I didn’t think I’d woken up at first. The room didn’t have any light, so the blackness felt like a velvet blanket draped over my body. Then I started to realize that the darkness didn’t come from a dream or having my eyes closed. The room didn’t have any light, any windows. Nothing.
With that realization came the one that I ached. Not the deep, soul crushing ache of when my soul had been cracked, though that pain hadn’t completely faded, either. Or maybe all the new pains had combined to make me think that one still existed. I didn’t know.
My back hurt the worse. It felt like someone had taken a sledgehammer to it, and after a good bashing, they had set that sledgehammer down and tried to give me a massage that only made matters worse. As I tried to shift, a flare of pain so powerful went up that I could barely breathe. I laid there, my mouth open, sucking down air. An earthy scent came with that air.
I laid on my side, which meant that I’d have to bend my back out of shape in order to move. It would hurt, but I started doing it anyway. One couldn’t move without shifting their back in some way. As I got to an upright position, I started to notice the other aches and pains. My legs felt tired, like I had spent the entire day and night running instead of laying on the floor. My neck had stiffened, and my shoulders didn’t feel too great either.
I tried to loosen up but couldn’t quite manage it.
“Lochlynn?” I called, and immediately knew that no one else had been put in this room with me. My voice had that quality to it that only came with being alone. Still, I called out again. “Hello?”
No answer.
Shaking my head, I reached out blindly in the dark, hunting for something, anything to help me figure out my location. My fingers brushed against the ground eventually. It had a gritty texture to it, like it had some dirt on it. It didn’t feel cold, but hard. Maybe some kind of stone, or concrete.
Holding my hand out, I walked forward until my hand hit a wall. I set my back against it, since I didn’t have any other frame of reference or a way to feel anchored to my surroundings. I started to take stock.
My hair had come undone and hung around my face in messy locks. I couldn’t tell if it had dirt in it, or if I just felt what already covered my hands. When I tried to wipe my hands down my shirt, I realized that they had left me in that silk dress. It had to have been ruined and maybe even torn. No harm in getting more dirt on it, I figured.
Then my hands went back to my hair. Still gritty. So, I’d been lying on the ground for a while. Long enough to get my hair dirty and put a kink in my neck that just wouldn’t go away.
And whoever put me in this room had taken my shoes as well.
I ran my hands over my body, where I could. I didn’t feel any wounds, lumps, or restraints. Demons wouldn’t have needed any of those things to keep me under control anyway. They could do it by putting up just the barest hint of magic. I couldn’t feel it right then, but that didn’t mean they hadn’t put any around the room I had been secured in.
Setting my fingers against the wall, I started to follow it to the left. When I met the other wall, I turned around, and paced to the other side of the room. It took me five steps to reach it. When I met that wall, I started to walk along it. That took me seven steps. So, the room didn’t have much size to it, and I had yet to find a door. I kept walking. As I made my circuit, I realized that the room’s door must’ve melded damn near seamlessly into the wall, because I couldn’t find it.
I stood in a dark, empty room, with stone under my feet, hard, cold walls surrounding me, and I didn’t know where. My lungs started to feel tight, and I rubbed my chest as hard as I could, attempting to force air into them.
That didn’t work, so I pushed away from the wall. I couldn’t feel like they closed in on me if I didn’t know where they were. Only, the second I no longer had that anchor, it started to feel like I drifted around the room, lost and by myself. I repeated in my head a dozen times that this room would only take a minute to walk around. Five steps across, and seven lengthwise. Hardly anything to this space.
Shaking now, I reached out for the wall again until I found it. I didn’t know which wall, though, because I had turned around in my panic. It didn’t matter. I told myself that a dozen times. It didn’t matter, because this room only had the four walls, and nothing in it. I didn’t need to know where they had put me, or how long I’d been there. It would be fine. I just had to breathe and think clearly. It would be fine. Fine and dandy.
What did they do to Lochlynn? The question came out of nowhere, and I pictured him in a room like this, sitting against a wall, with his arms resting on his knees. He wouldn’t have been half as panicked as me.
Then I thought about kissing him, and that did nothing to calm me down. It did, however, make me miss the demon boy more than I already did.
Swallowing thickly, I closed my eyes, and rested my head against the wall. I played little stories in my mind, trying to keep myself calm. When that didn’t work, I berated myself. I knew that something bad would happen the second that I chose to open that cage. I knew it.
Did I have the right to freak out about this?
I swallowed. Distract yourself. Eventually, someone will come in for you, and you have to look calm when that happens. You cannot look and act like you’re scared because they are hungry dogs. They will not only sense your fear, but they will feast on it. Don’t give them the satisfaction.
But what if they didn’t come? What if I stayed in that room for the rest of my life, which wouldn’t be that long? If I had already been in there for a couple of days, then my body would demand things. Like water and food. Without the latter, I wouldn’t last long. A body could go on for a long time without food, as long as it had water.
I’d go insane lone before that, of course. Alone, in the dark…humans couldn’t function like this.
Distract yourself!
I closed my eyes and pictured Yesterday. Lochlynn hadn’t worked, so maybe my sister would.
She’d be furious if she knew what had become of me. I could actually picture her storming the halls, pounding on every door that she came across. When we had been little, I’d always been the big softy. I wouldn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings or make anyone cry. All the kids in our first-grade class had known this. They had taken advantage of me, asking for things that they wanted and knew I had.
Until the one day that I said no. It had been show and tell, so I had brought my favorite toy to the class. It had been a huge stuffed bunny that I could sleep on. I named him Mister Floppy because of his ears, and I loved him with my whole heart. A girl in the class also liked him, and asked if she could have him, thinking that I’d say yes.
Instead, I said no. The girl had started to cry, but I still wouldn’t change my mind. That had infuriated this spoiled brat, and she had come at me pretty hard. She tore Mister Floppy’s ears off, and I had started to cry. Yesterday had come over, and clocked the girl right in her nose, breaking it.
All three of us got into trouble. The girl’s parents had to buy me a new bunny that looked exactly like Mister Floppy, though I never loved him as much. She got three days in detention, I had gotten one, and Yesterday had been suspended for a week. After that, no one had asked me for things. They were too scared of my sister, who just knew how to throw a punch to do the most damage.
She had pretty much always been like that. If she knew about me being locked in this room, I saw no alternative to her breaking into this building and hunting me down, heedless of the situation.
Since she couldn’t do that, then I would have to make sure that I came home in as close to one piece as I could manage. Which meant calming the hell down. Even if I didn’t want to, even if worries for Lochlynn swam through my mind, even if this darkness had already started to leak into my thoughts.
I started to take deep, even breaths. Each one helped relax me, and as the panic started to drift away, I began to breathe easier.
They would come back, eventually. If they wanted me dead, then I would’ve been dead. If the demons wanted me to suffer, they could’ve put me in the feeder cage, with the rest of the humans. Vampires would’ve sucked me dry in a year, two years. Who knew? Instead, they had put me in this room, with nothing to occupy my mind.
It felt like the equivalent of a demon timeout.
Did I give them the satisfaction of contemplating how I got there? Or did I sit and sulk? I didn’t see a third option.
I choose to sit and sulk.
***
I didn’t know how much time had passed. I could only do so much thinking, daydreaming, and worrying, and I ended up falling asleep what felt like a couple of hours after waking up. When I opened my eyes to the darkness, my heart constricted. I didn’t know the day, the time, anything.
My stomach howled demands for food while my mouth felt dryer than the desert I lived in. And my entire body still ached. My back especially. It had stopped for a while, but the adrenaline had worn off, leaving me aching. Again.
Rolling onto my hands and knees, I got back to a sitting position. Nothing made my back feel better, so I just didn’t bother trying. My thoughts drifted back to the dangerous places, so I shut it off, as hard as I could. I didn’t want to go into another panic attack.
I started to count but gave up around the time I reached a thousand. My own thoughts started to bother me. Next came the pacing, which I did along one of the walls, so that I wouldn’t break my nose running into it. My fingers dragged across the wood over and over. I’d spent some time before I fell asleep hunting for a light switch but hadn’t been surprised when one didn’t jump out at me. Hard to keep your prisoner in line when they control their environment. Clever demons.
I thought about what they could’ve been doing to Lochlynn again, and this time, I let those thoughts fester and settle into my brain. If I could desensitize myself to them, then they couldn’t be used against me. It didn’t work. Instead, my stomach twisted into knots, and I wanted to hold his hand, to feel him alive and breathing next to me. I wanted out of this room.
Out, out, out, out, out. Just let me out.
Then I slept again. Each time I fell asleep, I woke up hungrier and thirstier than I’d been before, and time became more meaningless. For what felt like an hour after that nap, I thought about my father. He’d always told us that dates matter, and I had lost them. I had lost all of them, every single one. I began counting all the special days that he had created for us, starting from January on. It occupied me for a long time but didn’t distract me from the discomfort of my howling stomach.
Somewhere in September, something distracted me. I had almost gotten used to the monotony, so it took me a second to realize the smell of fire had distracted me. It flashed out existence almost as fast as it had come into it. Then the lights came on.
I had been lying on my back at that point, so the bright fluorescent seared my eyes. Crying out, I rolled over, ignoring the aches that went through me when I did. I covered my face, trying to protect myself from the light. After so long in the dark, I couldn’t handle it all that well.
A door opened, and I tried to lift my head to see. The light blinded me instantly, and I ducked my head again. Footsteps came in, and the door closed behind them with an echo.
Unable to see anything, disoriented, dizzy, achy, and hungry, I just say there, waiting for whoever came in to approach me. When they didn’t, I risked lifting my head against.
The light proved too much.
“You might want to give yourself a second,” Landers said. “We’ve got the lights as dim as they’ll go, so you’ll have to adjust.” He sounded pleasant enough, but then again, he was psychotic.
Blinking back tears, I started the long process of getting used to the lights. First, I dropped my arms from my eyes, but stared down at the ground. Then, after a few minutes, I lifted my head. It still hurt, and it felt someone tried to sear my retinas right out of my skull. I could live with it, though.
I looked around the room first, to see how many of guesses had been true. I sat on a concrete floor, and the walls seemed to be made out of some kind of stone. The door blended almost seamlessly into the wall, but I could see it now. The room looked as small as I thought it had, too. For some reason, being right in so many ways, it made me feel more comfortable. Like I could breathe again.
While I’d been incapacitated, they had somehow brought in a table and two chairs. It looked like the kind of small, intimate table that one would find in a restaurant. I hated it immediately, down to the white tablecloth that had been draped over it. I hated the two cloche covered plates almost as much. I couldn’t smell anything, so I didn’t know if they had brought food or not.
Landers sat in one chair with one leg crossed over the other. He had a white linen napkin draped across his lap and drank from a goblet of demon water. He watched me with shrewd eyes. They matched the suit that he had on. Brown, with a yellow tie. I thought it looked hideous.
“Would you care to join me?” Landers asked, gesturing to the seat across from his own. “I’m afraid that you’ll have to wear that for a while longer, but I’m sure that your stomach is ready for something other than air.” As if to tempt me, he reached across the table, to the cloche that sat in front of my seat. He pulled the thing off, revealing a plate of pasta that made my stomach cramp.
He removed his own cloche, displaying a steak and potatoes. “You’ll forgive me for taking the better meal, I’m sure,” he said. “But I have earned it, whereas you haven’t even earned that food.” He gestured over to the plate across from him. “Please, Tomorrow, join me. I promise that the food isn’t drugged, and even if it is, I don’t need drugs to do whatever I want to you. I think you’re aware of that.”
Swallowing past my dry throat, I looked at the plate of pasta. I thought I could’ve refused it, despite my desperation for food. Except, he had a glass of water next to that plate. Normal water. That called to me with unrelenting seduction. I might’ve been able to refuse the food, but that water…It would’ve taken someone much stronger than me.
I got up, glancing down at the silk dress that I wore. It had been torn all along the hemline, and one strap had been broken. More holes showed around my knees, and dirt covered me from the concrete floor. I didn’t worry about it too much, because Landers himself said that I couldn’t change.
I approached the table, watching Landers the entire way. As I eased into my seat, I waited for him to strike at me.
He picked up his knife and started to cut into his steak. It looked bigger than my head, and my stomach rumbled again.
I took the water first and forced myself to only drink a quarter of the glass. If he disappeared for another couple of days, that would be my only water. It had to be savored. After setting it down, I grabbed my fork, and stabbed a piece of ravioli. It tasted divine, like all the gods that had ever existed blessed this one piece of food just for me. At that point, I lost most of my control, shoveling food into my mouth, savoring it but also trying to get fuel into my body. With each bite, I felt more human.
Landers didn’t seem to mind my bad table manners. He continued to slice his steak, and take delicate bites, usually with a bite of potato on them. After every three bites, he would wipe his mouth, and go in for another. I knew for a fact that this family often ate those disgusting fancy meals, but he seemed content with his steak, while I had my plate of pasta.
When I got down to the last ravioli, I ran it all around the plate, trying to get as much sauce on it as humanly possible. I popped it into my mouth and missed all the food the second it had been taken away. Leaning back, I looked around the room again, with clearer eyes. Everything looked the same.
I drained the rest of my water.
Landers hadn’t even finished half his food. He didn’t say anything, forcing me to sit there, watching him eat, while polished off that steak and all those potatoes. When he finished, he set his fork down properly, folded his napkin, and set it down on the table. He leaned back, watching me. “Three days.”
“What?” I asked.
“That’s how long you’ve been here. Three days. You slept through the first, and for the last day and a half, I’m guessing you’ve been trying not to go insane.”
Three days. That would make this the twenty-first of January. I had missed so many days. The nineteenth had been my mother’s birthday. Dad had made sure to tell us that. Yesterday and I had always baked cookies on that day, and I hadn’t been there to do that with her. A little stab of pain went through my chest.
“Would you like to know anything else?”
“How’s Lochlynn?” I asked, immediately.
He smirked. “You and my son seemed to be quite attached to each other. I visit him every day, and he always asks the same of you. I’ll tell you the same thing I tell him.”
“Which is?”
Landers smiled and took a sip of his demon water. I waited for him to say something, and when he didn’t, I finally got the joke. He told Lochlynn nothing, so he would tell me nothing. Locked in a room with a kidding demon. My life had gone way down hill, way fast.
“Where am I?” I asked. “Or am I not allowed to know that, either?”
That smile never left his face. “Oh, that I don’t mind telling you. This is the holding facility behind my house. The one that Lochlynn took you to? He didn’t show you all the rooms. I’ve got a few like this, for people that get out of hand. I find that werewolves and vampires can’t handle this room any better than a human could.”
“Are you going to keep me here?” I asked.
“That really depends on you,” Landers said, leaning back. “Well, it depends on you and my son, I suppose. When Lochlynn brought you home, I really thought the boy was going to change. That he had finally seen the right way to do things. I should’ve known better. You had too much spark in your eyes to be a proper pet. It takes a special kind of human for that. Like your guardian.”
I swallowed. “You know about Linda?”
“And your sister. Your father sold his soul to take care of you two. How precious. Do you think that he would be pleased with the way things have turned out?”
“I think he would be proud that I had integrity,” I said.
“Do you really?” Landers set his glass down, and leaned back in his chair again, a thoughtful look on his face. “I find that humans either romanticize or, and forgive the pun, demonize their dead. All the bad things they ever done, the bad things they thought, it either disappears or defines them. You loved your father with your whole heart, so do you remember any of the bad things he did?”
“My father didn’t do bad things,” I said, knowing that it sounded stupid even as the words left me mouth.
“Everyone does,” Landers said, and waved his hand. “That doesn’t matter. My point is, do you truly believe that your father would be proud of you, or do you think he would be horrified with the person that you’ve become?”
Swallowing, I looked down at the table. “I don’t know.”
“An honest answer. Good,” Landers said. “As a father, I am horrified by what my son has become. Lochlynn had so much potential as a baby. Then again, a father always thinks that when he first holds his children, fresh from the womb, wrapped in a blanket. Lochlynn had been strong, even then. He stared up at me, and though I knew I was a blur to him, he recognized me as his father. That’s the best part of the whole birth process for me. That moment where they recognize me.”
It almost sounded like he loved his son, but I couldn’t believe that. Not after the things that I had seen him do.
“I don’t know where everything went wrong,” Landers continued. “But I know that you made it worse. My son…he’s got a thing for you. Something just draws the two of you together. I feel it whenever you’re in the same room. You are more than just a human pet to him.”
I didn’t say anything, because everything sounded like it would get Lochlynn in trouble. If he hadn’t been hurt badly already, I didn’t want to be the reason that changed.
Landers shrugged. “I should have killed you when you first walked into my house, but I chose not to. It was my own mistake, because now my son has this thing in his head. This thing telling him to help you. It’s disgusting.”
Landers rose from the chair, and my heart shot into my throat.