Page 69 of The Witch's Heart
She’s crawling on hands and knees towards a window. At her back, flames chase quick on her heels. My heart breaks for what I know comes next. I am forced to watch as they reach her—and then consume her.
She screams—a sound that pierces my soul. My knees buckle and everything blurs as the flames overtake her flat. Drywall, furniture, cabinetry. All of it burns.
My own screams are strangled and hoarse, but I can’t make them stop.
The silvery glow beneath my skin brightens until I’m glowing nearly as hot as the fire itself.
Still, I am untouched on the outside.
On the inside—
I’m suddenly back in the small room below ground. Strapped to the chair. Tubes of my blood being sucked away into the machines behind me.
Nurse Schmidt stands at the end of my chair, smirking, satisfied.
I suck in a clean breath, one that is no longer tinged with smoke and ash. Then another. And another.
It takes long moments before I gain control and the sobs abate. Even then, all I can see behind every blink is Helen being burned alive—at my hands.
When I am quiet, Nurse Schmidt grunts. “You did good work.”
She says it like we’re a team. Like I didn’t just relive the murder I committed. Or watch as I attempted to take my own life. Like I didn’t just suffer in a way I never knew I could for the sake of some flimsy story about saving my sister.
There’s no possible way what happened here today has helped Estelle.
Cutter, maybe, though I still don’t understand what he’s after. And how torturing me this way helps him get it.
Nurse Schmidt uncinches the straps on my ankles and wrists.
Then she walks to the door and opens it, gesturing for me to go. In the hall, Sir waits, expressionless. He is unaware or, more likely, unconcerned with all that has happened in here today.
“This way,” he says and takes off without waiting to see if I follow.
But I do.
Because the idea of getting away from Nurse Evil and getting back to Declan and Dean has me nearly running to keep up.
Behind me, I hear Nurse Schmidt say, “See you tomorrow,zauberin.”
16
Every day for the next week, I am delivered to the leather chair and forced to relive the fire. At least I assume it’s a week. Hard to tell since I don’t see sunlight or a clock even once. I also don’t see Cutter or Dr. Livingstone because, apparently, we’ve abandoned all pretense of this experience being about mental health or healing. There’s also no outdoor visits. Instead, it’s one long emotional trauma reel after another. At the end of each session with Nurse Bitch, I am emotionally and physically drained.
Declan and Dean are summoned twice for “therapy” sessions that leave them both injured and exhausted when they return. After the second time, it takes Dean three days to shift back to human even with what little silvery magic I can summon to try and heal him. I haven’t asked what they did to him and he doesn’t say. Considering what my sessions are like, they can’t be pleasant.
Declan and I spent those three days holding him in wolf form and whispering to him about life outside this hell. About the bakery they would run and the bread they would make. When he finally shifts to human again, his eyes look more haunted than ever.
“Are you all right?” I whisper to Dean that night in bed.
His eyes are large in the darkness, and I reach out, cupping his warm cheek with my palm.
He covers my hand with his own. “I am now,” he whispers.
It’s clear the events of the party only made Cutter more determined to accomplish whatever he’s doing here.
We take advantage of every moment we can, sleeping in a tangled heap and rationing the food and water Sir brings twice a day. But my nightmares are filled with visions of what might have happened to Dr. Livingstone. And when I wake, the spirits are there, wailing and crying tears of blood.
Estelle, however, is nowhere to be found. I wonder if, instead of healing her, I’ve made things worse with the blood Schmidt siphons from me while I suffer her illusions.
