Lucy at War Read online

  Jamie shuddered as well, but fought through it. You are not your mother, and I am not Rolf. We will escape and they’ll come find us.

  A tear fell onto my cheek, whether from the present doom, the sweet sadness of my mom and dad’s union, or the utter impossibility of having normal things like love and marriage when all was said and done.

  Captain Six stood and offered me his handkerchief, and the simple gesture of friendship earned him one additional degree of trust that I didn’t even bother to hate myself for granting him. I met his eyes to communicate a smidgen of gratitude, and he nodded, sitting on the edge of the bed so he could hold onto my hand. “Your mother was extraordinary.”

  I offered up a hint of a smile.

  He stroked the back of my hand as he resumed his story. “There was a lot the Kunna Tofs gave Hildy. One of those gifts was the ability to capture an echo.” He exhaled, retracing his steps to compensate for my utter ineptitude in all things magic. “An echo is a portion of her spirit. It’s not her soul, mind you, but her spirit. When you were brought in, I saw the signs immediately. There’s no such thing as a Guldy in Undraland, yet here you sit with the blondest hair any Undran’s ever seen. You’ve been jinxed by elf magic, my dear. Your mother put her spirit in you, and your father used his elfish abilities to seal the jinx. It’s plain as day to anyone who knew Hildy like I did. She put her echo inside you. So while she’s most certainly dead, part of her is alive… in you.”

  Ten.

  The Barrier

  I began to understand the plight of the common mime when I finally started assembling my bearings. The questions came to me like bubbles in a tub, one after the other, each building on the other before they effervesced and floated into the air between us. I couldn’t ask the right question; there were too many to choose from.

  Captain Six seemed to understand, so he drove the tell-all forward. “You don’t sense her? It would be much like how the Tonttu scum is in your head.”

  I gave Six a scolding frown to end his Jamie bashing. Then I shook my head to indicate I didn’t hear my mom. I mean, I felt her love in me in the same way I kept my dad’s, Linus’s and Uncle Rick’s. They comforted me and made me stronger, but they weren’t the voice in my head. That was strictly Jamie.

  “Then she’s built a barrier to keep you from accessing her echo. I can’t imagine why, although, I would guess that would explain why you’ve shown us no magical aptitude. I’ll bet if you ever were taken under by the Nøkkendalig, the Kunna Tofs that gave your mother her magic would recognize you by the imprint of his magic in her. The river would light up to give you the chance to escape. She would lead you to the surface.”

  Waves and currents of astonishment crashed over me as pieces of the unsolved puzzle shifted into place. I’d wondered what the light was, but I didn’t like talking about that day, so I never got my questions answered.

  “Of course, that point is moot. We captured the remainder of the Nøkkendalig that night. They were imprisoned straightaway. No doubt you have no idea who they are, which is a blessing, my dear. I’d like to think I left my land devoid of the unforgivable evils as much as I could.”

  Six took my silence as an invitation to keep speaking, which I guess it was. “Tucker mentioned you didn’t have any abilities, though your lineage was vast. Huldra, wind elf, water elf, human and siren? To exhibit nothing is a statistical impossibility. Your mother put a block in you to keep her spirit in place. I’m certain of it.” He sat back, his ankle crossing over his knee. “I knew Hildy more than most. She wouldn’t risk leaving what was hers unprotected.”

  My mouth had been open for most of his explanation. To think of a portion of my mom – more than the ashes Tucker had stolen from me – traveling with me wherever I went was enough to blow my mind in seven uneven pieces.

  The captain lifted my hand as if it were made of glass. “Know this: I would recognize my Hildy if she were hidden inside a troll. Part of your treatment has been geared toward breaking the laplanding bond with that Tonttu waste of life, and the other part is to break Hildy free so you can access her abilities and communicate with her. Replace Jamie’s voice with hers.”

  He didn’t need a response from me. Six knew I was pretty much toast after that blast. The captain brought my hand to his lips and kissed the back of it like a true gentleman. Then his hand drifted to my knee, causing me to stiffen. When it climbed up my thigh, I thrashed around to escape the unwelcome ickiness, batting at him and hyperventilating through the awful.

  Six stilled his hand and squeezed. “Hildy, if you can hear me, I’ll do whatever it takes to give you a voice again. I’ll keep you with me until you can tell me all the things I’ve been waiting to hear.” Then he kissed the top of my head like a father-figure. “Let me go get you some dinner, darling.”

  When he left, the door shut behind him, and I knew from the double click that I was locked inside to keep me from escaping. Jamie urged me to use the time to search for weapons or tools we could use to escape, but I was useless.

  I could see my near future too clearly. Somehow they would figure out how to break the bond. Jamie would be killed after who knows what kind of torture, and I would be spared. But I would be forced to stay with Captain Six as he tried to coerce my mom to come out and play.

  I shuddered at the idea of sharing a body with my mom while she conversed with her ex-lover.

  My mom – parts of her, anyway – was alive in my brain. I searched for her, calling out in all the recesses of my mind, but the only thing that came back were imagined images of her. It wasn’t real. It was the same level of lucidity I used when daydreaming of Jens, which I didn’t do much of anymore.

  Jamie and I both flinched at the mention of Jens. I tried to muscle through the knee-jerk reaction of involuntary pain that felt real, but I couldn’t get back to that safe place in my mind. There was no bed he spooned me in on the upper level of our perfect home. There was no dancing to cheesy nineties hip-hop – the best kind of hip-hop, by the way – gyrating around the kitchen while we cooked dinner together. I couldn’t even picture him with dirt up to his elbows from working in our garden without feeling the jolt of fear from the shocks. I remembered giving him many a glad eye when he came in all dirty and tan with a bowl full of tomatoes and snap peas. What can I say? The man could rock jeans and a t-shirt like it was a 007 tux. You can’t not love the man that hoes your garden.

  Though I tried to revel in these images and memories, they hurt me on a physical level, so much that Jamie begged me to stop. He pushed images of Britta at me so I had a friend to distract me from trying to find Jens anymore.

  I made her help search for my mom, but it was no use. The block – if it was in fact there as Six insisted – was solid. I couldn’t access my powers. I thought back to my blast of roof-demolishing magic that brought my mother’s voice to the surface. Now it all started to make sense (in that crazy way Alice in Wonderland makes sense). When she’d blown a hole clean through Tucker’s roof, it had been to protect me from Tucker bringing my magic to the surface. I hadn’t been able to solve that mystery, so I’d shelved it. Now the answer was smacking me in the dumbfounded face.

  Eleven.

  How We Would End It

  I’m not sure how long the door remained locked, but Jamie refused food two times, so we guessed at three or four days. Captain Six never returned with the promised dinner, and I couldn’t tell if that was a good thing or a very bad thing.

  My body was frustrating me. On the one hand, I had the freedom to move around the small room. On the other hand, I hadn’t eaten or drank in at least three days, and I was terribly malnourished before that. I resigned myself to lying in the bed. Walking had become too painful on my joints. They felt like unlubricated rusty gears grinding against sharp bone with even the smallest movement.

  The door to my room opened, but it wasn’t Captain Six. A bald orderly in blue scrubs came around to the bedside and reached for me with greedy hands. I recoiled, shirking to the
other side of the bed, my fists flinging out at his face when he bent over the bed and dragged me over to him. Bile and panic rose up in me that I was being taken back to the darkness, back to the cell. I writhed and punched for all I was worth. Perhaps Foss’s lessons had taught me to throw a decent punch, but my best effort was no match for Baldy’s girth. He acknowledged my resistance as if I was a bothersome fly. I was shoved into the wheelchair, arms and legs strapped in place. I’d gotten in a solid kick, but it only irritated him instead of incapacitating my foe.

  A needle was jammed into my arm after the muting collar was slapped back around my neck. I went limp before I could claw it off, praying for my mother to bust out of her shell and rescue me from this never-ending hole.

  * * * *

  I awoke to utter darkness that filled me with the nothingness of a hopeless void with every cold breath I dragged into my aching body. They switched to bottled water in the cells, so Jamie let us drink that. But the food was still tamper-worthy, so we pushed the meals away each time they were sent to us.

  Our eternal nothingness was only interrupted by intermittent bouts of shock therapy, courtesy of our cell phones that had Jens’s voicemails on them. There were cuffs on our calves now that had zapped me so many times, I couldn’t feel the muscle move anymore, only a ripping pain I couldn’t escape. I had grown to fear the sound of my boyfriend’s voice, to wince each time I heard it.

  One bowl of refused gruel and only a bottle each of water equaled two days spent chained to the cold concrete floor in my solitary cell.

  Three.

  Four.

  Seven.

  At eight, Jamie and I gave up. Half the time we felt deranged from the pain of the shocks that lit our insides up with white-hot agony. I was starting to hallucinate images of Jens flying at me with his knife, running at me with a gun, and punching my deadened calves that had lost all sensation. They shocked us throughout the day, and woke us often in the night, so we could never get a full REM cycle. Sometimes if I even thought of Jens, I felt shocks that weren’t even happening. I learned to block him out of my mind completely.

  We resumed our deal and stopped drinking the bottled water, so we could speed up our ending. Jamie curled up next to me on the floor of my mind. We were leaning up against the brick wall and the translucent wall that were next to each other toward the back of my brain. Jamie spooned my limp form as we drifted in and out of consciousness. I’m here, sweetheart. I’m here. Feel the warmth? I’ll keep you warm.

  He conjured up my gray squirrel, and David Cassidy burrowed next to my face to keep me company. I shivered in the dark as Jamie muttered incoherently, his mind slipping as mine was.

  My arms had been covered by the sadistic sirens to keep me from sight, but they’d ruled my collar unnecessary. My big brother and I were together, and that’s how we would end it.

  Twelve.

  The Beginning of the End

  I flexed my wrists and felt stiffness there. On both arms were those cursed iron cuffs, weighing me down and muting any chance at me tapping into what little magic I might possess deep down inside.

  When the bald orderly came for me, I didn’t have the strength to resist as he released my fetters, picked me up with great care and strapped me into a wheelchair. The vinyl straps would’ve been a joke to Foss, but they dug into my thin skin, binding me to their wishes. Every movement caused my brittle bones to grind against each other. I called out for Jamie in my head, but his focus was so intermittent, it was a wasted effort. He moaned inaudibly in response, but offered no advice or comfort. Though we had chosen to die together, we were slowly losing our grip on each other, due to our diminished states.

  Fear was constant for me, so this was nothing new. I’d long since run out of tears, so my lower lip quivered soundlessly when a sack was pulled over my head.

  “Now, now. It’s only to shield your eyes from the lights in the hallway,” Baldy told me.

  I was wheeled into a dark room I’d not seen before, I realized, as the hood and my gloves came off. I could see enough using my arms as a guide, though I had to squint and close my eyes often to avoid the burn in my retinas. In the center of the room was something I’d only witnessed via Linus’s disgusting slasher movies. It was a patient’s bed with restraints for the arms and legs.

  Like a flipbook, innumerable horrors flashed through my mind, each more gruesome than the last. It was a thing of mercy I’d been eight days without food; I wouldn’t last long under whatever torture they had in store for me.

  An orderly took me from Baldy, wheeling me next to the bed. His goatee hid his expression and kept his look of scolding tempered at my weak attempts at breaking free. He was strong, with Jamie-sized muscles to lift me – not that he needed them. I was laid onto the bed and strapped down, despite my best efforts to escape. I wasn’t sure if I saw correctly, but the orderly’s brown eyes hidden beneath matching brown bushy eyebrows and low-hanging hair actually looked guilty at participating in my incarceration. To my temples, he hooked suckers connected to wires that fed into a small machine on a stand behind the bed.

  I silently pled for mercy, for help, for anything, but he left me after placing a rubber guard in my mouth, enclosing me in the room by myself. My hands glittered, giving me just enough light to be able to see that no one was there. I jerked at the restraints, but as with everything thus far, I was ineffectual to save myself.

  This is it, Jamie. This is how we die.

  Stay strong, he answered back, though it was more of a wish than anything else. Neither of us had even a modicum of strength left. The powers that be had taken off Jamie’s iron restraints, but he was too paralyzed to move in his cell. Jamie did the only thing he could to comfort me in my hour of need. He conjured up an image of Linus, who ran to me with urgency befitting my other half. My heart swelled as fake Linus cupped my face, and even though I knew he wasn’t real, the security he always gave me was.

  We did the best we could, syster, Jamie said.

  All I could do was gape at my brother. It was Linus when he was healthy, with a little roundness to his cheeks. The half of me that was missing ached. The agony was almost enough to tear me off the table. Linus stood next to the cold slab I was strapped to and looked at me as if I was wearing an embarrassing hat or something. Linus took his thumb and rubbed it across my forehead. Well, that’s weird. You’ve got something on your forehead.

  Too many things, I replied. Don’t leave me.

  Linus kissed his thumb and pressed it to the crease between my eyebrows. You know I never have.

  My forehead burned for a nanosecond, and I saw a flash of my Uncle Rick’s serene face looking down on me.

  Then it started.

  Thirteen.

  Lightning from Within and Without

  Jamie’s voice filled the room, though I knew it was a recording. I had Jamie in my head hearing the same thing, and he was just as baffled as I.

  “Lucy, I need you to come over. I can’t figure out how to use my remote. The TV’s just a blank screen.” The message was months old, and I remembered that night well. Teaching Undrans basic human things took a lot of patience and a good sense of humor.

  No sooner had I recalled digging into the pumpkin pie Britta had made as Jens walked Jamie through proper use of his TV, did electricity rip through me from the connectors at my temples.

  I couldn’t scream. The electricity gripped me so hard, I couldn’t move. For endless seconds or whole minutes, my back arched unnaturally on the table. I had never known pain of that intensity before. I’d been hurt my fair share of times, but the zero to a million was something no one could have prepared me for.

  When the lightning finally released me, I slumped on the slab. I could feel an itch starting in the back of my brain, which was the only distraction from the agony that echoed throughout my veins. This was worse than the bursts of shock we got if we spoke. It was worse than the short eruptions that happened when they played Jens’s voice to shock that comfort away
from me. Those had not been electrocutions. I knew because I’d been able to wear iron on my wrists, and my arms hadn’t singed from the voltage. This was straight up electricity, and I was straight out of my mind from one small blast of it.

  Jamie’s voice played again. “Hey, syster. Britta made us chicken soup. Could you send Jens over to pick up your bowl?”

  That recording happened when Jamie and I caught a cold together. Undra’s remedies for the common cold were fascinating, but I wasn’t up for dipping my feet in scalding water for three minutes, then putting on icy, wet socks underneath heavy wool socks and then going to bed. He’d humored me with chicken soup. I’d humored him with giving myself a pedicure in warm water. He was a good friend.

  White spots burst through my vision, and I thought my eyes were going wonky on me. When I opened my eyelids, I was blinded by a light brighter than my retinas could handle gracefully. Even after shutting my eyes tight, I couldn’t escape the sun that seemed to fill the room. My head thrashed left and right, but there was nowhere to hide. I heard Jamie howling in my mind as he cowered on the floor away from the light that plagued us. Linus cupped his hands over my eyes as I flailed about fruitlessly.

  Another jolt of electricity, followed by another. With each shock, Jamie was thrown further and further away down the dark hallway that separated our psyches. I wanted to find him and bring him back, but he was lost in the black that kept us apart.

  I shouted in my mind for Linus to go after Jamie, but my brother stayed with me. Do you feel that? Linus breathed as heat started at my toes. I had a brief reprieve from the pain, but didn’t trust the lull. Can you feel the fire?

  What? What is that? Is it them? Am I on fire? I asked, disoriented and terrified. The room had gone back to black, but my eyes were still aching.