A woman stepped forward, the muted light of my room making her white uniform glow.
“Prep her for chores tomorrow. She can at least help with the laundry.”
The nurse gave me a fleeting look before returning her gaze to the doctor. “Are you—?”
“—sure?” Jones nodded. “She’s under guard. She should at least be useful while she’s here. In two days your father visits.” Her voice lowered along with her eyes. “He’s a stubborn man when it comes to his children.” Rising, she brushed her hands across her slacks. Her cell phone sounded, and, tugging it out of her pocket, she glanced at it, a smile stretching her lips. “Excellent. The thing we’ve been looking so forward to receiving is finally on its way in. I need to gather some paperwork and get ready to meet the shipper,” she informed the nurse. “Is room twenty-six prepped?”
“Yes.” The nurse waited until the door closed behind the doctor before addressing me again. “Can you stand?”
I nodded with more certainty than I felt.
“Good. Shower. Breakfast. Tomorrow: chores.”
The door clicked shut and I was alone in my room. With a groan I rose and steadied myself, holding the cold metal bed frame. Shower.
Bathroom.
There.
A door.
I shuffled to it and timidly bent to start the water running. Slipping out of my top and pants I stepped into the shower and let my head hang, slowly waking under the pelting sting of water.
Beneath its roar, my mind began to clear.
Was there a question I should have asked? I shook my head, water rolling down along my ears, threatening to plug them. “Ugh.” No answer—or, more appropriately, no question—came. Between the ache in my elbow and the emptiness in my skull, I realized there was no question I needed answered, no curiosity gnawing at my gut.
I dried my hair, dressed in a nondescript blue shirt and pants, and joined my guards.
“You two. You aren’t my regular guards. What are your names?” It was something I’d never figured out about their predecessors.
A moment passed as they exchanged a slow look. Their meaty skulls swung back on their tree-trunk necks and they blinked in unison. One jerked his chin toward the common room.
We trudged in that direction, down the hall lit with hissing fluorescent bulbs. Past the nurses’ station and the room with its whirring refrigerator locked and filled with chemically based support for almost any behavior deemed abnormal, all in handy vials and bottles with names so long they wrapped all the way around their labels.
I took a seat at a round white table while one guard got my food. There were only a dozen other people seated throughout the broad space, but I realized that was twice as many as had been here before my forced sedation.
Something strange was definitely going on.
The nurse rolled a cart in, the platter on its top lined with tiny crimped paper cups, black numbers on their sides. The daily meds. I stretched up as tall as I could as she stopped the cart beside my table. Most of the cups appeared to have the same selection of pills inside. The nurse glanced at the cup numbers briefly before selecting one for me.
Mine wasn’t like the others. “Umm? What’s so different about me?”
“Just consider it proof that what your parents always said was true.” Handing me the cup, she reached over and, folding my sleeve, swabbed my arm with alcohol. “You’re special.” She lined up a syringe and jabbed me, slowly pulling back the plunger so the shaft filled with red.
“Ow.” I twitched. “And drawing my blood? That’s new.”
“Get used to it,” she suggested. “Consider it our little way of seeing just how special you are.”
My stomach did a little flip. The Rusakovas knew my blood was part of the cure for the werewolves and we were pretty certain the CIA knew, too, since Officer Kent tried to kill me at the shooting range. Was it possible Dr. Jones was somehow tied in with them?
The nurse withdrew the needle, put a cotton ball and Band-aid over the spot, saying, “Press down a minute,” and went on her way.
Could they all be in cahoots? I squeezed my eyes shut. No. That’d be crazy. Opening my eyes, I sighed. Maybe crazy was to be expected in an asylum.
My guard returned, sliding a tray of food across to me, his long sleeve slipping up to briefly expose the underside of one wrist.
“Wait,” I commanded, seeing something strange. But he didn’t obey. “Fine.” I poked at the stuff daring to be defined as food and even ate some. It was like eating the love child of cardboard and Styrofoam.
While faking interest in eating I tried to get a look at the guard’s wrist. There was a mark—a tattoo?—that seemed familiar. I glanced at his other wrist. The edge of a matching something peeked out from beneath that sleeve, too.
“I’m full.” It was one of the easiest lies I’d told in the past few months. “I want to go back to my room.”
In unison they rose, one taking my tray while the other watched me with dull eyes.
“If you don’t tell me your names, I’ll just make something up.”
They didn’t react, just kept walking.
“Fine,” I announced. “Thing One”—I turned to the one on my left—“and Thing Two,” I dubbed the one on my right.
Still no reaction.
Heading back, I noticed a young woman in a straitjacket and leg irons latched to a bench, her escort standing by, warily watching the length of the hall, his arms folded, eyes only briefly pausing on her.
Or me and my guards as we approached.
The most interesting thing in the vicinity, she didn’t look much older than me. Her complexion made me think she’d been tanning recently; she definitely wasn’t the happily stuck indoors type. Her shoulder-length hair was brown, with narrow highlights of blond and red, and as we passed her I thought I saw her nostrils flare. I craned my neck, dragging down my already slow pace to watch another moment. Her gaze flicked toward me and I stumbled, catching a reflection of red in her eyes. She blinked, looking away, just another normal girl.
In an asylum.
I regained my balance and, untangling my feet, turned back toward my room, ignoring the creeping prickle as the fine hairs on my arms rose in warning.
Dr. Jones’s voice behind me made me spin around once more. “Excellent. Here are your papers.” She leaned toward the girl, who leaned away, baring her teeth in response. “We’ve been greatly anticipating your arrival, Harmony. You’ve had quite the journey.”