Revenant (6 page)

“She
explained how the magic Weatherton used on me morphed me into something with
extreme strength.”

I
searched his face, looking for any signs that she’d also told him how he’d turned
berserker and ripped Nurse Harrington to pieces. Dean had no magic of his own,
but when the magic of others hit him he became something else. Something
incredibly fast and powerful. And when he turned into this other thing, he
seemed to lose any humanity, any consciousness. He reacted in fury, with a
mindless brute force, attacking anyone in his path. He didn’t know that in
berserker form he’d killed poor Andrew and then tried to kill Wendy before coming
after me. He’d been seconds away from killing me when he’d miraculously morphed
back to normal. Had it just been luck? Or did a part of Dean hear me when I was
pleading with him for my life?

There
was no guilt or shame on his face. Wendy must have left out the worst parts of
what happened. “When did Wendy tell you about it?”

“They
put us together when they first took us. They put us in a cell for a day and a night.
Then they came and dragged her out. I hadn’t seen her again until today.” He
turned toward me, and this time his eyes were full of concern. “Colina, what do
you think happened to her? The marks on her arm—did they do that to her?”

I
leaned over, preparing to heft up the heavy bucket. Before I could, Dean moved
next to me and took the bucket out of my reach. He lifted it with ease and
slowly poured the water into a large pot sitting on the stovetop.

I
wiped my hands on my jeans, but it was useless—my pants were equally
dirty. I couldn’t wait to be clean again. “I don’t think so. Gage said Wendy
tried to harm herself.”

His
voice lowered to a whisper. “You think she did that to herself?”

“I
don’t know what to think.” I hoped when I got her alone that I could get her to
tell me what happened.

Dean
dropped the bucket and grabbed a box of matches from a nearby shelf,
approaching the stove. It was ancient, comprised of a wood stove married to a
small oven. Its black iron looked impossibly heavy and solid, and the tarnished
brass fittings made it look more like a steam locomotive than a cooking
implement. A small pile of dry, old wood was piled on the floor, and Dean began
to build a fire inside the stove as if he knew what he was doing.

“Have
you ever lit one of these things?” I asked nervously.

“No,
but I’ve started my share of campfires.” He worked on it for a bit until
finally a few flames appeared. He straightened and turned back to me.

“Dean,
promise me you won’t try to get someone to use their magic against you.”

“But
if I change and get strong—”

I
raised my hand to stop him. “Do you remember
anything
from when you changed?”

“No,”
he admitted. “I’ve tried, but it’s a blank.”

“When
you changed, you weren’t in control. You didn’t seem conscious of what you were
doing. You… You were
very
strong and
very
violent.”

His
eyes narrowed. “What do you mean, violent?”

I
regretted ever starting the conversation.

“Colina,
what do you mean I was violent?” he demanded when I didn’t answer him.

He
wasn’t going to let it go. “Dean, you…you killed Weatherton,” I finally
admitted.

Confusion
filled his eyes, which was quickly replaced by shock. He hung his head for a
moment, and then seemed to shake it off. Anger glowed from his eyes and squared
his shoulders. “That
madman
deserved to
die.”

I
continued in a quiet voice “But did Nurse Harrington? Dean, you were like…unearthly
strong. You ripped her to pieces.”

He
looked at me in shock. “I did
what
?”

“You
ripped her into pieces. Before that you killed—” I stopped talking
abruptly when I saw his expression.

He
gripped the tops of my arms, panic rising in his voice. “Colina, tell me.”

“Dean—
look,
you didn’t mean to. You didn’t know what
you were doing.” I didn’t want to tell him, but this wasn’t like keeping the
secret of what I was doing for Gage.
This was
something Dean had done—a power he possessed. He had a right to know. “You…killed
Andrew.”

He
flinched as if I had struck him. “Andrew is dead?”

“You
didn’t know what was going on. You beat him to death. And you hit Wendy.” As
soon as the words were out of my mouth I wished I could take them back. The
look on his face was one of pure despair. Before he could say anything, I
rushed
on
. “But you didn’t hurt her badly.”

He
watched
me for a moment before asking
softly, “Did I try to hurt you?”

I
shook my head. “You wouldn’t hurt me.”

“But
I tried—did I try to hurt you?” he demanded.

I
reached out and grabbed his arm. “You…came at me, but you stopped before
anything happened.”

His
fingers wrapped around my hand. “I could have killed you,” he said softly.

“But
you didn’t. You didn’t even lay a finger on me.”

“Why
didn’t Wendy say anything?”

I
didn’t know why Wendy had kept the gruesome details to herself, though I didn’t
blame her for not telling him. I wished now that I had kept my mouth shut.
He looked so sad, so utterly devastated.
He
wasn’t to blame, but now he knew he’d killed. And not for the first time—but
he didn’t know that. A part of me wanted to unburden myself and tell him what
his mother had confided in me—during the second ritual, Dean had become
possessed by
a killer who
squatted inside
him. No one knew anything was wrong until the madman killed a couple of girls
that were part of Dean’s guild.

Dean had no memory of it.

But
looking at his tortured expression now, I knew I couldn’t devastate him
further. He’d have a hard enough time coming to grips with this. I started to
say something, to offer some comfort, but before I could, he pulled away from
me. He turned and walked out of the room.

* * *

When I made it back into the main room, Wendy was still on
the piano stool. She was looking down at her feet, but she spoke as I moved
closer. “It’s an old mining town.” She looked up at me.
“This
place. The buildings outside. They like to set up in old
mining towns. Their kind likes to live underground, and the mining towns
already have tunnels for them to live.”

“
Their kind
? Who are they, Wendy?”

Her
eyes were wide. “It’s not who they are that is the
problem,
it’s who they
want
to be.”

She
sounded like Mildred, talking in riddles. “I don’t understand.” I waited for
her to answer, but she just looked at me in silence.

I
finally couldn’t take the silence anymore. “We will get out of
here.
” I said it with more confidence than I
felt.

Wendy’s
expression became vague and she stared off into the distance for a long moment
before answering. “You will escape. I’ve seen it. But not me.”

Wendy was a powerful reader, but she’d never
mentioned seeing the future before.
I didn’t want to believe what she was saying. “I would never leave here without
you.”

She
gave me a ghost of a smile. “You won’t have a choice.”

“You
had a vision?
You saw
the future? Tell me
what you saw,” I demanded. I wanted to reach out and shake her. If she knew
what was going to happen, why wouldn’t she say anything? “Wendy, tell me what
you
saw,
” I demanded again. When she
still didn’t answer, I lowered my voice and pleaded. “Whatever you saw might
help us get out of here…please.”

My
request landed on deaf ears. She turned her face away without saying a word. I
sat down on the bench next to her and gently put my hand on her arm. The cuts
were red, angry wounds against her pale skin. They were deep—they would
leave scars. “Did anyone take a look at these?”

She
gave me a half smile. “There was an old man. He seemed to have some healing
power.” Wendy ran her hand across her arm.
“They
were deeper, but he made them better.”

“Wendy,
what happened?”

She
looked away, refusing to meet my eyes.

I
wanted out of this place. Out of this nightmare.

I
looked over and noticed Dean, who stood in the doorway, watching us.
I gave Wendy’s hand a squeeze. “The
water is warming up. Do you want to take a hot bath?”

This
time she gave me an actual smile.

It took us a dozen trips to
the well to fill the bath for Wendy and Dean. I elected to go last, knowing the
tub would be filthy when I
was done
.
Dirt, dried blood, and who knows what other fluids
that ooze from bodies as they decompose covered me from head to foot. Touching
rotting corpses over and over couldn’t be
sanitary
.
I wondered how many deadly
diseases lived under my filthy nails or in my matted
hair.

As I carried a few pieces of wood back into
the house, a zombie work detail moved slowly by, dragging g
arden tools. I looked around
quickly, but Dean was inside tending to the stove fire. A bored-looking death
dealer dressed all in black kept an eye on them. Two banshees floated in the
air around the group, whirling around any zombies that began to stray. After
observing for a moment, I realized that the death dealer was using his banshees
to move the zombies along, like herd dogs tasked to keep lambs in line.

At
the rear of the line, an especially bloated corpse stumbled and fell to the
ground without even trying to catch itself. It hit the dirt and burst like a
bag of wet cement. The death dealer stood over the mess with an expression of
distaste and poked it with his boot. The corpse’s head popped off with a wet
sucking sound and rolled away.

I turned my back on the scene and
tried to focus on the bath I
was about to have—a bath would finally wash the stench of it all
away.
I had been around the dead before as a
healer, but once someone passed on, the family took the body away. Until now, I
had been blissfully ignorant of what happens to
a
body
when left out in the elements.

The
smell was an indescribable acrid odor, like rotten meat left in the sun. It
clung to my clothes, my skin, in my nose. I worried that even after I bathed it
would still be there. But the smell wasn’t the worst part. It was the memories
of their faces and bodies that haunted my dreams.

The
dead I was dealing with didn’t have
the peaceful
look of bodies prepared and placed into
satin-lined
coffins for viewing. These gruesome corpses had eyes that bulged out of their
sockets,
tongues swollen and protruding out of
their mouths. Their stomachs were bloated, and the bodies themselves had
changed color—some were green, some were yellow, a few had even turned
black. Their skin had blistered and rotted in the sun—often when I
grabbed an arm or a hand, the skin would peel away at my touch.

And
then there were the bugs. I knew insects burrowed into corpses and laid their
eggs—it was just a natural process of life. But the thought of laying my
hands on the dead when they were crawling with maggots and flies turned my
stomach.

I
cannot wait to get clean.

I hurried inside and quickly closed the door,
blocking out the stink and the line of zombies. If Dean saw them, then Luke
would know what I had been doing. He would know that I’d been helping Gage
raise an army of the dead. He would realize that he’d been used as a hostage to
make me do it. He would either hate himself, or me, and I couldn’t allow
either. I loved Luke too much to let that happen.

I dropped the wood by the stove and looked
down at the tub of steaming water. Luckily we had enough water at the moment that
we didn’t need to go back to the well.
Please
let the zombies
be gone
by the time Dean
heads out to get more wood or water.
I’d drained out the previous dirty
water and painstakingly refilled it. It took forever to boil, and the tub was
only half full, but it was
clean,
and
hot, and the smell of soap was a welcome change from the scent that clung to me.
I peeled off my
mud-stained
clothes and climbed into the old-fashioned
porcelain tub. The water turned murky as soon as my skin made contact. I slid
down until most of my body was submerged.

Sonja
had supplied us with soap and shampoo. I washed my hair twice and soaped down
my body three times. When I finally got out of the
tub,
I felt clean for the first time
in
a long time.

I
grabbed a towel from a pile left on the table. Gage said there would be new clothes
for us to wear, but I hadn’t seen any. I stepped over my dirty
clothes
and wrapped the towel securely around
me before heading back into the main room.

Wendy
was back on the piano
stool,
a towel
wrapped around her as well. She looked uncomfortable. She kept nervously
adjusting the towel around her legs and pulling at the top of it as though she
was worried it was going to fall off any minute.

Dean
didn’t look
uncomfortable
—in fact, he
looked confident and handsome standing at the window with his towel wrapped
around his waist.

When
Dean saw me, he froze and looked surprised. Then his eyes slowly looked me up
and down. I felt embarrassed by the sudden attention.

He
seemed to sense that he was making me feel awkward and gave me a sheepish grin.
“Do you think this is how they want us to dress for dinner?”

I tried not to act as self-conscious as I
felt, standing dressed in
nothing but a towel. I forced a smile onto my face. “With Gage, who knows?”

Dean
laughed, and I was happy to hear the sound again. He’d been quiet ever since
our talk in the kitchen.
He gave me an appreciative
look, and I couldn’t help but admire him.
Though Dean was tall with
broad shoulders, he was still a bit thin from being wheelchair-bound in the
asylum, and now from being kept in captivity here. He needed to put on some
more weight, a tad more muscle. But despite that, he
looked
pretty good wearing only a towel. I remembered running my hands down his frame
when I’d been at the asylum.
When I was alone
with Luke.

I turned away before Dean could see me blush.

Sonja
walked into the room.
The smug look on her face
was gone.
In its place was a black eye. Jacob walked in behind her
carrying three garment bags.

Sonja
looked at us and tried for a smile, but it never reached her eyes. “
Here are some things for you to wear.
” She
waved her arm around the room. “I’ll have the place cleaned up before you get
back from dinner.”

As
she moved closer, I could make out bruises on her upper arm. On closer
inspection, I saw that they were in the shape of fingers. She ignored my
inquisitive looks and addressed all three of us. “I’m sorry I didn’t get
the place
in better shape. I’ll have some food
brought into the kitchen
in case you get hungry
during the night.
I don’t know if you’ve
had a chance to
explore, but there are bedrooms in the back. I’ll have
the beds made with fresh linens and the whole place swept up and dusted.” She
swallowed hard and turned to face me. “I’m
sorry
I didn’t do all this earlier.”

She doesn’t look
sorry
, I thought. Instead,
she looked sullen. I wasn’t
sure how to respond. Before I even had a chance to say anything, Jacob dropped
the bags and the two of them left.

Wendy
got up off the bench and grabbed the closest bag. “She wasn’t sorry. He made
her sorry.”

“Gage?”
I asked, coming to her side.

“Gage
is the reason she’s sporting that black eye and bruises.” She paused a moment
and then gave me an odd look. “Sonja doesn’t like you, you know—she’s
jealous.”

“Of
me?”

“He
has plans for you,” she said under her breath.

“What
kind of plans?”

“In
his vision of the future, you’re by his side.”

“You’ve
got
to be joking.” But by the look on
her face, she wasn’t.

“Colina,
be careful.” She turned back to the bag she had grabbed, unzipped it, and
pulled out a dress.
There was a white piece of
paper with
my name written on it attached to the hanger. “This one is
for you,” she said, handing it over.

The
top of the dress had a jeweled bodice shimmering with red and silver stones. I’d
never worn a dress with the front cut so low. It looked like it would be snug down
to the waist and from there it flared out like a pool of red. There were no
other clothes around. My only choices? Keep wearing the towel, or put on the
dress. I doubted I
really
had a choice.

Sonja
also decided my makeup and hairstyle for me. She reappeared a few minutes later
with bags of her own. I sat in the kitchen as she worked on my hair. She pulled
out a small iron rod with a wooden handle and proceeded to put it on the stove
to heat. It was the equivalent of a modern-day curling iron. She curled my
shoulder-length hair into soft waves around my face, then carefully applied bold
red lipstick to my lips and dark gray eye shadow to my lids. She finished with
two coats of mascara.

She held up a hand mirror, and I
stared at my reflection. I no
longer looked seventeen. My brown hair was in spiraled curls around my face,
and the eye shadow made my hazel eyes look almost green. I looked much, much
older and more sophisticated. She handed me a pair of blood-red teardrop
earrings and a matching necklace. They looked like real rubies. They felt
ice cold
against my skin. A pair of jeweled red
shoes completed my outfit.

I
walked into the living room. Dean stood in the corner in an expensive-looking coal
gray suit and a silver tie. The gray accentuated his blue eyes and his black
slicked-back hair. He looked like a hero from one of those old black-and-white
movies.

His
eyes widened in surprise when he saw me. “You look—”

“Silly?”
I said, running my hands self-consciously down the skirt of my dress.

“Stunning,”
he answered, his eyes roving over my body. “You’ve never looked more beautiful.”

He
was moving slowly toward me, his expression just a bit predatory, when Wendy
walked into the room. Dean stopped when he saw her, his face filled with
obvious frustration, but then his expression changed and an appreciative gleam
came into his eyes, this time aimed at Wendy.

Her
dress was bright yellow and cut high in the front, but when she turned I saw the
dress plunged way down low in the back. A slight slit ran up one side, and I
could see a pair of sparkling gray shoes underneath. Her ink black hair was
swept up with a few long tendrils pulled down to
hang
gently around her face. Her brown eyes looked bigger with
purple eye shadow and mascara. Pink blush gave color to her normally pale
complexion,
and
her lips were a deep,
dark purple. Makeup covered up the bruises on her face, and the slashes on her
arms were no longer visible. Long, dark gray silk gloves c
overed her skin up to
her elbows.

“I
feel like an idiot,” she said.
She looked as if
she wanted to
retreat back
to the
bedroom.

Dean
gave her a wide smile. “You look gorgeous.”

Wendy
blushed.

“Gage
wants all of you in attendance tonight.” Sonja had changed into a long black
dress
with a slit on one side that went
all the way up to the top of
her thigh. She
wore heels so high I wondered how she could walk in them. Her red hair was
smooth and glossy and
fell down
to the
middle of her back. She looked tall and sleek, like a runway model.

The
bruises on her eye and her arms were barely noticeable. I’d watched her cover
them in makeup after she did my hair. She did it with
an ease
and speed that made me certain it wasn’t the first time
she’d done such a thing.

“We’d
better get going—Gage doesn’t like it when anyone’s late.” Sonja tried
for another
smile
but didn’t pull it off.
She turned to the door, speaking over her shoulder as she went. “The staff will
be cleaning while we’re at dinner. By the time you come back, this place will
have all the comforts of home.”

I
looked over at Dean. He rolled his eyes in a comical way, and I couldn’t help
but grin.

* * *

We headed down into the
basement and back into the tunnels. Wendy said it was an old mining town, which
meant the tunnels were
actually
mine
shafts. I ran my hand along the dirt wall as I walked. I could feel grooves in
the wall—places where tools had cut out the rock, or maybe worked away
trying to find gold or silver. We passed
an
intersection
and to the left was a tunnel with metal tracks running
through it. A large, square, rusted metal container with wheels sat on the
tracks. An ore car to carry rock to the surface? I
wondered,
If
I follow the tracks, will they eventually
lead me outside?

We walked until we pushed through thick red
drapes and entered an immense cavern. White material draped across the ceiling,
and
stalactites
hung down between gaps in the material.
A small stream cut across the center of the space, emerging from a
waist-high tunnel on one side of the room and disappearing into
the wall on the far side
.