THEN
Lenna went back to the motel room while the Taxi drove off. She was about to unlock the door, but before she could push it open, it got pulled open from the inside.
“Jesus, Lennie where the frakk have you been? I came back from Trixie’s place and you were gone. I thought you were safe geeking out here in the room, but no.” Rome pulled the surprised Lenna in a bone-crushing hug.
“Dude... can’t... breathe... need... air...”
Rome let her go but just enough to look at her closely.
“Stop staring at me, I’m fine, you are not the only one who has a little fun from time to time. I went to the bar a couple of blocks down the street. The bartender was cute and we had a little thing going on—“
“A little thing?!”
“He wasn’t bad, I had better guys before but he wasn’t bad.” Lenna grinned. She was a bit tipsy but not so much that she didn’t know what she was doing.
“Okay, okay, whatever, I don’t wanna know the details. Next time, leave a note. I thought you were kidnapped by…something.”
“Oh Rome do you really thing they would kidnap me? I would be far too annoying.”
“Exactly. You’d be dead before they left the room with you.”
Lenna rolled her eyes. “Fine next time I’ll leave a note. Now can I go and shower off the grease of Tom?”
Rome looked actually a bit disgusted, which made Lenna smile.
Weird how much I enjoy the company of the twins, well one of them. Before I met them no one cared when I was out.
...
NOW
They needed some supplies, like new clothes and shoes, so Rome and Lenna went shopping in a small shopping mall. The day ended in a coffee shop.
“I’m telling you, Rome, these are nothing more than some missing people, yeah okay here are more missing people than anywhere else but they just left, nothing supernatural is going on here.”
Lenna sounded annoyed. She appreciated that Rome started to look for jobs but his definition of a job wasn’t hers.
“Look, Lennie, they’ve disappeared without any trace. They haven’t been found yet, and, check it, their cars disappeared, too.” Rome sounded desperate, maybe because Raws was gone since 3 weeks and in this time he hadn’t contacted them. Rome always got nervous when this happened. Lenna knew that after 5 month with the boys. But just because he was worried about his retarded (a word she would never use in front of them) brother didn’t mean she would run after hideous jobs.
“Gee, Rome I’m not investigating stupid human missing cases. They run away from the sh*t hole and who can blame them?” Lenna was about to lose her temper, and he caught that:
“Fine.”
“I’m going back to the motel, you wanna drive with me back or do you wanna stay here and stare at the girl in the Victoria’s Secret’s shop?” Lenna was already out of the coffee shop and on her way to escalator. Rome seemed to be unsure, he checked out the girls in the shop hoping to get a glimpse of the girls in it but he wasn’t lucky. He bought two more coffees and followed Lenna, just minutes after Lenna. Rome thought Lenna would wait at the bottom of the escalator but she wasn’t there. So he thought she went outside. The Stang was still standing in the same spot, but there was no sign of Lenna.
“Elenna?” Rome looked around to see where the girl was hiding but he didn’t found her. Some kids were standing not far from him.
“Hey guys, have you seen a short brunette? She was wearing jeans and a white shirt with This is my zombie-killing shirt on it?”
“Dude, can’t you see that we’re busy?” said one of them before he turned back to his girlfriend. It looked like he was eating her face.
Rome walked back to the Stang. It looked normal, until he saw the key in the driver’s side door. That was wrong. Lenna would never leave the key with the Stang and then go. She had only just started to leave the keys in the ignition if he was waiting in the car.
It was a sunny day, in a frigging mall parking lot, full of teenagers and other weirdos Lenna didn’t even like parking her boy next to them. Why would she leave? This moment Rome knew something was off. He ran around the parking lot, yelling for his friend:
“Lenna? Lenna! Come on, this isn’t even funny. ELENNA!?”
For a moment Rome considered to go to the police.
Frak, bad idea, still a fugitive. I can’t risk getting caught. But for Elenna? Okay, nothing drastic yet, take a deep breath, Rome! How can I find Elenna if no one even saw her?Rome spotted a camera monitoring the parking lot.
“Yes!”
He unlocked the Stang and, sliding into the driver’s seat, thought, Sorry Lennie, I know you hate it when I drive, but this is important. Something is wrong.
He drove back to the Motel, making sure he wasn’t driving too fast. He really didn’t need the attention of the police now. Not when he planned to do something illegal.
Back at the motel room Rome pulled his laptop on his lap and went to work hacking into the security system of the mall to get the footage of the cameras…
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Lenna stepped out of the coffee shop; she didn’t feel like waiting for Rome. Not that she was pissed at Rome, but she was in a way pissed that there was no hunt here. She had hoped there was. It was a week since their last hunt and she had looked pretty stupid in this hunt…
It was a simple hunt, just a ghost. Rome was distracting the ghost while she was digging up the grave outside, but the stupid ghost realized what she was doing and attacked her. She ended up in a tree and needed Rome’s help to get out of it, not to mention that she was just wearing underwear. The ghost thought it was funny to take her clothes. Rome was still laughing hours after he burned the remains.
Lenna put the car key in the Mustang’s door, she was lost in thought when she felt someone close behind her, but before she could turn around someone knocked her out.
She woke up a couple of minutes later, in the back of a car. Her hands were tied together behind her back and she was blindfolded. The car was moving. She tried to speak but she couldn’t.
What the hell is going on? Rome, it would be really handy if you could turn on your ESP and find me right now, I’m in trouble.Lenna tried to remember the way they drove but the knock over her head was worse than she hoped. She managed to sit up. When the car stopped Lenna fell over which made her hit her head another time. The trunk opened and Lenna got roughly pulled out of the car.
Lenna tried to speak but it was just muffled sound that came out of her, even so she wanted to say Who are you? She was frustrated and scared and angry that this made her cry. What kind of hunter started crying when captured?
The kidnapper pulled her up by her hair and dragged her from the colder outside into a warm moist room. It smelled like dirt and blood. Lenna got pushed into a cage. It was not a large cage, she couldn’t stand in it and it wasn’t as long as she is either. As it seemed a second person pulled her to the other side of the cage while the door was closed. Just before they left the room in which the cage was. Lenna took a couple of deep breath to calm herself down.
Okay think, Lenna, make a plan. First get my hands free, get the blindfold off and get the gag off. Then find out where I am and get out. Okay let’s see how I can get rid of the bonds.Lenna fought against the ties on her back, it cut in her wrist. She seemed to be tied with a wire strap, no knots to untie. She needed something to cut it. But first she needed her hands in front of her. With some struggling and pain she managed to climb through her tight hands to get them in front of her. That allowed her to take off the gag and the blindfold. It was more or less dark in here, so she still couldn’t see very much.
“Oh that is not good. I’m in big trouble this time.” Lenna leaned her aching head against the cold metal bar. She knew it was foolish but she closed her eyes. She felt dizzy and her head was killing her. As suddenly a thought popped in her head. My knife! Lenna checked her ankle for the small hidden silver knife. “sh*t, they took it.”
Lenna leaned back against the cool metal. “Rome this time I really, really need you.”
Lenna hugged her knees; she didn’t want to but not to know what was going on scared the crap out of her. She turned 19 a couple of weeks ago and was hunter, but right now she felt like a lost little girl. This feeling wasn’t completely wrong the last thing she remembered was being with Rome in the mall, so she did get lost like a little girl. Silent tears were running down her cheeks. Lenna was cold, her head hurts, she was scared and she didn’t know what was going to happen with her.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Rome had accessed the past hour of the security footage from the parking lot and the mall, but found nothing anywhere. Lenna wasn’t on a single frame.
“Frakking hell, where is she? How can she not be on the videos? One of the cameras must have caught her, when she left the… The escalator’s here, and the door right to where we parked the Stang… So I should see something right… here. Frakk!”
Rome saw Lenna going on the escalator but that was it. Apparently, not all the security cameras were working, or some of them were just dummies.
“Why would they have freaking cameras if they’re not even freaking real?”
Rome looked frustrated at the screen before slamming the lid down on the laptop and throwing it on the bed. His toys were letting him down and it was really pissing him off.
“Maybe I should go back to mall and ask around; maybe there I’ll find her.”
Rome was helpless. He had no idea how to find Elenna.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Lenna had no idea how long she was here, but she knew it was some hours, and it was probably getting to be night outside. It took some time for her eyes to become accustomed to seeing in the dark room. She couldn’t see much, but it was enough to know that she was in some kind of barn and there were several cages like the one she was in. There was just one door—at least she just saw one door—and no windows. No light entered through cracks in the walls or ceiling. Her cage had no lock she could find to pick, and she didn’t have anything to pick it with anyway. It looked like the door was opened by an electrical mechanism from a panel on the far wall. She couldn’t find anything to untie her hands with, which didn’t made it any easier to be locked up.
“Oh, Rome, do you wonder where I am? Maybe they were stupid enough and left my phone on and Rome is tracking the GPS in it. No, he would first have called it and they would have turned it off and the GPS can’t be tracked when it is off.”
Lenna felt lost and it was cold. She realized for the first time that she was half-naked. Her shoes, socks, jeans, and jacket were gone, leaving her shivering in just her t-shirt and underwear. Wisconsin wasn’t a state in which you want to be locked in a barn in winter without hardly any clothes.
Suddenly bright light was turned on; it was so bright that it hurt Lenna’s eyes.
“What the hell do you want from me?”
“Shut up, witch!” The male voice sounded harsh and angry, and the cage shook violently as someone kicked at it.
Lenna thought she misheard him. Why should he call her a witch? First, she wasn’t a witch, and second, even if he knew about her… abilities, well, it didn’t make it witchcraft.
“Why am I here?” Lenna tried to sound brave, but she wasn’t sure that her voice was stable and fearless.
“You are just like the other witches. And you will die like all of them.”
Now her eyes became accustomed to the light, and she looked around her and saw two or three (it was hard to tell) mangled bodies in various horrible positions around the room. She gasped and tasted vomit in her mouth.
“I am not a witch!” she shouted when she regained her composure. “I’ve never been in this town before—whatever you think I did, it wasn’t me! I swear! Do you hear me?” As she stared at the horrible sights surrounding her, she noticed that the barn was much larger then she had previously thought. It looked like some kind of medieval torture chamber, with a few instruments she recognized from movies and books and some she didn’t want to guess at how they worked. This was more and more beginning to look really bad.
“I can smell a witch from a mile away, and you stink like a powerful witch. You will suffer; I know what you witches do.”
He now went to the control panel and punched a few buttons. The room around her creaked and groaned, and the cage she was in began to rumble and move. Something lifted it from above, and crouching in the cage she was lifted across the ground over to a large hold in the floor. It was full of water.
Ice cold water, she realized as she was lowered down into it. She screamed as the cage lowered further into the water. For a moment, there was an inch of air above her, and she glued her lips to the top of the cage to try to suck in more air, but then the machine jerked again and she was fully submerged. She thrashed and kicked and pounded on the bars, screaming as what little air she had left in her lungs escaped, but the cage didn’t budge, and she only succeeded in bruising herself.
Just as black spots began to swim before her vision and she began to think all hope was lost, the crank above her groaned and the cage began to rise out of the water. She choked and spluttered for some time before her lungs were cleared to breathe, and she continued coughing even as the cage was settled once more on solid ground.
“That was just to show you how serious I am. I’ll be back, and next time, witch, you’ll wish I’d killed you quickly. I still might, if you’re willing to sell out the other members of your coven.”
Elenna coughed again, clearing the last of the water from her lungs. It was cold before that in the barn, now it was freezing. The room went dark again and the guy left.
Lenna was shivering. She felt her stomach twist from some of the water she’d accidentally swallowed—it tasted like moldy socks—but she kept it down, not knowing when she would next have a drink of water. Lenna curled up in a ball and tried to keep warm. After some time she started humming all kinds of songs. Rome would have been proud to hear what songs she was humming. She didn’t hum them on purpose she just felt alone and needed this little reminder that someone out there missed her and was looking for her.
~~~~~~~~
Rome was back at the mall and trying to find someone who had seen this girl:
Luckily he had taken a picture with his phone just a couple of days ago. But there was no luck, no one still at the mall had seen her. He went to the security of the mall as the man was locking up the doors. “Sir, I lost someone, my friend, and she—she’s diabetic and needs her insulin. I went home to see if she came back but she’s missing and no one’s seen her. I need to find her, her name is Elenna, she’s….yeah, okay, she’s actually my sister—my little sister. I promised our parents I’d look after her and I need to find her! Please.”
“Look, kid, she’s not in there, I can promise you that. If she’s been missing all day you should probably speak to the police.”
“But—“
“I’m sorry, son, but she must have left the mall, and I’m definitely not equipped to help in a missing person’s case. I can give you a ride to the police station, if you like?”
“Uh, no, no! I mean, uh, no, I think—I have a buddy who’s a cop, I’ll get in touch with him. Thank you, sir,” Rome said as he politely and quickly backed away from the doughnut-eating rent-a-cop.
What he was thinking was,
sh*t. I can’t go to the police, can I? No one had seen his sister—uh, Elenna. She had disappeared into thin air. But people don’t just disappear…other people stop looking for them. Rome sighed, his shoulders drooping. It was very quickly looking like there was only one option left to him. And it sucked out loud.
~~~~~~~~
It didn’t take Lenna long to dry herself:
“Wasser das hier ist, ich befehle dir verschwinde!”
But it did cost her a lot of her energy. It was worth it, though. Her few clothes were dry, which meant she was a bit warmer.
This game was getting old, they would let her sit in the cold and the dark, lying on painful metal bars which dug into her skin, still coughing wetly from the water, for a few long hours, until they would return suddenly and turn on the light, which blinded her and hurt her head. For the first time they opened the cage, pulled her out by her hair and threw her into the middle of the floor between two big guys. Seeing that she had now her hands in front of her and had removed the blindfold and gag, one guy cuffed her across the face and another kicked her in the back when she fell to the ground.
Before she could concentrate again through the pain, her wrists and ankles were being clamped in iron chains and tied to opposite ends of a long table. The wheel on one end of the table gave her a pretty good idea what she was in for.
“What did you do to her, witch?! Where is my family?” The guy turned the wheel a few screws, until her muscles were straining. She yelped.
“I don’t know! I don’t know your family! I’ve never been here before. You have the wrong witch. I’m not the one you are looking for. Let me go, please!” Lenna didn’t care that she sounded scared.
The man grinned horribly and turned the crank again. “Tell me!” He bellowed.
She felt something give in her shoulder, and Elenna screamed and started crying. “I don’t know! I can’t tell you anything! I don’t even know who you—“
“Stop lying!” He cranked the wheel again. “Where is my family?” Another turn. Her other shoulder was aching now, too, feeling like a rubber band straining to break. “I know you have them, along with the rest of your kind! What—“ crank “did—“ crank “you—“ crank “do?!”
The shoulder gave out with a disgusting pop, and Elenna’s vision started to go black. How were these guys expecting her to say anything through this amount of pain?
The next thing she was aware of was a splash of cold water, which made her yelp and gasp, and her involuntary jerk made something give out in her knee.
“Wake up, witch, I’m not finished with you! Next time, you’ll die if you don’t tell me where my family is. Do you hear me, witch?” He slapped her across the face for emphasis, but she barely felt it. She was presently loosed from the rack and thrown unceremoniously back into the cage, her hands still bound by that tiny annoying painful cable tie. The room went dark and Lenna was once again left alone in the cage. She could hardly move but she curled up as best she could and started sobbing.
I never thought I’d die alone in a dark scary barn. She took a deep breath then, and resolved herself: Fine, let’s give it a try and see if I can help Rome find me.
“Feuer, Erde, Wasser und Luft auf meinen Befehl vereint euch, lasst Rome wissen wo ich bin. Ich weiss nicht wie, aber ich befehle es!“
Lenna closed her eyes and just hoped that either way she first died or Rome would find her.
~~~~~~~~
Rome took a deep breath as his hands gripped the steering wheel. He had been sitting here in front of the station for nearly twenty minutes debating whether to go in and get the police involved on Elenna’s disappearance, and risk getting himself caught, or go at it alone and risk losing her. Of course it was no contest, but he offered plenty of excuses: it was just as likely she’d be lost permanently even if the chuckleheads in blue got in on the case—they hadn’t found any of the other missing persons yet—and then Elenna would still be missing and he would be in jail, unable to help her. Also, it was looking more and more like this simply wasn’t the police’s kind of gig. It was a job for a hunter.
But, still, what kind of hunter was he? Without Elenna, not much. And Rawson wasn’t around to help. Alone, he wasn’t much good.
So there really was only the one choice. These were just excuses. He had to get her back, even if the only way he ever spoke to her again was through a phone and a glass window pane while wearing an orange jumpsuit and ugly shoes.
He had just grabbed the door handle to let himself out and face the music when he felt really weird. The world spun and warped, and then there was a flash of bright white light, and then:
A van driving down a street. The van stopped in front of a farm. He saw Lenna in the barn, inside a cage, tied up and beat to crap. He saw the faces of her attackers, saw one of them slam a heavy boot into her back, and she screamed. A flash of red rage threatened to block out the vision, but then a sign appeared, and he saw the van’s licence plate. He heard her calling for him, pleading: “Rome, help me! Save me, Rome, please!” And then she was chanting in German, and then someone threw a bucket of water on her, and then with a great white flash of blinding light, the vision was gone.
“Lenna!”
Rome was breathing heavily; this was not like one of his normal visions. It didn’t hurt as much as normal, and this felt more like someone put it in his head. Someone like his little witch. He pulled his smartphone out—this puppy wasn’t even out on the market yet—and looked up the name of the farm on his GPS. It wasn’t more than twenty miles away. He put the Stang back in gear and drove as fast as he could, not caring if the police saw him now. He knew he had to hurry. His stomach tightened at the thought of her hurt until he felt ready to throw up, and his vision went red around the edges and stayed that way. Also, it wasn’t likely he’d be getting a repeat performance of the vision, as Lenna probably couldn’t use her powers like that again.
He recognized the van from his vision, confirming he was at the right place when he pulled up to the farm. The gravel flew out in all directions when Rome screeched the Stang to a halt in front of the place. Rome took his .50 caliber Desert Eagle, pocketed an extra magazine, and exited the car in record time.
He didn’t wait for anyone to come out and greet him: Rome marched with bloody purpose into the farmhouse adjacent to the barn.
“Who the hell are you?” The man didn’t look to happy to see him.
“You have someone who’s very important to me. Where is the girl?”
“There is no girl!”
“Stop messing around!” Rome bellowed, cocking the gun and advancing on the man homicidally. “I want to know where she is NOW, or you’re gonna be picking up your teeth off the floor with your elbows because I’m gonna shoot your frakking hands off!”
The man grinned evilly, psychotically. Rome noticed that the man’s knuckles had blood on them.
“Your friend is no girl, son, we did you a favor. She was a witch, a practitioner of dark arts and a menace to society. She got what she deserved.”
At the man’s use of the past tense, Rome lost his temper and shot him in the knee. The size of the bullet practically tore the limb in half.
“Where is she?” He shrieked. His voice cracked a little, and he stepped over the man, shoving the gun in his face. “What did you do to her?”
“She’s dead! I killed her myself, the little sorceress! And she suffered for that last little spell!”
Rome’s face went stony. He shot the man in the other knee. A little blood splattered on his shirt. He didn’t care. He turned and left the man wallowing in his misery and blood and headed for the barn.
“Hey!” There was a man waiting for him at the door of the barn, holding a shotgun.
Rome shot first and asked questions later. Like, after the man didn’t have much of his arm left.
He grabbed the man by his shirt collar and dragged him to his knees, holding the barrel of his gun against the guy’s chin. “Where is she? And no more freaking games, or you’ll end up like Special Olympics back there. And how many more of you douchebags are there?”
Lucky for him, the guy caved immediately. “She’s in the barn.”
Rome forgot he had asked a second question, forgot that he had just shot and probably sentenced to death two people, forgot that there was anything else in the world except for this barn, and, dropping the guy to the dirt, rushed inside.
Rome shot the lock off the barn entered the bar in Marine mode, gun drawn, safety off, in case of any other attackers, although he had only seen two in his vision. He wasn’t trying to be quiet, hoping to draw the scumbags out, but nothing else greeted him except a horrific stench and an even more appalling sight. When he found a lightswitch and flipped it on, he wished he hadn’t, because the inside of this barn looked like a torture chamber straight out of a movie.
And in the middle of the room rested a cage, and in that cage lay Elenna, just as he had seen her in his vision. Or maybe even worse. The sight of her like that filled him at once with rage and terror.
He rushed to the cage to get a look at her. She was breathing—but barely. She was also soaking wet, and her clothes were gone. Her wrists were bloody from a strip tie and too much rough handling, and her limbs lay awkwardly. She was covered in bruises. Rome took a knee at the cage.
“Lennie? sh*t, Lenna, baby, open your eyes, you with me?”
“Rome?” her voice was faint.
“Hang tight, chica, I’m gonna get you out of there,” he said, standing and looking around frantically.
“Rome!” Elenna’s body made a funny jerk as she appeared to try to sit up, but with her hands tied and her body in its condition, she only managed to cause herself more pain. “Rome, don’t go!” she was bawling openly.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, chica! Easy, easy, don’t move. Don’t move, I’m not going anywhere, kiddo, I swear.” He stuck his finger through the cage and touched her hand. Through the bars, her fingers hooked into his, and she bit her lip apprehensively. “Okay? I’ll be right back, chica, easy.” He considered asking her if she knew where the release button was before he spotted it himself, not that he was even entirely sure she’d be able to give him a coherent answer anyway. He ran across the room towards it before she could freak out again, or his heart had time to break.
He unlocked the cage via the control panel and sprinted immediately back to her, wrenching the door open and crawling inside next to her, afraid to move her, almost afraid to touch her, although he touched her hair and rested his hand on her arm where it looked like it wasn’t hurt.
Elenna smiled. The smile worried Rome, because she didn’t look all there. “Rome, it worked. You’re here, you found me. You got my message.”
“Yeah, yeah, sure thing, chica, loud and clear. Now talk to me, where you hurt? How bad?”
Elenna’s eyes focused briefly, and she frowned in thought. Then her frown deepened and tears began to stream down her face. She looked like she wanted to cry loudly or throw a fit, and the only thing stopping her was that she lacked the strength. “Everywhere,” she sobbed.
“Okay, okay, easy, easy, sorry, I gotcha, okay? Just take it easy, all right? Rest for me, okay? I gotcha.”
Elenna was suddenly terrified again, and shook her head. “Rome, what if they come back?” She struggled against the strip tie on her wrists, and then grunted in frustration. “Let me go, Rome! Please, help me! You’ve gotta let me go, why won’t you let me go?”
“Whoa, whoa, easy, easy!” If she was moving this much, she had to be okay, so Rome flicked out his boot knife and cut the tie. “Easy, chica, easy,” he told her, and, ever so gently, scooped her up and held her tightly, pinning her against his chest to keep her from hurting herself. “Okay, okay, no moving, I gotcha, okay. I got the bad guys, it’s okay. We’re okay. I gotcha. Yeah?”
Elenna’s fingers grabbed hold of his shirt in a deathgrip, but otherwise she stilled, and nodded.
“Promise?” she sniffed.
“Yeah, Lennie, duh, chica. Let’s go, baby, we’re moving out.”
Still holding Lenna with one hand, Rome located his gun and stuck it in the waistband of his jeans—a rookie move—but he hadn’t had time to grab a holster and he certainly wasn’t leaving his gun behind, or leaving her alone to get one. He took off his jacket, and although it wasn’t much, wrapped it around her. Briefly he got a notion of how badly she was hurt, as the joints in her shoulders caved weirdly. Both of them looked dislocated, which was disgusting, and had to be fixed sooner rather than later. But he was going to get her to the car first.
Lifting her elicited another whimper, more because she didn’t have the strength to scream again and less that she was trying to be brave. Then her eyes closed and her head rolled limp against his shoulder.
“Rome, I’m fine,” she insisted sleepily. Her voice was weak and broken, and he was pretty sure she was still crying, judging by the wet patch forming on his t-shirt. She was shivering and holding on to him as if she wanted to make sure he wasn’t leaving her. “I can walk.”
“Yeah, right, chica. You looked in a mirror lately, kid? Because you look like Jiminy Cricket could blow you down by whistling. You look awful.”
“Rome, you said you don’t like Disney movies.”
“Yeah. Um, shut up. Let’s go. Close your eyes.”
She didn’t listen to him, unfortunately, so when they walked by the bodies—they were bodies now, nobody lasted long with a holes in them that size—she gasped and lifted her head.
“Holy sh*t, Rome, gross! Did you do this?”
“Oh. Uh, yeah, I guess so. Sorry? Except I’m not really sorry—they were major douche silos that deserved worse, and…I guess I’ve done worse to better people, so…” He got a faraway look in his eyes, though from guilt or something else, Elenna couldn’t tell.
“It’s okay, Rome,” she whispered, resting her head against his neck again. “Take me home. You don’t even have to buy me dinner first.” Lenna forced a smile, but between the dirt, blood and bruises on her face, and the white tear-marks carved into her features, she didn’t look much better for it.
But Rome laughed at her attempted joke. “Consider it done. Room service, champagne, mirrors on the ceiling.”
“Ugh. I think those are stupid.”
“What? No, way, it’s great for when she’s on top—“
“Dude,” Lenna groaned, and Rome laughed.
“Okay, okay, sorry.” Rome grinned. “Rest now, we’ll get you home. Everything’ll be better when you wake up now, I promise.”
“You won’t go away with Trixie again? You’ll be there when I wake up?”
“Scout’s honor.”
“I bet you never were a boy scout.”
“And you’d be absolutely right. Just shut up, okay, and stop finding my plot holes. I promise I’ll be there. It’s probably gonna take me twenty million hours to put you back together anyway. I think both of your shoulders are dislocated, and your knee’s all swollen. What did they want from you, anyway?”
“They were witch hunters. Do you know what they did to witches two hundred years ago?”
“I’m trying not to think about it, Lennie.”
Elenna sound half asleep. “Don’t call me Lennie, I’m not a toddler. Anyway they wanted to know the other names of my coven. Wait I’m hanging out with you, does this mean we are one coven?”
“I haven’t even given you the good stuff yet, Lennie, and already you sound stoned out of your gourd. This is gonna go well.”
“He thought I killed his family, Rome. He was just protecting his own.”
“And so am I.”
Rome eased Elenna into the backseat of the Mustang and wrapped her in a blanket. Elenna looked exhausted and seemed glad to finally be safe.
“Geez, chica, you’re really cold. I think you need—“
“Don’t try it.”
“Yeah, sure,” Rome snapped back. “You can sit here and be a prude or I can keep you from freezing to death.” Without waiting for any further protest, Rome reached beneath the blanket and, as gingerly as possible, cut her remaining clothes off. They were sopping wet and smelled funny, so he let them drop outside the Stang. Then he grabbed the first aid kit from the glove compartment, and placed two extra-strength painkillers on her tongue, followed by a sip of water. She coughed a bit on it, and her cough was thick and wet, deep in her chest. It didn’t take a huge leap to assume she’d gotten water in her lungs.
This was looking worse all the time.
They made it back to the hotel in record time. Elenna was shivering and barely coherent. “Don’t go away; promise me not to leave me alone. Not a second!” she cried, looking really scared but her eyes out of focus.
“No worries, I’m not going anywhere chica,” Rome smiled at his friend as he felt along her bare shoulders, bracing himself for what he had to do.
They did have some morphine, and it was probably better to have her out of it, but apparently Elenna also had a
fear of needles he had been unaware of until she shrieked at the sight of him advancing with it.
“No! No, I’m telling you, I didn’t hurt your family! Leave me alone!”
“What?” Rome looked confused and hurt, and also every time she struggled or moved, the blankets moved aside and, well, it was just awkward seeing Elenna like that. “Easy, Lennie, it’s me, it’s Rome.” He put the needle behind his back, feeling like a dick, and advanced again as she relaxed. “Hey, look at that, Elenna, The Little Mermaid is on TV,” he lied, and before she could realize what he had done, he thrust the needle into her arm, depressed the plunger, and removed it.
She began to relax presently, enough that he was able to pop her shoulders back into place with only tears instead of screams, and iced her knee and was able to guide it back into place as well. Her wrists he bathed in warm water and wrapped in bandages slathered in antiseptic cream, and he pumped her full of antibiotics and hot tea as long as she remained conscious. When she was finally sleeping, covered in an electric blanket and bandaged and cared for in every possible way, Rome settled down next to her and resigned himself to a night of sleepless TV watching.
~~~~~~~~
A few days later the two of them were sitting in the Stang on the way out of town.
“If you ever tell anyone how scared I was acting, I’m gonna kill you.”
Rome grinned. “Aww, come on, that needle bit was priceless. You could have warned me you were scared of something so stupid as needles when you, I dunno, fight monsters for a living? How the hell was I supposed to know?”
Lenna looked at him and smiled back.
“Also: Dude, I can’t believe you lost me in a mall. Like a frigging five year old girl.”
“Tell me about it, infant. Next time we’re in a mall I’ll have to put you on one of those child leashes.”
Rome was laughing as they drove west into the sunset, Elenna joining him after she landed a solid punch in his arm.
Spell translation"The water that is here, I command you to disappear!"
"Fire, earth, water and air meld together on my orders, let Rome know where I am. I don’t know how, but I command it!"
((This little background event is produced with the lovely Maeglin we had a lot of fun and I would totally torture Elenna again if that means I could have so much fun with Maeglin
))