A Torment of Savages (The Reanimation Files Book 4) (19 page)

I ran into the kitchen with Kyo next to me and Ethan slightly behind us.

“Let him go,” I demanded. Micah was struggling to breathe, and I was very close to losing my mind.

“He is handsome,” Revath said brightly. “I have been watching him as I watched you.” She used her free hand to stroke Micah’s face. He flinched away.

“Leave him alone!” I screamed. “He has nothing to do with this, I am the one you fucking want, just take me and go.” Did I want to have my soul snatched by Revath? Hell to the no. But I would do damn near anything to save Micah from her.

“Oh, you will be mine,” Revath said. “But I am not ready for you yet. I am still collecting my debt, and having so much fun doing so. As a matter of fact…” She turned to Micah and I felt as though a brick of ice was sitting in my stomach. “I think I will take his soul.”

“No!” Kyo, Ethan, and I screamed at the same time. All three of us tried to move forward, to do what, I had no idea, but Revath held her palm up and we were suddenly immobile. I struggled to no avail as hot tears stung my eyes and I continued to scream at Revath.

“Don’t do it, don’t do it! Take me instead, take me!”

But my pleading went unheard, and I could do nothing but watch as Revath thrust her hand inside of Micah’s chest, causing his back to bow and the most horrifying scream of pain I had ever heard to erupt from him. When Revath pulled her hand out, Micah’s stunned ghost came with it and Micah’s body slumped. There was no hole in his chest where her hand had been, but he was dead nevertheless. I wanted to collapse into death myself. Revath laughed her disgusting laugh, and moments later, before Micah’s ghost could say anything, she picked up the large rune that hung around her neck and touched it to his ghost. It disappeared into the rune. After that was done, she did something that made me want to rip her head off and slam it against a wall until there was nothing left. She puckered her lips, pressed them against Micah’s lifeless mouth, and blew into it. I knew what she was doing. She was filling him with dark energy, turning him Savage. It wasn’t long before his body sprang to life again, red eyes flying wide open. It was only for a moment though, then he went limp once more. Revath cradled him closely.

“It takes a while to kick in,” she said, smiling.

“Micah, oh no, Micah, Micah…” I was burning up with so much anger and hatred for Revath that I almost couldn’t see straight. She ran her fingers through Micah’s hair.

“Oh, I shall have some fun with this one,” she whispered. “Some bloody, bloody fun.” She grinned at me. “Enjoy the pain you are still able to feel, for soon you won’t be feeling anything at all. See you soon, Selene.” She snaked her arm around Micah’s shoulders, and in the blink of an eye they were gone and the three of us could move again. I fell to my knees, my palms slapping the floor. Luna came over and tried to be comforting, but there was nothing she could do.

“Selene.” I felt Ethan and Kyo’s hands on my shoulders, but I flinched away and shot to my feet. I turned around and headed to the door.

“Selene, wait!” Kyo caught my arm, but I yanked it away. “Where are you going? She isn’t out there for you to find…”

“I know,” I snapped. “I just can’t fucking be here right now.” My eyes were filled with tears that I refused to let fall. I flung my arm out toward the kitchen. “Did you just see that? Did you see what I saw? She turned Micah into a Savage! And…and there is no way to save him unless I can get his soul back. Which won’t happen because pretty soon my soul will be taken too! So just leave me alone right now, Kyo. I need…I need to just…go.” I cast a glance at Ethan, who was holding Luna looking scared and sorrowful, then I grabbed my jacket and left the house.

I didn’t get in my car. If I tried to drive in the state I was in, it would end badly for myself and likely some other people as well. I started walking. I didn’t know where I was going, I just wanted to pretend like I could keep walking until I became numb to all of this. The night was cold, but I felt overheated. The wind against my face reminded me of Revath’s icy breath on my skin and I became even angrier. I could not stop seeing what she had done to Micah. It was the only thing playing in my head over and over. She had turned him into a Savage. How the hell did I save him? How did I get rid of this bitch?

At some point I tuned in to my surroundings and realized that I had walked quite far away from my neighborhood. I turned around and sighed. I didn’t want to go home, but that was all I could do right now. I started to walk back. My feeling of being overheated had died down, and I wrapped my arms around myself against the chilly night. The neighborhood I was walking through was quiet; there’d been no one else out and about, which was why I got an uneasy feeling when I heard footsteps behind me. It didn’t have to mean anything, but given where my life was at right now, my paranoia was sky-high. I had that skin-tingling, hair-raising, uncomfortable feeling, which only grew when I quickened my pace and the person behind me quickened theirs too. Not good.

I turned around to get a look at whoever was behind me, which would hopefully appease my nerves, but before I could make out any identifying features, I was met with a very heavy fist to the face that knocked me down. Moments later a bag was dragged over my head, and my arms and legs were bound before I was picked up and tossed over someone’s shoulder like a sack of laundry.

At first I thought a Savage had gotten me, but I seriously doubted this was a Savage. They were about all-out violence, not calculated attacks, and what I now realized was kidnapping. I was being kidnapped. I started to struggle, but whoever had me was incredibly strong and my thrashing got me nowhere. I started to scream, but there was no way anyone would hear my muffled screaming. Because there wasn’t anyone around.

I heard a car come screeching down the street before it stopped and a door opened. I was thrown into the backseat. Then the person who grabbed me got in the front, and the car drove off.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

I kicked out with my tied up legs, thrashed, and tried to get the other people in the car to say something to me but to no avail. And the more I screamed, the more suffocating it became inside the bag, so I stopped and concentrated on being able to continue breathing. I was beginning to feel lightheaded from the restricted flow of oxygen. It was best to keep quiet for now, but I was beyond terrified. I had not imagined that a threat other than Revath and the Savages would befall me. What the hell was going on?

I tried to pay attention to the movements of the car so I could get some sense of where I was being taken, but the bag over my head was disorienting, which of course was the point. It was even hard to maintain a sense of how long we had been driving; it could have been minutes or hours. At some point we stopped, and when the door opened, a rush of cold air swept over me before I was roughly pulled out of the car. This time I wasn’t thrown over a shoulder, I was dragged across the ground. I couldn’t resist the urge to struggle, but my efforts were futile. Soon, more footsteps joined the two from the car ride. In my semi-suffocating, completely blind state, my best guess was that there were three others.

I heard a door open, then I was pulled in and the door closed. I was dragged a short while longer before I was dropped. I would have tried to get up if it wasn’t for the fact that my wrists and ankles were bound. So I lay there, feeling as though my heart was crawling up my throat. My body shook and it wasn’t from the cold.

Another set of footsteps approached, then stopped close by. Moments later the first kick came, right to my ribs. The shock of it rolled me onto my side with a pain-filled gasp. I barely had time to process what happened before another kick came, and another, and another. I was pulled up and punched in the face before being thrown back down roughly. My head hit the concrete ground and it was all I could do not to pass out.

They didn’t only use their feet and fists. Something that felt like metal slammed onto my collarbone and the searing pain that radiated through my body was indescribable. I kept coughing up blood, which made my situation inside the bag even worse. I screamed and cried out and begged them to stop, but the assault kept coming. Every inch of my body was battered with fists, booted feet, and crude weapons until finally they stopped, and let my limp, broken, bleeding body slump to the floor.

Someone grabbed the front of my shirt and pulled me up. By the whiff of bad breath I got through the bag, I knew he had bent close. It wasn’t over. This was round two. I didn’t have anything left in me to scream, I had no choice but to surrender to another beating. But no fist came slamming into my head. Instead, he spoke.

“Maybe this will teach you not to go poking into things that are none of your business,” he said. I could barely process the words; it felt like my brain had broken into a dozen different pieces that were rolling around in my skull. “Stop looking into the warlocks or the next time we won’t be so gentle.” He pushed me down and the footsteps started walking away from me.

A heady scent filled my nose as I spiraled into the comforting arms of unconsciousness.

I never knew blood could smell so sweet.

* * *

When I woke up, I immediately wished I could fall back asleep. Being aware of every part of my body that was broken or sore was overwhelming. I blinked my bleary eyes against the assault of bright lights. What was it about hospitals that felt bright lights were what an unconscious person should wake up to?

Ethan stood over me, looking worried and scared, which lessened only a little bit when he saw me staring up at him.

“Hey,” I croaked.

“Hey,” he replied tentatively. “How…how are you feeling?” His hand was gently covering mine so as not to interfere with the IV that was in it.

“Like absolute hell. What…happened?” Talking was excruciating, as was breathing. Every single breath was accompanied by a stab of pain that indicated that I either had severely bruised or broken ribs. Oh, how I longed to go back to sleep.

“We knew you wanted to be alone, but we were worried, so Kyo followed you after you left the house. He saw some man bag you and drive off with you but was too far away to stop it. He tried to follow but lost you. So he came back to the house and I called the police, but no one was able to track you down. Then about an hour later an anonymous call with your location came in and the police found you in an abandoned warehouse in Red Hook. That was four days ago.”

“Four…days?” God, I wished I knew sign language. Although my hands and arms were pretty useless to me right now as well. I only now noticed that one was in a sling and the other was in a cast from my elbow down.

“Your injuries were…severe…” Ethan wouldn’t look at me.

“Tell me,” I whispered.

Ethan sighed. “Dislocated shoulder, broken collarbone, fractured forearm, three broken ribs, broken femur, fractured shin bone, concussion, collapsed lung, internal bleeding…”

“Holy…shit.” No wonder I felt like I had been rolled over by a Mack truck. My left thigh was in a cast, as was my leg from the shin down. They might as well have just put me in a body cast. My entire body had been fucked up. My anger rose and I had to fight to keep it down because it was causing my breathing to accelerate and that was the last thing I needed when every breath felt like a knife was slicing through me.

“The doctors are saying that you’re healing faster than you should be.”

“Thanks to Garrus,” I said around a cough. Ethan poured me a glass of water and helped me drink it.

“Yeah, the connection to him is helping you recover at a much faster rate, which is a good thing at least.”

Until Garrus pops over, then all of these injuries will re-appear again, along with everything else I endured. I couldn’t help the shudder that passed through me. My body had been so badly battered since being linked to Garrus that it scared me out of my mind to think of enduring that all over again. And all I could do was keep praying that he did not make his way through the open circle.

“Where’s Micah?” An absolutely stricken look came over Ethan, and he started fidgeting even more and would not look at me. I was already feeling as bad as I thought I could feel but his reaction to my simple question made me feel even worse.

“Ethan, where is Micah?”

Ethan started wringing his hands and looked at the floor. “Selene, don’t you remember what happened? What…what made you leave the house in the first place?”

I frowned as I thought back to the night I was beaten, and then I remembered. I gasped, and a wave of pain crashed over me and I had to lay back and try to keep myself as still as possible, waiting for the intense pain to lessen.

“Revath turned him into a Savage.” My eyes filled with angry tears. I wanted to destroy every part of Revath.

Ethan nodded sadly.

“Has there been any sign of him at all?”

“No,” Ethan replied. “There haven’t been any more Savage sightings. Or Revath. Kyo has been searching for them, for Micah, but…”

“Micah…”

“We’ll find him, Selene.”

I knew he was just saying that to make me feel better. Ethan knew as well as I did that we were powerless against Revath.

“Where’s Kyo?” I asked after a few moments.

“Home, worried,” Ethan replied. “He will be happy to know that you’ve woken up.”

I nodded, leaning back against the pillows. I was in pain, scared, angry, frustrated, and really wanted to be home in my own bed.

“The police don’t have any leads on who did this to you,” Ethan said sadly.

I gave a harsh bark of laughter even though it hurt. “I’m not surprised Ethan,” I said. “Not surprised at all.”

* * *

A week later I was home due to what the doctors were calling a miraculously speedy recovery. They of course knew nothing of Garrus and the real reason I was getting better so quickly, and I was not inclined to enlighten them. My leg injuries had healed, so I was able to walk. All of my casts were off, and my ribs were coming along; it only felt like I was being poked by a knife instead of stabbed.