Page 28 of Surviving Hallow Hill
Nine
“Em! Emmera!”
A gasp that feels like swallowing knives scrapes my throat and lungs. My eyes shoot open, and I don’t realize I’m screaming until I hear the sound scraping out from somewhere in my soul.
Memories of my torture assault me. Memories of my Lady are what have me clamping my lips firmly shut.
“Fuck, Em, are you okay? Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
I blink away the fog from my eyes, and find Sia in front of me, pushing aside strands of sweaty hair from my cheeks. His eyes are wide with worry, and when he sees the clarity in mine, he sighs and touches his forehead to mine.
“Fuck, Em. You were screaming. I almost killed Styx for hurting you.”
“Like I toldyou, he wasn’t hurting her. At least, it didn’t hurt after the shock. We would have felt that shit. She was screaming about something else.” Rue’s voice is strained with something I can’t quite make out.
I try to move to get a look at him when I realize I’m still lying down on the floor and my whole back feels numb. Sia is lying beside me, though, and there’s comfort in that.
I don’t even give myself a moment to feel embarrassed that they were reliving those awful moments with me and had to listen to me scream my lungs out.
“Is it off?” I ask, my voice scraping unpleasantly against my throat.
A light touch against my shoulder has me sighing. “It’s off, alpha.”
“Good.” I start to push myself up on my palms and feel a twinge in my spine.
“Easy,” Styx orders. “You’ll still feel pain for a while because the needles were so thick.”
I snort, wanting to retort something witty and perverted, but I don’t have the energy.
Unfortunate, that.
Slowly and with the help of Sia, I get up and sit. “Where is it?”
I want to see the damn thing that held me captive for so fucking long.
“Don’t touch it,” Styx orders when I spot it on the floor. The needles are covered in my blood and staining the rusty ground even more. “We only have a few minutes. Dr. Hyde is always monitoring your vitals, and I bet he still is. If it goes too long without sending anything, he’ll get suspicious. Rue, hand me the body.”
That’s why he wanted the half-alive body, I realize.
Rue moves quickly, dumping the bloody bag they’d brought in earlier onto the ground. A mangled body flops and twitches. I can’t make out a form. It all looks like mangled flesh with bits of protruding metal here and there.
But it’s alive.
“Hold it down,” Styx orders.
Rue throws him a look like he’d rather chew off his own dick than touch the thing but sighs and grips the thing, keeping it immobile.
Styx picks up the metal spine piece with enormous tongs and sets it in place against flesh. “This is going to hurt,” he whispers almost apologetically to the creature. He grabs what looks like a taser and presses it where metal and flesh meet and turns it on.
The thing convulses, and I watch with abject horror as the needles seem to come to life, like dozens of legs of spiders and shoot into flesh, embedding inside skin.
“Oh, Lady of Death...” I turn away and start gagging. Is that what that shit looked like going into me? Oh, fuck. I start heaving. “That’s so fucking nasty.”
“Looked like a fucking centipede,” Sia supplies, pushing my hair aside and kissing my bare shoulder. “Scuttling little legs.”
I lean away and send my fist to his shoulder, but there’s no real strength behind it. “Fuck you, that’s just gross. Fuck, I can’t believe that was inside me.” I shudder.
Sia’s palm caresses my cheek, drawing my attention to his eyes. “Em,” he whispers, and I know what he’s going to ask, but I don’t know if I have the strength to answer.
