| |
This couldn’t be happening. Stupid Doctor Wagner, I trusted him. I believed he would be honest, he promised he would. He just never specified we had different truths.
I had to come up with something, fast.
With my hands in my hair, I paced up and down the hallway for the small break Grandmamma granted me. The grant hall echoed the sighs of my desperation, only strengthening the nerves. If I couldn’t come up with something good, something solid, Stina would walk.
This was my one chance.
The door to Grandmamma’s office cracked open again and she appeared. “It’s time.”
“Just a little longer, I need time to find more evidence, I need—”
“The truth doesn’t need evidence,” she interrupted me. “It’s merely the truth.”
“Then why don’t you believe me!?”
Disappointment fell over her face as soon as I shouted at her and I knew I shouldn’t have. She hated that, she always had.
“I can get you another witness. Ria Riadottir, she’s working at the hospital here, she’s been taking care of Heike. She’ll testify, she—”
“No, she’s biased.”
If I couldn’t rely on Ria’s expertise, I was out of ideas and I didn’t have time to come up with new ones.
I stared at Grandmamma, balling my hands into fists. “I just need a day, I’ll find you the truth. You owe me a day.”
She scoffed, but didn’t correct me. “An hour, Brynhild. Don’t make me look like a fool.”
“An hour? What am I going to accomplish in an hour?”
“That’s not my problem.” Grandmamma turned around with the dismissive flair that she perfected over the years and left me with my troubles.
I stared at the closed door for just a moment, before realising I wasn’t going to find my answer in here. I had to get out there, maybe get someone from the Academy here?
No, they’d never make it in time. But who could help me prove what I knew to be true if Ria wasn’t allowed to testify?
I descended the short staircase in front of the East Mansion, faced with the wind and the reality of my situation. The only way I could convince Grandmamma was to wake Heike up. A task easier said than done, considering she’d been in a coma for almost a month.
Still, this was my only hope.
***
“YOU WANT ME TO DO WHAT?” Ria asked, her voice shrieking as we turned a corner in the sterile hallways in the hospital. She needed to complete her rounds and I was tagging along while I picked her mind.
“I need Heike to wake up now.”
She chuckled in disbelief. “I can’t just make that happen.”
“I need you to make it happen.” The urgency made itself known in my voice.
“Bryn, that’s not how medicine works.”
I growled. If I couldn’t get her to tell Grandmamma in person that Stina did this to her, then it was all over.
“There has to be something,” I tried. “Some kind of old potion, or maybe a plant, or maybe a medicine.”
Ria hesitated long enough for me to catch it.
“There is something, you’re just reluctant to tell me.”
“I...” She pulled me into one of the supply closets and glared at me. “You can’t tell anyone about this.”
“I swear.”
“Nobody.”
“I won’t.”
“Nobody, Bryn.”
“I get it!” The desperation cracked my voice. “Just tell me what it is.”
“I’m not sure, but there’s a story I heard. I had a patient once, she was... She got badly injured in a fight. She was unconscious for two weeks.” Ria checked the door before she continued, the paranoia clear in her eyes. “When she woke up, she told me about this... harrowing place. She was frozen, she couldn’t move. She knew she wasn’t supposed to be there, she said she felt it in her soul, but she couldn’t tell me how she knew.”
“Tell me more,” I demanded, not just curious for Heike’s sake. It sounded fascinating.
“She said she wasn’t alone there. There were others, all like her. Frozen, never moving once. She told me all of this just after she regained consciousness, but the next day, she couldn’t remember any of it. When I asked her about it, it was gone from her mind.”
“How strange.”
Ria nodded. She looked haunted in the dim lighting of the dark closet, almost like she was the one living the story.
“What else did she say?” I asked.
“She said it was cold, not uncomfortably so. Just... cold.”
“And? How did she come back from it?”
That was what I needed to know.
My friend shot me an apologetic smile. “She didn’t know, she couldn’t remember.”
“Come on, there has to be more that you remember. What else?”
“I-I don’t know, I... She was scrambled and confused, she said it felt like they were all just waiting for something. She just didn’t know what.”
Waiting...
That sounded familiar, I just couldn’t pinpoint where I heard that before.
Waiting... Cold...
The thoughts raced through my head like wild horses, amounting to nothing but a vague sense of recognition. It was there, I Just couldn’t quite get to it.
“You have that look on your face,” Ria said, gesturing to me. “What are you thinking?”
“I feel like I’ve connected the dots, but I can’t see the answer.” I softly bopped my fists against my temple, trying to jolt my memory into action. “It sounds familiar, somehow.”
“How’s that possible? You haven’t been unconscious have you?”
I shook my head. “I suppose not.”
“I mean, unless you’ve been dead—”
“Dead,” I interjected, the lights going on in my head, illuminating the last piece of the puzzle. “That’s it. The Hall of Time.”
“The what now?”
“It’s a place in the Veil, I don’t have time to explain. I’ve been there before. It’s, it’s a hall with frozen people, they’re souls, waiting. I thought they were all human, but there was a draw, a pull. I felt it, so it has to be there. I need to find Father Grim!”
“You’re not making any sense, but it sounds like you know what to do,” Ria said. She pushed me in the back. “Go. Go, go!”
“Right, I need to. I, ummm...”
Shit. Last time I travelled into the Veil on my own, I had Grey with me and I feared for my life. I should’ve brought my dusk wolf with me or taught Grey to travel to me on command.
How was I going to do that? What could I do?
I looked around me, an idea sparking in my mind. There were gauzes and bandages, towels and tubes, bottles and syringes. It was no poisonous chain, but if I couldn’t find something here that would put me out for a bit...
It was a crazy idea, but I had to do this. I had to prove my worth to Grandmamma, yes. But this was about something else. Bringing Heike back.
I pulled up my sleeve and held out my arm. “Inject me.”
Ria scoffed. “What?”
“I don’t care what it is. Enough to almost kill me.”
“Are you mad?”
“Yes.” I rummaged through the supplies, looking for a tourniquet that would help my veins puff up. “I know what I’m doing.”
“I can’t do this, Bryn. What if I kill you?”
“You won’t.”
“But, what if—”
I expanded my wings in the cramped space. They thudded against the metal shelves causing bottles and plastic containers to fall to the ground with rattling pills and glass shards.
I held out my arm again. “I’m a Valkyrie. Death is my job.”
Ria hesitated for a moment, before she groaned loudly. “Why am I friends with you? You always get us into trouble.”
“I always get us out of it too.”
“That’s true.” She sighed as she grabbed a dark bottle from the top of the shelves. The plastic casing of the syringe crackled like a candy wrapper and the needle flickered dangerously. She drew a good amount of the clear liquid and held it up to expel air bubbles.
“What is that?”
“It’s better you don’t know.” She rested the tip of the needle on my arm. “Are you ready?”
“Yes.”
“When I inject this much into you, it’ll race to your heart,” she explained. “Don’t die.”
“I won’t.”
The sharp prick surprised me, but the pain quickly ebbed away and made place for a cold creeping in my veins. It corrupted my bloodstream and reacted with the wind magic within me, teasing it, challenging it.
A familiar sensation enwrapped me and it wasn’t until long that a gust of black smoke curled around me. The smokey tendrils lured me in, tugging on my wings and wrapping me in the shadows of the world. The darkness stole me away and left me dangling on the thin edge between life and death. The Veil.