I readjust my legs splayed out, toes wiggling as my bare feet are kissed by the abyss of frosty air. “I’m lying down on a mattress I think. My arms are spread wide with some kind of leather cuffs around my wrists.”
He sighs.
“And you?” I ask.
“I’m on a hard chair with similar restraints on my wrists against a cold, stone wall and ankles bound to the legs of the chair.” He pauses, and his breath is uneven. “I still have my pants on, but not my shirt.”
I look down, even though I can’t see my own body. I don’t know how I didn’t notice before. Pins and needles bite into the pebbled skin across my chest and stomach. I only feel tight fabric across my breasts and pelvis.
My head drops down to the mattress, causing a sharp creak.
“What?” Niklaus adjusts in his chair. A low groan of old wood.
I gulp and roll my eyes. “I don’t have any clothes on. Well, I have a brassiere and underwear. That’s it.”
The room gets so quiet, I can’t even hear him breathing anymore.
“Goddammit, we need to get out of here,” he growls, straining against something, possibly his own manacles.
“I’m so sorry, my friend.” A sliver of bright, blinding light bolts down from the far-right corner of my periphery. “No one is going anywhere for a while.”
My eyes water as I strain to see a door open, and a man take shape.
My Uncle Niles stands at the top of a staircase, glaring down at us in his…
Basement.