I could feel his energy expanding toward me. He was using his incubus powers, and I braced myself for what was going to happen next. Except… it didn’t happen. Normally, I should have felt compelled to obey him, do and say anything he asked of me. But I felt nothing. His energy clung to my aura, and I felt nothing. His green eyes widened slightly, which meant he was catching on to the fact that I was… immune. He pressed on, nonetheless. How couldn’t he see that all he was doing was to make me angrier and angrier? How couldn’t he see that using his powers on a defenseless woman locked up in a madhouse, mostly drugged, was so utterly and disgustedly wrong?!
“Yolanda, come on. It’s me. You can trust me. I know I was a jerk to you, but that was just…” He tried to find the right words and failed. There were no right words. “It’s in the past. All of it. What happened this time is not a game. It’s serious. This is serious.” He motioned toward the room, the locked door, the window. “I want to get you out of here, but you have to do this one thing for me. Tell me the truth. What happened to you, baby?”
Baby. He dared to call me baby.
I lashed out. My mind went blank, the emptiness in my chest grew until it enveloped all of me, until it pushed his invasive energy away, and I lunged at him with all my might. The chair broke under our weight, and we found ourselves on the floor, with me on top of him, scratching at his face, trying to gauge his eyes out. I didn’t think, I didn’t feel. I just acted. There was this darkness within me that grew stronger and stronger. And it was hungry. My darkness and my emptiness were best friends, and they were both hungry. They wanted to swallow him whole, they wanted to swallow everything in their path. Not just Davien, not just this dreadful place he, Seth, and Adrian had put me in, not just the town of Salem. They wanted to swallow the world. There was this void inside me that couldn’t be filled and didn’t want to be filled. It wanted to unleash itself upon the Earth and turn it into a void as well. My void craved more void, until there would be nothing left.
Davien cried out. He tried to grab my wrists, but I was too quick for him. I could tell he wasn’t trying hard enough. Maybe he was afraid he might hurt me. He didn’t want to fight a woman. I laughed darkly. Well, good for him. He was going to die a gentleman. Because I wanted him dead. No, not dead. Death didn’t mean anything to me. I wanted him… I wanted him…
“Yoli, don’t! Stop!”
I wanted him…
I pinned his arms above his head and leaned over him. He probably thought I was going to kiss him. What a fool. I sank my teeth in his jaw and bit him hard. I wanted him inside me. I wanted him to be a part of me, to become one with me. I wanted to… devour him. I felt blood on my tongue, and he screamed under me. This time, he put all his force into pushing me away, and he managed to send me sprawling onto the floor. He jumped to his feet just as the nurse from before walked in, followed by two male nurses. They were big and bulky, and they grabbed me off the floor before I could react.
“I told you she’s dangerous,” the nurse scolded Davien in a bored voice. She took out a vial and filled up a syringe.
“She was fine… She just…”
“Please, Mr. Krause. It’s time for you to go.”
Davien shot me one last look. He was holding his jaw in his hand, blood pouring through his fingers, staining the front of his uniform.
“Why?” he asked me, still in shock.
I sneered at him. His blood dripped down my chin, and the two male nurses could barely hold me down.
“I want to show you…”
“Show me what?”
“What it feels like…”
I felt the needle sink into my arm. The potion was strong. I was going to be out in seconds. Yes, at the Karmic Asylum, medication meant… potions. Drugs created and spelled by mages. Davien stepped closer to me, and one of the male nurses pushed him away harshly.
As my eyes rolled into my head, I whispered: “Unbridled existence…”
CHAPTER THREE
I was sitting in my chair, a glass of water between my hands. As my fingers trembled, tiny waves crossed the surface of the water from one side to the other. I stared into the glass, brows furrowed, bottom lip between my teeth. Waves. I could almost smell the ocean, almost feel the breeze on my face.
“Excited about your daily walk?”
The nurse’s voice snapped me out of my thoughts. I raised my eyes to look at her. She gave me a smile and continued changing my bed sheets. She’d come in earlier, helped me get dressed, and then occupied herself with replacing the dirty sheets with clean ones. She did the same with the only towel I had in my bathroom. In a few minutes, she was going to take me for a walk around the Karmic Asylum.
I nodded.
Was I excited, though? I doubted it. I wasn’t sure what excitement was, or whether I’d ever experienced the feeling. However, it was important to be on good terms with the nurse. Today, she’d skipped the medication that usually came with breakfast. She’d said the doctor wanted to lower the dose and see what happened, but since I couldn’t remember who my doctor was and what he looked like, I was instead grateful to her for not making me drink the stinky potion that usually turned my stomach and barely allowed me to enjoy my breakfast. As she moved around the room tirelessly, putting things in order and gathering the dirty laundry in a basket, I considered her the most important person in my life at that moment. And I didn’t even know her name. She wore an identity card attached to the chest pocket of her scrubs, but it only read Nurse T. Not exactly a name, was it? I briefly wondered why the management of the Karmic Asylum had decided patients shouldn’t know the name of the staff members. She’d said countless times that my doctor was Doctor H. Letters. Why letters?
“Alright, let’s go then.” She gave the room one last scrutinizing look and nodded in satisfaction. “A bit of air will increase your appetite. Get you ready for lunch.”
That was right… I hadn’t been eating much lately, had I?
I followed her out the door, and she led me down the corridor toward an old elevator. We stepped inside, the doors closed, and an intense, heavy scent of moisture almost made me gag. I covered my nose and mouth with my sleeved arm. The elevator creaked and groaned horribly as it moved down. I stole a glance at the nurse. She was lost in thought, humming a random tune. The smell and promise of the elevator eventually turning into a death trap one day didn’t seem to bother her.
“Don’t you think it’s strange?” I asked, trying to make conversation.
“What is?”
“My room is so clean, and new, and… pleasant. Yet the rest of the building is about to collapse.”
“It’s not strange,” she said, letting out a sigh. “We’ve talked about this before. You got the best room we have because you are who you are, and Headmaster Colin insisted. No one makes donations anymore.” She shrugged. “You’re a princess, Miss Aleksiev. You lived a life of beauty and riches. I can see why a bit of mold here and there, a spider web, and a cockroach crossing the corridor like it’s the highway would repulse you, but it is what it is. And we’re doing our best. I’ve been working at the Karmic Asylum for longer than I care to remember.” The elevator creaked to a halt. She got out, and I followed her. “To be honest, I like it the way it is. It hasn’t changed, and that suits me just fine. No one died because of a little mold.”