A blustering and oddly warm wind had torn apart the earlier clouds. The black sky, with a few pinprick stars, glistened between the gray remnants. It was an apt comparison to her clarity, which had been returning ever since Sidney had removed the angelic relic.
With every passing moment, more pieces were revealed. There were just scraps from the years between her possession and Sidney’s appearance, but those scraps, like fabric pieces, still held their pattern and color, if not their completeness. With enough pieces, she could cobble together a past.
She stared up at the center tower, the two halls flanking away on either side. “It seemed bigger when I was strapped in a wheelchair.”
“Do you remember how long ago?”
She turned to look back at the apartment buildings that had crept up to the edges of the grounds. “These were empty fields when they brought me here. When I left, the streets made a grid on all sides.”
Sidney shook his head. “Decades. How could they not notice that you didn’t age?”
“I didn’t change, but they did. Often. It was not a forgiving place.” She frowned. “I probably didn’t make that any easier.”
From the scowl on his face, he didn’t feel very forgiving either. “There would have been records of your admittance and your therapies—as uninformed as they would have been, considering.”
“That didn’t stop the straps.”
His jaw clenched. “Then someone should have at least noticed that the straps didn’t leave bruises for long. And then they should have wondered. …” After a moment, he shook his head. “Of course they didn’t wonder, and even if they had, they wouldn’t have come to the right conclusions. I’m being unfair.”
She glowered. He could be fair to those long-gone torturers, but not to her. “I want to go inside.”
“I don’t know how stable it is.”
“Why should it be stable?” She stalked past him.
The sloping manicured lawns that spread vaguely in her memory had been eaten away by the city until only an overgrown patch of weeds remained, like the shriveled legs of a dead spider. But the brick building still stood tall and officious, though all its windows gaped, broken. The darkness within lent the illusion that the night was a black sheet behind it, as if the building itself were a facade, only a single brick deep.
Maybe she could push it over with her hand.
She kept her fists tucked under her arms as she climbed the front steps. She’d kick down the door instead.
But the double doors hung slightly open, buckled on their hinges. In the foyer, age had warped the linoleum floors and softened the lintels over the doorways enough to sag, giving the corridors an off-kilter look. Despite her simmering anger, the moodiness chilled her. The drear emotions of the inhabitants had tainted the place down to the mortar.
She swallowed against the stink of mildew that coated the back of her throat and gazed out the door with a touch of longing. “Sometimes they took us on walks around the grounds.”
“Why didn’t you run? They couldn’t have stopped you.”
She turned her gaze on him, realized she still had the wistful longing on her face, and scowled instead. “Where would I run to? I already knew there was something I couldn’t escape. I thought they would make me better.” She stared down where her wrists crossed over her chest, fists under her arms. They’d bound her in the white jacket the same way, but he was right; the bruises around her wrists had never lasted. “For a time, the teshuva liked the easy hunting. There were always malice, grown fat and slow on the misery and desperation here. The way they screamed when I crept up behind them and the teshuva tore them apart …” She shuddered. “Nobody noticed those screams on top of all the others. Which made me even more certain I was mad.”
“Some people suffering deep mental disturbances do actually see the tenebrae for what they are. Whether that’s cause or effect of their troubles …” Sidney shrugged. “Like you, they wouldn’t have the words to make anyone believe.”
Now she had the words for what she was, what she’d seen. And yet she felt as trapped and lost as the years she’d spent behind these walls.
She spun away from him and headed down the hallway, avoiding the slick damp patches on the floor that made footing treacherous.
He hastened to catch up. “Where are we going?”
“I want to see more.”
To her demon’s vision, the tenebrae signs had paled to the faintest of ghosts, just a few ichor smears where a feralis had retreated to add a carcass to its husk. Without human habitation, there was nothing to entice the tenebrae in any number.
Only graffiti scrawls, tatters of windblown debris, and slivers of broken glass relieved the institutional monotony of the halls. She peered into the empty rooms, but other than a few bits of memory—as uninteresting as crumpled cigarette butts—nothing seemed worthwhile.
Until they got to the therapy room.
There was nothing much to distinguish it from the other rooms—except for the table, bolted to the floor.
She edged inside, shuffling her feet through a drift of old leaves.
Sidney paused in the doorway, his shoulders filling the space. “Alyce?”
“Here’s where it went away, at least for a little while.” She circled the table, trailing one fingertip over the heavy steel.
He followed her into the room. “What went away?”
“The devil.” She stopped in the middle of the long edge of the table, opposite where he stood. Thick rivets marked where the straps had been, though only small rings of worn leather remained, pressed to the table. Four shallow depressions marred the squared edge.
She angled her wrist and covered the depressions with her fingers. They fit. Perfectly.
Sidney did the same on his side of the table. His larger hands eclipsed the embedded fingerprints. A soft sound she couldn’t identify left his throat. “Electroconvulsive therapy worked against the teshuva?”
“Maybe for a day, I couldn’t feel it. I couldn’t see the malice. I still knew they were there, but I could pretend. Then night would fall.”
He was silent a moment. “I don’t think I’ve ever read anything about ECT and demonic emanations. But I suppose, in theory, two such intense bursts of energy, interacting or interfering …”
Anger pulsed in her, dimming her vision. “It wasn’t theory for me.”
He lowered his head. “I see why you’d want to forget.”
Bitterness, like the sour stomach that had plagued her after the shocks, made her stare at him with more bile than she wanted to acknowledge. “You have no idea.”
But when he raised his gaze, she was caught by an answering resentment. “You think I didn’t wonder what life would be like, not having to know about the battles between good and evil?”
She stared at him uncertainly. “You wanted to know everything.”
He gave a low, harsh laugh. “Doesn’t that make me more of a certifiable lunatic than any patient who ever came through these doors?”
She shook her head. “Then why didn’t you run?”
“What? Like my brother? It was too late for me, even before possession. If I’d left after I realized how much being part of the war would cost me, that would mean my mother died for nothing.”
She bit her lip. Maybe Sidney couldn’t love her, but that didn’t mean he’d never loved at all. Of course, he would dedicate himself to the Bookkeeper world to pay for his mother’s death. Only her own cravings—not demon-driven, just hers—had made her think she could win a place in his heart. “You’re right.”
He gave himself a shake. “I didn’t mean to hijack your memories. This is your place. What are you thinking?”
In this place where she’d been crazy, he wondered what she thought? “I think this is a waste of time. If there was ever anything of mine here, it’s long gone. Like everything else in my life. Whatever price I paid, I’m never getting it back.”