Inside the house everything was clean, expensive, and vaguely institutional. Healers and guards wandered around, increasing the hospital feel of the otherwise beautiful surroundings. The women were being housed on the second floor, in separate bedrooms. They’d all been in various states of serious disrepair and had needed quite a bit of medical attention.
And after what they’d been through, I could only imagine what sort of help they’d need to begin to recover from the trauma of their incarceration and torture.
We’d been ushered into a small reception room to the right of the landing to wait for the Rhode Island investigators to meet us. Ryu had been given carte-blanche authority in the region, but ever the political animal, he didn’t want to step on any toes unless he had to. So we waited for Isolde, but it was Ezekiel who arrived, his ifrit fire banked to only a glow of flames surrounding his wiry figure.
“Sorry I’m late. I was… detained.”
“It’s no trouble,” Ryu said smoothly. “But where’s Isolde?”
A look of barely contained fury crossed the ifrit’s face as his fire flared up like a geyser until he regained his control.
“She’s been pulled from duty,” he said, his voice tight.
“What?” Anyan barked, his growly voice extra-growly.
“She’s been fired, Anyan. For not capturing the kappa.”
“But he was going to kill that female,” I interjected. “She did the right thing.”
The ifrit gave me a short, dismissive look. “Not according to the Alfar. According to the Alfar, we are all expendable, and the knowledge contained in the kappa was more important than any of our lives…”
Ezekiel’s voice trailed off as he glanced at Ryu. “I’m sure they have their reasons, of course,” he concluded begrudgingly. “But Isolde is a good investigator and a damned fine female. She didn’t deserve to be dismissed like that.”
Ryu’s expression went blank, like it did when he was machinating. “You’re right, Zeke. Isolde was a good investigator. But we all have our orders—”
“Orders, my hairy ass,” Anyan interrupted from behind me.
Ryu turned, his expression furious, but the ever-calming Caleb intervened.
“Let’s remember why we’re here, gentlemen. Upstairs are females who don’t need to see any more violence.”
I could have licked Caleb for his ever-present good sense.
Both Anyan and Ryu frowned at each other but nodded at Caleb.
We were taken upstairs, to another, smaller room that was set up like a small informal therapy area with a few chairs and a couch. Caleb, Julian, and Daoud stayed outside, but I was allowed in with Anyan and Ryu.
The first woman to come in was the kappa female. She was even shorter than the male kappa had been, and her skin was the same, wrinkled-green flesh of a sea turtle. She, too, wore a shell, and I wondered if she could take it on and off, like a coat, or if it was fused onto her. Her human eyes peered nervously around the room from her turtle face.
Meanwhile, healthwise she looked terrible. Physically she’d been healed, but she still looked terribly frail. I could also tell she was suffering being outside the sea. More to the point, however, her haunted eyes testified more eloquently than mere words to the horrors she’d endured.
“Ula Kappa,” she introduced herself quietly when she’d taken a seat.
“Hello, Ula,” Ryu said, his voice saturated with warmth and friendliness. But the kappa ignored him, flinching down into her shell and avoiding looking at either Ryu or Anyan. Instead, she kept her eyes focused on me.
I tried to smile at her but failed. Instead, I met her eyes with mine, trying silently to acknowledge her pain without implying I could ever understand it.
She met my gaze for what felt like minutes but could only have been seconds. Then she nodded, and, when she spoke, the voice emitted from her beaklike protrusion was as soft and breathy as a young girl’s.
“You’re of the sea,” she said.
I nodded. “My mother is… was… a selkie.”
I realized that was the first time I’d referred to my mother in the past tense, and I shivered.
“I want to go back to the water,” Ula said. It wasn’t a demand, just a statement.
“I know. And you will. Soon.”
“Yes. Now that he’s dead. I would never have been safe with my cousin still alive.”
Forgetting what I knew of the sea folk and interpreting her words literally, I nearly choked.
“That was… that was your cousin?” I asked, horror infusing my voice.
Her smile was small and bitter. “We are all cousins, those of us who live for the sea.”
Of course, I remembered, thinking of the Sea Code… and reminded again of just how thoroughly that damned kappa had shat upon it. “But he…”
“Yes,” was all she said, but her soft voice reverberated with her feelings of betrayal. “He captured us, which is not our way. But he was wrong—twisted inside. As well as very powerful.”
I recalled vividly how well the kappa manipulated my own ocean against me, and I nodded.
“He’s gone now,” Anyan said gently.
Ula shrank even lower into her shell, her eyes flicking toward the barghest.
“Ula,” I said, beginning to see what was going on. She was okay with me, as I was another female. Her prison guards had all been men, and I was beginning to understand the nature of some of the “experiments” they had undoubtedly performed.
“Ula, we need to know everything you can tell us about who captured you, what they did, and who else you might have seen coming and going in that laboratory. We need to know all of these things because we want to capture the people responsible and make sure this can’t happen again. Okay?”
The kappa nodded, although her face bespoke her agony.
“You can tell us anything. Please…”
She nodded, shifting around in her shell and knotting her small green hands in her lap.
“I was captured about one month ago. I thought the male was interested in mating, and that I was protected by the Code. So the fight was not much of a fight.”
The kappa’s small voice was carefully controlled, but I knew how much it hurt her to admit her weakness. She coughed slightly, and I went to fetch her water from a side table that held a pitcher and glasses. When I returned, I sat down next to her on the sofa rather than returning to my own chair. She took the water, drank, then turned toward me as if we were the only two in the room.
“I was in the laboratory the longest. The other females have only been there a week or two, at most. The havsrå was only just captured. Others were there before me, and others came after. They didn’t… they didn’t survive.” Her breath caught and I placed a hand on her wrinkly green knee for comfort.
“I only survived because I was considered less… interesting than the other females.” Her small, gray-nailed hand scrabbled at my own, and I grasped it.
“I don’t know anything about human science,” she said. “But what they did, it wasn’t anything. It wasn’t… it couldn’t have…”
“There was no point to it?” I suggested, trying to keep my shit together when what I wanted to do was curl myself around this little female and soak up some of her pain. Not that I could. Not that anybody could.
“No,” she whispered fiercely. “There was no point. Some of the things were made to look like there was a purpose, and a few of the males seemed to think there was a purpose. But most of them were just enjoying hurting us… No, they were all enjoying hurting us, but some of them were better at acting like they weren’t. They called themselves ‘doctors,’ like humans do, and they made us call them that as well.”
Her hand was hot and damp in mine and she was nearly crushing my fingers. But I wouldn’t have complained under pain of death.
“You saw what became of your captors from the lab, Ula. They can’t hurt you anymore. But we have to know, were there others?”
“There was. Or there were. One of the doctors that was there when I was first captured, he snapped and killed himself. He killed one of the prisoners first, then blew his own head off with a mage ball when the other guards came back in the room.”
I gulped. The things this poor female had witnessed…
“But for the most part, it was the two doctors you killed, the kappa, and… and the Healer.” Ula said the last bit in a whisper so breathy I could barely hear her.
“A healer? As opposed to the doctors?”
“No, the Healer. That’s what he was called.”
Listening to Ula, my memory started to ping like crazy as déjà vu’s pattering little footsteps ran up and down my spine.
“What did the Healer look like, Ula?”
“He was a goblin-halfling. Tall and green-scaled, like a goblin, but with human hands and face.”
As if he were sitting with me in the room, Conleth’s voice from so many weeks ago rang in my ears.
“… he looked half lizard. His nose was sort of flat and snakelike, and he was mostly sort of scaly. But his face had human flesh and his eyes were human. And his hands looked human… but for his claws…”