Pressure. Burning.
No.
The doctor’s jaw flexed. The hammer rose. Higher. Higher, as he prepared to slam it down and drive a splinter of sharpened steel up through my sinus cavity and into my brain.
Let me die. Let me die. Just let me—?
Boom! Pop! Crack-crack-crack!
The hand holding the ice pick faltered. It jerked, scoring a path down the side of my nose as one after the other, the massive light bulbs above Carson’s head erupted in a shower of sparks and shattered glass.
The room plunged into blackness. Ozone choked the air. A nurse screamed. Chunks and slivers of burning glass rained down on my thin covering, tinkling on metallic trays and scalding me in a hundred places. For an instant, I wasn’t sure if all this was only my imagination. If even now, Carson’s ice pick was severing the connection between the two halves of my brain. If the darkness was only my mind’s way of checking out.
“What in the hell is going on here?” Dr. Carson shouted. “Someone fire up a lamp. I will not be delayed.”
The nurse’s coarse hands retreated from my face. “Must be the fuses again, Doctor,” she said. “I’ll send someone over to look—”
Shouts from outside the door. Thumps. Bangs. A muffled scream.
A blue flash licked up from the tray nearest my head, the sparks igniting a metallic bowl filled with rubbing alcohol. A nightmare’s worth of masked faces bloomed around me before someone threw a damp cloth over the dancing flame, snuffing it out.
In the darkness, everything went very, very still.
“Did you hear that?” Carson’s assistant whispered, just as something heavy bashed through the surgery door.
“Hope?” a voice yelled. “Hope! Are you in here, lass?”
Chapter 33
JOY, STRONG AND BRIGHT AS THE SUN, BLAZED TO LIFE inside me when I heard Collum MacPherson’s hoarse shout. I screamed his name through the gag.
“What is the meaning of this?” the doctor yelled. “How dare you interrupt an ongoing surgical procedure? Remove yourself!”
“This is it!” Collum called to someone outside the room. “She’s here!”
A concentrated beam of white cut a swath through the darkness, illuminating the perturbed faces of the medical team. It snapped off. Three long seconds passed before it flashed again.
Off. On. Off. On. The light ruptured the darkness in short strobes, until it landed on my face, blinding me.
“Jesus, Mary, and St. Bride!”
The wonderful sound of Phoebe’s voice renewed my struggles. My back arched against the table. Phoebe rushed to my side as the light faded.
When it flashed again, the bright beam glinted off Phoebe’s knife as she jabbed it toward the enraged Carson. “Get away from her with that thing, you slagging monster,” she snarled as she felt down my legs and sliced through the bonds around my ankles. “You touch my friend again and I’ll carve you up like a bloody Easter ham.”
Before the light faded again, she’d sawed through the thick strap holding my head in place. Behind her, light blazed from a hole cut into the side of a wooden box that Collum cradled under one arm. My mind pinged, matching the object with a science-journal article on Nikola Tesla, and the diagram of a primitive flashlight.
Collum’s other hand clasped a brutal leather-wrapped club. My throat closed as the afterimage burning inside my lids revealed the comforting sight of Mac’s outline next to Collum.
Flash.
Mac moved to cover Phoebe, a pistol aimed at the doctor’s crew.
“Hope,” said his gravelly voice in the dark. “Are ye hurt, lass?”
I felt the strap give. As Phoebe freed my hands, I ripped the gag from my mouth and scrubbed the taste of leather from my lips.
“I—?I’m okay.” I tried to sound brave, but my teeth were chattering, chopping the words into micro-bits.
Phoebe’s nimble hands roamed my face. I heard a growl as her fingertips slid in the blood that was oozing from the scratch near my nose.
“Oh, Hope.” Her voice was low, scared.
With the drug still shrilling through my veins, I started babbling. “I’m okay. You got here just in time. He just scratched me. God, I’m so glad to see you. Did Doug get out? Please tell me he did. And can you get me the freaking hell out of here?”
“Doug’s fine. He’s out—”
Screams. The pound of fists and footsteps. Shouts that seemed to come from everywhere.
“Sir!” I turned as the red-haired O’Neill threw open the door at the rear of the room. Uplit by the oil lantern in his fist, there was no mistaking the fear on his dour features. “Doc Carson! Something’s happened. The prisoners—?I mean, the patients—?they’re free. Running the halls, they are. And someone’s set a fire. It’s chaos out there, sir. What should we—”
The rest of the guard’s words died in his throat as his mouth dropped open into a dark oval. A confused expression squinched his eyes. One hand rose to wipe away the blood that suddenly trickled from the corner of his lips. He dropped to his knees, the oil lamp slipping from his fingers and rocking on its base as he slumped face first to the floor. I saw it, then. A knife that protruded from the back of his neck.
The lamp uplit the macabre figure that loomed behind him. Terror sunk icy claws into the muscles around the base of my spine as the blank, empty eyes surveyed the room.
On the opposite side of the table, his back to us, Dr. Carson had gone very, very still.
Blood rimmed Eustace Clarkson’s mouth. It dripped from his chin, staining the chest of his hospital smock. I had no idea whose it was, but when he swiped a careless arm across his face, I knew it likely wasn’t his own.
“Holy Mother, save us.” Phoebe reflexively crossed herself. “Is that—?”
“Yeah.” I eased off the table, never taking my eyes from the crazed man as I slid into a crouch and pulled Phoebe down beside me. “It is.”
“But I thought he was—”
I shook my head as we peered over the edge of the table.
Eustace leaned down and jerked the serrated kitchen knife from the guard’s neck. When he stood, strands of lank white hair stuck to the gore on his cheeks. One of the assistants approached him, but backed up fast when Eustace’s arm rose, wraith-like, to point the knife at him.
Behind us, Collum and Mac were fending off more guards, but I couldn’t look away.
“Lightning. Lightning. Lightning in my head,” Eustace was singing, the words tuneless as he advanced into the room. “And it burns. Oh, doesn’t it just.”
Alexander Carson made a sudden, scuttling move to escape, but Eustace’s head snapped in an oddly reptilian gesture. His sunken eyes fixed on his tormentor.