Page 139 of An Oath at Midnight

Chase lay still in his bed. The bruises on his face were gone, but I had no idea what condition the rest of him was in. His other wounds were dressed or under the covers. I hovered my hand over his forehead, using my healing ability to feel out the damage to his mind. What I got was a whole lot of nothing. Well, mostly nothing. He was there, I could feel him, but he’d withdrawn completely. It was like he’d shut down his mind to hide from the horror of what he went through.

I got it, and I didn’t blame him, and my evening with Ryan hadn’t been half as bad as what Chase had endured. I still understood, though. I’d wanted to check out multiple times a couple of years ago, but I hadn’t because of Bram, and I’d used anger to get through it instead. That anger hadn’t all been mine, though. Cora’s hex had made everything worse.

A tap came from the window. Bram hovered in front of it, his wings steadily beating behind him. I rushed over and opened it for him.

He quickly climbed in and jumped down. “Let’s do this.” He strode to the door and carefully and quietly turned the lock.

I pulled a vial from my bag and stood beside the bed. “Hey, Chase, I wish I didn’t have to do this, but it’s our only hope of catching the person who did this to you, okay?”

Bram raised a brow.

“I’m taking invading his privacy to a whole new level. If he can hear me, I’d like to give the guy a little warning.” I popped the lid off my potion. I’d used Frances’s spell and her ingredients, but I’d also tweaked it a little and made it my own. Her way caused the recipient a lot of pain, intentionally as far as I could see, mine did not.

I held the vial out to Bram, since I couldn’t touch Chase, and he dipped his finger into it as I recited my spell and drew the symbol I’d shown him on Chase’s forehead. On the second recitation, I dipped my finger in the potion and drew the same symbol on the center of my own hand, then the third time, I hovered my palm above Chase’s forehead.

“If my hand gets too close to him, you’ll need to hold it up,” I said to Bram.

He nodded, and I closed my eyes, uttering the spell a final time.

Oppressive darkness filled my mind’s eye immediately, the hospital room, Bram, no longer there.

There was just…nothing.

“Hello?” I called into the darkness, my voice echoing through what had to be Chase’s mind.

Something fundamental had fractured the day he was attacked, and instead of just locking away the awful memories of what happened to him, he’d slammed everything behind a door and thrown away the key.

He’d been trying to protect himself, but he’d taken it too far, and now he was lost, stuck in the dark, unable to find his way out.

“Chase? Are you here?” There was a shuffling sound to my right. A figure huddled in the corner, curled in a ball. “Chase?”

His head lifted, and he stared up at me wide-eyed. “What are you…why are you here?” He slowly rose to his feet. “Am I dreaming?”

“It’s not a dream. I’m in your room at the hospital, and I don’t have much time.” I took another step closer to him. “I need you to help me. I need you to show me who hurt you.”

He scrambled back into the shadows. “No. I can’t. I can’t do that.”

“I know you’re afraid, but they can’t hurt you here. In here, they’re not real,” I said, holding out my hand to him. “If you don’t want to wake up yet, that’s okay. But I need to see who did this, Chase, so I can stop them.”

“I—I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t remember. I don’t want to.”

“I know, and you don’t have to. I can do it for you. I just need you to show me where it is. Where the memory is,” I said.

“You won’t make me go?”

“You can stay right here.”

He sat down on the floor again and wrapped his arms around his knees.

“Chase?”

“You can stop them?” he asked, his voice so childlike now it was unnerving.

“I promise, I’ll stop them. They won’t hurt you ever again,” I said and hoped that was true, for everyone’s sake.

He buried his face against one arm and pointed to a door that hadn’t been there before on the other side of the room.

The door was tall and wide, and as I got closer I saw that blood dripped from the cracks around it. I gripped the handle, took a deep breath, and turned it.