And then, seemingly out of nowhere, a strange detachment flowed through and descended over me. I felt it soothe and quiet the frantic pounding of my heart. I breathed deeply, slowly, two, three, four times, and felt the fear subside, and the despair recede.
I leaned back in the chair, and looked at Anne, as the steel inside me, a steel I'd never even suspected could exist, took over. My eyes held hers as the first nail was driven through the back of my left hand and into the thick wood of the armrest. I barely registered the pain as I felt the iron pierce my skin and the underlying muscle, tethering me in an absurdly intimate way to all the chair's preceding victims.
Anne frowned at my lack of reaction and I realised that she had been expecting me to cower and cry. Expecting it and wanting it. Looking forward to it. Bitch.
I relished her disappointment, grinning inwardly at my ability to thwart her.
The second nail was hammered into my right hand, and I felt her frustration grow at my lack of reaction. My inner grin widened.
"Give him the iron," I heard her say, is if from a long way away. My heart beat had slowed to once every two seconds, and my detachment had deepened, until I felt as if I stood at the bottom of an enormous chasm gazing upwards at tiny faces in the distance, untouched and untouchable.
I sensed rather than felt the needle slide into my vein, and a coldness spread up my arm and into my chest. I ignored it, concentrating instead on the ever slowing thud thud of my heart. Thud...thud. Thud.....thud. There was a sense of time passing, a feeling of fluidity to the air around me, as if life flowed onwards while I sat motionless in time and space. I barely registered the needle being withdrawn from my skin.
They left me alone then, but they may as well not have bothered. I wasn't in that grubby, detritus strewn room, nailed to that old stained chair. Oh, no.
I was in a different place entirely.
Rebecca
I realised pretty quickly that a confrontation with my mother was probably not going to happen anytime soon. She was on the opposite side of the world, and I was in the middle of a crisis. Mark had been taken by a psychotic vampire bitch, and Angus, Fergus and Oliver were all in the process of getting him back. And me? I was helplessly sitting here willing them to get out of it unscathed. Or even slightly scathed. I could live with that.