I lift my hand to reach for hers.
I don’t believe her words, but I want to. I desperately desire her, this, more than anything.
Save me,I want to scream.Take me away from here. Love me, Karia, like I have obsessed over you.
And yet the moment before our hands touch, my fingers a breath away from hers, a shadow forms between us.
It has a beak.
A mask.
A plague doctor.
A laugh that I have heard too many times before.
And I am back in my bedroom.
I am lying on my spine.
Dr. Klein has cut my hoodie, his hair is ruffled, black like my father’s, his eyes a brighter blue. He holds a salt shaker in one hand, glass, the crystals full to the top inside. In his other is a pair of scissors.
Karia.
Save me.
Chapter 17
Karia
“Tell me why you want to go to Haunt Muren. Tell me what your son did to you. Tell me how Sullen got out, and you knew where to go to escape. Tell me who was wearing the stupid fucking mask in the woods.”Since Sullen refused to answer me.
I keep my voice low as I glance at his sleeping form under lavish bed sheets, his body turned away from Sanford and I, huddled inside the door.
Dreary is a town that lives up to its name in the strangest way. The urgent care was relatively full, but when Sanford said his grandson had a stab wound, the staff moved quickly, including the receptionist, then the intake nurse. I’ve never seen black walls in a medical setting before, but inside Dreary First, that’s all they had. The contrast of white scrubs was a shock and I wondered who designed such an aesthetic.
Sullen didn’t need to undergo surgery; whoever glued his wound did a decent job, but I still heard his muffled grunt when it was repacked and stitched. He didn’t want me nor Sanford inside the patient room. We sat on a bench in the busy intake center, neither of us speaking.
When Sullen stumbled out all dressed, eyes darkened and a scowl on his face, complexion pale, the doctor gave him a wary glance, lingering on the cut along his cheek, before they both approached us. I asked where we should stay for the night, not bothering to offer a reason for why we were passing through. I don’t know if Sullen told him anything about how or who stabbed him, but I doubt it.
Either way, the doctor said Dreary Inn was only a mile away. He also warned us he wouldn’t be refilling Sullen’s pain meds.
I was surprised he offered them at all, and even more shocked that from the look on Sullen’s face, brow cocked and dead expression locked on mine, he’d already taken them.
It’s why he’s sleeping now.
After the urgent care visit, Sanford and I overruled Sullen and we didn’t walk. We got inside a transport car oddly hanging around the entrance, cab sign lit atop a black car.
Now, dark burgundy walls and floors surrounding us on the second floor of the inn—alongside a shocking, almost unnatural silence—I feel as if I am guarding Sullen and his rest from everyone, including grandpa over here.
Sanford’s gaze stays on Sullen with my demands, but I don’t let him cross the threshold of the door. We asked for two separate rooms at the check-in, and the middle-aged woman dressed completely in black didn’t question anything, with her voice or her eyes. Just gave us two old-fashioned keys like it was entirely normal for three ragged out-of-towners to show up past midnight inside a four-star inn. At least, that’s my guess on the star count. Neither Sullen nor myself have a phone, and if Sanford does, he isn’t letting on.
He sighs now, his hands in his pockets as he hangs his head and closes his eyes a moment, the lines in his pale skin deepening as he does. His suit looks worse than it did with more spots of filth and dirt, some grime along his neck, too. Ifeel a pang of empathy; I need a shower after our foray under yet another hotel, and Sullen didn’t seem to have the energy or care to take one at all, despite the fact we thankfully have more clothes in the bag Sanford thought to grab for us.
Like grandfather, like grandson, in that way.
After a moment of silence with the door propped open along my throbbing shoulder, I clear my throat, ready to send Sanford to his room. But before I can speak, his gaze is on mine once more, staring down at me from beneath his lashes.
“I gave you what I could, on how he became what he is,” he says, voice gravelly. There are red spiderwebs of exhaustion and bleariness in the whites of his eyes. “The masked man? He is Stein’s personal doctor,Klein.”
