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Chapter One

Talia

T he throbbing pain between my thighs has me averting my eyes from the doctors and nurses around me.

It's humiliating in a way their tests haven't been before.

I count in my head to distract myself, starting at one hundred and going all the way down to one.

They have to be done soon.

Please, please let them be done soon.

The metal instrument they inserted is pinching me in such a private, sensitive area.

The pain from it is making me feel nauseated, but I fight it back as best I can.

I can’t afford to lose the small amount of food I ate today, since I have no idea when I will get to eat again.

The searing, pinching pain down below makes hot tears leak from my eyes as I hold back my whimpers of pain.

It’s moments like this that I struggle to find my will to keep surviving.

They can do so much to me without breaking my spirit, but this is a line that, when crossed, it chips away at my soul and makes me question why I’m fighting so hard to survive.

As if they haven't done enough to study me, now they’re doing tests to make sure I’m ready for their breeding program.

The Croisés are getting desperate. They’re becoming angry with me and my lack of progress. They want me to show them what I can do, to unleash my power, and allow them to study it further.

Yeah, right. I may be na?ve like they tell me every damn time they try to convince me they know better, but I’m not so na?ve that I would play right into their hands and give them what they want.

The stuff they preach in this place is enough to set anyone’s teeth on edge. They truly believe they are above everyone else, and they believe themselves to be the closest living things to God. Now, I know little about God, other than he’s almighty and powerful apparently, but this God must not be a very good being if this is the worship he receives.

They torture, maim, kill, and hurt people and shifters alike in the name of this God. They steal, lie, and cheat to make themselves into something they were never born to be. How can they worship and preach the perfection of this God while also claiming he made a huge mistake, and it’s their mission to make it right? It honestly baffles me in so many ways.

If their God is almighty, why would he not have just given them the powers they seek? Why were they then given to me, and shifter-kind alike, mistakenly ? Every time I voiced these questions in the past, as a stupid young child who just wanted all of the information I could get, I was severely punished. After the second lashing, I knew it was better to keep my mouth shut.

The pain slowly subsides as they start to finish up. It only took another couple of times of counting to one hundred this time around. They do this testing monthly right now. Something about cycles and monthly menstrual things. I tuned most of the medical talk out, honestly.

My peryton is curled against me in my mind, giving me all the comfort that she can right now. Her thoughts remind me that we’re fighting for a future, one outside of the confines of this hell. The chances of it happening are slim, we know that, but it doesn’t stop us from holding on to the dream.

This time she adds in a battle cry, one that makes my heart soar and ache at the same time. She wants to make all of them pay for everything they’ve done to us and the perytons before us. Vengeance floods our heads, pushing every last morsel of pain out until a numb, cold rage sits in its place.

It’s been twenty-four years in this prison, and every second that ticks by eats away at the person I should be.

Perytons were once known for their benevolence and wisdom, the mythical shifters that played the mediators to the others. We’re not the violent type. We live in the world of healing and light. Those times are long gone, and in its place is me, a girl trying desperately to hold on to her kindness as the people around me wear me down to a husk of who I should be.

“Get your head out of the clouds and get back to your room,” the cruel nurse says, her eyes cold and hard as she pulls off her bloody gloves. “You may bleed for a little while, but you’ll be fine. I’ll tell the guards to throw some extra blankets in your room.”

Room? Scoff. Give me a break.

Prison cell is apparently too hard for her to say after she just violated me, causing me to bleed outside of my heat cycles. It’s funny the things humans will avoid to make themselves more comfortable after they commit heinous acts against someone else. They always seem to skirt some invisible line past the truth that doesn’t make any sense to me.

As I attempt to get up off the exam table, I flinch at the sudden flare of pain between my legs. Before anyone in the room can notice, I shut down my reaction to the pain. I turn away from the nurse and slip on my thread-worn clothes, internally squirming at the thought of blood getting on them. Like always, I have two unbearable choices; get blood on the only clothes I’ll have for a long time, or walk with a guard bare from the bottom down. Seems I will be living in my own dried blood because the alternative is too much for me.

Without a word from anyone, the door opens, revealing one of the guards ready to escort me to my cell. He’s one of the better guards to have escort me. His gaze is always unfocused and uninterested, his attitude showing his complete disinterest in me.

With quick movements, he attaches my chains, ones made of pure silver, to stop me from using my magic. As if silver even works on shifters, especially shifters whose magic is born of ancient times. It’s a myth neither myself, nor any of my ancestors before me, have felt the need to lie to rest. If silver is what they use because they think it works, then that just gives me the opportunity to use it against them if the situation ever arises.

The guard walks the halls at his normal speed, making me walk faster to keep up with him. Falling behind is not an option, even if silver itself isn’t harmful to me, the cuffs cutting into my skin still are. The beatings for slowing down the guard are also something to fear.

It’s best to shut up and keep up . The words were drilled into me from the time I could walk and over time started repeating in my head like a mantra.

The walls blur by me, my mind cataloguing every door and hallway like it always does, hoping for a glimpse inside of them to see if they lead out. The need to be out there, in nature, free , drives me so hard some days that I feel like I'm going to shatter into a million pieces right where I stand if I don't get out there. I never shatter though. I simply keep moving, going through the motions and the tests, waiting for my one opportunity to be free. The funny thing is, that's where the dream ends.

There's nothing past being free, because I don't know what it means to be free.

I know what I've read or watched, but freedom is a luxury I have yet to be able to experience.

The guard stops at the doorway that leads to the cells. The gothic, iron door adorned with crosses stays locked at all times, so it always takes a moment to get it open. Clicking and tinkling sounds from the keys always set me on edge because I know that nothing good ever follows it. It's instinct at this point to tense at the sound, waiting to be thrown back into my cell or dragged back out for more tests.

As the guard pushes the creaking, heavy door open, he roughly tugs on the chains to force me to follow him through.

His rough pulling mixed with the loud clang of the door swinging shut behind us makes me stumble forward.

I involuntarily flinch away from the guard and the door, shrinking into the wall.

Not that the guard seems to even notice as he just pulls harder, ready to be done with me and this part of his job.

"Blankets and rags will be brought by within the hour," he grumbles, scratching his short blonde beard uncomfortably.

"Hands still."

He undoes the cuffs while I stand in my cell, my eyes trained to the ground once he starts.

Spooking a guard while he removes the chains leads to unbearable, immediate pain for me.

I've learned it's best to stand as still as possible and keep my eyes trained on the ground.

There's less chance one of them will think I'm hostile this way.

Once he has them off, he closes the door to my cell, the lock quickly clicking into place.

After that, he's gone faster than it takes me to look up, the door to this block already banging shut behind him as I look at the clock on the wall across from me.

Moving around my small cell, I gather one of the rags they gave me for my last heat and wince as I get it into place. There's already blood in my pants, but at least this will stop any more of it leaking until it's over. There's one part of me that wants to know what they did to me down there to make me bleed outside of my cycle, but a larger part of me, coupled with my peryton, says it's probably better not to know. There was a saying in a book I read that said ignorance is bliss . Now, I don't know about going so far as to say bliss, but ignorance keeps me going, that's for sure. If I thought about even half the tests and experiments they've run on me in the past, I probably would have given up on surviving.

Sometimes, it's better to be alive and sane, than have all the information.

My body crumbles beneath me, sliding down the rough, stone wall until I hit the ground, directly on my nest of blankets that I call a bed. Within moments of closing my eyes, I'm whisked away to the meadow I visit my peryton in.

She greets me, nudging her head against my stomach and spreading her deep teal wings out beside her.

Like I do every time I visit, I burrow my face into her neck and breathe in the familiarity of our scent.

She's me, and I'm her, but we're two parts that coexist together, instead of one being with the gift to shapeshift.

It's one of the biggest secrets kept from the Croisés, aside from the true depth of my magic and my connection to the past.

It's the reason why they can never get what they want from the shifters. There's no way to pull her from me, but there's also no physical way to bring forth our connection because it's a magic all of its own.

It's older than any of us. It dates back to the days of creation, though none of us know who created it to begin with. If the Crosiés are right with their God, then it was their own God that created this connection and hid it from them. They either talk of a false God they worship or they've skewed the teachings of the God they think so highly of.

Either way, they aren't doing this for anybody but themselves and their own selfish desires.

Sitting on the ground in the meadow, I rub my peryton behind her ears, stroking the soft, short fur as I stare off into the golden distance. It's been nagging at me for a few years now, how humans seem to run on so much selfishness and care very little for each other.

The way these humans act with me and each other, it's a cruel kind of madness that I can't wrap my mind around.

There has to be more than I can see, a world that's kinder and full of light. I can't lose hope that past these walls, there's more. If I lose hope that there's better, I lose the last tether keeping me together.

The movies I've seen, the few they actually let me view, all ended with a happy ending. Same with the books I could get my hands on, happy endings everywhere. The question I've always had, but never found an answer to, is, do they all have happy endings because that's reality, or is it because they're so lacking in real life that people create them to make themselves feel better?

My peryton looks up at me, her jade eyes reflecting the confusion and uneasiness in my own gaze.

Yeah, I fear it's the latter as well.