Page 63 of The Succubi's Choice

Her arm aches, like it fell asleep and got stuck in the pins and needles stage, with sharp pains spiking up through her shoulder and down her chest and her head swims and —

She shoves the blanket off so she can look at her arm. Where the needle once was, there’s a cheery colored band aid. Her veins are black, angry against her pale skin, like a bad science fiction effect.

Her wrists are angry, red, like the skin’s been abraded from the cuffs.

She looks up, and Gabriel avoids her eyes, and Katya looks like she’s going to vibrate into another dimension out of anger. And she feels...small. In the face of it. Diminished.

“How long have you been here?” She asks, and her voice is still slow, still dragging over her vocal cords unwillingly, still stretched out. Like time doesn’t matter.

“Hours,” Katya snaps. “They should have never —"

“Lundy called me after he dropped you off,” Gabriel says, still not meeting her eyes. “Said you would need a friend.”

So he at least had an idea of what they would do, and instead of stopping it, he just called in her friends to pick up the pieces.

“He did not say anything about the apparent torture,” Katya’s voice spirals upwards, high-pitched, until it echoes through Miri’s skull. “Or about anything except that he dropped you off and —"

“Not as loud, please,” Miri mumbles, and, unbidden, her charm sparks in her hands, and Katya abruptly stops talking.

There’s a beat, where Miri’s breath is ragged, dragging itself out of her chest.

“I’m sorry I didn’t mean to, it just...” She swallows, hard, until her charm flickers out, and she just blinks at the tiled floor. “Where are we?”

“Downtown LA offices,” Katya says, her voice much quieter. “They took you here after they finished.”

“Can I go home?” She asks, her head thudding. “I don’t...”

A flickering glance between Gabriel and Katya, one she wishes she missed.

“Did they give back my phone?” She asks, the thought occurring to her once more. “Did they —"

Gabriel digs it out of his pocket, shows it to her, and for some reason, the fact that he has it instead of her sits poorly at her stomach.

“They took it away, I tried to call Lundy,” she says.

After a split second, Katya throws her arm around her in a side hug, over the blankets. “Miri, what happened here is not your fault,” she begins, and Miri just wants her to stop talking and not try to explain anything. “I don’t know why they decided but —"

“They were measuring the charm I think, I dunno, it’s weird and it hurt and...” Katya squeezes a little harder, almost too hard, but Miri just shuts her sore eyes and leans further into it, the feeling of everything wrong and everything gone sideways seeping deeper and deeper into herself and...

“So this is immoral, right?” Gabriel speaks up, still across the room, still looking anywhere but her. “We’re not going to ignore that this is pretty fucking awful, right?”

If she could shut her eyes harder, she would. “Can we just go home for now?”

There’s another suspiciously long pause, and she opens her eyes, unwilling, to see both of them looking anywhere but her.

“What,” she says, forcing the words past the lump in her throat, her heart sinking once more.

“They want to keep you in for medical observation,” Katya says, and her voice is professionally crisp, and that’s how Miri knows something is up. “When they got you here, they did some tests, some standard tests, nothing invasive, and they’re unsure of some of the results.”

Because of course they did, and of course they found some stuff off. “Unsure how?”

Again, they both wouldn’t look at her. “I’ll get you a printout.”

* * *

The printout is long,full of medical talk and facts about her that she’s never really been able to find out before, and had nothing about whatever the fuck they were testing in the hotel room, and she’s filled with such an empty, impotent sort of rage. The sort of rage that feels much more like despair and pressure in her sinuses than anything else, and when she holds her hand out for her phone, Gabriel puts it in her palm without any argument.

MIRI (1:02 AM): What the fuck.

---