Branded (29 page)

“Go to hell, bitch.” Asher’s muttering went ignored. They were right about the fox, only the fortress couldn’t fall yet. But it did. Right in front of his eyes. Never one to believe in miracles, Asher dropped to his knees as the shred of hope he’d held on to was torn to pieces. A sudden seizure wrecked his body and brought him to the floor. It only lasted for a moment, but when he opened his eyes again, something was missing. Something important. The link was gone.

Asher closed his eyes again and kept lying where he was, refusing to look at the mess he was in. This couldn't be happening.

Someone approached him from the side. “Are you—”

“Leave me the fuck alone!” Snapping his eyes open, he looked for a stone. Once he found one, he tossed it at the fucker as if hurting him would take away his own pain. He didn't hit.

The scream pierced his ears before he knew it was his own, and even then he couldn't stop himself. It was like watching himself in a movie with no control of his actions, and strangely enough, he didn't want it back. His body hadn't listened to him before, why should it now?

Asher picked more stones from the ground and threw them into the crowd of onlookers. Then, when he ran out of stones, he threw his lighters.

“Take them! Take all I fucking have! Why don’t you?”

It didn't feel good, felt fucking awful, but not as bad as stopping would. When his rage dissipated, there’d be nothing left.

Someone came at him out of the crowd of unknown faces, someone bigger and bulkier than him. The muscle-man wrestled him to the ground. Asher fought to get back up, but he couldn’t land a single punch on that ugly face.

The crowd caged them in, yelling words Asher didn’t understand. His legs were being pinned down. Someone took a hold of his hands.

“Calm down,” Ugly Face above him said. As if that were even possible.

Asher couldn’t move. Just like that time in the fortress, before he’d run. Just like—

He opened his mouth to tell them to fuck off, to let him go, because he needed to move, needed to know he was in control of his hands and feet, but he couldn’t get a word past the lump in his throat. He was breathing, rapidly, his pulse was racing, and still he didn’t get any air in.

“Kid?” A large hand settled over his mouth and nose. “You’re hyperventilating.”

He was what? Somewhere he knew the words should have meaning, that he had to calm down, but even as he was trying to figure out how to do that, the world went mercifully black.

***

When he woke up, his location had changed. People were buzzing around him, but no one was concerned with him. The sounds were made by busy healers and helpers rushing around between beds upon beds of sick and injured people. Completely different from the last time Asher had woken up in a sort of hospital. And when he turned his head… Yeah, that wasn’t José on the bed next to his. Just some fugly stranger.

Behind the bed, he spotted a window, and through that, the ruins of the fortress. Some desperate idiots were digging through the rubble, hoping for survivors, maybe.

Breathe in. Breathe out. Slowly. You don’t want to fucking faint again.

He threw his covers back and sat up, needing to move. As he swung his legs out of the bed, an intense pain shot through his left side. His mouth opened in a silent scream. Seemed he was out of painkillers. Cursing, he tried to take a step anyway, and fell face-first to the ground. Useless, he remembered, staring at the wooden floor, that's what he was.

A young woman appeared at his side. “Do you need help?” She grabbed him by the arm.

“Don’t touch me!” He slapped the woman’s hand away as if she was holding a gun in it. She looked taken aback at his outburst, maybe even a little scared.

“Shit,” Asher muttered. A crowd of people gathered around him. “Leave me alone!” He didn't want any of those grabby hands. He would get back up by himself. His left leg wouldn't support him, and neither would his left arm, but he could pull himself up into the bed somehow if he tried hard enough.

He held on to the bed frame with his right hand, when someone stood over him and tried to lift him up. Ignoring any and all pain, Asher managed to turn himself around on his back and kick the fucker. The guy let out a howl. Asher grinned. At least until someone rammed a needle into his arm that took him out.

***

He ran. Stones flew at him from all sides. People screamed, shouted at him. He couldn’t make out all the words, but some of them seemed to want him dead.

Some familiar faces stood to the side of the road, staring at him as he went by. Their eyes shone with accusations, though their mouths stayed closed. Asher’s gaze lingered on the form of his father, picking up a stone. But then a fox jumped at Asher out of nowhere and tackled him to the ground. It flashed its teeth at him and growled.

The fox vanished as quickly as it had come and Asher found himself at home, sitting on the couch in the living room. His mom was pacing up and down in front of him.

“You killed him.” She whirled around to face him. “How do you plan to make up for it?”

Asher rested his head in his hands and closed his eyes as if he could hide from the question. “I didn’t. I—”

“Then what’s that?”

When he opened his eyes again, the living room had been replaced with the fortress’s prison cell. He was kneeling on the ground, José lying in front of him. Motionless. Dead. Blood seeped out of the dead body and pooled over the floor until Asher’s hands were tainted red. Asher raised them to his face and stared at the blood dripping off them.

He woke with a scream to a dark room. He would have sat upright if something hadn’t prevented him from moving.

What the hell?

He couldn’t see much, but when he tried to move his arm again, it wouldn’t go very far. He’d been strapped to the bed. Forcing himself to calm down, he let his head fall back on the pillow.

Someone was approaching him, carrying a small light that illuminated him just enough to let Asher see he was green all over. If that was a fashion choice, it was a very bad one.

“Good morning,” Greeny said. “I’m Rad. How are you feeling?”

Asher simply looked at him. He was tied to a hospital bed because he was experiencing continuous mental breakdowns. How was he supposed to be feeling?

“I know you can speak.”

“Maybe I don’t want to,” Asher caught himself saying before he could stop himself.

Greeny only nodded. “Would you like to drink something?”

“Untie me. I’m not into bondage.”

“I’m afraid I’m under orders not to.”

“I’m not going to attack anyone.” At least Asher hoped he wouldn’t. He only wanted… what did he want? Did it even matter whether he was tied up or not? If he was free, where would he go?

“I don’t think you’re going to attack me,” Greeny said, as though that was any consolation. “But I don’t think that’s your only problem.”

Asher raised an eyebrow at him. This situation could get worse?

“They say you’ve burned down a village, dragon.” From the looks Greeny gave Asher, it seemed like that was already a fact. And why shouldn’t it be? The only one who would have doubted it was dead.

Don’t go there.

“A lot of people did horrible things in the war,” Greeny said as if to justify Asher’s supposed actions. “If your side had won, you would be regarded as a hero. But the way things are now… they found this village within hours after the magic was gone. It’s crawling with lizard folk out there. They’re deporting all the people of mixed races for evaluation they say.” Greeny shook his head. “But you and I know that’s not really what they’re going to do.”

“I don’t care.” The fate of the villagers was the least of Asher’s concerns.

“They’re going to question you, I think.”

“They gonna kill me if they don’t like my answers?”

“That is a possibility.”

Asher laughed. Not out of amusement, not out of happiness. It was mad little laughter that scared him a little. Fat lot of good José’s noble sacrifice had done him if he was just switching hands from one enemy to another. He’d let himself get caught too easily. And even now he couldn’t keep it together, he just kept going until he didn’t know whether he was laughing or sobbing or somewhere in between.

“Maybe you should go back to sleep.”

Asher shook his head. The smart thing to do would be to come up with escape plans. If he was anything like José, he would find a way out of this… But he wasn’t. He could barely string two thoughts together before his mind strayed to dark places and things got difficult and his breathing sped up. “I’m a mess,” he concluded for himself. “An absolute fucking mess.”

“Are you going to need help getting to sleep?”

Asher looked at Greeny. He had two options. He could either stay up all night and plot his escape, or he could let Greeny put him to sleep and escape his thoughts entirely.

“Yeah,” he said eventually. “Yeah, I think I do.”

A cool cup was pressed to his lips. “Drink this.”

Asher did.

***

In a different corner of a different world, a teenage girl by the name of Sofia was sitting in a hospital chair, flipping through a magazine, occasionally glancing at the clock. Over the past months she had grown accustomed to the regular beeping of the machine that let everyone know her brother's heart was still beating, even though he wasn't waking up.

Some people had started to doubt that he would open his eyes again, but Sofia knew he would, because her brother wasn't the type to give up. And so she would pop in every other day, whenever she could make time, and wait for that moment.

The doctors had said it was unlikely any of her words were getting through, but she still told him everything that was going on in their lives, how she thought their mom was going to go crazy.

Today though, there was nothing much to tell, and so she only made the random comment about how lately, fashion was going down the drain and he could count himself lucky that he was blind.

It was a visit like any other, but when she got up and went for the door, something unexpected happened. The monotonous beep - beep - beep of the machine turned into just one long beeeeeep that bore into her mind. That wasn't a good thing. That shouldn't be happening.

She rushed to her brother’s bedside, jabbed the red call button repeatedly, jumped into the hallway to call for help and found herself pushed out of the way as a team of doctors and nurses raced into the room.

"What's going on?" she asked, but nobody paid attention to her. They were talking among themselves in medical jargon she didn't understand. She couldn't even see what they were doing because there were too many people blocking her view.

The seconds dragged on until she was sure the beeping sound was going to haunt her dreams forever. And then it stopped and she thought her own heart stopped as well in the one moment it took for the machine to start again. Beep - beep - beep.

Sofia had never been more relieved to hear that stupid sound. She ran back into the room, ignoring the medical staff.

“José!” she called out and the nurses were nice enough to make space for her by the bed, though at this point she might have shoved them. She found her brother’s hand and grabbed it as if he was going to disappear if she didn't hold on. Her breathing stopped short when his hand moved. It hadn't moved in six months.

“José?” she tried again. He turned his face to her side. “Ohmygod,” she whispered.

And then he spoke. “Where’s Asher?”

She threw herself onto his chest and cried, not caring that she didn’t understand what he was talking about, because he was talking.

“You’re awake!” she cried. Everything would be alright now.

Epilogue

To say that José had been confused when he’d woken up in a hospital, with someone crying her eyes out over his chest, would have been an understatement. It had taken him several minutes to figure out that he was, somehow, not dead. That he was back in the real world and that the hysterical person being led out of the room was his little sister.

It hadn’t made a lot of sense. For a while, he even doubted whether his experience in the other world had been real. Until his mother, after giving him a hug that he thought would crush his lungs, asked him about the tattoos and he had to make up a lie.

Over the course of the next days he found that he’d been in a coma for six weeks. The doctors couldn’t say why.

Six weeks… That number didn’t seem right, but maybe time passed differently here. Sometimes it felt like he’d been gone for years. Sometimes it felt like no time at all.

His mind still caught halfway between here and there, he couldn't wait for his family to give him some space to breathe. Happy as he was to be with them again, there was something he had to do before he could go back to his life. So his first question for the nurses was about any other long-time coma-patients on the station.

Under the ruse of wanting to give hope to the family, he managed to get the room number of one that had come in about a week after him. The next day, his sister helped him find his way there.