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15

THE HOLE IN THE FLOOR

B lack’s hand lightly guided me by the small of my back as I walked in front of him to the office’s metal door. I let him do the same to the second floor staircase landing, still typing rapidly on my phone to Kiko and Alisha about backing up everything I’d sent, even as I followed the gentle nudge of his fingers.

Can I take you out to dinner after this? he murmured softly once I’d shoved the phone back in my pocket. Assuming we’re not stuck here all night, maybe we can start looking through house listings… or both… we could do both…

My breathing relaxed as he spoke to me in that murmuring voice.

It hit me then, what Black was reacting to in me, how tense I felt inside this house. There was something really wrong here, something I couldn’t put my finger on. The feeling had seeped deeper in my heart and head, the longer we stayed.

Something was wrong.

Something was really fucking wrong here.

We started to climb the carpeted stairs and I looked up. When my eyes slid down from that high, gilded ceiling, I found Black watching me carefully with his gorgeous, flecked-gold eyes. I smiled, hoping to reassure him.

He smiled back, and the relief on him was palpable.

I began ascending faster, until I was half-jogging, then running up the carpeted steps. I suddenly remembered that Nick said he needed us, that he needed me, in particular.

He’d found something, and he needed both of us.

Those four flights felt long, even with how fast I ran up them.

Maybe they felt longer because the ceilings were high, or maybe because my aleimic light began flickering up ahead, and I could now feel something that made me even more uneasy. It pulled my mind entirely off Rucker’s office, and computer files we were stealing. I started thinking instead about what I’d heard in the background while we spoke to Nick.

Someone… or something… had been in the room with him.

I didn’t worry about Nick taking care of himself.

I shouldn’t be worried about that; Nick was physically stronger than me or Black, likely both of us combined, so if he was in trouble that way, I doubted we could do much to help him in that respect. Anyway, the urgency I’d heard on Nick hadn’t been for himself.

He hadn’t seemed afraid at all, but more… agitated.

Upset, perhaps.

I shoved it out of my mind, realized it was futile to try and pull it apart until I could see whatever it was for myself.

The thought pushed my legs and feet even faster.

Seconds later, we reached the top floor, and Black was in front of me again.

Moreover, he had a gun in his hand, and he motioned for me to stay behind him.

I didn’t argue, but crouched down to a half-fighting stance and followed closely behind him. I wondered if I should start carrying a gun myself again, at least while we were out in the field, doing stuff like this.

It wouldn’t be a bad idea, doc.

Next time, I murmured back, and that seemed to satisfy him.

Like Nick said, the master suite took up the entire floor.

There were no real walls or doors, only partitions that broke up the high-ceilinged space, and made it feel even larger than it was. I followed Black, checking the corners as he followed Nick’s directions on how to find him. We walked straight from the top of the stairs up to the first partition, which was further down than it first looked.

At the opening, Black paused.

He turned his head right, then left, and frowned.

I couldn’t yet see, being level with the partition itself, so I could only watch.

Without a word to me, he began stalking in the lefthand direction, presumably towards Nick. I saw him lower and re-holster his gun as he began to walk.

I understood Black’s frown once I stepped past the partition myself.

Nick was down on his hands and knees, peering down at something,

Whatever it was, it looked embedded in the floor.

Nick didn’t look alarmed. He certainly didn’t look to be in any physical danger.

I jogged faster to reach Black’s side, and by then we’d nearly reached where Nick knelt on the floor. When he looked up, there was an expression on Nick’s face I’d never seen before. I had absolutely no idea what it meant, but it scared me a little.

That expression didn’t change as he met my gaze, then Black’s.

His eyes looked dead.

They also appeared darker behind the contact lenses, which told me they’d likely flushed red, but nothing in his expression reflected any of the emotion that usually went along with that change. He looked beyond anger, beyond hunger, beyond even grief.

It looked like someone had turned off the light behind his eyes.

“I smelled something,” he said, by way of explanation. Nick’s voice sounded as empty and dead as his eyes. “I smelled something, and tracked it here. I lifted the rug.”

I looked down at the space on the floor near where his hands supported him.

That darker hue in his eyes seemed to seethe in the shadows where he knelt. He’d found the one spot of carpet in that area where the sun didn’t reach. I followed his stare to the metal below him, and for the first time, I noticed a hatch had been lifted up.

A hole had been cut into the floor.

Something must be down there, near his hands.

Whatever it was, that’s what Nick stared at.

The uneasiness in my chest and gut worsened.

In the end, it was Black who broke the impasse.

He walked over to Nick, moving with gliding, predatory strides.

In three steps, he loomed over the vampire, and gazed down and through the same opening in the floor. I walked carefully around to Nick’s other side, around the open metal hatch and nearer to the balcony.

“You’re blocking the sunlight, Miri,” Nick said.

His deadened, empty voice made me flinch.

“Oh. Sorry.”

I stepped quickly to my right, out of the noonday sun and closer to Nick. As soon as I did, sunlight poured into the hole. I placed my foot carefully near Nick’s side and bent closer, now conscious of staying out of our only natural means of illumination.

Bars had been built into the floor. A thick metal edge held them all in place. Each bar looked about an inch thick and stood maybe one and a half inches apart.

Between those bars, a face peered up at me.

Wide, blue-green eyes stared into mine.

“Jesus!” It startled me so much, I jerked back.

Maybe I should have expected to see what I saw, or to see something like it, at least, but the stillness of that face meant its presence took me entirely by surprise. It was like looking at an abstract painting that suddenly snapped into a clear, unambiguous image. It shocked me so badly, I was breathing hard even after I stepped back, one hand pressed to my chest.

I stared at that face, and the large, round eyes stared back at me.

They hadn’t changed expression.

My eyes adjusted more.

It was a child, or near enough; I definitely wasn’t looking at a full adult. The face that stared at me was still rounded with youth, with a full mouth, too-large eyes, soft cheeks, a soft chin. Her features contained the barest hint of a heart-shaped face, but I guessed I was seeing the ghost of what her adult face might look like one day.

Her current face was close to round, despite her high cheekbones.

Her large eyes were rimmed with dark, long lashes.

I suspected that face would be even rounder if she wasn’t so thin.

I was looking at a young girl, a barely pubescent girl––fourteen?

Maybe thirteen?

Dark, tangled, dirty, but possibly straight dark hair hung down her shoulders and covered most of her upper back. Small, pale fingers gripped one of the bars, the nails painted pink. The expression on her face was tense, like she was prepared to have to defend herself if it became necessary, or maybe readying herself to run away.

I realized she was gripping Nick’s fingers with some of hers, holding him as tightly as she could through the openings in the metal.

She seemed to make herself smaller in Nick’s direction, too, as if her entire being winced away from me and Black and closer to Nick.

Given her situation, and all of us being strangers, and the resignation I felt all over her light, she might have been bracing herself for whatever came next. She likely didn’t know where to turn for help; maybe Nick made the most sense, given he’d been the one to find her.

He’d found her, and he hadn’t done anything bad to her yet.

Because a girl her age, living in a cage, in the floor of a mansion owned by a narcissistic billionaire asshole, likely had suffered through some very bad things happening to her already.

The girl swallowed, and licked cracked lips.

She looked dehydrated, underfed, terrified.

She had bruises on her wrists, and a large swollen area on her jaw and face.

Her toes had been painted pink, just like her fingernails.

She was completely naked.

Black let out a string of curses in a language I didn’t know how to translate exactly, one of those he used occasionally from Old Earth. He sank his weight down to a crouch; his boots stopped just at the edge of where the metal bars began.

Without saying a word to me or Nick, he addressed the young girl in the more scholarly-sounding version of Prexci, the seer tongue. I jumped when I heard him speak. It was the same version he’d taught me, and the one most of the Old Earth seers used.

“Who are you?” he asked gently.

Pain hit at the center of my chest. Briefly, it nearly made my knees buckle.

I hadn’t realized, gaos, hadn’t connected the dots.

I hadn’t gotten far enough in my thinking to know she was a seer.

The girl slowly, reluctantly, achingly pulled her eyes off me.

It hit me only then that she’d scarcely looked at Nick or at Black since I’d first made sense of her face. She might be leaning into Nick as her possible protector, but something about me drew her attention and her light, too. I could guess what that something was. I probably seemed safe to her––in comparison, at least.

Now, she blinked reluctantly up at Black.

Her shoulders hunched. She looked like a dog waiting to be kicked.

She looked submissive, like she might be waiting for an order she already knew she wouldn’t want to follow.

That sick, angry, horror feeling closed my throat, made my gut burn.

I’d seen that look before. I’d seen it while I’d been at war in Afghanistan and Iraq. I’d seen it on patients I’d had in the past, the ones I took pro bono, or assigned by the courts. I’d seen it in the victims Nick and I released the time we hunted down a child murderer.

She was in shock, but it was more than that.

She was in an ongoing state of survival and stress, and likely had been for a while.

She’d experienced so many emotions and fears, so intensely, for so long, whole parts of her had shut down to compensate. All of her energy and focus got diverted to the essentials, in an effort just to keep her alive. The profusion of things held back, things felt and suppressed, made her cheeks, jaw, forehead, lips, and eyes flinch and tense and twitch with effort.

I’d glimpsed something like it on Black before, too.

It came back to him at times, mostly when he recounted his time in the slave pens back on Old Earth. He would go back there sometimes, in some part of his light. His whole face would change, his light would change, and I would see it; I would know he was that seer child again. He would be in that place again, with those people. The twitches and jerks would alter his normal expressions, just like what was happening to the girl now.

His eyes would grow far-seeing.

Parts of his aleimic light would shut down.

If he went too far into it, I might need Yarli or one of the other seers to help him out of it. Sometimes I could get him out by putting him into a kind of aleimic trance. Either way, the nightmares would grow exponentially worse after, sometimes for days.

Black told me the hardest part of being in that prison in Louisiana had been how it threw him into a never-ending flashback of his childhood. He couldn’t end it. He couldn’t snap himself out. It felt like a nightmare he couldn’t wake from. And really, it was… the traumatized part of him couldn’t tell the difference.

Looking at this girl’s face was like seeing that in real time.

It was like Black’s nightmares, his memories, come to life.

She might even be close to the same age Black had been for the worst of his own abuse. Maybe it was my own trauma I was feeling, too, with Solonik and even with Nick, but with Black, I could really see it. Looking at her round, too-young face, it didn’t feel like a memory.

It felt like right now.

It felt like those things never left him.

I sucked in a slow, silent breath. I calmed my heart rate with an effort.

This girl needed our help. Gaos, she needed our help right now. She wasn’t some avatar for Black’s pain; she was real. I needed to focus on her.

I consciously created distance in my mind and light.

Once I felt marginally more in my doctor headspace, and less in my hyper-emotional seer wife headspace, I tried to make sense of the profusion of emotion and intensity in her devastating eyes. I didn’t see relief, or fear, or anger, or any of the other emotions one might categorize as “expected,” if one only witnessed captives being freed on television shows and in movies.

Captivity and shock and trauma did strange things to people.

It did particularly strange things to young people. Depending on how long she’d been down there, how much of her life had been molded and shaped around living like this, there was no telling how she might react to us, or whether she could even communicate with us.

She might even fight us.

I looked at her aleimi, as Black must have done. I’d known, of course, ever since Black spoke to her, what she was, but now my light confirmed it.

She was definitely seer.

She looked seer, even in those wide eyes, angular cheekbones, and perfect mouth.

But her aleimic light was what really gave her away.

It writhed around her like a separate, living being. I saw meanings stacked and woven there, a confused tangle of thought and feeling and intensity and repression. I glanced at her throat, didn’t see a collar, but I could feel something strangling her living light, even with how much of it I could see. It didn’t dim her light exactly, but more seemed to scramble it, in a way that likely made it hard for her to do much, if anything, with her seer abilities.

Was this another of Lucian Rucker’s fucking tech toys?

“Yes,” Black muttered coldly from next to me. “Likely. We need to get her to the lab. Do a CAT scan, possibly an MRI.”

His eyes never left the girl.

My eyes fell to the cage. It was only about six by four feet.

She could lie down in it, at least, and I saw that the bottom of it consisted mostly of a mattress. I didn’t see ventilation of any kind, apart from the steel bars. The metal door had an open window on it, presumably to let in air, and possibly some light. The only other thing I saw in the space with her was a stuffed elephant she gripped in one hand.

My throat tightened as I looked at her. I fought back the stinging in my eyes.

“Baby,” I whispered.

I don’t know why I said it.

Her eyes darted to mine.

She also looked even younger to me now, as I edged nearer.

Instead of looking fourteen in human years, she looked closer to twelve.

In seer years, that would make her––

“Eighteen or nineteen years old,” Black said, gruff, in English. “But doc, the comparison in years isn’t really apt. She’s not likely to be the same maturity level a human would be at that age. Emotionally, she’s much closer to the age she looks.”

I felt even sicker at his words. They absolutely felt true to me, though.

I could feel Black’s emotional reactions sparking and surging around me. He sounded choked up, which made me fight tears, too.

I fought to answer him, to talk to Nick maybe, who’d remained silent through all of our back and forth. I couldn’t make myself speak.

Then I saw the girl glance at Nick, as if remembering him only then.

She visibly flinched when she looked at him that time, but not in fear.

Her eyes grew wider and softer, then abruptly too bright, like she was struggling to hold back tears. She still looked like she was in shock, but relief was making its way through that shock now. She stared at Nick like she couldn’t believe he was there, like he was the answer to some wish she’d made, a fervent wish she’d never believed would be granted.

I wondered if she knew what he was.

Did she think he was seer, too? Is that how she interpreted how he looked? Unlike with Black, she didn’t look afraid of him. Was that some vampire thrall magic, too?

No, Black murmured in my mind. No, I don’t think so, doc.

He looked between the girl and Nick, like something about the connection there made him uneasy.

She knows him, he sent softly, nearly to himself.

I answered him anyway.

That’s not possible, I sent flatly.

Black looked at me. I know it’s not possible, doc, not in any rational way. But she does. She knows him. She thinks she does, at least.

I looked back at the girl.

Black was right. She looked at Nick with recognition, even with love. The too-wet softness in her eyes was nearly awe at his presence there, a disbelieving gratitude.

Still staring at him, taking in the contours of his face, she focused on his eyes.

“Wrong,” she whispered.

I jumped. Until then, I hadn’t been sure she could speak.

She shook her head, visibly upset. “Wrong.”

I gave Nick the barest glance.

The look on his face was pure rage. It wasn’t at the girl.

“Take off your contact lenses,” I murmured to him.

Nick jumped and glanced at me.

Then, hearing what I’d said, making sense of it belatedly, he hesitated, then reached into his pocket. He pulled out a small case with two eye compartments, and flipped open the lids on each. He reached up delicately and plucked first one contact lens, then the next, and put them in the round eye slots.

He blinked a little, presumably to clear his vision, then looked back at the girl.

He smiled at her. “Better?”

Relief filled her expression. She nodded, and her expression was almost shy.

“Pretty,” she said in a low voice.

Black grunted. I could tell he wanted to make a crack, and I knocked him sharply with my elbow.

Don’t, I warned. Not now. She feels safe with Nick.

I wouldn’t dare, doc. I might think it, and say it later, but I won’t ever in front of her.

Black’s thoughts felt profoundly sad, and I swallowed at the intensity there. Still watching the girl, he wiped his eyes, then crouched down to get closer to the floor.

“He is dead,” Black told her in Prexci, his voice gentle. “The man who lived here.”

She tore her eyes off Nick, seemingly with an effort.

She stared up at Black in shock.

“Dead?” she whispered.

She spoke the same language he did.

Black nodded.

“Did you kill him?” she asked, softer.

Black glanced at me, then back at the girl. He shook his head. “No.”

She looked up at Nick, and now her awe and fascination were heartbreakingly apparent.

“Did you kill him?” she asked shyly.

Nick shook his head, too. “No,” he said. He grunted then, and I glimpsed his fangs slightly extended. “I wish I had. I wish I’d done it several times over, little one. In a couple of different ways. I’d really like to find out who did do it… so I can buy them a drink.”

The fascination in her eyes turned into full-blown adoration.

He lowered his hand back to the area of her cage, and she reached for him.

“I wish it was you, too,” she whispered.

Around and between the metal bars, she wrapped as much of herself as she could around his ghost-white fingers, and squeezed.

Black and I exchanged looks.

That time, our minds remained silent.