The Ever After by Amanda Hocking

Author:Amanda Hocking
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

42

Manipulations

I was screaming into the ice water, then I surfaced, gasping for air, and Pan was kneeling beside the metal tub.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Let her breathe, Pan,” Elof said, and I saw him standing just behind Pan.

“Did I get too hot?” I asked.

Pan nodded. “Heat was radiating off your body, and then you started to scream, so I dumped you in the ice bath.”

“Do you remember anything?” Elof asked me.

“I think. Sorta.” I looked over to the Ögonen, staring placidly at me. “They implanted something.”

“What do you mean?” Pan asked.

“Spiders. They filled a room in the dungeon with spiders and then the spiders burst into flames.” My teeth started to chatter, so Pan took my hand and helped me out of the tub.

“How do you know that didn’t really happen?” Elof asked. “That it wasn’t some kind of bizarre torture by the Älvolk?”

Pan handed me a towel and I wrapped it around my shoulders.

I shook my head adamantly. “No. The Ögonen used spiders to scare me before.” I glanced over at Pan, thinking of the moment he’d confessed he loved me—a moment he no longer remembered. “And Pan was there, and he started acting strange when the spiders showed up.”

I dried my face with the towel, and I looked up to Ur the Ögonen. “Why did you do that? Why did you infiltrate my memories?”

Ur blinked at me, then looked to Elof.

“What are they saying?” I asked Elof.

“Nothing to me.” Elof shook his head. “Ur, we thank you for your help, but if you wish not to converse with us in whatever way you can, perhaps it’s best if you go.”

Ur blinked and then walked out of the lab. Though they were gone, that didn’t mean they couldn’t still read my thoughts from far away. I shivered again, thinking of the spiders covering Pan’s face.

“What did you remember?” Pan asked.

“We were left alone, by accident, I think,” I said, and I’d already decided that I was going to skip over all the kissing bits—at least until Elof wasn’t around. “Just me and Pan. And you asked me what Indu was doing with me, and I told you about the documents I translated for him. Some kind of gross blood pudding recipe with an elk heart as an ingredient. You called the Älvolk cannibals.”

“Shit,” Pan said. “Do you remember anything else?”

“That’s when it was overrun with spiders and fire.” I chewed my lip. “I have to remember what I translated for Indu.”

“You can’t do that again with the Ögonen,” Pan said. “You weren’t under that long before you got way too hot. It’s not safe.”

“I’ll never do that with an Ögonen again,” I said definitively. “I can’t trust what they show me.”

“Maybe you can’t completely trust anything you see when someone else is digging around in your head,” Pan said. He leaned against the island; his button-up was wet on the rolled-up sleeves and chest, so the fabric stuck to his muscles.

“I can trust Sunniva Kroner,” I said.

“That’s the younger woman who does the aural healing back in Förening?” Elof asked.

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