“A clever strategy, by the way,” Ariadne added.
“A desperate one that bought me all of thirty seconds before he reaffirmed his desire to rape and kill me,” I raged back at her.
“It bought you enough time to allow us to intervene,” she said in a voice that was overly complimentary.
“Allowed him to intervene, you mean.” I pointed at Old Man Winter. “Wolfe called you Jotun – a Nordic frost giant.” He nodded at me with a ponderous, slow dip of his head but did not speak. “You’ve faced Wolfe before?” He nodded again. “But you both survived. And Wolfe has been alive for thousands of years?”
Old Man Winter nodded again and broke his silence once more. “He has. A cannier foe there is not; he has survived living on the razor’s edge all these years and always among people that are the world’s most dangerous. What does it say about him to be able to live millenia in such conditions?”
My heart sank. “That he’s dangerous. Worse than anything you can throw at him.”
Old Man Winter nodded, once more fixated on my eyes. “In order to protect you, we must keep you in this building. Do you understand?”
Unbidden, a memory of the door of the box closing came to me, and I felt a momentary urge to fight, to argue, to struggle out of my bed and scream at him in defiance. Then the pain in my stomach surged as I moved, and another, hotter emotion came over me, a disgust and humiliation at the thought of Wolfe manhandling me in my room in the dormitory, of his hands all over me, his finger inside my guts, ripping me up…and I almost gagged. “Yes,” I said simply, swirling emotions batted to the side.
“Good,” Ariadne said with undisguised relief. “I was worried that you might be headstrong and try to resist good sense.”
I felt weak, drained. “Glad I could allay your misperceptions.” I laid my head on the pillow behind me, not bothering to look at Ariadne or Old Man Winter any longer.
She hesitated. “There will be agents surrounding the medical unit. They’re on constant watch, especially after what happened to the agents at your house and the way Wolfe was able to breach security in the dorm. If you need anything – food, books, entertainment – just ask.” She smiled, as if she could sense that although I wasn’t shooting any venom her way it wasn’t because I didn’t want to.
She and Old Man Winter left, but only after he gave me another long, hard stare. After they left, Dr. Perugini took a moment to record my vitals, fluffed my pillow with a matronly cluck, and then, with an admonishment to call out if I needed anything, walked to her office and shut the door.
The curtains were up between me and the rest of the patients, and from where I was sitting I could see the backs of agents through the windows, stationed outside the doors of the medical unit, and I heard a healthy cough from behind one of the curtains, telling me there were more behind the partitions. Yet still, I felt alone. Again.
I thought back to what Ariadne had said about expecting a different reaction from me at the thought of being in lockdown. I wondered for just a moment what I must look like to them, how my actions must appear; then I dismissed it and realized I only cared a little. I still didn’t trust them. They would protect me now, but for reasons that were their own; reasons that were still unclear to me, but almost certainly involved using me and my powers, whatever they were, for their own ends.
I looked across the unit and found the wall there to be made of reflective metal that allowed me to see a distorted picture of my face. Bruises dotted my cheeks and wrapped around both eyes. There was crusted blood under my nose, and it looked misshapen. My eyes were haunted, the look of someone who had the spirit battered out of them.
The overhead lights went out, dimming the room, and my reflection was shrouded in shadow. It was nighttime; I knew it even though there were no windows.
I heard a door close heavily at the far end of the ward, and it brought me back again to the sound of the box when Mother would slam it shut. “Keep your fingers out of the way,” she’d snarl just before she closed it. Then the little clicks followed as she worked the pin in place to lock it. She always shut the little viewing slit last, usually after saying something reassuring or taunting through it, and the light would go out from the world and I’d be alone in the dark, all by myself.
Confinement or Wolfe. I knew which I feared more.
Seventeen
I don’t know when I fell asleep but I know that when I did my head was still swirling with thoughts about Wolfe and the fight, if you could call it that. I drifted into a darkness that had little to do with my physical surroundings. I felt myself swallowed in that surreal, faded world that had been present both times I had talked to Reed in my dreams. But this time, somehow, it was different.
The world around me swirled in a sort of rough clarity; as it came into view I recognized the surroundings. Little lights hanging above, soft blue mats on the ground below, and blurred concrete at the edges of my vision gave rise to the realization that I was in my basement. I looked into the corner and sure enough, there it was – the box – peeking out of the darkness, its flat edges visible in the low light of my dream.
“Little doll…” The growling voice sent an involuntary twitch through my body, stiffening my spine and causing me to raise my guard. It did not a whit of good. Wolfe sprung at me from out of the darkness by the box, bounding at me, leaping from all fours. I was paralyzed, unable to move as he crossed the divide between us. I blanched away from the impending hit, throwing all the training Mother had given me right out of the nearest window.
Wolfe sailed toward me, then passed through me as though I were as insubstantial as the air we were breathing. He came to rest without touching the wall, pivoted and came back at me, passing through once more. An angry, perplexed expression darkened his already vicious features, and he bore the look of a man denied his fondest wish. He drew once more to his full height and looked at me with suspicion, keeping his distance and watching me, eyes wary and calculating.
“A dream walker…this is not real…” His voice was low and gravelly, and even though he couldn’t touch or hurt me, his words sent a very real chill of fear through my guts in the same place where his finger had ripped into my abdomen.
“What’s a dream walker? Is that what this is? What I am?” I put aside my fear, desperate for answers.
He ignored me. “You caught the Wolfe while he’s sleeping. Very tricky. You’re hiding, sneaking around behind the Directorate’s walls, counting on the Jotun to protect you from Wolfe?” His feral smile returned. “Why don’t you come out and play? It could be so fun.”
“Gee, I wonder why I don’t want to face a psychopathic lunatic like you,” I snapped at him. Hot anger boiled in me. “You’re unhinged.”
“Come out and play, little doll.” The smile was worse, a nasty, stomach-turning reminder of what he’d tried to do with me; to me. “The Wolfe just wants to play.”
“Are you stupid? Or are you deaf from where I stabbed you in the ear?” He flinched. I saw it and it gave me a moment of hope. “I’m not coming out. I’m going to stay here, because I have zero desire to be your plaything and die a horrible death after you do God knows what to me.”
“You won’t die, little doll,” his voice rasped. “That wasn’t a nice way to play, stabbing Wolfe in the ear. It makes him think about you every time the pain flares. But Wolfe won’t kill you, oh no, not yet. Not until they say so, because they want the little doll oh-so-bad.”
“Who are they …and what do they want me for?” I looked down at him, on all fours, as though he were ready to spring at me again.