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Her screams followed me into the darkness, a macabre soundtrack as I floated aimlessly in the pitch. I settled from the ether into a liquid semi-consciousness. My hands made ripples across the surface, tickling memories in random flickers of images and sounds—backwards and forwards through my life. Underneath it all, a niggling in the back of my head whispered that I needed to do something.
It was so quiet here, so calming. My arm didn’t hurt. Wait a second.
I lifted it out of the water and frowned as I sat up. The liquid around me seeped away, a sign that I was starting to wake from wherever and whenever I was.
Around the puckering bite marks, the skin had greyed and split, like some morbid child had played connect the dots with a dull scalpel instead of a marker. I touched the gaping edges, and they hurt, hot and heavy chunks of flesh as they fell from my body.
Stupid poison. Stupid naga. Stupid case.
The liquid beneath me rumbled like some giant Tyrannosaurus Rex bounding my way. So much for calm, cool, and collected. I stood, and my feet found solid ground. Better than clouds or an abyss, I guess. It also meant that I wasn’t as bad off as originally suspected. Granted, there were things worse than dying, like falling apart. Another piece dropped from my wound. Was that bone? Well, look at that.
Stupid poison. Stupid naga. Stupid case.
“Zo-Zo, can you hear me?” My sister’s voice rang through my headspace with complete clarity.
What the hell? “Sera?”
“Zoë, if you can hear me, I’m in a big empty building somewhere. There are windows but they’re really high up, and I can’t get people to get off their butts to try and see out. The walls are concrete, and the doors are those big, roll down things. Metal. Man, I hope you can hear this. I hope we’re still connected.”
When we were small children and our gifts were budding, we had found we could talk to each other in our heads. The range was limited, like inside the house or in same part of school, but in times of trouble, we could be louder, farther apart. I think this qualified as trouble, and neither of us was a little girl anymore.
She said there were others with her. That meant they were collecting people in this warehouse. Those people were scared, if they weren’t working together to get out—scared or resigned to their fate. I could work with the first one, and even the second one, but it was harder to convince them they could be saved.
“Sera, I can hear you!” I said it as loud as my inner monologue would allow.
“Zoë, if you can hear me.... Wait, you can hear me?” Her voice held a touch of restrained hope.
“Oh, by the gods, yes, I can hear you!” I jumped up and down, as if the motion would somehow propel my words to her faster.
“Oh, thank God! Did you get my whole message? Hey, I’m not crazy, and I will not shut up, lady! I’m talking to my sister, the witch. Okay, that does sound a little crazy. “
I shook my head. “Sera, I need to know more about your location. How long did it take to get there? Did they take a lot of crazy turns? Did you hear anything out of the ordinary, identifiable? Have you found Esther?”
“No.” The single word carried such sadness. “She’s not here. There aren’t any kids here. Lots of moms, though, and lots of stories like mine. Some of these women have been here months, Zo-Zo. Why collect mothers and babies?”
I shuddered. My case held a pretty plausible theory, but she was keeping her shit together, and I didn’t want to screw with that, so.... “I don’t know.”
She cleared her throat. “Let’s talk about something else, okay? Like where the hell I am.” She paused, and I could almost hear her racking her brain for details. “Um, it didn’t take that long to get here, under an hour, easy. They only blindfolded me. No, no crazy turns or backtracking. I can smell the water from here, so I’m guessing dock? Does that help?”
I sighed. “Yes, a little.” Dock was good. Warehouse on the dock was better, but we lived on the Chesapeake Bay with a bunch of docks, so not as helpful as it could’ve been. “Anything else, Sera? Anything at all? Anything weird that sticks out?”
Nothing.
“Sera?”
More nothing. Dammit. “Seraphina!”
“Hey, you’re not Mom! I’m thinking!”
I exhaled slowly. “Sorry, thought we’d lost connection.”
“No, I’m just.... Wait, the guys that bring us food, they feel empty, like the guys who took me, like that guy at the church.”
Like the guy at the church? Jareth? I shook my head. “Heath?”
“The creepy chipper guy who ran away when you went all witchy.”
“Heath.”
“Sure, that guy.” I could almost hear her shrug. “They all feel like that.”
I chewed on my bottom lip. Heath, despite pretending to be Jareth’s lackey, was the tie between the nagas’ drug trade and the church. He was also a naga himself. Did Jareth know about the dead babies? Did he know about the nagas? About Heath? Why keep the mothers alive? Why keep them at all? What in the world did the king naga guy want with me?
In the nasty case last year, the bad guys had wanted me to join their coven in a mad power grab, spurred by some stupid prophecy. I hadn’t seen anything that made me think the nagas had a similar thing going—the Great Naga seemed quite the powerhouse without little ol’ me. Hell, Jareth, too.
What was I missing?
“Zoë?”
“I’m here. Just thinking.” An awful niggling at the back of my head made my heart sink. “Sera, I’m going to find you, and we’re going to find Esther.”
“Just like you said.” Her voice quavered. Gods, she was scared.
What I would’ve given to hold her right then. “Yes, just like I said.”
“Hurry, okay? This place gives me the creeps.”
“Sera, I love you.”
“Love you, too, Zo-Zo. Please hurry. I can’t shake the feeling that something bad’s coming.”
***
Before I could say anything else, a bright light rose in front of me, hot and white like an interrogation lamp. There was no looking around it or shielding my eyes, and if you could drown in light, I was doing it.
