office staff was assembling like Howard Hughes's attendant vampire nurses in Vegas. My personal horror story had become a courtroom drama, and the theatrics of the scene gave me a strange sense of it not really being about me.
"And what did you do to her?" Helena demanded in a ringing voice.
The sound of doors being slammed against walls indicated that Ric was no longer content to eavesdrop from the waiting room.
The office door hit the wall and sprung off its hinges. The nurses flooded in after Ric.
"Sir," a nurse objected. "This is a private office."
"Not when it commits crimes against the public," Ric said in his deepest, darkest crime-busting voice. "Delilah! Take off that obscene paper sheet."
I readily complied, then hopped off that obscene table and took a place against the wall beside Helena. It was her show.
Ric came over to hook an arm around my shoulder and touched the surgeon's scissors in my grasp with a questioning look.
I couldn't answer it. The silver familiar would be what it would be. Maybe since they were armed with superior knowledge, I needed to be armed somehow. The over-crowded room finally took me back in time, to my first personal appearance here.
I was small, lost, and fearful, back in the don't-go-to place, where even Irma was silent. This was in the time before Irma, and even before Lilith. Maybe even the time when Lilith came out, dark debutante that she had been and still was.
"It's too much for her, Helena," Ric's voice rumbled against my side.
"Who is this man?" the head nurse demanded, coming to the defense of her doctor. "Who is this strange girl? She's never been a patient here. You lied," she accused Helena, even as her worried face betrayed uncertainty.
"Ric," Helena told him, "Delilah has to face the reasons for her fear, just as you did."
"I was a lot younger," he argued. "Still malleable. Delilah's grown past whatever it was. Look at her! You're sending her back to childhood."
"Tough love, Ric. And it'll get tougher. Stay with me. Fear is an infection worse than its cause."
She turned to the alarmed doctor again, then brushed past him to a cloth-covered tray on the sink counter, lifting it and then the cloth like a magician producing a trick.
I stared at the horrible array of instruments revealed. Again, I was jerked into a terrifying moment of my past, one just days ago, when I'd awakened paralyzed with panic on the Karnak mummification table, doomed to be forced to watch the blood slowly drained from my veins.
The wall behind me felt ice-cold, like a stone embalming table, even though I was still standing. The solid cold surface and being upright were the only things that kept me clinging to a shred of sanity.
"This," Helena said, lifting a long, thick steel tube, "was what you used on a twelve-year-old girl. She'd never even bled, until you forced this into her."
"God, Helena," Ric said, turning my head into his chest and clapping a hand over my only exposed ear. "You're putting her through worse than that old medical rapist did. Don't move an inch, you slimy bastard. I can still strangle you with one hand."
The emotions of other people's fear and anger swirled around and above my still, small center, absorbing what to me was a grotesque reality and blending it with the disguised reality that had haunted my nightmares ever since.
Lord, I was a textbook case.
Staring at the implement Helena brandished, I'd recognized the "turkey baster" wielded by the white-skinned or garbed "aliens" of my nightmares. It was my industrial-strength version of the "needle in the navel" procedure alien abductees claimed had happened to them ... only it hadn't been anything so fine and small as a needle and it hadn't been aimed at my navel.
I could feel Ric's anger and tension, his muscles taut and strained to their breaking point. Any minute he could spring on the old man to tear him apart, like Grizelle the Inferno Hotel's shape-shifting white tiger.
"What is that thing?" Ric demanded.
"An old-fashioned speculum," Helena said. "Modern ones aren't cold steel, but warmer plastic. A woman finally had some say in how her body was examined."
"This place is medieval," Ric said.
"Men are wimps," Helena answered. "You have no idea. You have no idea of how severe a menstrual cramp can be, nearing labor even."
I wanted to say "Amen," but words were caught into a mute ball at that icy center of my gut. I watched Helena pull open the