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“Magic? A spell?” I whisper the questions to myself.
Tiny comes back to me and lifts a brow.
“Follow you, got it, got it,” I sigh.
He leads me to a seat near, but not quite beside, the man’s head. I can look at him, am close enough to touch him, but I keep my hands curled at my side. My gaze moves over the room. This looks almost like an archaic hospital room. There are shelves all over the room with little glass bottles filled with different herbs and liquids. And the scent in the room is definitely herbal too.
Daddy goes to one of the shelves and pulls several bottles down. He pours little bits from different bottles, then takes a stick and smashes them all together in a shell, before adding a small amount of liquid to the mixture. He carries the shell over to the fire, and sets in on a rock in the center. Within seconds, the liquid starts to smoke. The others move, and they form the points of a triangle around the large seashell before Daddy picks it back up.
Isn’t it hot? And why the hell is it smoking?
I can’t see the inside of the shell, but their heads bow over it, and they appear to be in deep thought or prayer to whatever deity they pray to.
It’s strange. At that moment, I’m absolutely fascinated by them, this place, and the unconscious man. This all feels like a puzzle I can’t quite figure out, but I’m determined to solve. So even if they weren’t between me and the door, I still wouldn’t have run. I’m invested now. Have to see, at least, this part through.
A flash of super dark smoke rises from the shell, and a gasp slips past my lips as I lean forward, trying to figure out what the hell is going on. The beasts have joined hands, and they chant a strange humming sound punctuated by a grunt. More smoke rises and I can’t look away, not even when the smallest of the really big beasts hands me the shell. There’s a liquid of some sort inside of it and he motions to my mouth and lifts the shell toward me.
“You want me to drink it?” I give a glance at the dark brew, then give it a sniff. The drink neither looks, nor smells like something I want to drink. “No.”
But he holds it out again, arms extended, nods, pushes it toward me.
“No thanks,” I say slowly, narrowing my eyes.
In response, Tiny and Daddy come up behind Fluffy and cross their arms, all leveling me with a look I easily recognize. This is the same look one of my dads would give me if they were one hundred percent certain I needed to do something and weren’t going to bend. Like if I refused to go to school, or if I climbed up too high, and they wanted me to come down.
For some reason, the look makes something inside of me calm. My stepdad never gave me this sort of look. One minute he’d be sitting on the couch flipping through TV channels, and the next he was breaking my ribs. People who gave looks like this wanted to give you a chance to do the right thing on your own.
But if I ignored this look? I have no idea what would happen next, because I always obeyed my dads when they were the only ones who pulled out this look.So, do I really want to find out what the consequences are for disobeying? Here? With these three huge men?
Nah.
“Fine.” Not because I want to, but because Ihaveto.
I stare down at the smoking liquid and swallow hard, willing myself to just get it over with. Reaching out, I take the shell. Instantly, a vibration moves through my hands, and I almost drop the shell. Somehow, I manage to cling to it, then lower my head andreallystare at the liquid. My thoughts feel strange. My mind has locked onto the liquid, and it’s like nothing outside of it exists.
A force, not part of myself, compels me to bring the shell to my lips. A force I’m powerless to say no to. And before I know what I’m doing, I’m drinking it.
It tastes acrid, like smoke smells, but I consume every drop of it and swallow even when I only want to spit it back out. My stomach rolls, my head swims.Damn it, I’m probably going to die.I need air, to breathe deep and fill my lungs with as much oxygen as I can manage to pull. But the walls of the cave waver, like a flag in a breeze. They snap and distort and fear and anguish burn through me.
My chest heaves as I stagger, then fall into the wall.
One of the beasts grabs my hand and pulls me through the cave to a tunnel that leads deep into the darkness. I try to pull away. The last thing I need to do is to get stuck in the dark with this big guy, but the blond leads and the other two each grasp one of my arms in their cold hands. Or maybe they feel so cold because my skin is on fire. I can’t tell because I’m no longer in my body but watching from above it.
“She’s weak,” a gruff voice says. The one beside me on the left tightens his grip, and it feels like my body tries to pull away. I’m rooting for it to be free, but I can’t help myself from where I float above.
My body is no longer my own. I should be terrified, but I’m not.
“She’s fine. Keep moving,” says a deep voice that rolls against my skin like velvet.
Wait. I can understand them!Except that their voices are far away, further down the tunnel than I am, and I want to catch up to where they’re tugging my body along.
Are they even really talking, or am I imagining it?
Probably, I’m hallucinating. My conscious mind knows that. Like it knows that none of this is real. It can’t be. But the pain in my head, the throb of my pulse inside my brain says otherwise. Panic burns in my veins and my body begins to struggle, but they continue to move me forward, unhindered through the tunnel that smells like earth and my own fear.
“It’s okay.” I don’t know which one is speaking, but the slow cadence, the gentle tone, comforts me. A moment later, or a year, I can’t tell, we emerge into the forest and the light of morning hurts me, so I shield my eyes with my hand.
We’ve gone only a few steps, maybe more, I don’t know, when I see a black cloud, ominous, just a few yards ahead. It moves like black smoke, only it’s made out of something thicker than smoke. Oil maybe. It spreads out as far as I can see in that direction, and even up so high that I can’t tell where it ends.
