NellsBells

    She’s glad the others had thought to grab the device when looking for her, grateful Ryoshu had handed it over almost immediately once she was out of shock. Even staring at it now on the chrome desk she’d settled at, she can almost hear Daegan’s and Carson’s voices from the memories that had still been within the player. Damned, stubborn fools, she thought bitterly.

    When she heard the telltale ping of the restoration program on her monitor, she popped the chip out of its port and went to slide it into the memory player. The alien tech Nathaniel had used had always been a little redundant in what was needed to make something work when it was broken—but then what use would he have for his memories if he wasn’t there to sit and stew and them?

    The image cast on the wall in the room wasn’t perfect. It wavered and clipped now and then, but it played. It was a first-person point of view, considering the camera had been his left eye. It was fine watching the flickers of memories go by—even if the earliest on this chip seemed to be of her and her friends, hunting him down while he tried to kill them.

    It wasn’t until she saw a disjointed image of him staring himself in the mirror that she recoiled unexpectedly. She could dimly tell he was examining a syringe filled with something, but her own memories had decided to lay a curtain over her eyes. She found herself glancing down at her hands with him, covered in blood up to her forearm.

   She blinked, trying to shake it off, but a heart had joined the equation. Wet and still beating with a steady ba-dump that she felt as if it surrounded her. For one horrifying moment, she felt transfixed by the image as if it was a piece of art she needed to examine.

   Her heels pushed against the floor, chair rolling across the tile as she willed herself out of whatever paralysis she’d entered. Her hands were clean, there was no heart. She snapped her gaze up back to the imagery only to see more red—a cloak. Just a cloak.

   Alicia. They were arguing—the audio distorted in some parts, the entire conversation not clear—but they seemed to be blaming or mocking each other.

   “They were never supposed to go to my fucking safe house!” Nathaniel’s yell of rage was familiar to her, but she cringed at how distorted and projected it sounded thanks to the corrupted footage. She couldn’t quite make out what Alicia was saying, but she caught “too arrogant” and “look into it.”

    She could guess the context easily enough. Alicia using an address of his safehouse as the base of her fake property front, the coordinates Andrew had found. This much she’d already known, but instead she was trying to focus on where they were—if there was anything she could use for them to find later.

   The images distorted on the screen again and Liliana could see him walking down stone steps into a basement.

   Her body seized as she practically shoved herself out of her chair and quickly found the “fast forward” button on the device. She didn’t need to see that, couldn’t, and it wasn’t important anyway. Nothing that happened down where she was kept needed to be revisited.

   Her arms and throat felt uncomfortably warm, some phantom heat washing over her as she struggled to pay enough attention to know when to return the imagery to normal but not catch sight of herself in his memories.

   Something moved in her peripheral, a dim amorphous shape. She turned sharply to face it, but nothing was there.

   A chill of paranoia crawled down her spine, but she pushed it back. She’d been having good nights and bad ones since she’d been rescued, the bad ones felt like they were clustering together more recently. But no one knew she was in a lab on another continent right now, Elijah was waiting just in another room.

   She couldn’t start letting herself get spooked by her own shadow.

   Remembering the images flicking on the screen, she returned the device to normal to see Nathaniel moving down a corridor of some sort. The view was slow, but she recognized he was trying to move quietly. As he crept closer to an open doorway to his left, Liliana could pick up the distorted murmurings of a woman’s voice.

   The video clipped forward and Liliana got a view of Alicia turned away from the door in a room she didn’t recognize, talking to herself rather intently. Even gesturing now and then, three-quarters turned from where Nathaniel could see her.

    The audio wasn’t perfect, but Liliana was able to catch a few sentences amid Alicia’s self-tirade.

    “The potion will work, it is exactly what we need,” a pause, the video actually playing smoothly to let Liliana know it hadn’t skipped ahead before the blonde on the screen speaks again. “I don’t care about the time limit, if we do this, we will win.”

    She certainly sounded sure of herself, but people descending into madness often did. Liliana let the memories continue on.

    “Look,” a voice hissed right at her ear and she spun around so fast, arm swinging out with the force of a maul she hit her rolling chair and sent it flying across the room. It smacked against the wall so hard that it clattered to the ground in discombobulated pieces.

     No one there.

   “Closer,” the voice whispered again, somewhere behind her. Then, a myriad of echoes dancing around her “Closer” “listen” “back, back” “help you” “look.”

    Feeling dizzy, Liliana slowly turned back toward the screen on the wall. Her stomach dipped and the room was suddenly tinted a shadowy purple. The sterile, monochrome room painted that alien hue like she’d stepped into another world. At first it felt hard to focus, blinking and only able to see weathered pages filled with Latin flashing behind her eyes before she opened them again.

   Barely a few feet in front of her was a bluish-white shape of a humanoid—a woman? She couldn’t make much out, the apparition flickering in a way that brought her features in and out of focus. But there was long hair. And a translucent finger was pressing down on the “rewind” of the memory player.

    Liliana blinked again and the room was normal. The player was rewinding, back to Alicia talking to herself. It stopped just as the witch came into view again—just as Liliana saw the ghostly woman, now that ghastly purple, was standing near the wall so she disrupted the clear view of the imagery. Could almost be mistaken as a part of it.

    The woman stared at her, then slowly turned her head as Alicia continued to talk to herself. Liliana watched, her mind racing and rapidly debating if she’s gone off the deep end. But she wasn’t as perturbed as she probably should have been. Instead, she found herself pausing the player as she watched the ghost.

    Liliana had always been a quick study. Having to compensate her inexperience with a vast amount of knowledge and practical skills that could help her survive in a universe so unpredictable and at times, volatile. She could dissect why she was seeing what she was seeing later, she needed to seize the moment before it was gone.

    Her attention flitted between the spirit and Alicia. The way the ghost had lined herself up with the image on the wall made it look as if she could be in the room Alicia was in. In fact, it lined up almost perfectly. That Nathaniel’s line of sight could have easily been on two people, rather than just one.

    She considered Alicia. Hit the play button. The entire time, the witch never turns a different direction or paces. With the ghost there, she looked like she was having a conversation. “If we do this, we will win.”

Liliana considered Nathaniel’s eye—able to alert him to magic or invisible presences but the tech had never been able to see the dead. That left room to imagine there were other things his eye couldn’t have picked up.

    The longer Liliana watched, replayed and watched again, the more she couldn’t shake that Alicia hadn’t been talking to herself. But if she hadn’t, that begged the question who or what else was there.

    “If we do this, we will win.”

    Alicia had been turned on or turned against every ally she’s had in her vendetta. She had shown repeatedly that she was not afraid to cut her losses. It struck Liliana as odd that she would repeatedly use the term “we” in talking to herself. Something wasn’t adding up.

    Slowly, she turned her attention back to the apparition that was now staring at her in return. “Why are you here? Why do you want to…help?”

   “Help,” the woman’s voice repeated in a rasp. She said nothing further, only turned her head back toward the video even as the images moved beyond Alicia. Her mouth opened, too wide, in some sort of silent wail before her form scattered as if rustled by some invisible wind.

    Liliana blinked harshly, wondering if she might reappear, but she was alone. Well, not quite.

    “Hello? Lilia—the fuck, are you bleeding?” Elijah’s consternated voice sounded near the door to the lab.

    She turned to him with a frown, finally feeling something wet and warm sitting just above her lip, threatening to slide lower. She lifted her hand and pressed it underneath her nose, then pulled it back. She was, indeed, bleeding. She just hadn’t realized it at all.

    Foregoing her usual cleanliness, she wipes her nose with the back of her sleeve as her Childer moved closer. “What happened with the chair?” he asked gruffly.

    “It doesn’t matter,” Liliana said dismissively, a sort of clarity forming as the memories continued to play on the wall. What the ghost seemed to be implying was that Alicia hadn’t been talking to herself, which could be debated around in circles. The stranger thing was why a ghost would appear to her at all to implicate such.

    What mattered more, was Alicia had some sort of potion she was sure would work and secure her victory of something. They already knew she’d been running some sort of experiments. But if she was saving this—it probably meant she needed it for whatever her grand plan was. It meant she only had one genuine shot.

    Sharply, she turned and picked up the memory player to turn it off. Wiping at her nose again before she turned and headed for the door “We need to get back to Consequence, there’s some things I need to tell Valentino.”

    She could feel Elijah’s questioning gaze on her, but heard his footsteps follow her out of the lab that wasn’t hers.

    It wasn’t until after she’d made it to her townhouse the next night, the elegant home slotted in among a row of several others. Mildly surprised to see her car parked out front, knowing Elijah must have retrieved it at some point after she’d been taken.

    It had taken time to get clean, the ritual almost soothing to a mind that had been running on autopilot since she’d made the kill. Maybe it was her hair that did it.

    Sitting in front of her vanity in a silk bathrobe, trying to get ready for the night—seeing how dark her hair was. Knowing the color hadn’t run in the shower, that the natural inclination for her hair to return to its natural state whenever she rested for the day hadn’t reverted it to the honey blonde she’d known all her life.

    It wasn’t the right shade, of course. On her, it looked more like a deep, dark brown rather than the onyx black she knew Nathaniel had been going for. Knew intrinsically what dying her hair was supposed to represent.

    She remembers getting up. And then she was on the floor.

    Small figure hunched over herself, fingers digging into the carpet of her bedroom as her eyes warmed to the point it felt like her entire face had warmed over. Teeth gnashing as the tears spilled over and broke every single bit of resolve she’d given herself.

    She wasn’t quiet, her sobs threatening to choke her until she was nearly wailing, rocking herself at a disjointed rhythm. Trying to sort out why she was crying and what she actually felt in that moment, only to discover it was a myriad of things. All choosing in this exact moment to press down on her until she thought she would be crushed from the weight.

    Anger. That this had been done to her, that she had been trapped again. That he had planned to broadcast her death to the entirety of Consequence. To her brother. To her friends. That he had gone after the people she held close after spending so much time acting like his revenge against her was something righteous. That he was better than her. That he had never actually seen her because it had been so easy for him to paint her as the villain her mother was.

    Her fist struck the floor twice, hearing the wood crack under the carpeting on the second hit. Like a goddamn Rousseau. She couldn’t think about how many voices echoed around in her mind with that statement.

    Grief. The hardest to accept, that she could grieve him after everything. A traitorous part of herself, perhaps, out of sync with the rest of her that had known his death was the only outcome. Or maybe it was grief over the fact it had come to this at all. That in her short life, the person that had helped her recover from her mother’s death ended up hating her as soon as he knew whom her mother was. That her love had been so easy to toss aside, that she had ultimately been disposable to Nathaniel and his crew.

    That, like her mother, she could only be loved if it ended in tragedy and cruelty.  

    Relief. It was what had her gasping at times, her hand settling at her throat and along her collarbone, forehead pressing into the soft texture of her carpet. The fact it was over. Nathaniel could never touch her again. Could never destroy her home or business. Could never try to kill the people she loved. She was free of him, free, free, free. It almost made her laugh, the sound wet and hoarse against her onslaught of tears.

    She’s not sure how long she was locked there, crying until it felt like she was finally drained of it all. When it was ending, she was on her side, half curled up and running her hands along her face to wipe away the tears. The only saving grace was that she didn’t cry blood the same way so many of her fellow vampires did.

    Cry. It had been years, now, since she’d even shed a tear. She had still been the old version of herself back then, crying and pleading at men that had no intention of showing her mercy. She didn’t know what it said about her now, that the dam had burst open after so long. She certainly wasn’t suddenly the gentle, optimistic, kind girl she’d been before.

    But she didn’t feel her armor if distance and detachment, either. That too, had been shucked off. If she was honest with herself, it had been becoming rusted and chipped for some time now. She didn’t know yet if she should try to salvage it, polish it and repair the fissures that had been created by Carpe Astra.