Dark Wave

By Erica Mahoney

The Guild is not a nice place. Its members are not good people. If you've done something particularly debauch, that shadow in the corner of your eye may just be a Griffin.

When Emmeline murdered her hateful, abusive parents, she didn't think that she'd end up in a place like the Guild, surrounded by people who think of themselves as vigilantes. With Henry, a woman with a knack for the unusual, and Cyril, whose brain seems capable of holding all of the information in the world, Emmeline realizes that not everyone is a good person, and sometimes, those not-so-good people need to make room for better people. Just when she thought she had gotten used to the idea of vigilante justice, however, another threat creeps in to the strange story that has become her life. Emmeline had learned how to handle those outside of the Guild - what does she do when one of their own turns against them?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Erica Mahoney
• Release date: Jul 27, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310844867

Erica Mahoney

Erica Mahoney is an author of fantasy books, with sub-genres of sci-fi, romance, and occult. She gets most of her inspiration from dreams, abstract art, and, of course, things in her every day life. Her books are directed towards the young-adult/adult audience, and are full of mystery, conflict, steamy moments, and realistic dialogue.

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DARK WAVE

Erica Mahoney

© 2016 Erica Mahoney

Published by Erica Mahoney at Smashwords

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

CHICAGO, 1926

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

1936

۝

A BRIEF THANK YOU.

To everyone who ever laughed at me for being the weird one;

Thank you for pushing me to prove that I could be better.

To the man who showed me that you don’t have

to go through terrible pains to fight for the thing

that you love.

As always, to my family and my loved ones.

Thank you.

۝

CHICAGO, 1926

Insanity in individuals is something rare – but in groups… it is the rule.

- Friedrich Nietzsche

۝

If she pressed her face close enough to the metal bars in front of her, she could almost imagine that they weren’t there at all. She could feel the coolness of them sink into the skin on her face, but when she closed her right eye, all that existed was the skyline of Chicago on the other side of the window.

She often heard it said that the gulls were fairly simple-minded creatures; why else would an animal claimed to fly near the sea stay close to the Chicago River? She let her one open eye roll up just a fraction of an inch, and the tight corner of her mouth stretched as she smiled softly. Seeing the gulls always helped her feel less trapped; she could smell the river, and even though it was often more unpleasant than it was otherwise, she still wished she could open the window and let the cool breeze float into the room around her.

Almost as if the staff of the hospital had alarms that could sense when someone was thinking about freedom, the door behind her opened loudly and without warning. Her left eye closed, and every pleasant thought she had been able to entertain that morning left her in the time it took for her to sigh. She let her hands fall away from the bars, but she didn’t pick her head up until she heard her name.

Hattie.

She almost opened her eyes just so the man could see her roll them in their sockets, but she didn’t. She forced her mouth into a grim smile and turned her attention to the man standing just inside of her door. The nurse was there, cowering behind like she usually did, but Emmeline rarely paid much attention to her after noticing that she was there at all. Besides, she was far more concerned with the stranger in her room than she was the nurse hiding behind him.

Which one are you? She asked coolly, turning and pressing her back against the wall beside the bed. Jacob didn’t tell me that he was having someone stand in for him.

The man spared her a soft smile before moving further into the room, and that smile alone told Emmeline all she needed to know about the man. He crossed to the small desk settled against the wall facing the foot of her bed, and as soon as he pulled the chair out from beneath it, he folded himself into a sitting position and turned to face her. He gave her that same smile once more, and Emmeline felt her skin tighten in response to it – that smile wasn’t a hello smile; it was a we’re-going-to-fix-you smile.

"Doctor Perrivale will no longer be seeing you, Hattie. The hospital has sent me in his place. The man smiled, and Emmeline couldn’t help but notice that it seemed to be the most genuine thing about him in that moment. My name is Clemence, but you may call me Doctor Gott."

I’ll call you Clemence.

The brief moment of shocked silence was glorious; Emmeline let it coat her skin as she moved strands of her dirty, greasy hair away from her face. The man seemed to remember himself, and he looked down at a notebook in his hands. Emmeline recognized it immediately as the notebook that Doctor Jacob Perrivale had kept all of his notes of their sessions in. She tucked her arms around her legs and settled her chin on her knees, watching as Clemence searched through page after page. Finally, he seemed to find what he was looking for, and he looked up from the notebook to regard her.

Doctor Perrivale made quite a few notes about your lack of cooperation towards authoritative titles. Clemence paused and set the notebook down on the desk, flipping to a new page in the process. He pulled a pen out of his coat pocket and then look back towards the girl on the bed. He never said why, though… Would you care to enlighten me?

Emmeline curled her fingers, pressing the tips of her nails into the soft flesh on the underside of her wrist to keep herself from spouting out her private thoughts. She stared at the man for a long time, wondering how it was that someone not much older than she had established himself at such a prestigious building such as the Chicago Institute of Mental Wellness. When she was sure that she could keep her private thoughts separate from her practiced ones, she allowed herself to answer the man’s inquiry.

"Because authority is not a natural concept – it is a concept that the powerful man created to keep his power. This answer seemed to shock Clemence, and she let herself continue after only a brief pause. I don’t respect authoritative titles because I don’t believe in authority. The only difference between you and me, Clemence – aside from what you’re hiding behind your trousers, obviously – is that I am the one behind the lock and you are the one with the key."

Clemence had begun writing something in his notebook halfway through her speech, and for a long moment, the silence was filled only with the sounds of pen on paper. She noticed that he smirked, though, when he thought his face was hidden from her immediate line of sight. She wondered if she amused him, though it was more likely that he thought her beliefs romantic and grandiose.

Is that not the definition of authority? He asked when he finally looked up from the note book. I say, and you do?

"Authority is all perceived. You only think you’re in control because you have your medications and your security officers and your coat. You wouldn’t think you were in control if something happened and your guards couldn’t get here fast enough. You’d feel very out of control if something happened to your nurse, and your sedatives got away from you, and you were left at the mercy of your patients."

Emmeline made a grand show of stretching her legs along the length of the bed, and she forced her mouth to stay blank as both the doctor and the nurse tensed where they were. She allowed herself to arch an eyebrow at the man as she settled herself into the same position she had been in, and she smiled sweetly as she placed her chin on her knees once more.

You’re quite jumpy for a man in an authoritative position. She tilted her head on the tops of her knees, and her grin widened. "You’re not really listening to the ramblings of a mental patient, are you?"

Clemence didn’t answer her. He turned his attention back towards the notebook, and began scribbling more notes to himself on the pages. When he was through, he flipped through the pages closer to the front of the book, and stopped when he seemed to find what he was looking for. He nodded once - more to himself than anything else, she imagined – and then turned to speak with her once more.

Doctor Perrivale mentions several times that you speak as if you know your words to be the truth. Clemence arched an eyebrow then, and though it irritated her very core, she smiled wider. Unlike most patients suffering from delusions, you seem to have severe conviction in the things you say.

Jacob said a lot of things about me, I imagine. Emmeline allowed herself to be privately vindicated; what had started as something to make a point was now being done because she could tell how much it irritated the man sitting across from her. Does he say that my friends were imagined, and that I’ve never actually traveled outside of these walls? That seems like something he would say… Jacob was never very fond of me. I can’t say I’m sorry to see that he won’t be coming back anymore.

The board here thought it best that I take over, since Doctor Perrivale didn’t seem to be making any progress with your case. Clemence tapped the notebook on the desk to remind her of his previous statement. Let’s stay focused on the subject, Hattie – do you believe the things you’ve said to be true?

Emmeline’s smile vanished then, as quickly as if the man had slapped it from her face himself. Every muscle in her body tensed, and she forced herself to count to ten before allowing herself to entertain his question. She reminded herself of her purpose, and the difference between her practiced thoughts and her private ones, and though she had rehearsed for months, she allowed one of her private thoughts to slip into the conversation.

The fact that you think I’m insane doesn’t make me a liar.

Clemence did something then that she hadn’t been expecting; instead of turning red in the face like his predecessor had, he relaxed further into his position on the chair, tucking one hand under his chin as though he knew she had more to say, and he was gracing her with the opportunity to do so.

Emmeline didn’t like being surprised.

She could only move so far; the metal links of her one restraint clanked together as she moved her arms. The link around her wrist bit into her flesh, and the link secured to the wall made only one dull noise as she quickly unfolded herself, darting off of the bed and standing as far from it as the restraint allowed. When she had come to her senses enough to assess the situation, her right arm ached from the angle at which it was held behind her. The chair that Clemence had been sitting in was lying on the floor, and both the doctor and the nurse had backed themselves up against the door.

"You put windows in our rooms so that we feel free, but put bars on our windows so that we remember that we are not. Your smiles say friend, but your coats and needles say doctor. You think I’m sick – what’s worse, you think you can cure it."

"That’s what you’re here for, Hattie – that’s why I’m here. To his credit, Clemence’s voice was much calmer than his face was. We’ll find a cure -"

"You can’t cure what I’ve got, She hissed, turning away from him and towards the bed. It’s a choice, not a disease."

CHAPTER ONE

Chicago, 1923

Deep vengeance is the daughter of deep silence.

- Vittorio Alfieri

۝

The house sat atop a dark hill in the eastern quarter of old Chicago. Many of the manors in the eastern quarter had been untouched by the Great Fire, but most – if not all of them – had been remodeled to reflect the changing styles and tastes. The house on top of the hill hadn’t always had seven seemingly haphazard floors, but what it might have once looked like was irrelevant.

The windows glittered out into the darkness, both with their own alchemical shine and with the reflection of the small orb lights decorating each apex of each small roof – of which there were many, on this grand house in the eastern quarter. Unlike the windows of the commerce buildings, windows in residential manors were often left mostly unaltered, allowing an outsider to glance in and see the grandeur of the house behind the glass.

How then, wondered the shadow, had no one known of the events going on in this house before they had to interfere?

It’s getting late.

She glanced over at her partner and exhaled, gazing at him through the thick cloud of smoke that formed between them. She arched her eyebrows and pulled on her rolled cigarette again, turning her attention back to the quiet house in front of them.

Yeah.

She didn’t move; instead, she spent the next few minutes wondering why people didn’t say what they meant to say. He had said that it was getting late, but what he had meant to say was that the man had gone into the house with his son nearly two hours ago, stinking of booze and opium. He had wanted to say that the screams and cries had, after an hour, stopped. He had meant to say that the house was silent, and that the silence made his skin crawl.

Should we go in?

Not yet.

She could feel the incredulous stare coming from her partner, but she could hardly see it through the veil of Haze smoke and darkness. He danced from one foot to the other beside her, reaching up to readjust the wire-framed glasses on his nose. For another few minutes, he seemed content to let her observe in silence, doing nothing more than smoking and losing feeling in her extremities. The air around her face smelled sweet and spiced from the Haze, and she enjoyed breathing it in almost as much as she enjoyed smoking the alchemically altered tobacco itself. If she wasn’t allowed to enjoy the simple things in life, she mused silently, what did she have to look forward to?

"What are we waiting for?"

She spared him a sympathetic glance, sighing softly before she turned her attention back to the house. She was certain that these cases were the most difficult for him; his masculinity and animalistic nature surely made it difficult to stand there and wait while unspeakable things were happening to the girl inside of that house.

She was also certain that half of their job was about to be taken care of for them.

More screaming, She answered after a long moment.

She could hear him open his mouth to protest, but he remained silent aside from that. It wasn’t often that she told him to wait longer than necessary, but when she did, she had a good reason. She took pity on him, though, and said nothing when he took a few cautious steps towards the dark, silent house. After all, he didn’t know that she had been studying this case for weeks, and that she was certain that the girl inside of that house would soon join their ranks.

They didn’t have to wait long; she had just stamped her cigarette out on the ground with her boot when they heard the first shouts. The victim was undoubtedly male, but fear and pain had turned his vocal chords into those of a female; the sweet, high sound of panic barely pressed out through the windows of the house. She heard her partner’s mouth fall open again, and when he turned to look at her, she shrugged lazily.

The brother.

She reached into the front pocket of her pants, digging around in the deep crevice; it might as well have been an entirely separate pouch more than a pocket, she found herself thinking. Her fingers finally grasped the loose cigarette, and she didn’t have to search too much longer to find the lighter right beside it. She placed the cigarette between her lips and lit it, and before too long, there was another thick cloud of smoke forming around her face.

Like a perfectly conducted orchestra, she thought, sending a stream of smoke towards the house. First, the lights.

A light came on in the upper-most right window – the bedroom reserved for the eldest of the family. In this case, that meant that the parents shared the bedroom. A shade was drawn down over the window, which kept her from seeing inside, but she could see the shadow dart across the room right before the second set of screams sounded. There were two of them – one male, one female; she made a mental note to ask the girl how she managed to take the both of them out without being overwhelmed by either of them in the meantime.

Why aren’t we -

She held up the hand holding her cigarette, tucking some of her fingers towards her hand to signal to him that he needed to wait just a moment longer. For as intelligent as he was, he severely lacked patience. Of all of the things she hated – and she hated quite a bit – rushing through the anticipation of things was the worst. Almost as if to prove her point, something in the house made a noise; the sound of something heavy falling onto the wooden floors would have been missed by someone who wasn’t already listening for it.

And a-one She paused, took a drag on her cigarette, and then began swirling it in the air towards the house – a conductor in the strange symphony. "And a-two…"

The only living person remaining inside of the house screamed.

The girl continued screaming, and she found herself wondering once again how no one else had noticed the events going on inside of the house. The man beside her - and slightly in front of her now - looked over his shoulder at her, motioning with his hands to show her exactly how he felt about waiting. She stared at him for a long, lazy moment, feeling much like a mother who will eventually indulge their child.

"Now?" He demanded.

Soon, She offered, sucking on her cigarette. Soon.

۝

The silence that followed her screams was the loudest sound she had heard in her entire life.

More than the silence, Emmeline noticed the smell; there was something sweet about the way the air around her filled with the scent of blood and shit and decay. Perhaps, she found herself thinking, the sweetness came not from the meat, but from knowing that the faces lying in pools of vomit and blood could never leer at her again.

Her hands ached more than her body ever had, no matter how drunk and sadistic her father became; she tensed and curled her fingers a few times to work out the ache of holding the fire axe in her grip for so long. Her throat ached, too, but she imagined that she could take the burn out of it with some of her mother’s alchemically enhanced wine. She wiggled her fingers a few more times, and then looked around her; it seemed that before she could do anything, she had some cleaning up to do.

Emmeline, She muttered to herself in her best impression of her late mother, lifting a hand to wipe the blood away from the corner of her mouth. "Why on Earth would you let the house get so dirty? You know I’m not able to get up and clean it myself anymore."

It wasn’t entirely true, she amended silently. Her mother had fallen ill sometime after the Great Fire; the doctors had diagnosed it as stress, and she had been given a healthy dose of the alchemical wine. Her mother had decided that the mixture of alcohol and opiates helped her so much that she was going to drink more of it – and more, and more, and more, until there was nothing left of her mother but an empty shell that allowed things to happen in her household without her say so.

Not that it made much a difference - her mother never had been able to tell her father and her brother that Emmeline’s body wasn’t for their pleasure.

She shook her head, almost wistfully, and kicked the hand closest to her foot before turning away from the mess entirely. The closet on the sixth floor would have what she needed, and that was where she directed herself as she left the room. She was distantly aware of the way her feet stuck to the wooden floors, but she never looked down to discover the trail of red footprints following her through the hallways.

You’re making a mess, Emmeline. When she spoke this, her voice deepened – an awful imitation of her late father, but an imitation that helped her spirits slightly. I’ll have to show you what happens to girls who make a mess.

For a long moment after she stopped speaking, she held her breath and waited to hear the heavy footsteps following her; they didn’t come, and her heart fluttered slightly knowing that they never would.

She had to hold herself upright against the wall as she made her way down the stairs to the sixth floor hallway. Her knees had begun to shake terribly, though she felt no dizziness, and very little nausea. She almost had herself convinced that her nerves will still worked up from the sudden decision and execution of her actions. Perhaps, she thought with a soft smile, her mind hadn’t yet adjusted to the knowledge that she was free. She would never again be someone’s maid, or their chef, or their unwilling whore.

Emmeline was free.

Something deep in her stomach ached, and she pressed a hand to her side to help quell the spasm. The thin shirt that covered her body stuck to her skin strangely, and when she peeled it away from her flesh, there was the most sickening of sensations in her belly – as if someone had sewn the shirt directly to her innards, and pulling the former was drawing string through the latter. The fabric between her fingers was wet and heavy, and it wasn’t long before the smell reached her nose; she would have thought that it was coming from the room she had just left if she hadn’t noticed the red stain spreading through the cotton of her night shirt.

Her hands shook when she lifted the hem of the shirt to just beneath her breasts, though she didn’t remember them doing so for the entirety of the past three hours. She could see the white meat of her flesh shining through the blood, which poured freely from the wound stretching from one hip bone to the other.

So that the man buying you knows you will always belong to me. A whore’s mark for a whore’s body.

She tried turning her head at the sound of her father’s voice, but she couldn’t stop looking at the wound in her gut. She arched her back and twisted ever so slightly to get a better look, and the pain coursed through her stomach so violently that she nearly vomited there in the hallway. The gleeful thought that her mother would have died from that alone was cut short when she noticed that she could see something inside of the wound moving as she twisted. She would have tried touching it, but that’s when she started laughing. She knew, somewhere in the back of her mind, that she was dying, and the noise that bubbled out of her mouth was the laughter of a person no longer set in reality.

This is to be my life, she thought bitterly. She caught herself on the wall, and used it to slide towards the floor. Freedom has graced me, and death claims me.

The romantic notion that death was the only true freedom was interrupted when she started vomiting. Each spasm tore through her core with the hot iron of pain, which forced more of her stomach’s content – of which there was very little to begin with – to join the mess on the floor. Her nose was quickly filled with the smell of her own vomit, which was only a step above the smell of death coming from the other room. The mixture of it all forced her to dry heave for a long while after her stomach was finally empty.

When she was through with that, she started screaming again.

۝

Emmeline floated in and out of darkness for an unknown amount of time; even if she had had a timepiece near her, she wasn’t sure that she would have been able to open her eyes to look at it.

It was difficult for her to determine whether or not she was truly awake, or if she was imagining the sounds and smells around her. She could hear someone talking in soft tones, but she was so accustomed to people around her shouting that she wasn’t sure her ears knew how to decipher such softly spoken words. She tried opening her eyes, but it felt like someone had glued her eyelids together – after, she amended, they coated her eyes with grains of sand.

The voices near her hadn’t ceased, and she assumed that they hadn’t noticed she was awake. Her heart fluttered behind her ribs as she tried assessing her surroundings as much as she could without the use of her eyes. She concentrated on her wrists and her ankles, and found both to be free from any restraints. The mattress beneath her back was so soft that she felt she had somehow become a part of it; it was certainly not the lumpy hand-me-down mattress of raw cotton that she had grown up sleeping on.

The realization that Emmeline wasn’t in her house anymore set in slowly, allowing her heart the proper amount of time to have slowed before it started hammering in her chest once more. She tried opening her eyes once more, and her panic grew when she realized that it wasn’t just the remnants of sleep keeping them shut; her eyelids wouldn’t separate from each other, no matter how much effort she put into making it happen.

She relaxed into the mattress for a long moment, listening for the voices. They were still carrying on a conversation, but she still wasn’t able to make out what they were saying. She wasn’t concerned with their conversation, either – she was more intent on figuring out where she was, and what kind of people would deprive her of her sight but let her limbs remain unrestrained.

Pain pulsated through her stomach, and though it wasn’t as severe as she had remembered it being, it was a familiar pain. She lifted her hands to her stomach, though she felt like she was moving her limbs through molasses instead of air. She heard herself make a noise for the first time since waking up, and the voices stopped talking when she moaned.

She’s awake.

"What a profound observation, Cyril – thank you. She’s also about to touch her sutures, so if one of you would kindly -"

Someone’s hands wrapped around her wrists and brought her hands up above her head. She wanted to open her mouth and protest, or jerk her hands away from their captor, but she seemed to have used up all of her energy by moving her arms the first time. She felt someone’s hands tickling the skin on her stomach, and she moaned once more when the fingers began prodding the sensitive flesh beneath her navel.

"She doesn’t seem to have pulled any of them. Bring me the rinse, Cyril – no, the rinse, in the clear jar."

She could hear someone muttering something quietly, but she couldn’t make out the words – she assumed that no one was supposed to hear it, anyway. Footsteps scurried away and then closed in again, and she could hear the sounds of liquid sloshing around in a container near her shoulder. She recognized the sound of someone unscrewing a metal lid from a glass jar, and even though she expected the smell of alcohol to reach her nose, she was greeted with the subtle scent of oranges and lemons.

Try not to flinch, now. She heard someone set the jar down on a nearby surface, and then someone’s hand touched the side of her face. It’s going to make cleaning this off more difficult, and that’s not something you want.

Emmeline didn’t have the energy in her to protest, so within seconds, the smell of citrus grew stronger. Whoever had their hand on the side of her face was working at her eyes with a soft cloth, and even though she was concerned with where she was and who was around her, she let herself admit that there was a certain calming effect to be experienced by the smell of the so-called rinse.

There had to have been at least three people in the room with her, she decided – the one named Cyril, the one barking at Cyril, and the one who hadn’t said a word since taking her hands away from her stomach. With nothing else to do until the hands were done working at her eyes, she let herself concentrate on the hands around her wrists. She was surprised by the realization that her captor wasn’t being unnecessarily rough or cruel; they applied just enough pressure to her limbs to keep them against the mattress, and no more. In fact, the person seemed to be gently kneading the flesh on her wrists with their fingertips, though it was entirely possible that she had imagined the sensation.

There, Came the voice closest to her after a moment. Take your time. The lights have been dimmed to make the adjustment a little more bearable.

The hands were pulled away from her face, though the ones at her wrists remained, and she was left with the smell of oranges and lemons in her nose. For a moment, Emmeline seemed to have forgotten how to open her eyes; she felt the strange pressure against her eyelids as her eyes rolled around in their sockets. Eventually, she was able to peel them apart ever-so-slightly; the world beyond them was a shadowed blur, but it was an improvement over the complete darkness behind her eyelids.

There were two shadows hovering by the right side of her bed, both vaguely human shaped. She let her eyes focus on them, and after shorter a time than she expected, the shadows began clearing and sharpening until she found herself staring at two strange men. The one closest to her head was older than his counterpart, who seemed no older than Emmeline.

The older man seemed to have been the one who had cleaned her eyes off, judging by the slightly used-looking cloth in his hands. The man’s brown hair, which was just beginning to gray near the temples, was oiled back against his scalp to keep it off of his forehead. Resting over his eyes were a pair of glasses that looked more like goggles, and that made his eyes seem huge as they stared out from behind the lenses. His clothes were cut and styled like those of the Elites, but the color of his jacket immediately labeled him as a Medic.

The boy standing beside him – though, Emmeline concluded, he was more of a man than a boy – wore glasses as well, and as she looked towards him, he pushed the thin wire frames further up the bridge of his nose. His hair was short, though it still fell over his eyebrows and the tops of his ears, and didn’t seem to be oiled at all. The black vest over his white shirt was opened, which made it easier for her to see the texture of velvet as it caught the light.

Elites. She let her eyes close as she exhaled slowly. I’ve been kidnapped by Elites.

Her eyes snapped open as she remembered that there was at least one more person in the room with them. She pushed her head back against the pillows and rolled her eyes as far towards the top of her head as they were likely to go, making a soft noise of discomfort as the movement stretched the muscles of her stomach. Whoever had been holding her wrists seemed to take pity on her; one of her hands was freed, and a hand came towards her chin to help support the angle of her head.

Emmeline didn’t look up at another man, though the style of clothing enough would have said otherwise. Thick, red hair fell down around her face in curly waves, and as the person standing above her moved, she caught glimpses of the metal shards braided into the curls at random intervals. The buttons on the woman’s vest – which was a man’s vest, Emmeline noticed – were polished brass, and the deep red of the shirt beneath it was a color only worn by Elites. It did nothing to dissuade Emmeline of her previous assessment, and did nothing to set her at ease. She was sure her father and her brother owed the other Elites a lot of money, and she wasn’t sure how to begin to explain that they were no longer in a position to pay any of it back.

Death, she sighed mentally. Death and freedom.

The only woman in the room aside from herself pulled her hands back away from Emmeline’s body and stepped around to the other side of the bed, standing opposite of the two men. She reached into the deep pockets of her black pants and pulled out a thin, rolled cigarette, lighting within the same amount of time. When she exhaled her first drag, the air was immediately filled with the sweet, cloying scent of cloves and spice. Emmeline knew the smell, though she couldn’t for the life of her remember why or how.

Must you do that in front of her? The older man turned his attention towards the woman long enough to scowl. She doesn’t need you polluting the air she’s breathing.

She’s not dying from consumption.

"She’s not dying at all," The younger man added, sending his own scowl towards the woman.

The strange girl took a slow pull on her cigarette, and Emmeline was fascinated with the way the end of the small tube glowed as the woman breathed in its smoke. The woman pointed towards the younger man – Cyril, Emmeline reminded herself – and winked.

Cyril’s got the idea of it, She said, her comment directed towards the older man. "She’s not dying at all, so you can stop fawning over her as if she’s on her fucking deathbed."

It’s a highly inappropriate habit, Henrietta. The older man scowled once more, and then returned his attention to Emmeline’s stomach. "Just like those clothes you wear – I’ll never know why he lets you get away with it."

Because I’m the best. The woman paused, and then shrugged as she glanced at Cyril. Sorry.

The boy shrugged a shoulder carelessly; Emmeline wondered if he took no offense because the statement was true, or if he just wasn’t the kind of person to take offense to things easily. Emmeline decided that she might have liked this strange group of people if she weren’t being held captive by them. She wondered if this is what her family might have been like, if the members of it were sober and less inclined to rape their own blood.

Emmeline sucked in a breath as the older man’s fingers began finding the sensitive places on her lower stomach. She picked up her head to look down the line of her body, and if she hadn’t been so uncomfortable, she would have been appalled at her state of dress. The thin night shirt she last remembered wearing was nowhere to be seen; her breasts were covered with dark silk, wrapped around her chest as if she were trying to pass for a man. A heavy but sterile-looking blanket covered everything below her waist, though there was more of her underwear showing than she would have liked.

The man prodded an area close to her wound, and she gasped. The three strangers all looked at her in unison, as if they had briefly forgotten that she was alive and capable of feeling pain. The man snapped the fingers of his free hand towards the room, and after a long, lazy stare in his direction, the girl named Henrietta moved to follow his command. She was out of Emmeline’s line of sight for just a short moment, and Emmeline could hear the sounds of jars and bottles being picked up and put back down. When the girl finally returned, she held out her prize for the man’s inspection.

Thank you. It was the first time Emmeline had heard him say something genuinely kind. Here we are… This will help with the discomfort.

Emmeline struggled to look at the object in his hand, but the world was growing dim with fatigue and pain. The man unscrewed the lid to the small jar and reached beside him towards a small table, set up between him and Cyril. Emmeline only grasped the details of the situation when the man revealed a dangerous-looking syringe and moved it towards the small jar.

No. Her voice was soft and weak, and her throat was suddenly just as coarse as it had been before… Well, she wasn’t sure how long ago. "No. Please don’t."

Emmeline decided then that if they were going to torture her, then she would endure every moment of it. She knew the kind of hollow husks that people became when opiates entered their system, and she wanted nothing to do with it. She had wanted nothing to do with it when her mother had started drinking that damned wine, and even less to do with them when the wine allowed her mother to turn a blind, uncaring eye to the treatment of her daughter.

It’s only for the pain, The man told her, bringing the needle closer to the flesh on her arm. It’ll help you remain comfortable.

Emmeline’s throat constricted around her vocal chords, and whatever energy she saved by not speaking was expended twofold as she tried moving her body away from the needle. She ground her teeth against the pain in her core and ignored the burning sensation in her eyes, shifting herself as close to the woman on the other side of the bed as she could. Her muscles, however, had a different idea about the amount of energy that she had stocked up, and gave out halfway through the motion. When Emmeline collapsed against the mattress, she whimpered pathetically; she wasn’t sure if it was from defeat, or if it was from the renewed pain in her stomach.

Leave her alone, Harrison. The woman surprised her by reaching her hand down and wrapping it comfortingly around Emmeline’s. She’s going to split a suture, and it’ll have been entirely your fault.

It’s only opiates, Henry. Cyril crossed his arms and looked down his nose at the girl. She must be in pain.

"She doesn’t want the fucking opiates, Cyril. Henrietta pulled her hand away and turned her hazy eyes towards the Medic. Give her a topical salve – and for the love of God, put the fucking needle away."

For a long moment, it seemed like Harrison wasn’t going to listen to the woman. Finally, he sighed and let the syringe clatter down onto the small table beside him. He left the side of the bed, muttering to himself, and it wasn’t long before Emmeline heard the sounds of things being moved around again. She felt herself relax into the mattress beneath her, and when she sighed in relief, her breath tore out of her lungs weakly and jaggedly.

She felt her eyes threatening to close once more, and she fought the urge by looking around the room she was in. Harrison had been correct; the room was certainly much dimmer than she would have liked for properly looking around, but any brighter of a light would have forced her to keep her eyes closed. The walls around her were papered in a rich design; a cream color served as the background, with columns of intricate designs in red set apart every foot or so. Wooden planks reached up from the floor, stopping after perhaps about two feet; they were stained a dark cherry, and Emmeline found that it suited the paper above it very well.

Gas lamps were set along the walls, though she couldn’t twist her body around to see how many of them were in the room. She saw only two, set just above a mirror on the other side of the room – which was, in turn, set above a heavy looking chest of drawers. Most of the light in the room seemed to come from a small brass chandelier, hanging above them in the center of the room. She used its light to look down at the bed around her, and found that it was much larger a bed than she was used to. Not quite as large as her parents’ bed had been, it was certainly larger than the mattress she was used to sleeping on.

The man still standing at the side of her bed cleared her throat, and she let her eyes make their way lazily back to his face. He raised a hand to push his glasses up the bridge of his nose again, and then he smiled. It took Emmeline by surprise, an emotion that tightened her chest and made her brace herself for a blow. After a few seconds, she relaxed herself long enough to realize that the man hadn’t raised a fist to strike, and that he was still smiling at her – albeit with a little confusion now.

We aren’t going to hurt you, Emmeline. He frowned, as if he hadn’t before thought about the fact that the possibility might cross her mind. We’re friends. He scratched the back of his neck and then stuck his hand out towards her suddenly, making her wince back into the mattress. I’m Cyril.

"You’re an idiot. The woman reached over Emmeline and slapped the man’s hand away. She’s not going to fucking hurt herself just to shake your hand. Stop making sudden movements before you make her disappear into the damned mattress."

Cyril looked down at his hand, as if he wasn’t sure how it was capable of frightening anyone. Emmeline almost thought that she had offended him, but the boy shrugged and dropped his hand to his side, smiling apologetically at her. She tried to return the gesture – honestly, she did – but her mouth wouldn’t move, and her jaw wouldn’t unclench. Instead of trying to force herself to be comfortable around a strange man, she turned her head slightly and looked at the woman standing beside her bed.

Henrietta, Emmeline recalled aloud.

Cyril laughed suddenly, and covered it up by coughing into his hand. Henrietta let her eyes linger on the boy for a long moment, and then let out a long, lazy stream of smoke from her nose as she turned her attention towards Emmeline. The two women studied each other for a brief moment; it was hard to tell through the smoke and the pain, but Emmeline was sure she saw some sort of emotion flash through the girl’s otherwise dull eyes. Finally, the redhead shook her head, sending a wave of curls tumbling over her shoulder.

"Henry."

Emmeline opened her mouth to ask why such a pretty girl – and she was beautiful – would want to go by a masculine version of her name. She wanted to ask her why she dressed like a man and cursed like a man and smoked like a man, but Harrison returned to her bedside then, holding something else in his hand. He unscrewed the lid and dipped a new, clean cloth into the shining gel. As the cloth passed by her face on the way to her stomach, she inhaled the scent of mint and eucalyptus leaves.

There is a slight trace of opiates in this salve, The man told her, glancing back at her after studying the wound on her stomach. They won’t enter your blood stream, however – you’ll hardly know that they’re there, minus the relief you’ll feel in your wound.

Emmeline spent the next few minutes wishing that she had let the man inject her with the drugs instead; his fingers worked around her wound, and though she knew it was to help her, she felt like she might vomit from the pain all over again. Her fingers curled and tensed on the mattress beside her, and that’s when she realized how badly they still ached.

His hands were always too familiar… His legs were always too constricting… His arms were always too strong… Bit by bit by bit, Papa. You can’t hurt me anymore.

She remembered the smell, then, and the sight of the severed body parts scattered around her parents’ bedroom. She had left her brother intact, save for the large hatchet wound in the back of his skull. Her mother had lost those delicate hands so that she couldn’t drink her wine, even in the afterlife. Her father, however… When she was through with her work, she couldn’t tell which parts of her father’s body had been separated from which parts.

Oh, God… She moaned, despite her surroundings and current company. The mess. Her house is a mess.

Just before she closed her eyes against the memories, she saw Harrison and Cyril exchange a look of concern. Henrietta – Henry – seemed nonplussed by her muttered comments. She sucked on her cigarette and reached down with her free hand, patting the back of Emmeline’s hand comfortingly.

"Judging by the number you did on your dear mother, I don’t see her getting angry about anything anymore. It’d take an act of God to give her that ability back. Henry chuckled, and it was as dark as it was comforting. There’s no mess. It’s been taken care of. Let Harrison do his job now, kitten."

Emmeline heard the words and wanted with her entire being to respond, to tell the girl how wrong she was. She shivered on the mattress and bit her tongue against the pain in her stomach; Harrison had been correct, fortunately, and the pain didn’t seem as bothersome as it had just moments ago. She’d have a scar there, she was sure, and she wondered if her dead father was laughing at her now from wherever it was that he ended up.

Something to remember me by.

She shivered again, unable to shake the sound of her father’s voice from her head. She felt the knife carving into her stomach all over again, felt the stiffness of her spine for the hour that she laid on the mattress, blood mingling with seed and sweat and anger and shame. Her fingers ached as if they still gripped the fire axe, and they jumped when she focused her attention on them. She shivered again, and now that her body seemed to realize it could shake without her stomach pain roaring to life, it didn’t want to stop.

Her temperature’s going up again. Henry’s voice sounded distant, as if she was talking with her face in the mattress. "Harrison, fucking give her something."

I can’t risk sticking her with the syringe if she decides she wants to fight against it again – I could cause tissue damage.

For fuck’s sake. Emmeline couldn’t open her eyes again, but she soon felt Henry’s cool hands on her wrists, and she couldn’t fight it when her hands were pressed down into the mattress by her sides. "Harrison, give her something now."

Emmeline felt her lips moving, but she couldn’t hear the words come out of her mouth. She wanted to know who these people were – they had found her at her own home, surrounded with dead family members and blood and who knew what else. What kind of people brought someone like that back to their own house instead of to the authorities? Were they truly nursing her back to health just to depose of her with their own methods?

She couldn’t force her eyelids to separate. It was as if someone had attached weights to them since she had last opened them, and they were stuck in their downward position. Someone in the room whispered something, and she’d be damned if it wasn’t her brother whispering to her father. She felt the large hand press against her upper arm, and though she struggled to get away from it, she still felt the pinch of her father’s fingers working on her flesh.

No, she screamed inside of her head. They can’t hurt me anymore. I’ve killed them. They’re dead. They’re dead. They’re dead.

No one heard her – especially not the taunting voices floating through the room, taking form in the shadows and poking at her with callous fingers. She thought she heard herself whimper, though she felt someone touch her forehead with a gentle hand, but she couldn’t be sure any more what was a dream and what was reality.

She’ll burn through the fever tonight, Someone said after a long moment. Tell him he can come see tomorrow. She needs to sleep.

"She’s been sleeping for six days."

"She needs to sleep more. A body needs to rest when it’s been injured – something I wish you’d take to heart before you do yourself more damage the next time you come to me."

I haven’t -

Come on, Henry. This voice was different – softer. Let her sleep.

She didn’t know whether the people around her left, or just fell silent, but she heard nothing else after that. For a long while, she was trapped in darkness and forced to listen to the soft whispers and laughter of the shadows around her. They broke into her mind and rattled it in her