Page 94 of The Diamond in the Rough

I’d sat in the chair, shuddering, for a good five or ten minutes before I’d been able to pick up another file after that.

Still another had been not an Arcanid, but a witch—like me—left at Tranquil Brook—also like me—by a family who didn’t want them to have the magic they’d been born with. She’d tried to fight the ‘treatment’ Dr. Garraway had prescribed—the machines he’d used to drain her magic. She’d complained of fatigue, nausea, headaches, joint pain… all things I was intimately familiar with. She’d still been alive when Tranquil Brook had been emptied—or so it seemed, since her file simply stopped, and the last date had been about four years previous.

It was a very small ray of hope in what was proving to be a nearly bottomless pit of darkness.

At least Ward and Beck had cleared the grounds of ghosts, so I didn’t also havethatto deal with on top of the weight of memories.

When I’d been a patient here, some of those same ghosts had been a relief—not because I’d particularly enjoyed interacting with them, but because seeing them again meant that my magic was still there.

The ghosts of Tranquil Brook hadn’t been… normal. And not in the way that Sylvia wasn’t normal. Lady Sylvia Randolph was herself a witch, and she was far stronger and more powerful than any of the ghosts I’d encountered here. Archie LaGarde, too, was unusual, although he was a necromancer—a warlock—rather than a witch.

Even though some of the ghosts at Tranquil Brook had also been witches, they’d been… broken. Being stripped of magic had left them incoherent, shattered in soul as well as mind and body. They’d been hard to understand and harder to convince to leave you alone if they understood that you could hear them.

I was glad they were gone, and not just because it meant they weren’t there to bother me. They had moved on. They were at peace.

If only the same were true for those of us still living.

From the files,they’d taken me into one of the treatment rooms, and I hadn’t been able to suppress the shudder that had rolled through me when I’d turned away from the hallway with the baths. I really, really hoped they weren’t going to ask me to go in there. Not after the nightmare I’d had last week.

I hadn’t been prepared for what I got from that godawful machine.

She screamed,one hand striking the side of the box as her body convulsed.

“Goddamn it!”he shouted, one hand struggling to hold down the creature’s hairy leg as he kicked and spasmed. “Hold himdown!!” He turned the throttle dial, increasing the strength of the machine. The creature kicked harder, one sharp hoof catching him in the arm, opening up the skin.

“Doctor!” one of the nurses gasped. “It’s too high!”

“The hell it is!” he yelled back. “Hold him the fuckdown!”

One of the orderlies dove in, throwing his weight down on the creature’s body as he turned the dial all the way up.

The creature gave one more heaving spasm, then calmed.

“Thank fucking God,” he grumbled.

“Doctor?” the nurse said, her voice shaking.

“What? It worked,” he snapped. “The convulsions have stopped.”

“He’s dead,” the nurse whispered.

She knewthat magic was a sign of corruption, of sinfulness. But so many of their patients were children—young adults. Boys and girls, many of them who had been here since they were nine or ten.

What could a child of nine or ten possibly have done to be punished with magic?

She supposed that it was a case in which the sins of the father—or mother, although that’s not how the saying went—were visited upon the child. That the lesson wasn’t meant for them, but their parents. They were innocents suffering for the sins of others.

That’s why it was important to purge it from them. No matter the cost.

She couldn’t standit anymore. The screams. The convulsions. The empty expressions on their faces.

She undid the screws on a panel in the back, then stuck the screwdriver in and jammed it, hard, until something in the innards twanged.

This wasn’t helping them.

This patient was particularly difficult.One of those who had been here a long time, and yet showed no signs of any actual progress.

He frowned, fiddling with the controls on the machine.