burrow into me, trying to crawl deeper, like I’m prey that’s attempting to hide from it. Because...this doesn’t feel like it isn’t real.
“Now,” he begins as he walks back over to me. My wary eyes don’t stray away from the coil of metal wire he’s now gripping. “I need you for one purpose, and one purpose only,” he says conversationally as he stops at the foot of the table.
He pulls off my shoes and socks before fluidly tugging my sweatpants off my body, tossing them onto the floor and leaving me bare in my underwear while I look up at him, frozen in fear and uncertainty. I don’t even voice a protest as he removes my pants and shoes, my lungs and muscles suddenly feeling like they’re dipped in hardened concrete.
What is happening to me?
“You will call your scythe,” Dr. Ophidian declares, confusing me even more. It’s clear he expects me to understand what he’s saying, but I don’t. “After that, I’ll handle the rest.”
He looks at me expectantly, and dread cinches around me even tighter than before. After another silent beat passes, he gives a long-suffering sigh and then slowly begins to uncoil the wire in his hands.
I flinch when he lifts my left foot, his hold firm around the bone of my ankle. I watch, my breath coming in uncoordinated spurts as he takes the end of the metal wire strand and presses it into the arch of my foot. “I have to admit, I was hoping you’d be difficult,” he says with an ill-fitting grin that curls his lips. His teeth gleam, so at war with the grim surroundings of the room. “This helps me let out some of my frustrations. You and your sisters have been very difficult.”
Sisters?
The doubt that’s been in the back of my head, sounding alarms that I’ve been ignoring, grows louder, like it’s demanding I accept its warnings as truth as Dr. Ophidian begins to wrap the wire around my foot. I gasp at the first constricting loop, but he doesn’t stop. With deft, meticulous movements, he begins to twine it around my limb, and every loop he makes digs in harder and harder until he reaches the bottom of my calf, and the metal slices right into my skin.
I cry out at the sudden pain and try to pull my limb from his hold, but he doesn’t relinquish it. One look at Dr. Ophidian’s face tells me he likes that he’s hurting me. He likes the struggle that just shot through my veins. My mind slams and spins, thoughts rattling around like marbles spilling from a glass.
What the hell is happening?
I shake my head, thrashing to pull my body from his hold, but my top half is secured to the table, and impossible strength holds my bottom half still. I can’t move. I can’t get away.
Whimpers escape me as he keeps going, the wire cutting into me with every pass, and I will myself to wake up, for my mind to right itself and make this all go away, but my inner voice retaliates, screaming at me to open my eyes and realize that the monsters I’m seeing are real. That the pain is real. That I’m not in some mental ward, I’m here. But to admit that...to face the reality of that…
“Call to your scythe, Sable.”
The firm order comes as Dr. Ophidian continues to loop more wire around my leg. Around and around he goes, never slowing down, never stopping, every rotation slicing into my skin and making blood run off in rivulets.
I jerk and struggle against the bindings that hold me to the table, but it’s no use. I’m held completely captive as he wraps me in a cutting spiral, all the way up to my fleshy thighs. I scream when he digs in particularly hard, so deep that I know I’ll need stitches.
I blink furiously, trying to get the vision and the tears to go away, and my body suddenly jerks in retaliation, though it feels like I’m being electrocuted. I scream through gritted teeth as pain rips down my back, and then some foreign muscle tears out of my shoulder blades, something hitting the back of my head and bunching up behind my back like an uncomfortable mattress.
I look behind me only to see dark purple feathers beneath me—so dark they look nearly black. What in the world…?
“There you are.”
My eyes snap up to Dr. Ophidian again, and his grin is so wide and ecstatic that he