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“Right.”
“Necromancer!” someone shouted from outside. Rinaldo.
All three of them groaned.
“God damn it.” Harry threw up his arms in frustration. “Now what do we do?”
Gideon cracked his neck loudly to one side and then the other. “We go say hello, while Marguerite does precisely as she suggested—find the piece of the talisman on her own.”
“Try not to break the building while I’m in it?” She shook her head. “Please?”
The necromancer was already heading back toward the window they came in, Harry on his heels. “I will do my best.”
And just that quickly, she was left standing on her own in the dark. Well, on her own with Algernon. She scratched the rat’s head. “Well…I guess I should try to find that stupid talisman piece before Gideon wrecks the joint again.”
With each step, the silence of the building began to press on her like a physical weight. The only sound was the crunch of dirt and bits of ceiling paint under her feet. Darkness weighed in on all sides, and the cone of her flashlight seemed to do little to fight it off.
And now and then, just on the edges of her vision, she saw movement. Each time it made her jolt, and she had to take a deep breath, hold it, and slowly let it out. “They’re just ghosts. Just ghosts. They have every right to be here. It’s fine. They can’t hurt you.”
She pulled in a startled hiss as one of the spirits seemed to rush at her. She froze. She couldn’t hear it. But she could just feel it shouting at her. Whoever it had been, they were very angry she was up and about on her own. She might not have known the person while they were alive, but she certainly recognized the type. Authority. And one who liked to abuse it.
“Fuck off.”
She was here to do a job. She was here to get a part of her past back. And she wasn’t going to be scared off the trail by some silently screaming, long dead ghost of an orderly whose only meaning in life probably came from torturing those they viewed as less than.
Marching on ahead, she searched for—well, honestly, she had no clue what she was searching for. A brick. The whole building was made out of brick. But as she could hear the sounds of a fight outside the building, she knew she had to find it quickly.
Pausing, she shut her eyes and took a deep, slow breath. She wasn’t quite sure what she was doing, but she needed to focus. She needed to remember.
In a rare moment, she reached into her mind. Willingly.
Slipping away from the orderlies was easier than it should have been. It wasn’t their fault. The patients outnumbered them a hundred to one, if not worse. And they spent all their time focusing on the more violent or more disabled of the “inmates.”
A harmless, little, peaceful, amnesia patient? She wasn’t worth the effort. Normally, she wouldn’t take the risk—being caught somewhere she wasn’t supposed to be would get her beaten or meals withheld. But this was important. Very important.
Gripping the shard of the pendant so hard that the pointed edges dug painfully into her palm, she snuck away from afternoon activities without being seen. Keeping the weird little thing hadn’t been too hard—it didn’t look valuable, so they had no reason to want to take it from her.
Hide it.
Keep it away from him.
She didn’t even know who he was. A phantom in her mind. A shadow of a figure that she couldn’t ever quite see, no matter how hard she tried. But she knew that the pendant belonged to him, and he was dangerous, and he was the reason she was like this.
Broken.
Broken like the talisman.
Worse, even. You could put the pieces of a talisman back together. But her? She was far too shattered, like a broken mirror. Bits and pieces, flecks of glass, would always be missing no matter how hard she tried to find them all.
Her life was pointless. Meaningless. She only had one mission—to punish the man who did this to her. This thing was important to him, and therefore it had to be kept from him at all costs. After that? She didn’t care. This place was a circle of Hell, she was certain. It wasn’t even kind enough to be considered purgatory.
The torture. The starvation. The overcrowded rooms. The disease. The medication that took it all away was only a hair better than being aware of the world around her.
Once her job was done, she would find a way to kill herself. She wasn’t considered a risk, so it would be easy enough to fashion a noose from bed sheets and end it all. Death couldn’t be worse than what she suffered now.
It was deep in the basement that she found the perfect spot. Tucked around a corner in a small storage room, amongst the boxes of paperwork waiting to be filed away, she found a loose brick in the wall close to the floor. Pulling it out carefully, she shoved the fragment far to the back and pressed the brick back in. She was glad to see it didn’t stand proud of the surface or look in any way out of place.
She smiled. Her job was done.
