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She blinked at
me. "Your mother didn't refuse the testing. She was proud to join our ranks. Is that really what you want?"
I sucked in a quick breath. “You knew my mom?”
When my mother was alive, I hardly ever met her sisters-in-arms at the HQ. It was a secret society. Too secret for an eleven-year-old girl. After she died, they didn’t exactly come around much. Only once - to attend her funeral. That was the last time I saw a harpy before they attacked me the night of Nicky’s first murder.
“Yes, I knew her well. She would want you here,” Ruth replied.
For my mother, the HQ was everything. It was her daily life. She lived and breathed the mission of the Harpy Quorum, to bring evil to justice and make the world a safer place for their children.
Ruth was probably right; my mother would want me here. She’d want me to take up the role of protector. I just wasn’t sure that’s what I wanted. I had a museum to run. I had friends. My life had taken a different route. I didn’t know if I could just abandon it.
When I didn’t say anything, Ruth sat at the extra chair and pulled it up to the computer. She touched the screen a few times, opening up programs and readying the machine. I wanted to tell her not to bother, that I wouldn't be joining their cult. But, I couldn’t find my voice.
“This test will stretch your psychic vision powers,” Ruth began. “You will drink a potion and we will observe the effects through the computer. I must warn you, it can be a little jarring.”
I nodded, although I wasn’t sure what I was agreeing to do. I already had the psychic visions. Why did they need to observe them?
The blonde with the broken nose brought out a small shot glass full of black liquid. It was as thick as Pepto-Bismol, but had a sweet sugary smell. I stared at it distrustfully.
Potions could really mess a person up, if brewed incorrectly. Angel had tried to mix one for an energy boost last year. A magical energy drink, she’d called it. Instead of energy, she ended up in a coma for a day. It scared the crap out of me. Luckily, she came out of it after some help from a local wizard. But still, I didn’t like the idea of downing some mysterious potion.
“Drink,” Ruth commanded.
She handed me the shot glass and began hooking little sticky pads to me, with wires attached to them. A few went on my forehead, a few others attached to my chest.
It felt like I was watching myself on a TV screen – like I was in some weird spy movie. Without much thought, I obeyed and gulped down the black liquid. It tasted sweet with a sharp aftertaste that lingered at the back of my tongue. The thick liquid slid down my throat and eventually landed hard in the pit of my stomach.
The room was silent, waiting for a change. I could feel the impatience in the harpies closest to me. Several minutes went by, without anything happening. Even I began to get impatient.
“How long does this stuff take…?”
All of a sudden, the visions hit me like a two-ton semi-truck. The bright room dissolved in a flash and was replaced by a dark apartment. In the corner of the living room, a young child cowered, his face dirty and his jeans worn. A woman and a man stood in the middle of the room. Their mouths stretched wide open in screams, each of them red in the face with anger.
I wanted to run across the room and hold the little boy, tell him everything would be okay. But my feet were glued to the threadbare carpet. My throat wouldn’t make a sound. I watched in silence as the man pulled a silver handgun from the waistband of his pants and pointed it at the woman. He screamed again before sinking three bullets into her skull.
Her body dropped to the floor, her face lifeless and still like a morbid Barbie doll. The little boy just crouched next to the couch and stared. I yelled at him to look away, but he didn’t hear me.
In a heartbeat, the apartment was swept away, and in its place was a dusty and hilly field. I didn’t recognize the location. It could be anywhere in the world, but it certainly wasn’t Arcana.
Two men with dark and weathered skin stepped into view. They had fabric wrapped around their heads and long scraggly beards. Deep in conversation, they didn’t even look up as they passed me. I reached out a hand to touch the man closest to me, but my arm passed right through his shoulder. It was like I was a ghost.
The men stopped a few paces past me and looked around. I didn’t see anything, but I could hear a rumbling in the distance. Suddenly, a team of five horses appeared at the top of the next hill. The horses pranced and bucked as their riders reined them in while observing the two men on foot.
It didn’t take long for the riders to kick their horses into a gallop. They chased the men, screaming words in a language I didn’t recognize. Helplessly, I watched the men on horseback pull out guns from their sides and shoot down the men, nearly trampling them as they fell.
Blood pooled in large brown circles on the ground. Shouts of victory deafened me as the riders jumped off their horses and turned their victims over. Even from my vantage point, I could tell one of the men was still alive. His chest heaved with the effort it took to breathe with two bullets in the back. I got up on my feet, desperate to move. If I didn’t stop them, he was going to die.
A portly man with a missing index finger pulled out his gun and strode toward him. He pointed his gun without ceremony and shot. With a last jerk of the body, the man on the ground was dead, his final breath leaving his body.
I gasped and felt the world tilt again. Scenes flashed before my eyes like film through a projector. Men slaughtering men. Women being beaten. Children locked up in tiny spaces. Blood and guts and tears. Each image sucked the breath out of me like a hard punch to the gut.
I saw knives and guns and bats and bare fists. So many ways to kill a man - each of them as effective as the last. With all of the violence, a small thought in the back of my head worked its way to the front. If this potion didn’t end soon, I was going to die in this tilt-o-whirl of death. My head couldn’t take any more.
Chapter Four
Just when I thought I was going to pass out, my vision dumped me in a thick forest, the night sky inky black through the leaves above my head. My stomach reeled, threatening to come up my throat. There was so much death in the world. Who knew when these visions would stop? That potion could last for hours.
