Page 1 of Buried Secret 295

Chapter one

A scream echoes throughthe night air, pulling me from my sleep. The noise speeds up my heart rate as I look around my small, dimly lit cell. Minimal light comes through the entry bars, shining off the metal as it streams inside. My eyes rapidly search for anything amiss, yet nothing seems out of the ordinary as I force myself up to a seated position. Every movement makes me want to scream out in pain, yet the sense of danger still thrums throughout my system, and that overrides everything else. I know I won’t be able to relax until I can see every vantage point of my cell.

I hear nothing but the usual sounds of crying and chatter from the other cells. With every second that passes, I hear nothing else, and my body relaxes. Relief hits me, along with annoyance, that my mind is playing tricks on me again. Maybe not so much annoyance as it is a disappointment that I can’t even rely on mymind anymore. I can’t even trust my thoughts and memories. I no longer can remember what my mother looked like. It’s not that I care to remember her. It is just one more memory, one more person gone from my memories forever. The whole thing makes me feel empty yet leaves me longing, wondering what was there. I am left with gaps and missing pieces that don’t fit together anymore, yet sometimes, I’m left with only an emotion still attached to a name or place. Of course, that has been their goal the entire time.

Being stuck in this situation isn’t my fault, nor was it of my choosing. This place was forced on all its residents, who are unfortunate enough to call this place home. After all, nobody would have chosen for this to happen to them. Dr Vic would probably get a thrill with the fact that I am sitting on my lumpy cot questioning if things are happening or not. His experiments have worked too well, making me angry that he has had many successes lately. His accomplishments are, of course, at my expense. Dr Vic started slowly, as he did with everyone—torture to build a solid foundation so we don’t break apart over the slightest thing.

I would take those days of torture over his injections any day. While it’s happening, everything feels like the worst possible pain. However, I didn’t know they were building you up, preparing your mind and body for injections. He and Egor started by scrambling my brain with a lobotomy, then moved on to playing their games of torture using electricity and oxygen deprivation. Dr. Vic writes in his notes on how your body responds to pain, even measuring your brain waves as he watches and instructs Egor to make adjustments he needs for his research. He loves to scribble how I respond to everything in his little notebook. I want to steal his pen and jab it into his eye socket, especially whenever he strokes my cheek and tells me what a good girl I am.

The room starts to spin, and as relieved as I am about the noise, nausea takes over, and I slowly lower myself back onto the cot and dense pillow. I roll onto my side and place my back against the wall, unwilling to remove my eyes from watching the doorway. Call it paranoia or whatever you want. I have every right to be on guard. I wish I could fall back to sleep, but my body hurts so badly that I don’t see that happening. My teeth chatter as the cold chills seep into my bones, yet my brow sweats like I am feverish. Nausea has my stomach churning, and I try to suck air into my lungs to fight this feeling.

The breathing technique isn’t cutting it as my stomach revolts, and my body begins to dry heave. I roll off the side of my cot, falling to the metal floor below out of fear of vomiting in my bed. As I push up onto my forearms, the pain from the fall distracts my body from wanting to throw up what little contents are in my stomach.This is how I die.That is the thought I keep repeating while I nod to myself in acceptance every time the thought appears.

I curl up into a ball on the cold metal floors. Why can’t death take me faster? I can’t even control how I die here in this place. I always hoped to die fighting in the ring below on the dirt ground. At least, that was the plan I imagined with my time spent locked in this cell. That they finally found a worthy beast for me to fight. I wanted to look up past the crowd of people who would be screaming and cheering as they watched while waiting for one of us to die. The crowd eagerly watches as their greed is on the line, waiting to see how their bets will pay out. Their voices are almost deafening as I drown all of them out while looking past them all to the cells above, where all the prisoners are kept. I am, somehow, locking eyes with 203‘s cell and crying out a goodbye. Maybe when my soul left my body, I could see his face for the first time.

Instead, I’m lying on the cold metal floor, dying from either the shifter venom leaving my system or perhaps because I shifted into a beast. Shifting into any form wasn’t natural or even supposed to be genetically possible for me. Yet, when Dr Vic took a gamble and injected me with double the normal dose of shifter venom, it worked. I could feel his blue, seemingly bleached eyes watching me through the glass windows in the recovery cells as I shifted into a beast. These cells allow us to connect to our healing abilities without using essential resources.

I shake off the thoughts as I reach into the air above me. My hand catches the little light that streams through the bars, reassuring me I’m back to normal. My skin is smooth again on my arms, besides the various colors and textures of the scars that line my flesh from weapons and fighting off beasts. I shiver as I think about how my bones snapped and broke as they rearranged into my other form—the form that didn’t exist until yesterday, or perhaps the day before. I am not sure how long I have been back here. My eyes snap shut as the memory comes to the surface of the fur that sprouted along my arm from my shift. I stifle a sob that wants to leave my lips, knowing now they can torture me in two forms.

Never have the injections left me feeling this horrible. Dr Vic has always added a little more venom at each session I have with him. I suppose he got tired of waiting for me to adjust and doubled the dose. My body takes to shifter venom better than it does the vampire. The room has slowly stopped spinning. I stay on the ground for a few more minutes until I can muster the energy to push myself back onto the cot.

A small grunt leaves my lips as I settle into the corner of my bed. My eyes lock on my favorite imperfection, and I smile as I lie on my back. I scoot myself backward to reach up and touch the small hole that lives there. My fingertip grazes the spot where they tried to fasten the metal together, but the screwkicked out sideways. Whoever was building these cells never bothered to fix it. After all, it was a slight imperfection that wouldn’t matter in the long run. Yet, it made all the difference between me and 203.

A scream of anguish rips out into the night air. My hand jerks back and away from the minor imperfection, as if they could sense my happiness, which might draw attention to the small hole. This is the same scream that woke me. It’s the only type of scream that still affects me after all these years. You would think each scream from this place wouldn’t affect someone differently. All of them bounce off the metal walls like a tin can amphitheater. Yet, the new arrivals make a distinct noise different from any torture or death.

Maybe it’s because they had a life only yesterday. Friends, family, and people who love and care about them. They had freedom. Now, they find themselves in a place with no comfort or kind words to help them. You have no choice but to ignore them. If you offer them a kind word, the guards will stop you by coming into your space to beat you until you submit. Not that it would matter because, after all, what words could you even provide them with? How can you prepare anyone for this life? There is no way to explain to them that every day will be worse than the one before. They still cling to the hope that someone will come for them. That somehow they are going to be found.

Nobody is coming for us. We are all going to die here. We are the toys that they play with until we break. It doesn’t matter if they break us. They will have two more to replace the one that died. Even if the toy doesn’t perform how they want us to, it doesn’t matter. Dr. Vic can alter us into something they want before throwing us into the fighting ring to fight beasts and monsters from different realms. They are getting rich off the sick people who watch us for entertainment.

When another scream fills the air, once again, I wince. Another reason I hate the new arrivals is because they remind me of when I first arrived. I can’t remember how long I have been here, yet I am reminded of the naive girl I once was. It causes me to remember her, bringing her to the forefront of my mind even when I want to push her down and never think about her again.

As I blink my eyes, they feel like they are swelling from my fever. Sweat trickles down my face, and I can feel sleep trying to pull me down, but now I am terrified of falling asleep. I worry I won’t wake again once I close my eyes. What will I see from the venom-induced delirium that is taking over? “Salem?” I hear a voice that sounds like it’s coming from the corner. A shaky breath escapes, and hot tears stream down my face as I try to remember who the voice belongs to. It feels like there is a ghost watching me. I jerk back when I hear another whisper that feels like it’s coming from under my cot. “Salem.” A woman’s voice calls out to me almost in a whisper. My hands go to my ears, trying to block out the sounds.

“Salem!” A gruff voice calls to me. It causes my hands to drop from my ears as panic grips at my chest. “You better get a good night’s sleep. I’m expecting a lot out of you tomorrow. It’s a big day.” It feels like there is a threat within those words. A whimper leaves my throat, and I shake my head. What’s happening? Dark spots take over my vision, and I can no longer open my eyes.Please don’t hurt me.I plead to the darkness, but when has it ever listened to what I want?

Chapter two

Past

My eyes open, andI try to push down the excitement of my 13th birthday. It’s what every child born to a magical family dreams about and looks forward to the day when their powers come into play. Until this point, we were powerless, which I felt all too often in my life. Maybe powerless wasn’t the word for it; more like it was that I am invisible, an annoyance rather than powerless. I am a burden to my household, and the sad part was nobody bothered to pretend otherwise. I care for myself and try to draw as little attention to myself as possible to feel a small amount of love from my parents. Both of myparents want little to do with me. My father is self-involved in his own life and seeking power through the ministry. He wants to make the rules and not follow them if he doesn’t think they should apply to him. The man wants to be the most powerful person in the room. My mother doesn’t seem to care about anything anymore. She tends to drink or self-medicate when she thinks nobody is looking. The good news is that she is functional. She wouldn’t be able to continue if she embarrassed my father because she made it known to our household that our appearance was the most important thing. We don’t want to draw negative attention to ourselves because it will hurt my father’s rise to the top.

My best friend Ember and I have been debating what your 13th birthday will be like, probably because her parents and mine have explained things differently. She has repeatedly told me not to get my hopes up today. She keeps reminding me we will attend Black Rose Academy together in a few short years. Nothing else matters. I focus on that and keep my eye on the end goal. Because one day, I won’t live in a house that tries to change everything about me. As much as I want to defend my parent’s actions, I have run out of excuses. However, I don’t want to give them a reason to take Ember’s friendship away from me. I know they would if they could. They hate that I am friends with her, primarily because of her being of mixed bloodline. Her mother is a succubus, and her father is a vampire. My family believes in being pure.

They dislike everything I love. They began forcing me only to have my older sister Lulu’s hand-me-downs. I suppose they hold on to the hope that I would become like her because, of course, Lulu is everything I am not. She took after my mother in the looks department. Blonde hair that curls perfectly, bright aqua eyes, and a bubbly personality that people flocked to. Then there’s me. Dark, almost black hair, yes, it curled, but notperfectly. It seems as if my hair is more frizz than anything else. My hair was so unruly that my father told my mother to do whatever she could to fix it since I was becoming an eyesore. I went through hair treatments, but nothing worked. Finally, at her wit’s end, she spent the money to have a permanent spell placed on me. My hair curls perfectly now, even if I don’t put the product in it, which I often don’t since it seems like a waste of time.

That isn’t the only thing they wanted to change about me. No matter how hard I try to fit into their world, my personality gets in the way, and then I end up ruining it. Everything I touch taints itself, becoming stranger, darker, and odd after I try to put my spin on it. This causes my parents to raise their eyebrows with a look at the other that says, ‘She gets it from your family.’ Then, they went back to ignoring me after tossing it away, pretending that they didn’t break my heart as they tossed out something I loved.

It doesn’t help that I only seem into things most girls aren’t supposed to be—at least not the ones in our family. Among them were sketching, entomology, reading, and enjoying dark clothing, all things my mother and Lulu classified as creepy and weird. When I was eight, I had a collection of rag dolls I made from discarded scraps of material. They were my little Frankenstein dolls, mixed and matched with what I could find—complete with button eyes. They lived in a shoebox in my closet as my secret. Or, at least until Lulu found them and ensured they were burned. She cried dramatically while complaining to our mother that I was making Voodoo-type dolls of her. According to her, I was trying to curse her and her friends. Her sick smile of victory would shine through when anything of mine got thrown out. That means anything that doesn’t meet the perfect standards of the family gets taken away. Ember started keeping things I made or wanted to keepat her house. She states I can have them when we attend Black Rose together.

My anxiety is riding high as I give into the morning stretch and sit up in bed. The bubblegum pink tulle canopy tickles my face as I climb out of the monstrosity over-the-top bedding. I hate it—it’s from Lulu’s princess phase. Naturally, I got them after she wanted to change to butterflies. Dark thoughts of burning them down enter my mind. I smile as I picture everything from the dolls, horses, and stables as they catch fire, burning the eyesore color to ash. That would be an improvement to their appearance.

I try to shake off the dark thoughts running through my mind. They are becoming more frequent, and I haven’t wanted to bring them up with my parents, who would use them as an excuse to ship me away. It’s noticeable how much my mother prefers my two siblings over me. She doesn’t voice it out loud, but it’s noticeable. At first, I thought it was my imagination, but it’s not. It used to make me try harder, but now I have stopped trying altogether and accept that being invisible is the route to take. Mother only talks to me when she is disappointed in me. Even if she does, her eyes seem to almost scan over me. Her gaze made me feel all the imperfections that live in my appearance. I can’t help but think that if I could change it, I would. If I could cut the imperfections that live on the surface out, I would if that meant they would love me.

Today, I can finally make them proud. That is my hope for today. This is a chance for a new start. There is no way this day can’t be about me, with no Lulu to sabotage it while twisting my words to make it seem like I am in the wrong. Half the time, I wonder if maybe I am the one who is twisted, as they say. My grandparents have my siblings at their house because today is about learning my magic and guiding me. I practically skip to the kitchen before becoming nervous. My body stops, andmy anxiety makes my knees weak as I round the corner to the kitchen. Something inside of me is screaming to turn around. To run away. My feet did not want to transition from wood floors to tiled ones. I shake my head as I try to reason with myself that this will be good. This could be life-changing for me, yet only terror grips my chest. ‘You always ruin everything. Why should this be any different?’ My inner voice scolds me.

I flinch back and feel his eyes on me. Of course, this happens when I’m having an inner argument with myself. He flexes the newspaper, and a growling grumble sounds in his chest. ‘He hates you, can you not feel it?’ Something seems to scream at me.

With another shake of my head, I press on, my legs feeling heavier with each step. My body feels like it is swaying as I try to put one foot in front of the other. I am trying my best not to make this heaviness in my limbs known, but I am feeling more awkward than normal. Still, I am determined that today is the day I will change how they see me. My father’s eyes scrutinize me. He folds his newspaper neatly shut as he watches my movements. ‘Today is judgment day,’ my father’s deep rumble of a voice enters my head. My lip trembles as I look up at the intimidating man.

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