The darkness gathered back into itself, so that all around me was a hazy grey light, like the sky just before the dawn. In front of me, though, the darkness became solid. Corporeal. The darkness made itself into a cloaked woman, and she was walking towards me.

"The wild hunt," she said, as though no time had passed between then and our last conversation. For all she seemed to care, I was asleep in the bath again, rather than unconscious and god knew where.

"I have to find Kieran," I said. "I have to-"

"All you have to do," the woman said. Her voice echoed around me with the power of a thousand voices still, but it seemed that one voice was stronger now. So strong that it made the other voices sound weak and insignificant. The weird thing was, there was something achingly familiar about that voice. I could have sworn I'd heard it somewhere before. Somewhere in real life. "Is look."

Her body drifted apart again, like smoke blown on the wind. Only, instead of smoke, I was embraced by a cloud of darkness. It surrounded me in such a dark inky blackness it may as well have been solid.

"Look," I heard her whisper in my ear. A bed formed up out of the darkness. A huge, ornate four poster, with thick blankets and billowy curtains around it. I took a step closer and saw, lying in the middle of that giant bed, a man. An old man. His hands clutched at the blanket, looking frail and thin. His eyes were wide in the darkness and a sliver of moonlight glanced off the white of his eyes.

"Who's there?" he asked. His voice trembled.

"I'm Laur--," I started, trying to find a way to explain myself that wouldn't sound completely made up.

"Oh, it's you," he said. He was looking past me. A man had entered his room. He was tall, but I couldn't quite make out his face.

"Who?" I asked. The shadows wrapped around the man thinned, somewhat but I still couldn't make out his features. I frowned.

"We aren't," the voice in my ear gasped, "strong enough."

The shadowed man sat down on the edge of the bed. He picked up one of the old man's pillows.

"I don't need another one," the old man said, waving the pillow away. I guess he was expecting the shadowy figure to prop him up with the extra pillow. Instead, the man that I couldn't see pressed the pillow over the old man's face.

I ran forward. I tried to pull the pillow off the old man's face, tried to pull the other man away, but my gestures were useless. I couldn't touch anything. My hands slid through the pillow. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't change things.

I may as well have been a ghost, for all the difference I made. Oh god, I thought, what if I was? What if that blow to the head had killed me? What if I were dead? For all I knew, I was. It's not like I'd ever bothered to ask anyone what death felt like. What if this was it?

"Good night," the shadowed man said, letting the pillow fall away from the old man's face. The old man's eyes were closed. His veins stood out in sharp contrast and his breath was nonexistent. He was still. Silent. I knew enough of death to recognise it when it was in front of me. The shadowed man leant down and kissed him on the forehead. He whispered a single word that seemed to echo in the darkness.

"Grandfather."

Then the darkness solidified around me again and everything went still and silent once more.

First there was sound. It was hazy, far away sounding like the noise was fighting its way through a blizzard to get to me. Then came the pain, like a searchlight, pulsing through my skull in long sweeping motions that pushed the sound away. I opened my eyes and the room was spinning around me.

Nausea pulled at my stomach and I tried to sit up but something held me down. I couldn't move. My stomach spasmed, waves of muscles coiling, tightening, squeezing, until vomit poured, hot and fast from my mouth. I tried to turn my head to the side, spitting it up, but I retched again and pulled one of the muscles in my neck as my stomach tugged at my attention.

I called out, a long gurgling cry that didn't make sense if you thought of it as a word. It was beyond words, but it communicated my desperation as my throat closed off against the vomit forcing its way back down my throat. I coughed, choking on the hot sour liquid.

Someone stood above me in the darkening room. There was movement. I was pushed onto my side. A hand held firmly against the back of my head, my arms and legs pinned into new positions. I tried to pull my knees into my chest, to curl up in my agony, but my legs were held straight.

I coughed the last of the vomit out and lay weeping, on my side, each shuddering breath dragging the pain of life back into my body. I could feel hot moisture clinging to my body, in my hair. The whole world seemed to reek of my vomit.

I was pushed back onto my back and strapped down. The ceiling was smooth and gray and strangely luminous. There were no light bulbs, that I could see, but the light was spinning in lazy circles around me.

Cold water was thrown over me. I gasped at the sudden shock of iciness. It was freezing. Goose bumps sprung up all over me. I felt my nipples tighten against the cold, my back shudder. Another wave of ice passed over me and I coughed against the immediate chill.

"What if she throws up again?" I heard a voice whisper beside me.

Nobody answered.

I tried to think where I was, where I'd been taken from, who had taken me. I remembered being in the library with Jack, looking for Kieran. We'd gone around a corner. I hadn't been expecting to see anyone there. I hadn't even been expecting to see Kieran, since he hadn't answered when I called his name. But he was there. Lying on a couch.

I clung to the images in my mind, from just before someone had smacked me in the face and I'd gone down.

Kieran was lying on the couch but he didn't look relaxed. His head was flung back at an odd angle, his shirt was covered with blood, and there was more blood trickling out of his nose. He wasn't dead though, I know what death feels like, when its that close. He was just beaten. Hurt. Someone had attacked a member of the royal family, and then they'd taken me.

I couldn't remember what happened to Jack, but there were a lot of people there. Five at least. If Jack could take on five people and win, I didn't think I'd be lying there, strapped to a bench, in a room I didn't recognize.

I felt tears track down the side of my face, snaking over my cheekbones to pool in my ears. No one was coming to save me. I'd never felt more alone. It was no longer just a matter of feeling unloved. I was actually, completely and utterly without an ally of any kind. I could die here, and nobody would care.

"Oh, no," I heard a voice that sounded familiar. "What has happened to my beautiful lady of death?"

"Zephan?" I asked. He stepped above me, bending to put his face over mine. The shining beauty of his face was not dulled by his surroundings, if anything, he looked even more unbelievably stunning by contrast.

"What have they done to you?" he stroked my cheek, wiping my tears away and brushed my hair out of my face. I opened my mouth to tell him but my explanation dissolved into a wordless moan as he yanked on my hair. He held his hand up so that I could see the strands of hair that he'd pulled out. He blew the coiled strands out of his hand.

"There, there," he said, bending to kiss me on the forehead, "don't cry." His lips were so hot, I felt like he was branding me with his kiss, burning it into my flesh. He pulled back, hovering bare inches away from me and I had a good look at his eyes for the first time. There was something there that I hadn't seen before. A new light that shone through the blue of his eyes, streaking them with the gleam of insanity.

"Hey, Zephan," I said, trying to make my voice friendly and warm. "What are you doing here?"

"Oh, my sweet, sweet lady," he murmured, lying down beside me, pressing his weight against one side of the straps that bound me, so that I was pulled slightly towards him. "I think you know." He curled his body around me, his heat burning against my frozen skin. I felt his hand skim up, over my rib cage. He caressed the underside of my breast, tracing gentle circles up and around. The circles got smaller and smaller until his fingertips rubbed across my nipple.

Warm tingles of colour seemed to spread from his fingertips, caressing my entire body, flooding me with warmth and comfort. I felt like I could trust Zephan. Like I could tell him anything.

I arched my back, pressing my breast more firmly into his hand. The bindings cut in just under my rib and across my shoulder but I didn't care, so long as Zephan kept touching me. I turned my head into his shoulder and inhaled the soft cinnamon scent of his skin. Beneath the smell of cinnamon, the sourly acidic traces of my vomit came through, from where they hadn't managed to rinse it all from my hair. I pulled back, shocked and disgusted by the way I'd forgotten myself under Zephan's persistent caress.

As I jerked away from Zephan, I saw a thin ribbon of purple light stretch between his fingertips and my body.

"Magic?" I asked, incredulously. "You used magic? Is that why you're so popular? You cheat?"

Zephan glared at me. He gripped my nipple between his finger and very slowly and carefully, without breaking eye contact, he twisted. I cried out at the pain. Then I spat in his face. He got off the bench, so that he was standing over me again. He wiped my spit away, then, with the same hand, struck me.

Pain shot through my cheekbone, making it throb. Slowly, the searing pain dulled to a warm tingle. I tried to ignore the tears running across my face as I glared up at Zephan.

"We could have done this gently," he said. His voice sounded tight and hard. "You could just give in now, come to me. If you wanted you could rule beside me. We could be the most powerful couple in all of history, you know. The greatest rulers of all time."

"Great for who?" I spat, thinking of the hordes of Fae who were sacrificed to the land on a daily basis.

"For us of course," he leaned over me so that his eyes were directly above mine. "I could make it so that no one would ever hurt you again," he said. His eyes were gentle as he gazed on me, as though he saw something worth being soft and warm to. As though he thought it would get him somewhere. He was mistaken. I knew that there was nothing gentle in him, nothing kind. Every inch of warmth and understanding I'd ever felt from him had been a ruse, every ounce of charm a lie, a mere conjurers trick.

"Or you could go fuck yourself," I said.

"No," he said softly, "my dearest lady of death. I could fuck you up." He stepped away from me, motioning to someone. I heard the rattling sound of old wheels, like a shopping trolley, and another bench was brought up beside me. I turned my head to look at the other bench. It took me a while to process what it was I was seeing.

There were straps on the other bench, like there were on mine, but what they were holding was so burnt and bloody that I could barely recognize it as human. Then he turned and looked at me, rolling his head to the side to make eye contact. They'd left the area around his eyes untouched, so that his stare remained entirely human. His eyes were a clear, dark green, like the glass on a wine bottle, his pupils the normal inky black, but the whites of his eyes were red from crying. Tears still leaked out from the corners of his eyes.

I felt my own tears increase in volume. I wept, out of fear for what Zephan would do to me. I was also crying for what had been done to this man. I stretched my hand out, sliding it against the straps that bound me to the bench, and brushed my fingertips against his. He pressed his hand back against mine, wrapping his long fingers around the ends of mine, so that we were almost holding hands.

"This is Oren," Zephan said. Moisture leaked across my hand, pooling between my fingers. I didn't have to look down to see that it was blood. "You remember me telling you about him, don't you?" he asked. He bent down beside my ear to whisper, "I've been missing your strawberry kisses."

I jerked against my bindings. Tears rushed from my eyes in a steady stream, pain shot more heavily behind my eyes. My throat felt like it was swollen shut with the pain of realisation. I'd told Zephan that he was behind the times and he said he'd have to talk to the man who'd put together a research package on my world.

Oren.

He was lying beside me, broken and bleeding, because I'd pointed out the flaw in his research.

Of all the things he could have been torn apart for...

"I'm sorry," I whispered to Oren. "I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry." Zephan slapped me again, but I didn't stop whispering the words, over and over. Not until the first cut came.

Then, all I could do was scream.

You think you know what pain is. You cut yourself shaving. You fall over in the street. You burn yourself, trying to make dinner for the first time. You get dunked by a wave and feel salt water rushing into your mouth and you think you know the fear of death, in those moments before breaking through to the surface.

But you don't know. You don't know what it's like to feel pain coming at you from all directions, knowing that it's organized, knowing that someone is planning to hurt you, knowing that there's a pattern there somewhere. You keep hoping that you'll be able to figure it out, that you can brace against the pain, but it takes a special kind of insanity to torture a person and people who have that, they don't run in patterns that anyone else can understand.

You think you know what pain is until it hurts so much, you don't think you know anything anymore. Until words like pain and agony cease to have any meaning. Ache. Throb. Pound. Shoot. Twinge. Sear. Burn. Wrench. Tear. Rend. Pierce. Stab. Convulse. Contort. Torment. Gnaw. Excruciating. Hell on earth. Prolonged agony. Wounded. Traumatized. Paroxysm. Raw.

I became a thesaurus of pain, but the only thing that had meaning was the smell of burning hair, and burning flesh. The overwhelming feeling. Feeling so hard that I wished I never had to feel anything again. Nothing bad, and nothing good, because anything related to that sensation couldn't possibly be good, for as long as my nerve endings remembered what it was to feel that.

And through it all, I clung to Oren's hand and he held on to me, so that even when I felt like my mind itself was fleeing from the pain, I knew that there was nowhere to run, nowhere to turn to.

In the end I turned my mind down into the darkest place I could find. I dove through the centre of my being. I fell through darkness so thick it quenched the fire clinging to my hair. I fell through myself, dragging Oren with me, and we ended up, collapsed and huddled together on my kitchen floor.

I reached for the telephone and, clinging to my last vestiges of consciousness, I called for an ambulance.

----------------------

Yikes. Who figured out it was Zephan?

And poor Laurel and Oren, do you think they'll survive?

Til next time,

x zuz