strode toward Quentin, offering him my hand so he could show me the memories while he used his Order gifts on her. I didn’t like the creep touching me, but it was the least of the sacrifices I was making to get answers.
His slim fingers clutched mine and his eyes slowly slid together until they were one, large entity at the centre of his face. Then he reached toward Janice whose eyes were full of fear as she jerked against her restraints once more. But it was no good. And as Quentin’s hand pressed to her forehead, she fell still a moment before my mind went dark.
I was no longer standing in that room, but hanging in an abyss while disjointed memories tore through my head. I tried to make sense of them and I felt Quentin’s power slowly mould them into order, playing them out in my head like they were my own memories. I only had to urge my mind towards one and I could view it as if I was there, seeing it through Janice’s eyes.
She was shaking hands with the warden, magic sparking between their palms before she signed a contract on her desk. Then the memory changed and she was pulling on scrubs, walking into a surgery among other doctors and nurses.
She was looking down at a man strapped to a table as he jerked against his binds, his chest carved open as light poured out of him and into a large glass jar, channelled there by some strange metal object that was glittering with a dark and ominous magic. Sickness clutched my gut as that light was torn free from the man’s body by the scalpel as Janice cut through it, carving away the strange, ethereal matter that connected it to him. To his soul. To his very being. Then as soon as the jar was sealed, he started convulsing and everyone in the room ran forward to heal him, his chest stitching back together, but he was still jerking and his eyes were rolling back into his head as he screamed. And finally, he fell deathly still.
Janice drew her hands away from him with a curse, turning to note down the loss on a clipboard. A number struck out. Three hundred and eight.
Then she waved her hand and the man was wheeled from the room before another one was brought in.
The memory faded once more and I was drawn into another one as Quentin guided me into it. I was looking through Janice’s eyes into a glass chamber where a girl with pink hair was strapped to a chair. My gut tightened as I recognised her as one of the inmates who’d lost their minds in this place recently. But she didn’t seem crazy now, she just seemed…absent. Her eyes were hollow and I could tell that a vital part of her was missing. Whatever that light was that had been taken from the man who’d died, it had been taken from her too. She may have survived, but it didn’t look like her soul had been left intact.
A fierce anger filled me as I watched a nurse stride into the room with a jar of light clasped in her hands. Janice followed her into the room and moved to stand in front of the pink haired girl, gazing down into her dead eyes.
“What was she before?” Janice asked the nurse who checked an Atlas in her palm.
“A Vampire,” she replied and my jaw tightened.
Janice nodded and took a scalpel from a trolley beside the inmate and started slicing slim, shallow cuts across her wrists, the crook of her elbows, her neck, her temples, her ankles. Then she took the jar from the nurse and laid it in the girl’s lap, firmly twisting it to open the lid. The light immediately filtered out like it was a living thing with a mind of its own; it shifted and writhed and seemed to search for something as it drifted across the girl’s body. As it reached her cuts, it slowly slipped inside her and the girl gasped, her eyes brightening as her head snapped back.
“That’s it,” Janice urged hopefully. “Accept the new sensation. You’re a Werewolf now. Can you feel the change?”
The girl just gargled and shock rippled through me as I realised what was happening. What those jars were. What had been done to this girl.
Fur spread across her skin and she screamed as her mouth and nose extended into a snout and