Hug? Sure, why not? As to the world, it’s pretty much the real world (with additions) so I’ve not bothered to describe it in much detail. There’ll be expansion, though, as Claire learns how little of the “real” world she understands. Thanks for reviewing.
Sci Fi & Fantasy / Mercy's Price Chapter 1
Friday evening, the sun dropped below the horizon leaving the university campus in deep shadow. Electric lights fashioned after antique street lamps cast cones of warm golden light between a ring of imposing brick buildings surrounding a single, modern glass fronted building. A single figure strolled unconcerned between light and shadow.
Nighttime was Claire Alexander’s favorite part of the day, especially nighttime in autumn. She loved the way the wind felt on her skin, the bite of cold on the back of her throat as she breathed. She loved the way the shadows could hide almost anything in their velvet depths.
Claire wrapped her sweater jacket closer around herself as the wind picked up. It would be November in a few days, and it was definitely getting colder. She wouldn’t be able to take these walks when it really got to be winter. Having to bundle up in a full coat and gloves and what not ruined the fun. She glanced up at the clock tower high atop the History department building. It was getting close on midnight. She should probably head back to her room and get ready for bed. She had an essay due Monday, and she’d barely even started on it. The Puritans were just so boring that it was hard to write anything about them.
There was a recessed stairwell into the basement of her dorm. Even in broad daylight the place was shadowed. The campus cats liked to congregate there. Claire liked watching the feral creatures, even if she could never manage to get close enough to pet one. One of the cats had been looking particularly chubby. Claire glanced into the stairwell as she passed, hoping to catch a glimpse of the new kittens.
Shadows in the darkest corner of the stairwell shifted in a way no shadows should. Claire froze, startled and a little frightened. That was no cat. The huddled form was too large and human shaped to be a feline. No one except maintenance people went down there, though, and it was far too late for someone to be working in the dorm’s boiler room. It was really too late for anyone to have a legitimate reason to be there.
Claire debated her options. It was possible the figure hadn’t noticed her. She could just keep walking. The door to the dorm was only a few yards away. There was an emergency call button beside the door. She could reach it, and press it, and the campus police would be there in minutes to deal with things while she went inside where it was safe, well lit and warm.
The person could be hurt, though. They could have fallen down the stairs. Even the few minutes it took the campus police to arrive might be a few minutes too many, if they’d hit their head. Who knew how long they’d been in that stairwell, maybe bleeding?
Speculating didn’t do any good.
“Hello?” she called down into the darkness, while she fumbled in the pocket of her jeans for her penlight.
The figure stirred but didn’t respond. Claire got the light out and pointed it towards the figure. A pale face looked up at her. The features were delicate and young, but definitely masculine. Dark eyes narrowed at the light, and he lifted a hand weakly to shield his face. A dark line of blood dripped from his temple, glinting almost black in the weak light.
Claire lowered the light and moved down the stairs perhaps a little more quickly than was safe. The voices of her friends chided her in her imagination, telling her that bloody young men hiding in dark stairwells were not safe and were best left to the campus police to deal with. She ignored them. He was hurt, and probably very frightened. She couldn’t just walk away.
When she reached the bottom of the stairs, the boy huddled even closer to the locked door of the basement. Her penlight cast wild shadows over his face and glinted off his blue nylon windbreaker as she squatted to balance on the balls of her feet so they’d be eye to eye.
“Hello,” she said again. “I’m Claire. I’m trained in first aid. Can I help you?”
He shook his head. She couldn’t tell if his pupils were unnaturally large because of injury, or the light, or if it was just illusion. She really hoped it was an optical illusion because she knew he had some kind of head injury and she knew those could be very bad.
“No?” she asked, “You don’t need help or you won’t accept help?”
“No,” he whispered. His voice was rough, like he gargled with sand or something. “No one can help me. No one will.”
“I’ll help you,” Claire said.
He looked at her. His eyes were green, murky green like jade. They seemed to be old and full of secrets. That, or the lighting was bad and he was hurting. He stared into her eyes for a long time, and she thought he was going to refuse her help again. Then he just swallowed and lifted one shoulder in a weak shrug.
“Do as you want.”
Claire decided that would have to do for permission. She’d been taught in first aid class you had to ask permission to help someone, which she’d always thought a bit silly. She raised the penlight to take a better look at him. The windbreaker and a pair of dark jeans covered most of him and hid any injury. Both his clothing and his shoulder length hair were coated in fine gray grit, which proved to be gravel dust when she reached out and brushed a little of it off his sleeve.
“Did you fall?” she asked.
He shook his head.
She realized she couldn’t do much for him where they were. There just wasn’t enough light to tell injuries from shadows.
“Can you stand?” she asked. “My car’s in the parking lot beside the dorm,” she continued, “If you can make it that far I’ve got a first aid kit in there and I can drive you to the hospital.”
He shook his head. “No hospital.”
“No hospital? Okay,” she said, mostly because she didn’t want to waste time arguing, “but can you stand up anyway? I don’t think it’s healthy for you to stay in this damp stairwell.”
He shrugged again, and tried to stand. He moved so stiffly and slowly it was painful to watch. He had to brace his arms on his thighs to straighten his back, and it was clear as he wavered in place that he wouldn’t be able to stay upright on his own for more than a few seconds. Claire wrapped an arm around his waist before he fell. He was short, maybe an inch or two over five feet. He was so slender her arm wrapped around almost to his belly button. He was light, too. She thought if she had to she could carry him out of the stairwell.
“I’ll help you up the stairs,” she said, “okay?”
He didn’t bother to reply, just let his head loll against her shoulder. She tossed her head to keep his hair out of her mouth. He smelled of dust and something metal that set her teeth on edge. He tried to walk on his own, but really she pretty much carried him up the stairs. As they reached the top a gust of wind blew his windbreaker partially open. He didn’t wear anything underneath. Standing under a streetlamp, colors were distorted. Still, whatever color, Claire couldn’t convince herself that was anything but blood on his chest.
He didn’t get injuries like that from a simple fall.
“Were you in an accident?” she asked. It would explain some things, like the dust. Wouldn’t she have heard a wreck, though? He couldn’t have made it very far.
He shook his head slowly. “No accident.”
“Was it a fight, then?”
He looked away and down, stating as clearly as if he’d yelled that he wasn’t going to answer. Claire huffed and turned them in the direction of her car. Claire was glad it was so late that no one was out and about, because she had no idea how she’d explain this. She was also glad that the campus had eschewed the pretty streetlamps for more modern ones in the parking lot, because they cast better light.
She set him down to lean against the fender of her car. He squirmed uncomfortably until he was twisted against the car, most of the weight of his upper body supported on his left arm. He was panting faintly from the effort.
“Okay, that’s it. I’m going to go call for help,” Claire said.
“No,” he reached for her arm. His hand closed weakly over her wrist. Though his grip was feather light, his knuckles were white with strain. Stretching his arm revealed a bracelet of some kind around his wrist. Claire leaned down a little to investigate. The thing was more of a manacle than a bracelet, a quarter inch of solid steel. She couldn’t see any kind of clasp or hinge, but there had to be one because it fit flush against the skin.
“Look, you’re hurt bad,” Claire said, “I have to get you some help.”
“No. Please.”
“You’re delusional or something. You need help.”
“No one can help me.”
“You’ve said that before. Just let me try, okay?”
He looked up at her, meeting her eyes for the first time since she’d first offered to help him. She’d thought he was around fifteen years old, but she had to revise that and add a few years. If he weren’t so small, she’d wonder if he wasn’t older than her own twenty years.
“Why?” he asked.
She blinked. Why? Who asked a question like that at a time like this? Apparently, this guy.
“Why not?” she asked back.
“You have no reason.”
“You’re hurting. You need help. Here I am with a car and a first aid kit. What more reason do I need?”
“I might be dangerous.”
Claire pried his arm off her wrist without effort and patted his hand. “I think I can handle myself.”
He sighed and slumped further over. Claire stood up and went to the trunk. Her mother had put a first aid kit in there when she’d first gotten the car, just in case. Claire had honestly almost forgotten the thing was there. She figured maybe she should see how badly he was hurt before she forcibly dragged him into the emergency room. She had to dig around under a tarp and an old empty suitcase, but she finally found the first aid kit.
She set the plastic case next to the boy and opened it. She pulled on a pair of gloves, because she already knew he was bleeding. He watched her silently, without much real interest. The way he just sat there, quiet and still, was a little intimidating but Claire couldn’t have said why.
“I’m going to have to take that jacket off you, okay?” Claire spoke softly, though he didn’t really seem to be afraid. He nodded once and leaned forward a little so she could pull the windbreaker free.
Seeing what was under the jacket, Claire dropped it and bit her lip to stifle a yelp of shock. Besides the black jeans, the guy wore only a spiked leather collar and a second metal band around his left arm, identical to the first. The jacket had hidden them, and a mass of injuries that a simple fight or fall could not account for. Under the golden light his skin was sallow, darkened in places with bruises. A few of the darker spots were greenish yellow, mostly healed, a few dark purple blue, obviously fresh.
Claire was finally able to identify the metallic scent she’d noticed when he leaned on her shoulder. It was blood. He was pretty much covered in the stuff. She’d seen a little on his chest, and now she could clearly see the cuts which produced it, but that was nothing compared to his back.
Raw hamburger looked more intact than his back. There was barely an inch of flesh that wasn’t cut and bloody. One flap of skin actually hung loose, a triangle of meat exposing muscle and blood. Claire put a hand over her mouth to stifle either a scream or the urge to vomit, she couldn’t tell which but neither would be constructive. The windbreaker dropped from her nerveless hand, the soft crinkling sound of nylon against concrete made the boy jump.
Claire knelt behind him and opened the first aid kit, chiding herself all the time. What was she doing, staring like an idiot when someone desperately needed help? What had she gotten first aid training for, anyway, if she was going to be so childish? Of course, the best thing would be to get him to a hospital as soon as possible, but first she really should try to patch him up at least a little or else he might just manage to bleed out in her car. She couldn’t do much, she didn’t have anywhere near the skill, but she could make him comfortable. The real doctors could do the rest.
“This is probably going to hurt,” Claire warned her patient as she pulled on a pair of latex gloves. “Just see if you can hold still, huh?”
He nodded once. Claire pulled out a gauze pad to clean off some of the blood. She should probably use one of those premoistened alcohol wipes, but she couldn’t stand to think of how much pain that would cause. As she wiped a little of the blood away, she saw a dark line on the skin.
“You’ve got a tattoo back here?” she asked. She wasn’t really surprised when he didn’t respond.
She kept cleaning, tracing the lines as she did. It was impossible to make out the design, beyond that it must have been intricate. Someone, this kind of damage couldn’t be an accident, had done a very thorough job of eradicating whatever the pattern had been. It was beginning to frustrate her, because her eyes kept trying to find a line to follow and it looked like it should be familiar, but the cuts kept interrupting. Someone had really wanted to hurt this guy. Who could do something so vicious? What could they possibly gain?
There were too many cuts too close together to even think of bandaging them individually. Claire finally ended up just layering a bunch of gauze pads over his back, thicker than was probably needed, and wrapping his torso with the entire roll of gauze. That should take care of most of his chest, and support his ribs just in case. Claire used what was left in the kit to bandage the individual wounds on his arms. Someone had really messed the guy up. Claire was torn between hoping she’d never come face to face with such a monster, and wanting a chance to give him or even possibly her a piece of her mind.
“There, all done,” Claire said brightly. She hoped he’d take the slight trembling in her voice for a reaction to the cold.
She settled back so she could get a better look at her patient. For his part, the guy stared intently at a stray bit of gravel next to the right front tire of her car. She supposed she’d better start working on getting him to agree to go to the hospital. She’d leave him where he was and go find a phone to call an ambulance, but she thought he might do something unfortunate like try to run off and end up in traffic if she did that.
“That’s the best I could do,” she said. “But you’re hurt kind of badly, I don’t think you understand how badly. I couldn’t even tell what the design of that tattoo was supposed to be and…”
He looked up at her, interrupting her useless babble. His eyes were almost black with pain and understanding. Yes, he knew how badly he was hurt.
“Wings,” he said, still in a whisper.
“What?”
“They were wings, but no more,” he said. He wrapped his right hand around the manacle on the left wrist and tugged at it, twisting desperately but the thing didn’t budge. “He cut my wings.”
He was going to hurt himself if he kept that up. Claire put her hands over his, using more strength than she’d expected to need to still the frantic attempts.
“Here, let me look,” she said.
She took a closer look at the manacle. She still couldn’t tell how the things had been fastened in place. Honestly, she didn’t think they’d fit over his hands. Maybe he’d been wearing them a long time, and they had been put on when his hands were smaller. She knew there was no way she’d get them off now without breaking the bones of his hands.
“I have friends,” Claire said, thinking as she spoke, “the twins have metal working equipment, don’t ask me why, and they’ll probably be able to get these things off your wrists if you want.”
“Please,” he twisted his wrists so he was the one holding her hands, “if you can, please.”
“Okay. Okay, just stay calm, we don’t need you going into shock,” Claire said, “Here, let me help you into the car.”
If she could get him into the car, she could easily enough get him to the hospital. He hesitated so long when she got the door open and tossed both kit and gloves into the backseat that she thought he was going to refuse, but he finally climbed into the passenger side seat. He didn’t buckle up. He pulled his knees up to his chest and stared out the windshield while she closed the door and went around to the driver’s side.
“Please buckle up,” she said.
He looked at her, as if he wasn’t sure what she was talking about. Claire fastened her own belt.
“I’m sorry,” she said, guessing the strap would irritate all those bruises, “but it’s the law.”
“I understand.” He reached for the belt, moving with exaggerated care. It was like he had to focus all his attention on every little nuance of motion or he couldn’t do it. Was that normal? Or was it a sign of something really wrong and that he should be in a hospital not her car?
Claire leaned over to help, bundling the jacket between his stomach and the lap belt, hoping it would help. He grimaced a little but thanked her quietly.
“It’s a short drive,” Claire said, not specifying that she meant to the hospital, not to her friends’ townhouse. She’d apologize later, after a professional had properly patched the guy up.
She started the car and pulled out of the dorm parking lot. She really hoped she was doing the right thing.
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BunniesAreEvil reviewed Version 1 -
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Intriguing so far. I like the description of the campus and how Claire is enjoying her walk. There are several times throughout this story that the writing seems to get hesitant when it is describing something, like when it’s describing the guy’s eyes. ”His eyes were green, murky green like jade.” Why not just say “His eyes were the murky green of jade” or something similar? Be firm with your descriptions. There were some other spots that I tripped up over becuase they seemed awkward. “Having to bundle up in a full coat and gloves and what not”- The “what not” seems awkward. ”close on midnight” is something you hear people say but it reads awkwardly in exposition. Maybe switch to “close to.” I’d cut the “Speculating didn’t do any good.” It doesn’t really seem necessary. When describing the boy’s voice-“like he gargled with sand or something”-take out the “or something.” ”Raw hamburger looked more intact than his back.” This sounds awkward. Why not just say his back looked like raw hamburger? “Someone, this kind of damage couldn’t be an accident, had done a very thorough job of eradicating whatever the pattern had been.” Either put “this kind of damage couldn’t be an accident” in front of this sentence (as its own sentence) or cut it. Sounds awkward. Overall I enjoyed this story and am curious as to what you have planned for the next installment. Keep up the good work.
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DeadEdward reviewed Version 1 -
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The story is nice… i missed the prologue.. oh well…
The style of writing in the beginning seems a little stiff, forced. It gets better in the end. I don’t know… i think if u work it a bit more it should be quite good, okay it is good now too but i ment the writing styly. About your fantasy its lovely. But i do think u need to create more of the world. It all seems a bit empty. I am sure i’ll get better… Hug?
GothicRayne reviewed Version 1 -
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Wow this is really good. I love it a lot. I like the pace it’s going along very well. I can’t wait until we learn more about this boy and who hurt him so badly. And about the bracelet things he was trying so hard to get off. I cant wait to see more.
hellbunny reviewed Version 1 -
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This is very good. The descriptions and the dialogue were superb. Claire is a very brave and compassionate young lady. The characterizations are well done and believeable. I didn’t see anything that could be changed or improved. I’m looking forward to the second chapter.
“shadows could hide almost anything in their velvet depths”- beautiful description.
revanwithin reviewed Version 1 -
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I read the prologue for this and this is even better. I loved your descriptions and you seemed to work well from this Claire’s prospective.
“His eyes were green, murky green like jade.” (Here I think it would be better and more concise to say, “His eyes were a murky green, like jade.)
” She set the plastic case next to the boy” (You’re talking about the injured guy? I wasn’t envisioning him as a boy).
“the soft crinkling sound of nylon against concrete ” (That’s one of those descriptions that makes you feel like you’re right there, something realistic beyond seeing or even feeling. Great job!)
I enjoyed this whole-heartedly and look forward to reading more!
Weaver reviewed Version 1 -
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I admit, I skimmed this at first. Then I came to the part that starts with ‘“Wings,” he said, still in a whisper” and ends with ‘“He cut my wings.”’ Something about that really caught my attention, and I went back to actually read this piece through. I didn’t even take mental proofreading notes!
One comment about the dialogue (other that to say that most of it is quite good): In the line ’”You’re delusional or something…,”’ I’m not sure that “delusional” is the word you want. Do you mean “delirious” or something like that instead?
Anyway, I quite enjoyed reading this, and I’m now curious about your characters, so I’m going to look for the prologue so I can read that too.
AnnaElizabeth reviewed Version 1 -
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I like the way you write, your style is very good and profesional sounding(except for this sentence:’He tried to walk on his own, but really she pretty much carried him up the stairs’). I like your character, she is unique, unlike a lot of other stories I have read here on Urbis. This is some intersting subjust matter, keep up the good work!
The_August_Kid reviewed Version 1 -
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This is moving along greatly. I read the prolog and loved it. The first chapter really upholds the story and brings your writing style in to the light. The dialogue shines through and really shows your talent. It all seems real and never forced or awkward. The characters are fleshed out and interesting and really keeps the reader interested, like I was. This is coming a long way and I can’t wait to read chapter 2.
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