Kitty is on offer as well. The young awry might even have been intended as the main event.
I’ve never attended such an atrocity. But I know that it didn’t get thrown together at the last minute.
Sick to my stomach at all the thoughts I’m cobbling together in my head, I tuck Kitty closer to me. Snatching the kids on this specific night had to already have been planned. Was someone waiting until one of them manifested as awry? Was it their mother? That’s what Kitty wouldn’t outright say, wasn’t it? They weren’t supposed to take Tommy, she said.
Just Kitty.
But Tommy was already ready, waiting. He had been since even before he approached me at the literacy event and repeated what he’d once heard somewhere, from someone.
That people with purple eyes are locked away for their own protection.
“Now,” Coda murmurs through my phone speakers.
The tech awry is right. We need to move.
More platforms are rising. The grating churn of the mech that powers the pedestals should cover our retreat if we’re careful. The Banksy angel starts to lift even as we move away.
Transferring my hold to Kitty’s wrist so I don’t lose my grip on her hand if we need to run, I keep as much to the shadows as possible. Trying not to blindly bump into more displays. The way to the office is blocked now, and we haven’t yet found Tommy, so I head to where the men came from, toward where we heard the pained cry.
Instead of trying to find the opening, we skirt the thick black velveteen curtain that I wasn’t close enough to see from deeper in the room. On the other side of the curtain, only one much larger platform occupies this section beneath the stage.
This platform is large enough to hold a metal cage. The steel bars of the cage are so thick I’d have trouble closing my hand around them, but with enough space between them that the slight figure huddled within is clearly discernible.
Tommy.
And Tommy isn’t an awry.
He’s something … else …
With my own essence loosely twined around me, I can sense the tenor of Tommy’s power even through the heavy-duty protective essence entwined around the cage.
Kitty twists free of my hold, dashing toward her brother before I can caution her. Fortunately, my fear makes my own reaction quick enough that I’m up on the platform only a moment after her, snatching her back before she makes contact with the bars.
She opens her mouth to shriek. But Tommy’s hand, thrust through the bars, closes over her mouth to muffle her indignation. Tommy, who is shirtless, hisses in pain. The skin on his bare arm sears, then blisters, from the essence coating the metal bars. His hiss isn’t human at all, and neither is his malformed jaw.
Kitty cries out a second time, grabbing Tommy’s arm and trying to shove the limb back through the bars.
He withdraws, cradling the seared arm against his chest. His other shoulder is clearly dislocated. The bruise capping that shoulder deepens further in color, as do the blisters on his arm. Yes, even as I watch.
Tommy is healing, and too quickly for a not-wholly-manifested eleven-year-old. He’s barefoot, his toes misshapen and partially clawed. He’s wearing only jeans, torn at the knees and frayed at the hems. Though they might have been that way before he was kidnapped.
He’s definitely not an awry but a shifter of some sort— and seemingly stuck in the middle of a transformation. I can’t get a solid read on the energy underlying this partial shift. Perhaps the protections coating the cage are fucking with my senses. But it feels as if an ancient power, completely different than the essence that fuels me and Kitty, pulses through his veins.
“You came,” he rasps through his misaligned vocal cords. His eyes are bright with fever, or with the power of his beast. “Mirth. You came for us.”
“I did,” I say, perfectly steady. “Always … we’ll make sure this never happens again, but I’ll always come when you need me.”
“Okay.” Tommy closes his eyes, slumping in the center of the cage and carefully avoiding the bars.
“What have they done to you?” Kitty sobs.
“Shot me up with something,” Tommy says wearily. “It triggered me … my essence. They thought maybe I was awry. Like you.” He laughs harshly. “Boy, were they wrong.”
“They could have fixed your arm. Clothed you,” I say, completely pissed, and not quite certain why I’m fixating on those details over the kidnapping itself.
Maybe because I’ve nearly been kidnapped — or at least solid attempts have been made to kidnap me — so I’m used to it …
It’s probably best to not pick at that bit of possible psychosis right now, though.
