Tempest’s Legacy (24 page)

“I want to go back to the water,” Ula said. It wasn’t a demand, just a statement.

“I know. And you will. Soon.”

“Yes. Now that he’s dead. I would never have been safe with my cousin still alive.”

Forgetting what I knew of the sea folk and interpreting her words literally, I nearly choked.

“That was… that was your
cousin
?” I asked, horror infusing my voice.

Her smile was small and bitter. “We are all cousins, those of us who live for the sea.”

Of course,
I remembered, thinking of the Sea Code… and reminded again of just how thoroughly that damned kappa had shat upon it. “But he…”

“Yes,” was all she said, but her soft voice reverberated with her feelings of betrayal. “He captured us, which is not our way. But he was wrong—twisted inside. As well as very powerful.”

I recalled vividly how well the kappa manipulated my own ocean against me, and I nodded.

“He’s gone now,” Anyan said gently.

Ula shrank even lower into her shell, her eyes flicking toward the barghest.

“Ula,” I said, beginning to see what was going on. She was okay with me, as I was another female. Her prison guards had all been men, and I was beginning to understand the nature of some of the “experiments” they had undoubtedly performed.

“Ula, we need to know everything you can tell us about who captured you, what they did, and who else you might have seen coming and going in that laboratory. We need to know all of these things because we want to capture the people responsible and make sure this can’t happen again. Okay?”

The kappa nodded, although her face bespoke her agony.

“You can tell us anything. Please…”

She nodded, shifting around in her shell and knotting her small green hands in her lap.

“I was captured about one month ago. I thought the male was interested in mating, and that I was protected by the Code. So the fight was not much of a fight.”

The kappa’s small voice was carefully controlled, but I knew how much it hurt her to admit her weakness. She coughed slightly, and I went to fetch her water from a side table that held a pitcher and glasses. When I returned, I sat down next to her on the sofa rather than returning to my own chair. She took the water, drank, then turned toward me as if we were the only two in the room.

“I was in the laboratory the longest. The other females have only been there a week or two, at most. The havsrå was only just captured. Others were there before me, and others came after. They didn’t… they didn’t survive.” Her breath caught and I placed a hand on her wrinkly green knee for comfort.

“I only survived because I was considered less… interesting than the other females.” Her small, gray-nailed hand scrabbled at my own, and I grasped it.

“I don’t know anything about human science,” she said. “But what they did, it wasn’t
anything
. It wasn’t… it couldn’t have…”

“There was no point to it?” I suggested, trying to keep my shit together when what I wanted to do was curl myself around this little female and soak up some of her pain. Not that I could. Not that anybody could.

“No,” she whispered fiercely. “There was no
point
. Some of the things were made to look like there was a purpose, and a few of the males seemed to think there was a purpose. But most of them were just enjoying hurting us… No, they were
all
enjoying hurting us, but some of them were better at acting like they weren’t. They called themselves ‘doctors,’ like humans do, and they made us call them that as well.”

Her hand was hot and damp in mine and she was nearly
crushing my fingers. But I wouldn’t have complained under pain of death.

“You saw what became of your captors from the lab, Ula. They can’t hurt you anymore. But we have to know, were there others?”

“There was. Or there were. One of the doctors that was there when I was first captured, he snapped and killed himself. He killed one of the prisoners first, then blew his own head off with a mage ball when the other guards came back in the room.”

I gulped. The things this poor female had witnessed…

“But for the most part, it was the two doctors you killed, the kappa, and… and the Healer.” Ula said the last bit in a whisper so breathy I could barely hear her.

“A healer? As opposed to the doctors?”

“No,
the
Healer. That’s what he was called.”

Listening to Ula, my memory started to ping like crazy as déjà vu’s pattering little footsteps ran up and down my spine.

“What did the Healer look like, Ula?”

“He was a goblin-halfling. Tall and green-scaled, like a goblin, but with human hands and face.”

As if he were sitting with me in the room, Conleth’s voice from so many weeks ago rang in my ears.

“… he looked half lizard. His nose was sort of flat and snakelike, and he was mostly sort of scaly. But his face had human flesh and his eyes were human. And his hands looked human… but for his claws…”

“Did the Healer have claws, Ula? Human hands but for claws?”

“Yes,” she gasped. “His claws… How did you know?”

“I’ve met someone who told me about him,” I said,
hearing Ryu and Anyan shift in their chairs on the other side of the room. “He sounds like a nasty piece of work.”

“He called himself a Healer, but the things he did… He just tore through our bodies…” For the first time since we’d started talking, Ula’s eyes filled with tears. I extricated one of my hands from her grip, squeezing the other to let her know I wasn’t letting her go, then passed her a tissue I had stashed in my hoodie’s pocket. I glanced quickly at Anyan, and he nodded. Ula had done everything she could for now. Except for one, last question…

“Ula? Honey? I understand how you were captured. But how could… how could they keep you? Why didn’t you use your magic?”

“They gave us shots. Two the day we were captured, then every morning. Something in them made it so we couldn’t feel our elements.” Ula let go of my hands in order to grasp the cushions she sat on. I could hear fabric ripping as she tensed. “And I still can’t feel them. I can’t feel… anything. What if I can never use my magic again?” Her eyes searched mine, her expression pleading, and I could feel her rising panic so palpably it made my flight-or-fight response start to kick off in reaction.

“What if I’m ruined?” she asked finally, her small green face creasing with agony.

“We’ll figure out what they did to you,” I hissed, suddenly furious. “We will figure out what they did, and then we will fix you. You’re not ruined, Ula. Never ruined.”

She sobbed once, hard, and I reached for her. She cried
in my arms, and I told her, over and over again, that we would find out what had happened to her.

And I prayed to every god I’d ever heard of, including that of Job, that I was telling the broken little kappa the truth.

D
o they make something stronger than whisky?” I asked numbly from my corner of the booth.

“Nope. Unless they have moonshine,” was Anyan’s only response.

“Then I’ll take whisky, too. Make it a double. If they won’t sell you the bottle.”

The barghest gave me a grim smile then went to get our drinks, leaving me with Caleb, Daoud, Ryu, and Julian.

We were spread out in one of our fancy hotel’s giant, cushy booths, but we all looked like we’d just come from a funeral.

Each of the women had told a similar story of horror, and the healers who attended them had been able to fill in blanks that they were as yet incapable of revealing. Besides rapes and beatings, each of the women had endured different series of bizarre, Dr. Mengele–type experiments. One woman had her ovaries replaced with a human’s; one had her womb removed and replaced
with a bizarre balloonlike contraption; yet another had a human fetus implanted inside her. We didn’t even bother to conjecture about what had happened to the pregnant human. By the time they were rescued, most of the women’s “surgeries” were so infected that they’d basically had to be hollowed out, losing any of the female reproductive organs that the “Healer” and his monstrous cohorts hadn’t gotten to first.

And I’d been the one to talk to all of the victims. They’d clammed up, and understandably so, whenever a male spoke to them. Even Ryu—who, for all his flaws, was a master at getting people to trust him—couldn’t make a dent. Anyan, with his huge size and intimidating features, didn’t stand a chance.

But they’d all talked to me. I was small, and a woman, and the havsrå—an absolutely beautiful creature with perfect female features, except for a strange, hollowed-out back—had commented that she could see I’d been hurt as well. When I told her that the people who captured her were responsible for the deaths of my mother and my close friend, she’d actually tried to comfort me. Her kindness had nearly broken through my attempts at professionalism, considering that her beauty and grace had made her a particular favorite of her captors.

And yet, despite the horrors she’d endured, there was still kindness in her soul.

“Those bastards tried to break those women,” I said rather randomly. “But they didn’t succeed. The females, they’re going to be okay.” I nodded my head firmly, as if by saying it I could make it so.

The boys just looked down glumly. I think the fact that they’d had to sit on their hands and be quiet through the
women’s stories made it all even worse, for them. Especially for Ryu, who was used to being in the center of things. And despite their violent histories, both baobhan sith and the barghest had been horrified by what they’d heard from the women and from what we’d been told in our own healer’s reports. My compatriots may have been accustomed to war and certain forms of brutality. But there was a big difference between what happened on a battlefield and the shit some sadist could dream up given time, a female captive, and a lot of pointy medical equipment.

Ryu sidled closer to me in the booth. I was too weary, at that point, to sidle myself away.

“You were amazing today, Jane.”

“Thanks, Ryu. But I just did what I had to do.”

“No, it was incredible how you talked to those women. You were so brave.”

“Somebody has to talk to them. They have to tell their stories. And somebody has to listen.”

Ryu frowned, clearly at a loss for how to talk to me. But after everything we’d heard today, the last thing on earth I wanted was flattery. I wasn’t being brave or strong, I was simply in the same position that we
all
were in: doing the best we could to get through the next five minutes.

And to stay human while we do it.
That thought managed to bring a small smile to my lips, and my eyes sought out Anyan’s big figure at the bar. He was hard at work negotiating with the waitress as I think he was really trying to buy the whole bottle. I’d noticed, over the course of our various adventures, that he never glamoured any humans unless he absolutely had to, and she appeared to be giving him a hard time.

“Jane?” Ryu interrupted my barghest-ogling.

“Sorry, what?”

“I was asking about how you were doing. With Iris and everything.”

“I’m doing okay, actually. I think.”

“I’m very sorry for her loss. And for yours.”

“Thanks,” I said, wishing we could talk about something—anything—else.

“Whisky,” Anyan’s gruff voice interrupted as he plonked down a bottle of Black Label and five glasses. “She wanted a kidney for the Balvenie, so this’ll have to do,” he apologized, quite unapologetically.

“Thanks, Anyan,” I said, already reaching for the bottle. “I am gonna have some booze, and then go to bed. I feel like we’ve been running a gauntlet all day, I’m so exhausted…”

Before I could finish, I felt that familiar, yet ever strange tingle of First Magic, just as Terk apparated in, directly onto my lap.

Fuck
, I thought, knowing that whatever the brownie was here for, it would probably mean an end to my early-to-bed fantasies.

The little creature in my lap waved at me, then threw open its arms for a hug. I couldn’t help but smile as I leaned forward, wrapping my arms gingerly around its little shape. Terk was so small that I was practically smothering the poor little brownie in my bosom, when Anyan coughed.