Total pages in book: 45
Estimated words: 40901 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 205(@200wpm)___ 164(@250wpm)___ 136(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 40901 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 205(@200wpm)___ 164(@250wpm)___ 136(@300wpm)
Champ looks at me blankly. “Sheriff, I took this job with the notion of being able to assist you in your attempts to harness angelic power. I did not take it because I wanted to torture angels.”
Poor Katie. I cannot help but want to torture her. Her pain makes me stiffen. I did not want her to be injured by my bungling guards, but the notion of her taking pain at my bidding certainly excites me. But the doctor is right. This is not the time to unleash my darkest impulses, though her insolence certainly makes that an appealing possibility.
“Let me know when she is discharged. If she escapes before then, it will be on your head.”
Katya
Starlight stamps out of the room, spurs jingling. He’s too hot to be that petulant when denied the opportunity for cruelty. I can only imagine how disappointed he is. He must have been looking forward to dragging me out of that cage and whipping me and whatnot for years. It was all taken away from him with one head butt and a hail of arrows.
“Thank you for standing up for me,” I say to the doctor. “That was very sweet of you.”
The doctor tilts his head. “You have enough problems without Starlight adding to them at this precise moment. The leg and shoulder are flesh wounds. Thanks to your angelic healing, they’ll be healed within the hour. The gut shot is going to take longer.”
“How much longer?”
“Two, maybe three hours.”
“So you’re saying this ordeal has gotten me three hours free of him, max?”
“Might be able to stretch it to four or five. But yes. He knows your healing rate. It’s impressive.”
I look the doctor up and down. “Why are you working for him? You seem like a decent person.”
“I made a deal with him,” the doctor says, offering no further information.
I think, quickly. This is the first chance I have had to ask any questions about the nature of my incarceration.
“How many other angels are here?” I hope the doctor will answer my questions.
“I don’t know how many people are here.”
“Have you had any other patients?”
“Whelp, someone came in not long ago with a broken nose. Aside from that, no.”
“So he’s paying you to sit around here with your thumbs up your asses for weeks at a time?”
“We’re all playing MMORPGS out back,” Doctor Champion explains. He’s making little notes on my chart, not really paying attention to the questions I’m asking.
Starlight clearly has resources to fucking burn. I knew he’d gotten rich. I just didn’t know how rich. He seems to have built this entire facility, a place capable of holding many hundreds of prisoners if it had been made for humans, just for me. It’s possible he has others here, and I need to determine if he does. If there are others to be freed, they will be freed. I have no intention of leaving even a single soul in his cruel grasp. Taking me is going to be the biggest mistake Starlight ever made.
My problem is not knowing enough about Starlight as a man. I was aware of his existence, of course. This is not the first time he has tried to capture me. He has made laughable, fumbling attempts in the past that of course failed, but he followed me to England, and then to Germany. And now I am here, wounded in an American prison and entirely at his mercy.
“Have you known Starlight long?”
“Long enough,” Champ says with a long-suffering tone.
“I imagine any length of time is long enough. Were you in the military together?”
“I’ve never been in the military.” The doctor lowers the chart and gives me a friendly smile. “You’re going to have to take your information fishing mission elsewhere. All I know is that I needed something, and Starlight got it for me. In turn, I agreed to work here for a year.”
“Me too.” One of the nurses is back with a glass of ice chips. She looks like the sort of woman who has known trouble in her life. There’s a wisdom to her eyes, the kind of wisdom nobody ever wants to have. I can feel the tragedy emanating off her, the buried hurt. She is a woman who has deserved better and never gotten it.
“Starlight showed up when I needed him, helped me out, and got me a job. I never wanted to work in a prison, but this isn’t really a prison, is it. It’s more like a…”
I wait for her to finish the sentence, because it is more like a…
But none of us seem to know how to finish that sentence. I find myself almost glad I was shot out of the sky. In doing so, I have found some good people who seem to be caught up in a predicament with Starlight. Not quite allies, of course, but fellow travelers.