Harken

17 White

The claws on Wyck’s hands were spread apart like the teeth of a shark, gray eyes trained on me with fierce intent, lips parted in a smile. His breathing was so even that I knew he’d been waiting while I’d been inside the house, preparing for the moment I would emerge. His face hadn’t aged a day from the man I knew in my nightmares.

I’d been in that position so many times in my dreams that I knew there was a pistol in his right hand. But when I looked and saw no weapon besides his claws, the shock broke me out of my deer-in-the-headlights petrification.

Seized by internal programming I didn’t fully control, I launched into the air, claws extended fully for Wyck’s throat.

Wyck was faster. In a flash, he cut through the air, the scaled back of his left hand catching my jaw like the strike of a steel hammer. The thud and crack were deafening, throwing me off my feet and into a black void.

My back slammed into the grass, muted colors spinning above me like muddy paint in a running blender. My jaw felt like it had been dislocated below my ear. The ringing in my head was unbearable as I tried to lift myself, waving my arms like an overturned beetle rocking back and forth to find which way was up and where the sky and ground became separate.

“Of course you weren’t dead. I knew better than to fall for that,” Wyck’s leering voice came from over my scalp as he landed on the grass behind me. He spoke like all of this was merely play to him, a slow singsong quality in the way he accented his words. He laughed in victory, a tiny sound coming from deep in his throat.

“You’re much too smart for that,” he went on. “But I’m smarter than you are, it seems. Smarter than Mr. Sharpe, too—the idiot bastard.”

There was twisted glee in his voice, a maniacal cadence that caused him to accent certain words oddly and wheeze as he tried to breath in and out. I choked for air that’d been knocked from me in the fall. He watched as I struggled, offering neither help nor any prevention, tilting his head down over me.

“You’re bleeding,” he told me. Wyck studied the blood as it ran down the side of my face with an odd interest. I could feel the liquid dripping from somewhere on my lip where his red ring had grazed. I gagged on it, spitting and choking.

“It’s just a little blood,” he said. “No need to thrash. I’ll get it.”

He bent closer to me and I tried to move, so he slammed a knee onto my shoulder in response. I groaned out a cry that refused to escape as I felt my bone ground into the grass, his head nearing mine from the other side. He extended a single silver claw, hand wavering as it came closer to my face, ignoring my squirms of pain under him. For one terrible moment I thought he meant to slice my throat, but instead he only wiped the blunted flat side of his claw across my lip, staining his silver with my blood.

He lifted up straight, looking at the blood, finally releasing. I’ve just got to stand up. If I could stand then I could get my hands from under me, I could slash him across with the razors…

I found a sliver of strength and dove to grab his legs, but he stopped me with a swift knee to my stomach that sent me curling up again. I managed to get onto my side but my arm had too little strength to keep me up, so I fell over onto my front. I struggled to put my hands out but only managed to tilt my head and see the sides of Wyck’s black leather shoes as he knelt beside me. He continued to study the red on his claws before finally retracting them, the blood sliding to stain his fingers.

“I’m just so happy that we finally get to meet this time,” he said. “I’ve met you so many times before that it’s almost like I know you already. Maybe we should introduce ourselves again?”

If someone standing nearby had heard his tone, they never would have thought that he was kneeling over my beaten body. He was so calm that it was frightening, a control that told me that he’d already accounted for any possible means by which I might escape.

He reached out and grabbed me by my chin, squeezing it so tightly that the inside of my cheek felt like it was being cut against my own teeth. He pulled me to look at him, his grip around the side of my neck and upper throat.

“I’m Wyck Alyson,” he said. “I’m Morgan Alyson’s Chosen, and her son too. I’ve killed you a lot. And now you’re mine. Mine!”

He tapped me with his thumb. He tilted his head again. “Now it’s your turn. Tell me who you are, Michael.”

I gritted my teeth together, refusing to play a part in whatever sadistic game was going on in his head. But he became impatient and tightened his grip, turning me back and forth.

“I’m Michael Asher,” he said in a high voice, squeezing my lips to move. “I will rip your skin into tiny pieces, Wyck—if you’ll just help me up off the ground, please.”

Another tiny laugh, like a child playing with dolls, but maniacal when coming from such a man. I wanted to run, to fly, to draw him away from that place, so close to my sister who probably was in her bed again, thinking I was far away.

I just couldn’t. I didn’t have the energy. I didn’t even have the breath.

Wyck grew tired of waiting. He pushed his shoe under my chin, lifting my face up with its hard rim. I couldn’t cry out, even as the pain in my back burned from the impact I’d made. I ground my teeth together until I was up and staring straight at him, his head bent over to see mine. He looked confused.

“And you’re supposed to be humanity’s hero?” he said. “It’s times like this I wonder if I’ve tracked down the wrong person.”

He dropped his foot and let my head hit the dirt again. Fight, Michael! Get up! No matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t. He stepped over me, shoes on either side of my face, and methodically pulled a black bag over my head, tightening the string around my neck. I could see nothing.

“Feel free to sleep for the rest of our trip,” he told me. I felt a gentle prick like a mosquito bite on the inside of my elbow. Something cold ran into my arm. Then I was gone.

A tinny cry slashed through the silence, a long pronunciation of an insistent, mechanical beep that refused to be abated. It was like the painful burn of an alarm clock buzzer, broken so that it continued as a single tone, screaming for attention, never giving any indication that it might fade.

Someone shut that off, I thought. Can’t anyone hear that abysmal noise?

I couldn’t tell from which side of me it was coming from, or if it was actually behind my head—or above me, even? It came from all directions, confusing me, continuing with the same force as it had when I’d awoken. So I opened my eyes to search better.

White.

All that surrounded me was so bright that nothing could be distinguished from the glow, blinding me the moment my eyelids parted. My vision blurred like I was peering through an out-of-focus lens—then again, when all there is to see is white, it’s impossible to focus on anything.

As my vision cleared and adjusted to the light, the nothing faded into a something. The source of the light was a giant, circular arm of bulbs that hung over me like a medical examiner’s lamp, so powerful that I could feel heat radiating from them. As I blinked, I began to pick things out in the brightness: corners and ends high above me that were slightly grayer because of shadows. I heard someone breathing sharply in and out, only to realize that the reverberating sound was coming from my own mouth.

The beep continued. I still could not find its source.

So I attempt to roll over, only to find that the motion was impossible. I looked down, unable even to lift myself more than to tilt my head at a slight angle, and saw to my horror that my arms and legs were held down by black straps.

Being unable to move sent a jolt through me. All at once it hit that I was lying on a gurney, arms and legs and neck strapped down to the table like I was an experiment. My head jerked from one side to the other. Everything in the room was white, from the thin sheets under me, to the metal bars that held up the bed, to the tiny tables with vials and needles and sharply edged tools shining in the glare.

I heard the click of a door behind me, hidden in my blind spot. I instinctively tried to look but was unable to do more than twist my neck up, vision blocked by the edge of the pillow under my head. In the strained corner of my eye, I saw the white-jacketed outline of someone moving around the room behind me, reaching onto my other side and clicking a button. The droning alarm ceased.

I turned to look but wasn’t fast enough to see the person before their form disappeared behind me again.

“Hel-lll-lo?” I said. Even forming the single word was a struggle. It didn’t sound right, it was all slurred and messy. I didn’t even say the full thing, like I’d groaned it halfway and then let it trail off.

“Hello?” I tried again, saying it slower, enunciating it out this time. But the person behind me did not respond, moving to type something into a keyboard with a steady stream of clicks.

I slid down painfully, noticing more of my surroundings with every second. My arm hurt and when I looked down, I saw there was a needle poking from the inside of my left elbow, attached to a long tube that went up to a nearly-empty bag of liquid. On the wall to my left were small diagnostic screens with meters and buttons, something else monitoring my pulse. There were no windows, no skylights or any clue where I was. The room itself was anonymous.

I moved my other hand to pull the needle out, but of course my arm was still stuck and didn’t move more than a half-inch. My efforts only made me dizzier.

“What’s going on?” I said, all of my words clear now. I could still see the person in the white coat hovering just out of my eyesight, still engrossed in the computer. I saw long, blonde hair—not Wyck.

“Please, tell me something,” I said, breathing heavily. “What are you doing to me?”

Still, no response. I wanted to scream, hoping that a doctor outside the door behind me might hear the noise and check in, someone who’d at least say a word to me. I couldn’t plead with someone who didn’t listen.

But my senses had been slow in their return. All at once, before I could open my mouth to cry out, I realized where I was. The white room. The same room that Callista had told me about, the room where she’d been kept a prisoner.

No…!

I was fighting against the straps again, kicking and flopping and bending trying to break free. I knew screaming was of no use because no one would hear me, but I shouted as loud as I could anyway. The bed shook and its screws creaked as I moved, the sheets coming off from under me as I tried to roll over. The pillow fell to the side and off the bed, the tube in my arm shaking like a whip, but I could not move to free myself, and when I finally fell exhausted again, the only result was a raw redness left on my wrists and ankles.

“Let me out!” I shouted at the person. Finally I heard her stand. I relaxed unwillingly, my eyes following her as she came around my right side. But she wasn’t moving to attend to me. She pushed a rolling table around the edge of the room, its wheels creaking against the hard tiles.

Her face looked almost like that of a cat, puffy cheeks and giant lips below a straight nose that looked like it’d been traced on by pencil. Her skin was frighteningly lineless, like old movie stars’ after plastic surgery disasters, even down to the skin on her hands that showed the frailty of age disguised behind medical stretching. Her hair was bleached and straightened and went past her shoulders, a sickly-thin frame obvious even beneath the jacket. She didn’t look at me as she passed.

“Please?” I begged. “Where am I?”

Still no answer. It was almost as if she wasn’t even in the room with me at all, looking ahead and not reacting in the slightest to my voice. I lay in aback as she rested the table against the wall across from my feet. On it were two television screens.

The woman turned around, but didn’t look into my eyes, just over to my arm where the needle was, face not showing any reaction.

“Are you a doctor?” I asked her. “You have to tell me what’s going on!”

She walked up to me and readjusted the pillow behind my head. She started to disappear so I resumed my shouting and thrashing, demanding that she turn back and respond. My pillow fell again so she returned, but only pick it up from the floor—humming disjointedly to herself—and push it back under my head.

She reached behind me and adjusted a dial on the drip going in to my arm. I felt something cold going through the tube.

“Please…” I begged, voice falling even though I’d tried to continue in a shout. The liquid made me lightheaded. I felt my muscles relaxing against my will. No!

In seconds, I was a shell again, breathing in and out madly, unable to lift my limbs or fight anymore. The woman continued humming to herself as I became silent, the rumble of an air vent clicking on to make the room even more refrigerated.

I couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak. They’d taken away all of my control.

As the panic set in, I heard a new, gentle buzz behind me, like a cell phone on vibrate. The woman arose from her stool, crossing the room again to go back to the table she’d pushed across from me. She clicked buttons and the screens fizzled on, then she turned to me and adjusted my bed so that I was angled higher.

One of the televisions gave a high-pitched sound and I tilted my head to look. The screen on the left had come to life, fizzling with static before its picture appeared. At first, the camera was unmoving and focused on a pile of torn papers and broken glass spread in a mess on a floor. It was day there, dim because of window blinds, but I saw someone’s fingers as they lifted the camera up, turning it around to face them. I heard a scrape across the microphone, which popped static through the TV.

It was Wyck. His back was to a blank wall. He sounded out of breath.

“Hello?” he called, that awful voice stinging my ears. He appeared grainy in the bad lighting of where he was. He tapped the lens on the camera.

“I can see you but can you see me?” he said, playfully again. I didn’t reply, but he caught my eyes flicking around nervously from his voice, and he smiled.

“There you are,” he said, face brightening but eyes nearly dripping with his tainted enjoyment. “You’re very lucky today, because today you’re getting television straight to your bed. And you don’t even have to worry about changing the channel if it gets boring.”

He was looking straight at me. I noticed a tiny camera poking from between the two televisions. Sweat rolled down my forehead as his words crackled through the screen. The most movement I could muster was to tremble and to lick my lips that had split dry in the chill of the room.

“You look unhappy,” Wyck observed, not seeming to like this, or at least acting so. He couldn’t keep the camera still in his unsteady hands, making the screen bob and shift as he swayed. The wall behind him remained blank, continued to hide his location from me.

“I mean, you shouldn’t be,” he said. “You’re about to see the greatest show on earth, I think. A stupendous show. Impossible to forget afterwards—or your money back!”

Everything about him was so premeditated—so unconcerned that it scared me. What was he doing? It was almost as if he was leading me along, letting the awful anticipation become a part of the torture I knew was coming. When would he order the nurse to reach for the tools, when would she begin slicing away parts of my skin and digging it into my side, hoping that I would tell them where the Blade was.

I was already steeling myself. I had a low threshold for pain, and as evidenced by my earlier birthmark experience. I even became squeamish when there was too much blood. But how much could they know? I was a professional at seeing truth, so I knew how to tell a better lie. I could easily bluff them, lie and scream that I didn’t know where the Blade was. They’d try hard, but they’d never kill me. They’d never hurt me so much that I couldn’t find the Blade for them.

Eventually, Callista and Thad would notice I was gone and they would come running. Their connection to me would lead them straight to this room. I only had to last until then.

As I thought these things, Wyck seemed to not like whatever passed over my face.

“Oh Michael,” he said, voice so low that it now almost resembled a growl. “Michael, Michael. Oh Michael,” he’d distracted himself, blinking. “That’s such an…interesting name. Do you know what it means?”

His eyebrow perked up hopefully, gaze shifting to look at some screen through which he was able to see me. I didn’t respond.

“It means ‘who is like God?’,” he revealed, showing his perfectly straight, entirely white row of teeth. “It’s a Hebrew name, with a question inside. I bet you didn’t know that though.”

Another scratch of his shoes, another dizzying turn and twist of the camera. He was amusing himself again, like he was already thinking of the punch line of a joke as he told it.

“Are you like a god, Michael?” he asked, lifting his free hand as if in deep question. I still couldn’t reply. He stared through the camera for a few seconds, waiting on me. Then, as if realizing why I wasn’t responding, he straightened up.

“Leilah?” he said. “Please adjust Michael. It slipped my mind that he should be awake for this.”

The woman arose from her seat again and went to my left side, turning the dial. Then she went to one of the metal tables, taking a needle and syringe already filled with liquid. She turned my other arm over, pricking me with sharp end. I didn’t feel the needle sliding in, but whatever was inside the syringe revived me quickly enough to make me feel it going back out.

All of my muscles constricted at once, then suddenly relaxed, and I fell back onto the bed shaking uncontrollably.

“That’s better,” Wyck said through the sound of my painful wince. “I’ll repeat: are you like a god, Michael?”

I didn’t reply. I wasn’t going to talk to him, not even utter a single word. I knew that he was playing some sort of mind game, and once I allowed myself to talk he’d use that to keep me going. It was a trick that I’d used on my harsher clients: small talk would lead to deeper things. Tiny victories would win the war. I refused to entertain Wyck.

He detected what I was doing immediately. His eyelids fell halfway and I heard the plastic of the camcorder being squeezed between his hands.

“Are you like a god?” he roared suddenly, voice going so deep that it was like the scream of a death metal singer, making me jump in terror as his teeth nearly slammed with the camera. The speakers threatened to burst under the onslaught of his yell.

“No!” I shouted, immediately cursing that I’d allowed myself to be cracked so easily. Wyck was left out of breath, bloodshot eyes wide with the rage that he’d let loose. Then, realizing he’d lost his cool, he forced his breathing down, spluttering until it was cleared, straightening his hair back into position.

“But you kind of are,” he said, clearing his throat, voice returning to his regular sneer. “Can’t you come back to life when people kill you? You can, right? How interesting.”

As he said this, he started to sway from side to side, turning around so that I could see the rest of the blank wall. Then when his movement exposed just a few more inches, I knew exactly where he was. The wall was from my kitchen back home.

I wish I were wrong. But I saw the dishes we’d used now broken in pieces across the counter, my mom’s herbs dangling in the window, the metal faucet on our sink cracked off from some violent scuffle and dribbling water everywhere. Wyck got the camera secured into his hand, wobbling unsteadily as he wiped his forehead free of perspiration.

“But what about other people, Michael?” he went on, continuing to rock back and forth as if unaware of my horror. “Can you bring other people back to life after they’re dead, too?”

No. You can’t be there. You can’t! I was petrified by the insanity in Wyck’s eyes.

“I don’t think you can do that,” he said. “In fact, I know you can’t.”

Then he tripped over something and threw his hands in front of himself to catch his balance. I heard a shout of pain through the screen, a terrifyingly familiar sound that made my eyes go wider. The camera’s view dipped when Wyck caught himself, and for a flash of a second I saw my mom.

She was curled up on the floor, her face under her arms and her back pressed into the corner of the room next to the wreckage of what had been our dining room table. I screamed as loudly as I could, suddenly a furious beast tearing at the straps again.

“Don’t hurt her!” I shouted at the top of my lungs, my own voice paining my ears and scratching like sandpaper against my throat. Wyck realigned the camera so that I couldn’t see my mom anymore.

“Please!” I screamed. “Don’t hurt her!”

“Now you suddenly seem so eager to speak to me,” Wyck said in observation. “How nice of you. For a minute I thought this conversation would be completely one-sided.”

He looked through the camera and beyond me, tapping the glass of his camcorder lens. “Leilah? I think you can turn on the other screen now. Mother will want to see.”

The nurse walked out from behind me as I gritted my teeth and pulled at my wrists. Inside and out, my body and mind cried. It was like being stuck in a nightmare after taking sleeping pills, begging to be awoken but physically unable to escape. I fell back on to the bed, voice gone. I didn’t want to think of what Wyck was doing, what he’d already done.

Leilah flicked the switch on the other screen and it came to life at once.

On screen were now a woman and a child. I recognized the older instantly: she was the same olive-skinned, black haired woman who’d appeared in my second nightmare with Wyck, the one who’d ordered him to kill me. His mother, Morgan. Just like Wyck, her eyebrows were solid white, and the gaze of green that she stared with showed as little emotion as I’d seen in my dream.

She was sitting in an ornate wooden chair whose back was so tall I couldn’t see its full height. Most of the room behind her was too dark to perceive. In her lap was a child who couldn’t have been older than eleven or twelve, a boy with hair in black curls on his head and eyes that matched hers. His eyebrows were white, and also like her, he had a red ring on his right hand. He looked at me intently.

“Ah, mother,” Wyck said, breathing out quickly, looking excited that she was watching. “I’ve—”

“That’s him?” the younger boy broke in, with a hint of an English accent that his brother lacked. Wyck spluttered to a stop, blinking at the interruption.

“Yes,” Morgan replied. “That’s Daniel Rothfeld.”

“Why is he in bed?” he asked. “Make him stand up for me.”

“We can’t, Teddy,” she replied gently. “He’ll run away.”

“Can you still hear me?” Wyck said, unable to disguise his irritation at being interrupted. The eyes of the other two moved away from me and to his screen in their room. Wyck hesitated under his mother’s gaze, still panting for air through his mouth.

“We can hear you,” she said with coldness. “Go on, Wyck.”

“Yes, yes,” he stammered, trying to bring himself back on track but put off by their disruption. He turned again, looking around for something that he’d left leaning against the corner of the counter: a broomstick. He seized its handle.

“Well, we’ve been through this so many times, I figured a repeated episode would get mighty boring,” he said, swallowing. “You see, we keep chasing you, Michael. We keep running. I don’t like to run! I’m tired of it. I’m ready to end this whole thing.”

He furrowed his brow. He gestured to me.

“It’s like…you’re a disease,” he said, coughs punctuating his words. “We’ve just been treating the symptoms of you for decades. But now it’s time to vaccinate the source.”

My brain had started to clear itself again. I knew that Wyck was talking about the Blade—he probably already knew that I’d gone after it as soon as I had escaped them.

“I don’t have…the Blade,” I told him. I didn’t feel the denial was giving him too much.

“No no no no no,” he broke in, waving his hand furiously. “You don’t have to lie yet. I’m not even asking you yet. We’ll get to that.”

He turned the broom over, exposing its bristles on the other end. Then, with a wild swing, he slammed the end of it down onto the counter. I heard the crack echo in my old kitchen, the long pole breaking off with a jagged, spiked edge on its end now.

“Just while you’re watching,” Wyck said, spinning the broken handle back over, “be sure to come up with a good lie. And hold onto it. I’m gonna want to hear it after class.”

“My family doesn’t have anything to do with this!” I burst. Even when he sniffed at my objection there was a lack of care…an inkling of entertainment lapping up my pain like it was nourishment to him. But he paused nonetheless.

“Well,” Wyck said after thinking a moment, “I guess they’re about to have something to do with it.”

He shrugged. “And besides: the color red looks good on a human.”

He looked to the floor.

The camera jerked, a whoosh as the broom handle swung down in Wyck’s fist. I heard the painful scream of my mother amidst the crack of something striking her. It was almost like one of my own bones had broken, so harshly that I couldn’t make a sound.

She yelled for him to stop and he did, turning to look up at the end of the stick. He studied its jagged edge as I watched in wide-eyed, wordless horror.

“Nope, still no blood,” he said with dissatisfaction. So he struck again and I screamed so loud that I couldn’t hear the sound my mother made, struggling to pull myself from the bed even if it meant tearing my own arms out in the process. But my claws refused to emerge.

“Stop! Stop!” I shouted, but Wyck refused to. I shook, feeling my ankles hitting against the straps, like I’d vomit if I had enough strength inside. I heard the whistle of the stick again, the sickening snap, the weak sob.

Morgan sat back comfortably into her chair. How could she simply ignore the sounds, to let it go on? Wasn’t she even going to ask for something, to at least attempt to get the location of the Blade from me? She just watched my reaction. And Teddy slid to sit on one of her legs as she wrapped her arms to hold him up.

“I’ll tell you!” I yelled. “I know where the Blade is!”

My mom’s screams had left all of my defenses broken, so that absolutely nothing else mattered to me at that moment. I heard another shout, and another…

Don’t tell them, Michael!

You can’t tell them!

You can’t ruin everything now, not when you’re so close!

“See, right now,” Wyck said, pausing to catch his breath and wipe his sweaty forehead with the back of his hand, “my goal isn’t to kill you.”

He took a deep breath, readying the broomstick again, lifting it back behind him, gritting his teeth together.

“It’s just to—” He swung the staff forward. “—make… you… feel… dead.”

Every word: another strike, another scream, another crack that drove itself through me. I cried horribly, unable to see, unable to shut out the sounds.

“It’s in Saint Helen’s Cathedral!” I broke out in a moan, unable to fight any longer. The words spilled from my lips, eyes sagging, and arms weak now in the bonds that held me down. Wyck, hearing me, looked up at the camera. He seemed surprised that I’d broken, as if all along he’d been expecting me to resist to the end.

“What city?” he asked. He didn’t even give me a second to get enough breath to reply before he’d kicked my mother on the floor, a crash as she hit the bottom of the dining room table. I jumped in fright.

“In Lodi!” I shouted. Wyck’s eyes shifted to look beyond me.

“Is he telling the truth, mother?” he asked. I realized that Morgan had been staring at me intently, and when Wyck had startled me, she’d been reading a Glimpse in my eyes.

It was too late for me to look away. So my power was Guardian after all.

“He is,” she confirmed.

Teddy clapped with glee, his eyes jumping from one side to the other as he watched Wyck and I with rapture. Seeming satisfied, Wyck finally stopped his beating, sweat now rolling down the sides of his pale face. I couldn’t even hear my mother’s weeping anymore.

“That was…tiring,” he said, unaffected. He lifted the end of the broom handle, and smiled when he saw that it was stained with a splattering of red.

He tossed the broom across the floor and I heard it clattering away. I felt limp, worthless, discarded. I wished I could have passed out anything to block the echoes of my mom’s screams.

Wyck, though, started to pull something off our counter, mixing jars of liquid together while the camera swayed in his uneven grip. He grabbed something out of his pocket: a cigarette lighter. He flicked it and suddenly a tendril of flame flared up from the side of the camera.

“Wait…” I said, lips barely able to move. Wyck didn’t listen.

“I…told you the truth…” I said, blood pounding through my neck. No, Wyck. What are you doing? Don’t… I stared at the screen with tear-filled eyes. He shrugged again.

“This place could use a little brightening up,” he said, and then turning from the camera, he threw the lighter and the jar. The contents sprayed across my kitchen, immediately feeding the tiny flame and flaring up into a burning trail. When the rest of the can hit the ground, there was a massive explosion like a bomb going off, and the lights burst into Wyck’s face.

He readjusted the camera, and in this motion I saw my mother lying unconscious on the floor, in a mess of blood now lit by the growing fire. Unmoving. Trapped.