“You look unhappy,” Wyck observed, not seeming to like this, or at least acting so. He couldn’t keep the camera still in his unsteady hands, making the screen bob and shift as he swayed. The wall behind him remained blank, continued to hide his location from me.
“I mean, you shouldn’t be,” he said. “You’re about to see the greatest show on earth, I think. A stupendous show. Impossible to forget afterwards—or your money back!”
Everything about him was so premeditated—so unconcerned that it scared me. What was he doing? It was almost as if he was leading me along, letting the awful anticipation become a part of the torture I knew was coming. When would he order the nurse to reach for the tools, when would she begin slicing away parts of my skin and digging it into my side, hoping that I would tell them where the Blade was.
I was already steeling myself. I had a low threshold for pain, and as evidenced by my earlier birthmark experience. I even became squeamish when there was too much blood. But how much could they know? I was a professional at seeing truth, so I knew how to tell a better lie. I could easily bluff them, lie and scream that I didn’t know where the Blade was. They’d try hard, but they’d never kill me. They’d never hurt me so much that I couldn’t find the Blade for them.
Eventually, Callista and Thad would notice I was gone and they would come running. Their connection to me would lead them straight to this room. I only had to last until then.
As I thought these things, Wyck seemed to not like whatever passed over my face.
“Oh Michael,” he said, voice so low that it now almost resembled a growl. “Michael, Michael. Oh Michael,” he’d distracted himself, blinking. “That’s such an…interesting name. Do you know what it means?”
His eyebrow perked up hopefully, gaze shifting to look at some screen through which he was able to see me. I didn’t respond.
“It means ‘who is like God?’,” he revealed, showing his perfectly straight, entirely white row of teeth. “It’s a Hebrew name, with a question inside. I bet you didn’t know that though.”
Another scratch of his shoes, another dizzying turn and twist of the camera. He was amusing himself again, like he was already thinking of the punch line of a joke as he told it.
“Are you like a god, Michael?” he asked, lifting his free hand as if in deep question. I still couldn’t reply. He stared through the camera for a few seconds, waiting on me. Then, as if realizing why I wasn’t responding, he straightened up.
“Leilah?” he said. “Please adjust Michael. It slipped my mind that he should be awake for this.”
The woman arose from her seat again and went to my left side, turning the dial. Then she went to one of the metal tables, taking a needle and syringe already filled with liquid. She turned my other arm over, pricking me with sharp end. I didn’t feel the needle sliding in, but whatever was inside the syringe revived me quickly enough to make me feel it going back out.
All of my muscles constricted at once, then suddenly relaxed, and I fell back onto the bed shaking uncontrollably.
“That’s better,” Wyck said through the sound of my painful wince. “I’ll repeat: are you like a god, Michael?”
I didn’t reply. I wasn’t going to talk to him, not even utter a single word. I knew that he was playing some sort of mind game, and once I allowed myself to talk he’d use that to keep me going. It was a trick that I’d used on my harsher clients: small talk would lead to deeper things. Tiny victories would win the war. I refused to entertain Wyck.
He detected what I was doing immediately. His eyelids fell halfway and I heard the plastic of the camcorder being squeezed between his hands.
“Are you like a god?” he roared suddenly, voice going so deep that it was like the scream of a death metal singer, making me jump in terror as his teeth nearly slammed with the camera. The speakers threatened to burst under the onslaught of his yell.
“No!” I shouted, immediately cursing that I’d allowed myself to be cracked so easily. Wyck was left out of breath, bloodshot eyes wide with the rage that he’d let loose. Then, realizing he’d lost his cool, he forced his breathing down, spluttering until it was cleared, straightening his hair back into position.
“But you kind of are,” he said, clearing his throat, voice returning to his regular sneer. “Can’t you come back to life when people kill you? You can, right? How interesting.”
As he said this, he started to sway from side to side, turning around so that I could see the rest of the blank wall. Then when his movement exposed just a few more inches, I knew exactly where he was. The wall was from my kitchen back home.
I wish I were wrong. But I saw the dishes we’d used now broken in pieces across the counter, my mom’s herbs dangling in the window, the metal faucet on our sink cracked off from some violent scuffle and dribbling water everywhere. Wyck got the camera secured into his hand, wobbling unsteadily as he wiped his forehead free of perspiration.
“But what about other people, Michael?” he went on, continuing to rock back and forth as if unaware of my horror. “Can you bring other people back to life after they’re dead, too?”
No. You can’t be there. You can’t! I was petrified by the insanity in Wyck’s eyes.
“I don’t think you can do that,” he said. “In fact, I know you can’t.”
Then he tripped over something and threw his hands in front of himself to catch his balance. I heard a shout of pain through the screen, a terrifyingly familiar sound that made my eyes go wider. The camera’s view dipped when Wyck caught himself, and for a flash of a second I saw my mom.
She was curled up on the floor, her face under her arms and her back pressed into the corner of the room next to the wreckage of what had been our dining room table. I screamed as loudly as I could, suddenly a furious beast tearing at the straps again.
“Don’t hurt her!” I shouted at the top of my lungs, my own voice paining my ears and scratching like sandpaper against my throat. Wyck realigned the camera so that I couldn’t see my mom anymore.
“Please!” I screamed. “Don’t hurt her!”
“Now you suddenly seem so eager to speak to me,” Wyck said in observation. “How nice of you. For a minute I thought this conversation would be completely one-sided.”
He looked through the camera and beyond me, tapping the glass of his camcorder lens. “Leilah? I think you can turn on the other screen now. Mother will want to see.”
The nurse walked out from behind me as I gritted my teeth and pulled at my wrists. Inside and out, my body and mind cried. It was like being stuck in a nightmare after taking sleeping pills, begging to be awoken but physically unable to escape. I fell back on to the bed, voice gone. I didn’t want to think of what Wyck was doing, what he’d already done.
Leilah flicked the switch on the other screen and it came to life at once.
On screen were now a woman and a child. I recognized the older instantly: she was the same olive-skinned, black haired woman who’d appeared in my second nightmare with Wyck, the one who’d ordered him to kill me. His mother, Morgan. Just like Wyck, her eyebrows were solid white, and the gaze of green that she stared with showed as little emotion as I’d seen in my dream.
She was sitting in an ornate wooden chair whose back was so tall I couldn’t see its full height. Most of the room behind her was too dark to perceive. In her lap was a child who couldn’t have been older than eleven or twelve, a boy with hair in black curls on his head and eyes that matched hers. His eyebrows were white, and also like her, he had a red ring on his right hand. He looked at me intently.