He shuts the door behind him with a nudge of his heel, his mismatched gaze trained on me. Even though his left eye is clouded over, I get the impression it’s watching me just as much as the uninjured one. My shoulders hunch, my legs pulling closer to my body, as if I can shrink away from his scrutiny.
“We might as well start at the beginning,” he says in the low, resonant voice I remember. “What is your name?”
I stare at him. In more than eight years, my captors never bothered to ask that question. It never mattered to them. Before, in my old life, I must have told people my name dozens of times, but I’m out of practice, and giving it up now feels somehow perilous. Why does he want it?
The man frowns. He walks to the end of the bed and rests his hand on one of the posts. The black lines of the tattoos that creep up from under his sleeve and up his neck across his jaw remind me that he’s not really a man, no more than the ones who shoved me into their cage were.
“Do you understand me?” he asks, measuring out the words more slowly.
I nod automatically, just a brief dip of my head before I catch myself with another flicker of panic. Should I have acknowledged that? Was I better off if he thought I couldn’t?
He takes another step, and my body cringes against the headboard. The man takes in the movement with his pensive gaze and stops where he is. He lowers himself so he’s sitting on the edge of the bed right by the footboard, turned toward me, leaving a few feet between us.
He’s only slightly less intimidating closer to my level.
“You’re scared,” he says—a statement, not a question.
A hysterical giggle claws at my throat. Ya think? Jamie would have said, with all his eight-year-old impertinence, if someone made a ridiculously obvious observation.
“Why don’t I start then?” The man leans against the bedpost behind him with no hint of impatience. “I’m Sylas, originally of Hearthshire, and this is my keep. You won’t find yourself in a cage here. I just have some questions to ask to give me a better sense of your situation.”
He could be lying. But if it matters enough to him, he could probably also find ways of forcing the answers out of me—ways much more unpleasant than this. A longing trickles up through my chest—a longing to clutch at this moment of relative peace and normalcy, however brief it might be.
I open my mouth. My tongue tangles. How long has it been since I last spoke—an actual conversation, not just a single word or a cry prodded out of me?
Finally, I work a fragment of my voice from my throat. It comes out in a raspy whisper. “Talia. My name. It’s Talia.”
As I say it, it no longer feels like giving up but reclaiming something my captors never quite managed to tear away from me. I am Talia McCarty. I’m a human being, not—not vermin, or whatever else the monsters called me. It’s easier to hold onto that certainty here in actual clothes sitting on an actual bed with sunlight streaming past me.
“Talia,” Sylas says, rolling the name off his tongue as if tasting each syllable. In his resonant baritone, it sounds lovelier than I ever thought of it before. Important. Like I’m not just a human being but a figure of acclaim. “Can you tell me how you ended up in that cage in Aerik’s fortress, Talia?”
Fortress. Like keep, it sounds like a word from a fantasy movie, not the reality of my childhood. But then, the reality of my childhood didn’t include men who could change into beasts or magically sealed locks, either.
How did I get into that cage? The icy splashes of memory flicker in the back of my mind, but I manage to stay focused on what’s in front of me. I don’t have to go back there to answer.
My voice still refuses to rise above a whisper, but I don’t force it. “They attacked me. Bit my shoulder.” Of its own accord, my hand rises to the ridges of scar tissue there. “I was out, walking in the woods, after my family had gone out for dinner. They looked—they looked like huge wolves, and then they didn’t. They took me… like you did… and when I woke up I was in the cage.”
“I apologize if our actions reminded you of that time. We had to make haste to ensure we weren’t caught and forced to leave you there.”
I’d appreciate the apology more if I knew what he and the other men he was with plan on doing with me. They talked about me too much like the ones who put me in that cage—like I was something they wanted to use.
And here comes the part where he gets at that purpose. He tips his head, the sunlight picking up a hint of deep purple in the thick, coffee-brown waves of his hair, and indicates my now-sealed wrist. “We healed your most obvious wounds as well as we could. They were taking your blood. How often?”
“I don’t know. I think it was weeks apart. I lost track of time pretty quickly.”
“Of course. And the rest of your days there? It doesn’t appear they treated you all that well.”
“No.” My back stiffens. The words tumble out before I can catch them. “Are they—are they going to know you took me? If they come here—”
Sylas holds up his hand. “They shouldn’t know, but even if they figure it out, I have no intention of letting them throw you back in that wretched cage. Aerik is mostly talk and not much action. If he dares to try me, he’ll regret it.” He grins, baring fierce white teeth.
I don’t know whether I should believe him, but he seems sure of himself. I suck my lower lip under my own teeth for a moment and realize I haven’t answered his question. “The rest of the time, mostly they left me alone except to bring a little food and water. And to change the toilet bucket.”
“Did they ever tell you what they wanted your blood for?”
I shake my head. “They didn’t really talk to me.”
“All right. What of your life before that? Were you already here, in the Mists, or did they take you from the human lands?”
My words fail me for a few heartbeats. “The Mists? What’s that?”
I guess my confusion is answer enough. Sylas’s mouth twists. “The land of the fae. Where you are now. You had no knowledge of us before the attack, I take it.”
“No.” Fae. Like faeries? My mind dredges up an image of Tinkerbell, but the man in front of me is about as far from that little pixie as I am from Batman. He doesn’t have much in common with Santa’s elves or the seven dwarves either.
“You had an ordinary human life, then?” he asks. “Parents, school, playing in the park, that sort of thing?”
He must be able to tell just looking at me that I’d have been taken as a child. If I’ve counted the years right, I’m barely out of my teens. “Yes,” I murmur, too much anguish balling at the base of my throat just with that one word of acknowledgment.
“No experiences before your kidnapping that stand out as unusual?”
“I—I can’t think of any.”
My fingers are starting to ache where they’re clutching the sheet. Maybe Sylas notices. He stands, smoothly but so swiftly my heart skips a beat.
“I think that’s enough talk for now. We should get some food and drink into you before you waste away before my eyes.”
My stomach pinches, but I’ve had enough experience since my kidnapping to clarify, “Nothing that… does funny things to my head or my body. Just normal food?”