SERAPHINA
He’s stolen me. He’s really done it.
A dark nothingness.
A terrifying void.
A soothing calm.
I was born into nothing and nowhere, and that’s where I stayed, for eighteen years. Now I’m out, reborn into the light … and I don’t like it one bit.
The sun is like a burning ball of fire, aimed right at me. Even in the back of the car, with a knitted cap over my head to both conceal my hair and cover my eyes… all I want to do is scream.
The little edges of light below my eyes hurt more than the cattle prod Ignacio used on me once, when I’d broken down and begged him for more food. Water streams from my eyes, sticking the thick wool cap to my eyelashes, sticky salt and blinding pain my first entry into this foreign world.
So, maybe not so different to being born.
All I’ve ever wanted is to see the sun. Now that I’m out, I can’t bear it. It hurts. Is this the world outside? I always imagined it to be… softer. More like the watercolors I paint with while I wait for Ignacio. The ones I used to paint with, I correct myself. I’m not there anymore. I’m…
“Where are we?” I ask blindly, my stomach doing somersaults. I’ve never been in a car before. I’ve never been anywhere before. I don’t like it. My body isn’t used to anticipating the roll of the car around corners, the need to brace when we slow down suddenly. My legs are only just now starting to wake up; for a time, I was convinced they would never work again. My side is still numb. I want so badly to look at the spot where Xavier cut me open and put his fingers inside me. Part of me is terrified. Part of me is fascinated. Only time will tell which feeling is justified.
“We’re on the Interstate, sweetheart,” Xavier says. Sweetheart. I don’t think I’ve ever heard that word before. I like it. It sounds gentle. It does not sound like a word somebody would use on a person they intended to hurt.
“You okay back there?”
I nod. Then I realize he probably can’t see me. “Yes.”
“Really? You don’t sound okay. You need something?”
I am starving. I haven’t eaten in – hours? Days? I have no reference to time, no way to know how many hours have passed since I fell in the shower, doubled over from the pain in my side, the pain that Xavier Bishop fixed by sawing me open and taking something out.
“Are you going to kill me?” I ask. Point blank. I am not a girl of the world; I do not know such things as subtleties.
Ahead of me, I hear Xavier make a choking sound. “Why would I want to kill you?” he asks.
I wiggle my toes, thankful to be able to feel them a little. “You’d want to kill me because I belong to Ignacio,” I say dully.
“Jesus Christ,” Xavier mutters. “Girl, I just almost got shot getting you out of there. I had to ride in a chopper. I hate those damn things. Believe me when I say if I wanted to kill you, you’d be dead in Mexico right now.”
Adrenalin spikes in my belly, and something else, too. I don’t know the word for it. It spreads through my stomach, and lower. He risked death to smuggle me away.
“We’re not in Mexico?”
“No.”
I wait for more information, but he’s silent.
“What happened to Ignacio?” I ask, swallowing down nausea from all the turns he’s making. “Is he alright? Is he dead?”
“I don’t know if he’s dead, but he’s definitely not alright,” Xavier answers.
I feel the car come to a stop, and put my hands out to stop from sliding off the seat. The leather under me is warm, contoured to my body after so many hours on the road.
“We’re here.”
* * *
Here is a place Xavier tells me is called a motel. I’ve never heard this word before, but it’s not dissimilar to my circular room in the tower. It has more light though, light that Xavier tries to minimize after he carries me inside. I sit in the center of a soft bed, the sheets smelling of chemical flowers and talc, and follow Xavier’s movements with my ears as he closes every curtain and switches off every light.
“Okay,” he says. “You want to try and take that thing off?”
Gingerly, I reach up and push the scratchy fabric up and away from my eyes. More tears roll down my cheeks, not from sadness but a physical response to the air, the damp outside, the crack of light underneath the door and framing the edges of the windows.
It hurts. A sob lodges in my throat, and I fold the material back over my face again. I’ve felt plenty helpless before, hungry and alone in my tower, but I’ve never felt like this. Despondent. Lost. I don’t know who I am, what I look like, or how to open my eyes in this cruel, radioactive-bright world.
“It’s still too much, huh?” His voice is kind. My body instinctively wants to lean into whichever direction he’s speaking from. He stole me, it’s true, but maybe that’s not such a bad thing. I nod. It’s still too bright.
“I have an idea,” he says. I feel him next to me, and then he’s looping an arm under my arms, another arm behind my knees, and I’m being lifted.
“Don’t be scared,” he says quietly.
I curl into his warm body. I am terrified.