REAPING INNOCENCE ◦ STILINSKI [3]

xxxiii.

xxxiii. THE PATH TO PARADISE...

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IT WAS DARK, and very cold.

    Her eyelids fluttered open and that took care of the darkness. As for the cold...she was bone-cold, freezing, chilled to the marrow. Glancing around, she quickly gathered that she was somewhere underground. Rats or mice were scuffling somewhere among the darkness, but the sound didn't bother her.

    What had happened? She was very confused and she began assembling information about the night before. She'd been at the school. They were trying to protect Hayden from the Dread Doctors when...Oh, God. They found me.

    This is it, thought Carter, her breath catching in her throat. Oh, my God, this is it; this is really it. It was too much to cope with; she couldn't think. She had the sudden intense sensation of being in the middle of a lucid dream, one where she knew she was dreaming but she couldn't change anything or wake up. Her muscles were deadlocked.

    She could smell the fear from the brothers, and could feel the sharp edge of it. Twisting, she tried to find them, but their bodies were concealed by the darkness. The swinging overhead lights skimmed over objects around her, but at first Carter's eyes could make no sense of them. She saw angles, planes, contours, and then something leaped into focus. A dead-white face, floating grotesquely in a tank filled with a translucent green fluid.

    If she'd never seen the body before, she would've screamed. Something was scattered about the floor like fragile ivory sticks. They were human bones, splintered and crushed.

    Thick metal cuffs chained her to the floor, preventing her from getting up. With a quick yank, she attempted to break the chain but a sharp pain stabbed at her arm. Looking down she saw that thick needle was imbedded into the crease of her elbow filled with a murky black liquid. She could feel it working through her veins, thick and warm.

    But suddenly her head was reeling; it was full of gray and spinning fog and she couldn't seem to clear it. She couldn't think; she couldn't speak. The floor seemed to be dropping away from her. Dimly, she realized that whatever the unknown fluid in the IV was being used against her, that it was overwhelming her body and her mind.

    Carter felt her body giving, and she could no longer resist the fog. She fell forever.

While unconscious, time was fluid. Carter had no idea how long she'd been out or how long she'd been chained down; minutes, hours, days...there was no way of knowing. She struggled to open her eyes for several moments before she finally succeeded. And even before she could focus in the dim and shifting light, she knew. She finally knew.

    The figure in the leather pants and jacket turned from the jar of fluid she was inspecting, and Carter saw her own face on its shoulders. But now, it was different from her own. It was a subtly distorted face, pale and beautiful as an ice sculpture, but wrong. It was like the endless reflections of herself Carter had seen in her dream of the hall of mirrors. Twisted and hungry, and mocking.

    "Hello, Raeven," she whispered.

    Raeven smiled, a sly and predatory smile. "You figured it out rather quickly that I was the one who killed you. You're not as stupid as I thought when I first met you," she said.

    Carter's throat was sore, as if she had been screaming. It felt dry as well. When she turned her head slowly to the side, even that little motion hurt. Liam was beside her, slumped forward, bound by his arms with a thick tube stuck in the crease of his elbow. His head sagged against his chest, but what she could see of his face was deathly white. His throat was torn, blood had dripped onto his shirt collar and dried.