Darkness came and went more times than I could count. It all blurred together. It could have been hours or weeks with only the bright flashes of pain to interrupt the numbness and unnerving warmth. None of it made sense even when I remembered the IV bags. Occasionally my mouth flooded with the taste of copper or an injection burned through my thigh or hip, and I would feel better long enough to remember why I shouldn’t have felt better. Then the gray twilight returned and the cycle started over.
Until finally I opened my eyes and everything came back into focus – including the pain. I groaned and didn’t bother hiding it. My head pounded in time with my heart; it felt like a watermelon on a toothpick.
“There you are,” a cool voice said, and I tensed. The lights changed and dimmed, hiding part of Dragomir’s expression from me. “I was beginning to suspect you were a lost cause.”
I winced and moved my right arm until my whole side objected. A heavy splint and miles of bandages encased my arm from fingers to shoulder, and similar wrappings weighed down my left leg and right shin. “What day is it?”
His lips compressed and a hint of teeth showed against his lower lip, then he turned away to retrieve another tray. “It’s night. Sunday.”
Counting the days from when I’d fallen off the trail and been injured took way too much effort, but at least I knew I’d missed my deadline to get the film to the producers.
I was too late.
My eyes closed and despair settled around my heart. Damn it. My best chance to find Jamie slipped away, destroyed by a madman and some weird rich dude who lurked in the backwoods mountains.
“That is not good news, I take it?”
His accent lingered, strange enough I couldn’t place it. Foreign but softened by time and distance. Definitely not American. Perhaps European. Northern or Eastern European. The dark hair fell across his forehead, longer on top and cut short on the sides, and his deep-set eyes gave his features a vaguely predatory cast. My first instincts resurfaced, sensing danger, though I couldn’t put my finger on why. Just because a man wore cuff links didn’t mean he was civilized and safe.
He watched me and waited for a response as my thoughts drifted with regrets over missing my deadline. I cleared my throat a couple of times until I thought my voice would remain steady. “I had to get something done by Saturday. Clearly I didn’t, so I lost a job.”
Dragomir made a thoughtful noise as he lifted a bowl from the tray to show me plain broth. He spooned a bit into my mouth. “The documentary, yes?”
“You found my stuff?” Appreciation for his assistance quickly disappeared under a deeper, invasive regret. “You looked through it?”
My cheeks tightened, though it seemed impossible I still had enough blood left to blush. What if he’d listened to my whole sad story and my research into possible migratory patterns for Sasquatches in Appalachia? If he was actually my competition, he could steal my research and all my leads, my evidence, everything… My heart jumped with outrage. Samples and scraping filled my pack, along with the half-written paper I’d begun preparing in anticipation of the show becoming popular. He held a copy of it along with all the information I’d stockpiled. Dragomir saved my life, no doubt about that, but what if it was only to steal my professional future?
He waited for me to stop fidgeting and fuming before he continued feeding me the soup. “Of course. I intended to notify your next of kin, in case you took a turn for the worse, yet there wasn’t much information of use.”
“You shouldn’t have listened to the footage.”
“Worried about what I’ll think of a Bigfoot hunter wandering around on my mountain?” The corner of his mouth turned up as he glanced at me, and my heart sank. So he thought I was crazy, too. Maybe that made us even, since I was pretty sure he wasn’t right in the head.
“No,” I said. My face grew hot once more; maybe it was just a fever and not more embarrassment. There wasn’t any reason to be embarrassed about my research in front of such a slick, well-dressed guy. “I happen to be on the cutting edge of cryptozoological research. I observe cryptids and document their presence and activity. It’s a legitimate scientific field.”
He put aside the empty bowl and offered instead a sports drink for me to sip. “I don’t remember the last time I saw a paper about cryptids in a peer-reviewed journal, Ada.”
“What do you know?” I muttered. Flouncing away or at least rolling to my side so I didn’t have to see his perfect face and the hint of amusement around his eyes would have been great. I hated the defensiveness in my reaction and wanted to bury it all under the façade of indifference that had served me so well in grad school classes filled with male students twice my age who didn’t hesitate to dismiss me. But I didn’t have the mental bandwidth to regulate the emotions into obedience, so I ended up sounding sullen and pouty as a teenager. “You live in the mountains and wear stupid clothes that are completely impractical. You belong out here even less than a sasquatch does.”
The amusement definitely increased as he sat back. “Ah. The pain medication must be wearing off.”
He set a syringe against the IV port and I started to snap he’d better not drug me again. The sharp metal taste of medication filled my mouth before I could even get a word out. My muscles relaxed and the pain dissipated in the cold rush of medication in my veins; I only recognized the agony I’d been in when it was no longer there. “Why did you think that?”
“You get peckish when you’re in pain.” His stool rolled away so he could dispose of the syringe and retrieve another bag of fluids to hang on the IV pole. “I’ve felt your wrath many times over the past few days. I went through my store of fentanyl quickly and only recently resupplied.”
“How do you get that?” I blinked to clear the fog from my thoughts but instead it took ages for my eyes to open back up. It would be good to know how the weirdo came by the sedative, in case I could pick some up for tranquilizing a sasquatch or other cryptid. “That’s a controlled substance.”
“I have my ways.” He offered me the sports drink once more. “I’m sure someone with your education could synthesize it with ease.”
My face floated away as I gazed up at the ceiling, waiting for the rest of me to follow, and pondered why I needed to be mad. Something to do with the cryptids. My research. His stupid clothes. “I’m looking for what’s already out there. Not something fake or made in a lab. I collect samples and document migration and sequence genomes. The cryptids are out there. Some of them, at least.” I snorted. “And chemistry is stupid.”
Dragomir smiled faintly. “There is a great deal in the world that is unexplained. Even beyond your cryptids.”
Time drifted as everything went blurry and soft. Dragomir moved around in the room, and the quiet strains of classical music faded in and tangled in my brain. I exhaled. Maybe this would be my life. Confined to a weird white room while a creepy dude hooked me up to IVs and gave me pain meds. “You said you wanted my help. Why? And how? I can’t do anything – like this.”
I would have gestured but neither of my arms obeyed. Which would have made my point perfectly if he’d been paying attention.
He made one of those thoughtful noises and rolled the sleeves of his shirt back. The pale skin of his forearms and hints of tattoos in blue ink distracted me as he adjusted the sheets covering me. “You have a great deal of training in scientific experimentation. I have a… special condition that has no cure. You can assist me in developing a better understanding of the condition and how it might be managed.”
Finally, something I could hold on to and focus on. But incredulity had me lifting my head to stare at him. “You want me to run experiments on you?”
He shrugged but didn’t elaborate.
My head weighed a million fucking pounds and landed back on the pillow after only a few heartbeats. “What kind of condition?”
“A blood abnormality,” he said. His expression turned guarded but my instincts remained silent as the intrigue of scientific discovery filtered through the opioid haze. “Very unique.”
Weights dragged my eyes shut, but I couldn’t turn my brain off. I couldn’t stop the line of questioning, not when I might be the one to cure an incurable condition. Maybe more than just Dragomir suffered from the condition. Maybe this would be a way to scientific notoriety that had nothing to do with chasing Mothman through Appalachia. Then Betsy would get off my back about getting a ‘respectable job.’ “I’m not an immunologist, you know. I’m hardly an expert in how to treat similar conditions, and I’m not an MD. Don’t get your hopes up.”
But I loved a challenge, and as long as I was laid up, unable to move, I might as well work on a mental puzzle. I didn’t wait for him to agree with my lack of qualifications. “How does it present?”
“Photosensitivity,” he said. He tugged at the bandages and splints around my left leg, unwinding them with singular focus. “With catastrophic cellular damage to any samples presented to UV light.”
“Huh. Sunlight.” I licked my lips to clear the bitter taste of the opioids. “It’s not porphyria or solar urticaria?”
“No. I ruled those out fairly quickly. The symptoms do not align with phototoxicity or other known photosensitivities.” His accent strengthened and shifted, somehow turned ancient. Just the tone and cadence of his words mesmerized me more than the pain meds. “Severe allergies to certain food groups. Insomnia. Dental malocclusion.”
Even more interesting. I hadn’t seen any deformed teeth, not that he’d smiled enough to really tell. “I’m not a diagnostician. I don’t know anything about identifying or treating human illnesses.”
“You’re the closest thing I’ve found to an expert,” he said. “You’ve got additional qualifications I would like to… exploit.”
“What, I’m the only PhD tied up in your basement?”
Dragomir’s mouth tugged wider in a smile, revealing slightly elongated canine teeth. “That is true, however it is not the primary reason. You’ve demonstrated an openness to things existing beyond the boundaries of accepted science. That is useful, perhaps more than you know, to someone like myself.”
My eyes narrowed. Maybe I’d actually died and gotten stuck in some weird-ass purgatory or coma. I didn’t believe in ghosts but comas and hallucinations definitely existed, particularly after head and emotional trauma and hefty opioid usage. He could be nothing more than a figment of my imagination, a dying brain’s effort at distraction on the way to nothingness. “Why would your cure be beyond rational science?”
“Rational science has failed to cure it,” he said. “Which makes me believe any possible solutions must exist beyond it. Do you not think so?”
A headache crept around the edges of the opioids and latched into the space behind my eyes. “I don’t know. I try not to make assumptions about things like that before I can look at the evidence. Although there’s no telling how much help I’ll be like this. I can’t even sit up and only one arm sort of works.”
“I don’t think you’re in quite as bad shape as you assume.” He lifted the lower splint on my leg away. “It looks like you only bruised your femur and twisted your knee, but there wasn’t a break in your tibia or fibula.”
The headache beat harder, more intense. I remembered the snap of bones breaking as I fell off the trail, and being in that white room as Dragomir wrapped the splint around my leg. A vague look at yellow-white bone sticking up where it shouldn’t have been. “That’s impossible. It was broken. My leg was broken.”
“Perhaps it felt that way.” He turned away but I couldn’t look at anything except the lumps of my bruised and battered legs. “Your ribs were bruised as well. Those hurt the worst, from my experience, although you should be able to sit up and move around in another day, if we bind them up well.”
Another day. I tried to move my leg. Just in case. “I should probably call my family to let them know I’m okay. So they don’t worry about me.”
“There is no reception this far out,” he said. “The signal can’t penetrate the mountains.”
It made sense. It definitely made sense. Even if I didn’t know where “this far out” actually was. My chest still tightened with anxiety. “What about a landline?”
“No services out here at all.” Dragomir’s head tilted and he smiled once more.
It was the first time I could pinpoint what bothered me about his expressions – the smile never reached his eyes. The skin around his eyes didn’t crinkle. Nothing in those cool blue-gray irises reflected anything but my face back at me. His posture didn’t change in the slightest. “I have a generator for electricity and a well for water.”
“What about food? And all this – stuff?” I needed to know how he survived so long that I’d never run across him or anything like he had set up in all of my wandering. There weren’t places in the mountains to hide the kind of facility he had to have, if I’d been on the brink of death and he had the medical equipment to save my life. How did he get it all out there? Helicopter? Drones? Maybe, just maybe, if this guy hid from all the searches, Jamie was still out there, waiting to be found.
Maybe he’d seen Jamie, found him. Maybe Dragomir saved my brother’s life, too, and sent him on his way. Or still had him locked in the basement. My heart beat faster.
Dragomir shrugged once more. “Food is not a problem if you know where to look. As to the equipment… On occasion I have a colleague bring more supplies out via truck or mule. I prefer to meet him somewhere else, so even he does not know the location of my home.”
“Why don’t you want him to know where you live?”
“I’m an eccentric,” was all he said.
Eccentrics who hid the location of their houses from even their friends probably weren’t about to let a complete stranger walk away from that house so she could reveal the location. Even if that stranger could experiment with treatments for whatever mysterious disorder he had.
I focused on keeping my breathing nice and normal. No reason to let him know I was about to freak the fuck out. “Right. Of course. When do you want me to look at… whatever it is you want me to look at?”
“Tomorrow.” Dragomir cleaned up the rest of his supplies. “I would not recommend standing on your own in the interim. Here are some books, water, and more broth. I have business yet tonight that will require my attention, but use this call button to alert me if you need assistance.”
He didn’t wait for an answer as he paced to the door. It was the first time I remained conscious when he left the room; I concentrated with all my might to memorize every motion and detail as he walked out. He moved with a fluidity and grace bordering on impossible for a dude that tall. “Rest well, Ada.”
“Uh, sure.” I held my breath as he disappeared through the door, then listened as it shut behind him.
A soft click followed. A lock. He’d locked me in.
My mouth dried with panic. I was definitely a prisoner, and not just because my maybe-broken leg kept me from moonwalking to freedom.
Whatever was going on, I had to figure it the hell out before things got even dicier. I didn’t know what his game was, what kind of mental fuckery he got off on. I’d figure it out or die trying.
I didn’t feel anywhere near as awful as I had when I woke up the first time. I knew I should have died after falling down that ravine. I knew it. And yet somehow he pulled me back from the brink. What kind of superhuman doctor was he? What magic had he worked so far from civilization and a Level I trauma center?
I blamed the lingering effects of the fentanyl for the inability of my brilliant fucking brain to figure out what the hell was going on.
I was smart enough to figure it out. I had to. He didn’t have to let me leave, and no one would find me if I disappeared without a whisper. I stared at the door. That damn locked door. I could think my way through it, like every other problem in life. I could. I was a goddamned genius. I knew more about the world at three than most people learned in their freakin’ lifetime. I had so many advanced degrees I could have traded them in like carnival prizes. I’d been part of a team nominated for a fucking Nobel prize before I knew how to drive.
I would figure out what the hell his motive was and I would win whatever mind games he wanted to play. I would survive, because that’s what Montgomerys did.