Angelic

Ev ~ 13

WARNING: this chapter contains detailed torture methods and the emotional trauma it can have on a person. Read at your own risk.

...

I forgot about time first. Being in an unknown place, where it was always dark and you lost all sense of day and night, it seemed worthless to try and tell how long I'd been here. I blacked out so many times that it made it even harder.

There were only two things on my mind. I didn't know why I kept thinking about them. The things these creatures did to me, their methods of torture... It was enough to make me forgot my name. But those words, and that place--they kept running through my mind, again and again and again.

A beautiful, confident girl sat across from a tall, brunette-haired boy. It was easy to tell that the girl was confident just in the way she held herself. And the boy across from looked happy, like she was the reason for her happiness. A pizza pie was placed between them on the mustard-colored table. They talked, but the words were muffled, but their laughs were clear. I couldn't say how I knew, but it was intuition, like knowing a best friend from behind--the girl was me.

The memory came to me sometimes when I became conscious again, only to be chased away by painful memories of whips against my back and scorching hot needles peeling back my fingernails.

It was relief to pass out from exhaustion. I didn't dream of anything. I was grateful--it was the only time I ever found peace, the only time the air wasn't filled with screams.

There was something else that went through my mind in the few moments between waking and being tortured. Words that were forgotten as soon as I thought them, but were saved in the recess of my subconscious. You're so strong, Eveline Carstairs. Your strength makes you brave. And that bravery, that courage... It's rare, even in a Shadowhunter. Don't let this new world change you. Don't let them take that away from you. I didn't know who Eveline Carstairs was; it only sounded familiar. I didn't know what a Shadowhunter was, either. No memory came with the name. I didn't know who spoke the words, or who the words were spoken to, but they gave me hope. I wouldn't be able to explain why. If anything ever deserved to be called hopeless, it was the hell I had walked into.

Luckily, I only remembered a few of the times they tortured me. One of the worst was when they tied me down to some hard piece of wood, both of my hands and feet stuck in place. They placed a cloth over my face, blinding me in darkness, and then poured water over the cloth for what felt like half a minute. The wetter the cloth was, the tighter it wrapped around my face, suffocating me. Only once or twice did they take the cloth off my face, allowing me a few gasps of cool, sharp air, but I assumed it was only to keep me conscious longer.

A few of the times I woke up, I was in an empty room. At least, I assumed it was an empty room. There was no sound from anything but me, and it was pitch black. My eyes wouldn't adjust to the dark, despite my night vision Rune. It was these times when I realized how thirsty I was, and I would begin choking and coughing because my throat was so dry. My stomach grumbled and tightened with hunger pains, but it was nothing compared to everything else I was forced to endure. Once I had woken up and was fully aware of the fact that I wasn't going to be tortured again in the next thirty seconds, I focused on other things, like trying to get out of here--wherever that was--and figuring out who kidnapped me and why they would want to torture me. I didn't get to ponder on that too long, though, because it was soon after that I would hear someone else's screams, someone else crying out in agony as I had earlier. It was clearly a male, a man by the sounds of it. I heard his voice occasionally, more and more the longer I was here. It caused worry in me. Was I taken to a concentration camp? Shadowhunters didn't have those, but what if Shadowhunters hadn't kidnapped me? What if something... more powerful had? Other times, when I wondered who took me, I couldn't even recall what Shadowhunters were, or if it was a strange word I had made up. The only thing I knew was that it never seemed to end.