Chapter 18 #2
At least Ward and Beck had cleared the grounds of ghosts, so I didn’t also have that to deal with on top of the weight of memories.
When I’d been a patient here, some of those same ghosts had been a relief—not because I’d particularly enjoyed interacting with them, but because seeing them again meant that my magic was still there.
The ghosts of Tranquil Brook hadn’t been…
normal. And not in the way that Sylvia wasn’t normal.
Lady Sylvia Randolph was herself a witch, and she was far stronger and more powerful than any of the ghosts I’d encountered here.
Archie LaGarde, too, was unusual, although he was a necromancer—a warlock—rather than a witch.
Even though some of the ghosts at Tranquil Brook had also been witches, they’d been…
broken. Being stripped of magic had left them incoherent, shattered in soul as well as mind and body.
They’d been hard to understand and harder to convince to leave you alone if they understood that you could hear them.
I was glad they were gone, and not just because it meant they weren’t there to bother me. They had moved on. They were at peace.
If only the same were true for those of us still living.
From the files, they’d taken me into one of the treatment rooms, and I hadn’t been able to suppress the shudder that had rolled through me when I’d turned away from the hallway with the baths.
I really, really hoped they weren’t going to ask me to go in there.
Not after the nightmare I’d had last week.
I hadn’t been prepared for what I got from that godawful machine.
She screamed, one hand striking the side of the box as her body convulsed.
“Goddamn it!” he shouted, one hand struggling to hold down the creature’s hairy leg as he kicked and spasmed. “Hold him down!!” He turned the throttle dial, increasing the strength of the machine. The creature kicked harder, one sharp hoof catching him in the arm, opening up the skin.
“Doctor!” one of the nurses gasped. “It’s too high!”
“The hell it is!” he yelled back. “Hold him the fuck down!”
One of the orderlies dove in, throwing his weight down on the creature’s body as he turned the dial all the way up.
The creature gave one more heaving spasm, then calmed.
“Thank fucking God,” he grumbled.
“Doctor?” the nurse said, her voice shaking.
“What? It worked,” he snapped. “The convulsions have stopped.”
“He’s dead,” the nurse whispered.
She knew that magic was a sign of corruption, of sinfulness. But so many of their patients were children—young adults. Boys and girls, many of them who had been here since they were nine or ten.
What could a child of nine or ten possibly have done to be punished with magic?
She supposed that it was a case in which the sins of the father—or mother, although that’s not how the saying went—were visited upon the child. That the lesson wasn’t meant for them, but their parents. They were innocents suffering for the sins of others.
That’s why it was important to purge it from them. No matter the cost.
She couldn’t stand it anymore. The screams. The convulsions. The empty expressions on their faces.
She undid the screws on a panel in the back, then stuck the screwdriver in and jammed it, hard, until something in the innards twanged.
This wasn’t helping them.
This patient was particularly difficult. One of those who had been here a long time, and yet showed no signs of any actual progress.
He frowned, fiddling with the controls on the machine.
This boy had only gotten worse the longer he’d been here. He could feel the magic surging in the child. Feel it rebelling against everything they did to rip out the foul earth-magic.
The family wouldn’t have minded, even considering what the little monster had done, if only the magic had been clean.
The doors to the treatment room opened, and the patient was wheeled in, strapped down even though he was still ostensibly human.
He strapped the machine to the patient’s wrists and ankles, took the charcoal and drew the sigils on the pale, thin chest.
Breath gasped in and out. Those dark, unnaturally black eyes wide and filled with hate.
He was doing his job.
But this one. This one he enjoyed stripping the power from.
I jerked out of the vision and hit the doors hard, running blindly.
I sat on the step, sobs ripping through me, my chest aching and air difficult to draw into my lungs. There was just… too much. Too many thoughts that were too painful to even consider.
The little monster.
Me.
I knew whose memories the last set had been. Not Dr. Garraway’s—I was pretty sure I’d never met him in any meaningful way. Dr. Rhett Protheroe. He’d been right. I’d hated him. I’d hated everyone who had subjected me to their so-called treatment, but I’d hated him more than most.
I shuddered, my body remembering what it had been like on the other side of that memory. Nausea surged, but I didn’t move.
I’d already thrown up everything that was in my stomach, including most of my stomach acid. It had gotten to the point where I was ignoring both the nausea and the convulsions designed to purge my stomach, since there wasn’t a point in even trying to bring anything up anymore.
But I’d hit my limit.
I just couldn’t anymore.
And the second my butt had hit the wood of the back steps leading out to the now-overgrown and neglected yard, I completely lost control.
I’d run outside, mostly dry-heaved off the edge of the porch, then collapsed on the wide set of stairs, the mask I’d barely had time to rip off at my feet in the overgrown dead grass.
I was folded in half, arms crossed over my thighs, face on my arms, trying to keep from having to look at anything.
I knew there were still agents moving around, searching, trying to find anything else that might link Tranquil Brook to either Roderick or Phillip Dagget or to the mysterious other Garraway to the institution.
Or which might provide us with a possible name of our killer.
I had tried to help.
But I couldn’t take it anymore.
I became dimly aware that there was a hand on my back, heavy and a little warm, gently moving in slow circles. There was a big, warm thigh pressed against mine.
“The fuck is going on, Raj?” I recognized Hart’s voice. “He okay?”
“Of course he’s not okay, Hart,” came the snapped response from next to me. “He just touched half the shit in this damn asylum. Can you even fucking imagine the hell he’s been through today?” Raj sounded angry.
I hoped he wasn’t angry with me. I couldn’t take it if he were angry with me. More angry, anyway.
I couldn’t stand one more person—past or present—yelling, screaming, cursing, crying. Not one more. My lungs constricted, and I struggled to gulp in more air.
“Shhhhhh.” I felt the hand moving across my shoulders. “You’ll be okay, Rayn. I know you’re not now, but you will be.”
“Here.” Hart’s voice again.
“What the hell are—Oh.” I felt him move away from me, making me shudder involuntarily. But then the hand was back. “Rayn,” he said, his voice soft and gentle and very close to my ear. “Hart brought your gloves. Do you want to put them on? You can be done touching things for the day.”
I couldn’t make myself lift my head, but I turned it, weakly holding out an arm.
“Watch your sleeves,” Hart said from behind us.
“Right,” Raj acknowledged.
When his dark-skinned hands carefully eased the glove over my hand, he’d rolled up the sleeves of his pale yellow button-down so that they didn’t touch my skin.
I took the second one from him, forcing myself to sit up, although I still felt terrible.
“Here, kid.”
I looked over at Hart, who was handing me a water bottle with a straw top. I stared at it.
“Jesus, Hart, he has to touch that to drink from it.”
“He’s got gloves on.”
“With his mouth, dumbass.”
“Fuck. Sorry, kid. Hang on.” Hart headed back into the building, yelling something about anyone having a goddamn Coke.
Sitting up was making me dizzy, so I dropped my face back into my now-gloved hands, fighting the urge to lay down. Raj’s hand returned to my back, gentle and slow.
“S-sorry,” I managed.
“Nothing to be sorry for,” came the low response. “We put you through hell today, and you took a lot more than anyone was expecting.”