And then I was thrown over someone’s shoulder, and carried down an alley and up some rickety wooden stairs, and into a hallway. It was dim, too, almost dark, with just a few patches of diffuse light from above giving any illumination at all. But even that was too much.
Because there were posters on the walls, most small, more like flyers, others as large as a newspaper page. But almost all of them contained faces, sneering, jeering, hateful faces that seemed to leap off the walls, yelling and threatening, or rattling the bars of the cells many of them seemed to be in, trying to get at me. And some weren’t even human.
A large Were leapt out of a page and into the hall, snapping at me with huge, slavering jaws, causing me to shriek and twist away and end up on the floor when the man carrying me lost his grip.
I leapt to my feet, in a crouch, panting, looking for the threat—
Which was suddenly gone.
I stared around in panicked confusion, not sure where to go or what was real. Someone had hit one of the hanging lights, and the dim circle strobed the small corridor, making the gallery of horrors that much more terrifying. They all seemed to be coming for me now, a hundred ghostly hands stretching impossibly long, reaching, reaching, reaching—
Until one of them jerked back with a curse. “The bawd bit me!”
“What do you expect?” someone else asked. “She’s off her chump.”
“She isn’t mad; she’s bespelled!” a more familiar voice said, sounding furious. “I would expect a group of
magic users to be able to recognize the diff—”
There was a sound of a fist hitting meat.
The voice cut off.
And then I was dragged into a room that branched off the corridor.
It was wood floored and walled, with old gas lights overhead and a large wooden piece of furniture in the middle, like a freestanding counter. There were no posters. But there were two boxes on the counter, black ones the size of shoe boxes that looked familiar, but that I didn’t look at too long in case they turned into something else.
I looked back toward the door instead.
And found Rosier standing just behind me, bleeding from the lip.
“It’ll wear off,” he told me, low-voiced and hurried. “Until then, don’t trust your senses. They’ve been compromised—”
“No shit,” I told him thickly, and had the pleasure of seeing him stare.
And then one of the men on the other side of the desk slapped a baton down on it, with a crack that reverberated through my confused brain like a gunshot. “No talking!”
Okay, I thought, trying not to collapse in a heap.
And then someone was stripping the coat off me, but he’d forgotten about the cuffs. So the leather pooled at the ends of my arms and sent me to my knees when he jerked on it. He finally figured it out and released me, so I could sprawl naked on the dirty floor.
I looked up to see another leather coat coming toward me, with one of the boxes in his hand. And Rosier suddenly tried to fight, and then to run, and he seemed really dedicated to the idea. Because it took three of them to wrestle him to the floor as well.
I didn’t run.
What was the point?
The sidewalk would just eat me.
And then the lights went out.
• • •
It was wonderful.
It was wonderful.
I didn’t know where I was or how I got here. But suddenly, there was no light, no sound, no anything to provide stimulus for my overheated brain. Just a lot of warm, floaty nothingness, peaceful, calm, allowing me a chance to breathe.