The Starling Saviour

Chapter 22

'What happened out there?' Ted yelled angrily as I stirred from my slumber. 'We were supposed to fight back! I was supposed to fight back!'

I tried to look for Ted, but all I could see was nothingness, as if I had been transported into deep space with not a star in sight.

'Where are you?' I shouted back. 'I can't see a thing!'

'We're blindfolded,' Ted replied at once in a sarcastic tone. 'Obviously.'

'I'm sorry, I thought my eyes had been gouged out,' I spurted back as sarcastic as Ted has been. 'Now stop getting so stressy and help me figure out what's happening to us!'

'Okay,' I heard Ted mumble sulkily.

'Is it only us two here?' I started with my 'blind' investigation. 'Have you heard any of the others speak or anything?'

'I got nothing,' Ted said, me imagining him shaking his head at the same time.

'I guess they're not here then,' I concluded to myself quietly, before getting ready to raise my voice again. 'Does that mean they've been separated from us?'

'I guess so,' Ted agreed. 'But why?'

'I have no idea,' I commented, racking my brains. 'What is the gang's motive here, to split our group apart?'

'Maybe us two are too much of a threat to them,' Ted said rather egotistically. 'We're most experienced, by far, but the others aren't. They're just starting out.'

'I don't want to even think about what they'e going to do to us,' I said in an unknown disgust, dreading the worse.

'You won't have to for any longer, Princess,' a voice in a thick American-Italian accent whispered in my ear.

First of all, creepy.

And second of all, who was he?

Removing my blindfold, the man who had just spoken to me smirked in my face, until then proceeding to remove Ted's blindfold too.

'This is certainly no way to treat a 'princess',' I retaliated in irony.

'Who do you think you are?' Ted seethed in anger. 'Holding us here!'

Taking in my surroundings for the first time, I could see that I was tied to old operation chairs you would typically see in a dentist's room, the mere look of them bringing the smell of mouthwash and disposable plastic gloves to my nose.

Well this certainly wasn't going to help my fear of going to the dentists.

The overall stench of the place soon overrode my fears, an almost... venomous scent plaguing my sinuses. A mix of poison and blood.

The rest of the room was shrouded in a clinical and harsh but dim and weary light, from the lone lightbulb hanging, exposed, in the middle of the ceiling. It was hard to turn my head due to my neck being clamped down to the almost flat back of the chair, so I assumed Ted was in the same situation as I.

'It gonna get interesting in here, lady and gentleman,' our mystery captor announced like a sinisterly chessy gameshow host, stretching disposable plastic gloves on his stubby fingers just like I had imagined.