Chapter five

“Let’s go” Cameron clenched his jaws, popping the muscle on the side of his mouth as he did so. I could tell the decision was momentous for him, having to willingly leave two of his friends behind, but it was obvious that the threat of Cara possibly not surviving was more important - I agreed. None of us had any idea what Malum would or could be doing to Val and Cara and it was that ‘unknown’ that scared me the most.

We’d already seen what he could do to her through her dreams and when he’d captured her for a short amount of time last year... I couldn’t even imagine what would be happening with the weeks that passed. A cold bubbling feeling sat at the bottom of my stomach and I gulped loudly. She’d be okay. She had to be okay... She had to.

“We can’t wait around any longer guys... we need to leave now” I murmured monotonously, the fight that had been my voice a moment ago, now withering away with the thought of my missing ex-girlfriend. We all quietly ran towards my car that been parked around the side of the forest and tossed all our bags inside.

“Looks like we won’t be using the extra car” Helena noted.

“It’s okay. We’ll just squash into the one car... there’s no point bringing another one” I added.

“There’s no need” Chimera piped in. Evanesce slammed the back door shut after Blake climbed in after Helena and my eyes narrowed at the two girls standing outside the car.

“What do you mean?” I bit out.

“We have no use for a vehicle. We can travel quite effectively by ourselves” Evanesce answered me with a raised brow. “Now, let’s go” The two girls suddenly twirled their heads, almost like they were stretching out their necks and soon their bodies blurred as they twisted around and darkened into the familiar black silhouette of the shadow. It howled and flew away towards the road glancing back, almost waiting for us to follow.

“This is so weird” I mumbled under my breath as I gunned the engine and sped off after it. The dark grey clouds hid the glowing moonlight completely and, since we needed to leave the campus undetected by The Control, I’d left the headlights switched off until we were far enough. By now, Gabriel, the head of the Healers, and Sicilianna, the head of the Fire-ableds would either know or have an inkling that we had left and hopefully we would be able to be far enough out of their ability reach. “I think we made it without them noticing” I whispered.

It was obvious that I’d spoken too soon when all of a sudden the asphalt underneath car shook violently and cracked like pitch black lightning in the ground. It seemed that they may have noticed us leaving... I thought sarcastically. I yanked the steering wheel side to side trying to avoid any of the tyres falling into the deep ditches, but the road was no longer solely cracking. Instead huge cracked chunks had begun to lift upwards, almost as though trying to overturn the car and I swore as I swung the wheel to the right, barely avoiding another rising chunk of asphalt.

“What are you doing?! They know we’re gone! Turn the bloody lights on!” Cameron shouted from the front passenger seat. He was bracing himself by clutching one hand on the seat and the other against the roof, his eyes wide in panic as they searched the road for more Earth-abled traps.

“Shut up! Shut up!” I shouted back, but switched the lights on nonetheless.

The road looked like a mixture of the choppy waves from the sea and the after effects of an earthquake. I silently thanked myself on bringing the jeep instead of a smaller car, but the thought quickly died when I noticed a large, long empty hole in front of us that stretched right across as far as I could see. The road had been split so badly that the car would have to practically fly across the ditch to make it. There was no way around it, and if that hadn’t been bad enough, from the massive ditch huge angry, red flames suddenly burst upwards like the burning gates of hell.

All around me I could barely make out the screams and cries coming from inside the car. I had no other choice but to slam my foot right down on the gas and hear the angry roaring of the engine as we sped toward the giant burning flames. The ground shifted and turned up as we neared the flaming ditch. I felt my arms lock into position while my hands gripped the steering wheel tightly; I couldn’t help but close my eyes as I felt the car lift up into the air. All sense of gravity seemed to disappear from my stomach and I could feel the tingly sensation of falling, like falling out of bed, except this time I was falling through the air, past a burning ditch with three other people, inside a metal car.

Everything happened in slow motion. In the faintest crack between my eyelids I could see the powerful Fire-abled flames take shape of Sicilianna’s furious face as we soared through the air, and just above us the shadow whooshed gracefully out of sight. The hair on my head prickled as it gently lifted from my scalp and the beating of my heart seemed to overtake the screaming from the car. Just as fast as everything went into slow motion, it went back to normal as the flames disappeared behind us and the front of the jeep scraped loudly against the road sending little sparks flying out the side. First the front tyres and then the back tyres skidded loudly, leaving the faint scent of burnt rubber.

The steering wheel jerked and I quickly came to my sense as I tried to straighten out the car. By the time the cracked roads and fire was out of sight I became aware of my heavy breathing and furiously racing heart. “So... I guess it was safe to say that The Control knew we were leaving...” Blake’s voice, a little higher than normal, filled the silence.

“Spose so...” I added. I really didn’t have it in me right now to come up with a snarky comment.

We continued to drive in silence ignoring the burnt rubber smell that seemed to linger for a while. It wasn’t until a few minutes later did I notice sniffling coming from behind me. I peered at the back to see Helena, a little paler than her normal pallor, gasping for breath as though in a state of shock. Blake looked a little lost at what to do and had settled for wrapping an arm around her shoulders and awkwardly patting her knee.

“You okay Helena?” I asked stupidly.

“I’m okay” She tried to answer in a painfully fake, perky voice. Her red rimmed eyes giving more away than her forced smile. “I’ve just never had to jump through a burning fire of death before... you know...”

There was a moment of silence but it was quickly filled by our laughter. We’d managed to leave the campus despite The Control trying to stop us. We’d managed to be just out of reach for any real damage and now I felt the sense of determination and freedom mixed together when I realised we were finally on our way to rescuing Val and Cara. I rolled the window down and felt the cool air rush inside taking away some of the lingering burnt rubber smell with it.

I stared at the road and nearly jumped out of my seat when the shadow flew into the headlights and hovered above the hood of the car. Sticking my head out of the window I began to shout at it, “Don’t do that! For crying out loud we just escaped The Control, I don’t need to crash the car now!”

The shadow lifted up a hand in apology, though I wasn’t sure if it was sarcastic or not, and flew straight off the hood to fly just ahead of us. I’d spoken to them before about the two hideouts I’d narrowed it down to and since they hadn’t any idea which one Malum could’ve been hiding in, we were travelling to the closest one – an old factory in a small ghost town. I stared at the back of the shadow and hoped that this wasn’t some sort of trap... until I could figure that out I wouldn’t trust the shadow girls completely. I had people’s lives on my shoulders and I wasn’t about to put their lives in the hands of a maybe-maybe not freed Elemental.

[Val’s POV]

“AHHHHHH!!!!”

Tears mixed with sweat while my scream echoed around my cell and I could feel that I was just on the verge of collapsing from dehydration. I felt the sweat and tears disappear almost immediately. The odd cell I was trapped in stopped any sort of precipitation appearing or me from turning into a Water-being. I breathed through the pain that wracked my body as I forced myself off the ground and fell against the wall. Why didn’t he just kill me? This slow torture was far worse than if he just had one of his robotic Elementals finish me off.

My head fell against the glass keeping me locked in my stone cell. Where was Cara? I hadn’t seen her since I was thrown in here the first time weeks ago. I could only dare to hope that she was still alive and Malum hadn’t been able to break her. Cara’s innocent face appeared in my mind and I sobbed at the thought of anything happening to her. Even as my tears fell they quickly evaporated before even reaching my cheeks. Dread filled my body when I began to feel another ‘dose of persuasion’ as Malum put it.

I cringed at the pain that scorched through every cell, every pore of my body. It felt as though millions of tiny, invisible, burning white blades were slowly slicing into me from everywhere. I didn’t want to give Malum the satisfaction of knowing I was in pain, but my straight face didn’t last two seconds before I fell to the warm ground and screamed until my throat felt like it was being ripped apart.

As the pain subsided once more I just couldn’t bring myself to sit back up. Malum had given me a ‘dose of persuasion’ every five minutes and despite trying to fight against it, using my own Stinger powers I once had last year... nothing worked. I wasn’t sure if the blast that occurred between me and Derrek down in the caves last year had destroyed that ability of mine or if it had something to do with Malum but nothing I did could stop the timely doses of pure torture.

From the corner of my eye I noticed a pair of legs stride past and halt opposite me. I gasped for air but the hot air only made my throat feel worse. I lifted my head and saw a girl with mocha coloured skin and long, grey metallic hair staring at me with dead eyes. She punched a few buttons and the glass slid open immediately cooling down my cell. “Let’s go” She demanded in a monotonous voice. I wanted to freeze her or throw water daggers at her or something but I was so drained from my timely torture that I didn’t have the strength to do anything.

“Piss off” I croaked angrily at her, filling my voice with as much venom as I could. I couldn’t even spit at her feet.

Without warning, almost as though she knew I wouldn’t have easily obeyed her, she lowered her head and her hair streaked forward like thick metal wires or snakes and wrapped around my waist. They coiled around and around, up until it curled around my arms, then suddenly lifted me into the air as though I weighed nothing. I shrieked as she began to walk down the corridor, looking as though her hair was floating behind her as it would underwater. She walked fluidly while her hair kept me upright off the ground and my weight didn’t seem to bother her in the slightest.

Realising that she was walking out of the dungeon, I began to kick and squirm as much as I could to try and get her hair to release me, but the harder I tried the tighter her metal hair became. Finally she turned into a room and lowered her hair slightly letting the tips of my toes scrape at the dirty ground. I looked around me and I swore I’d just been brought into the remake of Frankenstein’s laboratory with a sick twist. All across one side of the room were rectangular pods that stood upright filled with a sort of plastic-like goo. What made it distinctly horrifying were the... things... people... beings that were trapped behind or in it and were pressing up against it although they couldn’t break the surface.

Each of the bodies writhed against the goo, and the surface of their bodies and faces could be seen – like bodies pressing against liquid plastic. No matter how I tried to analyse it in my head, the more it  confused me. What were they? Were those... I gulped, the people Malum experimented on? Tearing my eyes away from the tortured looking bodies I scanned the rest of the room. The ceiling was high and filled with cobwebs as a low hanging black chandelier that, once upon a time, would have looked beautiful.

Shelves covered the rest of the walls and were filled with different liquids, animals, plants and odd things I couldn’t make out, while a large steel machine filled the majority of the space. In the dead centre was a long padded bench that had someone struggling against the binds that held them to it. Then right next it, the worst of everything that frightened me in this entire room the most, was Malum. His skin was no longer a pallid, yellow but instead had a grotesque reddish tinge while it stretched abnormally over his skull. His hood fell over his head to only just cover his eyes but I knew he was watching me. I hadn’t seen him since he ordered for Cara and me to be locked in the dungeon cells. The only contact I’d had were the doses of torture he’d inflict on me, and the whispering in my head to just ‘give in’.

“Valerie” Although his appearance seemed brittle and grotesque, his voice was gruffer than before and deeper, somehow more animalistic. “Welcome to my test chambers”

I didn’t say anything. Behind Malum, the poor person he was probably experimenting on twitched and it was only then did I notice the muffled sobs coming from them. “Sir...?” The metal haired girl spoke up.

“Yes, Medusa, keep young Valerie where she is for the moment” Malum spoke to ‘Medusa’ before turning to me. “You have much more drive than I remembered Valerie. Although I find that very worthy of becoming another Elemental, I believe that I need to squash that out of you-“

“You will never break me” I spat at him, ignoring the shooting pain in my throat. “You’d have to kill me first!”

A small smirk curved at his thin lips before disappearing. “I thought that would be the case when you refused to give in. So... I decided that my persuading would need to be put up a notch” I stared at him, oblivious to what he meant... until he stepped to the side revealing the person behind him and strapped to the padded bench. Tears instantly filled my eyes.

“CARA!!!” I screamed trying to fight against the metal hair holding me in place. It was clear that Cara had been crying.  She had dark, sunken shadow while her eyes were completely red while the rims were even redder, raw looking even. A gag had been tied past her lips so only the muffled cries could be heard and her lips were dry and cracked. “CARA! I’ll get you out of here okay! Hold on, don’t give in to-“

Malum had waved his hand and Medusa tightened her hair around me, squeezing me so tightly I could barely breathe. I could feel warm trickles down my arms and knew that she’d cut into my skin as my blood dripped from my fingers, dotting the ground with red drops. Malum stared straight at me, his black and red eyes piercing into my own as Cara’s body suddenly arched as much as it could from the bench and the gag muffled more of her screams.

“Now, let’s see how long it’ll take to break the both of you” Malum laughed as my screams filled the test chambers.

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A/N

Sorry guys! I’d given a teaser to my fans on my facebook page and that was what..? nearly two weeks ago or something? I’m not sure. My bad, my bad!!!

I’ve been finding it harder to get enough time to write without being disrupted.

Anyhoo, this chapter is dedicated to @xylzezinx :) Your wish is granted!

Nix <3

Ps. The pictures on the side are of the people being experimented on and what I meant by plastic-y goo. It was hard to describe. Also... these were the pictures that pretty much gave me the idea for this entire third book. They were the inspiration for it. :)