Page 68 of Captured in Love
I stifle a sigh. Yes, I told him off for glamouring the rescue boat captain, but this is a different situation. Right? We’re trying tosavesomeone, for gods’ sake. It’s anemergency.
He smirks, leans his elbows on the reception desk’s counter, and smolders at the woman. “It’s okay. You know us. It’s all right for us to visit the patient now.”
The woman’s eyes go glassy, her face blank, and she nods. The transformation is scary to say the least, and I already wish I hadn’t asked Raphaël to do this, but we need the directions. We don’t have the time to go checking every single hospital room.
“Yes,” the head nurse says in a monotone. “Down the corridor on your left and through the glass door. Room one-nineteen.”
Raphaël thanks her, and we move off to the side, out of her field of vision. I don’t know how long the compulsion will hold, and I don’t want to stay here and find out.
“Come on,” I whisper. “Stick close, and I’ll cloak us a little.”
The invisibility spell I used in Paris and in the Egyptian tomb isn’t strong enough to make us completely invisible to the hospital staff—there are three of us, which makes it more complicated, and we’re a moving target. Instead, I focus on making us completely boring. We become part of the scenery. To the people we meet in the corridor, we’re no more interesting than a fake potted plant or a waiting bench.
And there it is, a white-painted door with the ‘119’ tag on it. There’s a notice in Icelandic stuck below it, some of the letters printed in red, but I have no hope of deciphering that.
Levi glances over his shoulder, then slowly presses down on the handle and cracks open the door. At the same time, I put a magical shield in front of us, readying myself for an attack. If the witches are here, we’ll be ready for them.
The door makes a soft noise, awhooshagainst the carpeted floor. Nothing happens, and the only visible person in the room is a woman in a pistachio-green hospital gown, sleeping on the low bed. Levi probes the space with his magic and finally nods for us to enter. We hurry through and pull the door almost closed behind us, leaving a tiny crack because there’s no door handle on the inside.
Then I stop and stare.
I’ve only ever seen a room like this in movies, and I find it strange that this little hospital in a small Icelandic town has one. But maybe they need it, maybe sometimes people just need a safe space to rest.
The floor is thick gray carpet, the walls wrapped in soft beige pads. Apart from the bed, which seems to be two mattresses stacked on top of each other, there’s only a beanbag for seating in one corner and a plastic sippy cup of water on a padded windowsill.
The woman twitches in her sleep, her long brown hair spilling over the pillow. The first thing I note is that this isn’t the Dorokhov witch, the one who chased us through the bazaar in Cairo with her husband. No, this stranger is in her forties, maybe fifties, white, and very thin. I have no idea if this is the result of her recent ordeal or how she looks usually, but she seems frail and very, very human.
As I approach her, she shifts in the bed and her hand pokes out from under the covers. Her wrist is bandaged, and barely healed scratches mar the insides of her underarms.
Did she damage herself?
A knot of pity lodges in my throat, and I swallow past it. “Do you think she’s sedated?”
Levi steps up to me. “Probably. Otherwise she would have woken up already.”
It feels so godsdamned wrong to be here while she’s insensible, because we’re invading her privacy, but if we leave her in the care of human doctors, she could be in grave danger. I perch on the edge of the bed and gently take her warm, dry hand between mine.
“Um, ma’am?” I say softly. “Wake up.”
A frown line appears between her eyebrows, but she doesn’t open her eyes. Whatever they gave her must be strong, and I wonder what had prompted the humans to do this. How distressed the woman must have been for them to so completely sedate her.
“Fuck,” Levi mutters, echoing my thoughts.
Raphaël crouches next to me and puts his hand on my knee. “Can you try to connect with her?”
I take a deep breath and nod. “I’ll try.”
Reaching out for my magic, I slowly search for the woman’s consciousness. Just an exploratory gesture, not trying to violate her thoughts or influence her in any way but to see who she is.
The first images I get are fuzzy. It’s the drugs working through her system, disabling her brain’s ability to protect itself. If she were conscious, she’d feel something brushing at the edges of her mind, and she’d close up her barriers. My stomach turns at the violation of both the sedative on her brain and my own intrusion. It leaves me feeling dirty and rotten, no matter how much I’m trying to tell myself that I’mhelpingher.
Despite that, I reach deeper, right to the core of her being—I need to know if she’s really a witch.
And there it is. A glowing orb of magic, purple shot through with gold, beautiful but dimmed by the same drugs they pumped into her system.
I sigh in relief that I was able to reach her so easily, that we got to her before humans figured out she is different from them. I start to pull away the tendrils of my power. We can wait for the sedative to flush out of her system and get her moved somewhere safe.
Then a mental clamp fixes right back on me, squeezing me in its grip.
