Flora helped herself to a slice but otherwise stayed out of it. She'd done her part for busting out Emilena, now it was someone else's job to risk their lives infiltrating a police station.
------------------------
By all rights, Lily knew she should be waking up with a splitting headache, but her powers had already healed all the damage by the time she regained consciousness. However the only thing it couldn't heal, her mental confusion and horror, still left her badly disoriented as she tried to get her bearings.
She was in a decent sized basement, strapped naked to a wooden chair bolted to the floor. Her arms were bound to the armrests with heavy leather straps. From the ceiling dangled a bare light bulb. Along the left side of the basement was placed a row of cramped wire cages, the doors firmly shut with padlocks holding them closed. At the far end of the room was some sort of wooden table, metal manacles connected to the four corners by chains. A thick-looking bag had been left on the table's surface, and coiled on the floor next to it was a dirty garden hose, hooked up to a tap in the wall. Water was pooled on the table's surface, and the bag looked damp, as if it had recently been soaked. A car battery with attached nodes sat securely beside the table.
"What the hell?" she breathed, almost passing out again from shock. She wondered if this was all a terrible dream. Jolting her body furiously in an attempt to dislodge the chair, she succeeded only in making several loud thumps against the armrests.
She still couldn’t believe just how psychotic her husband turned out to be. He’d been emotionally and physically torturing her (and, more likely than not, her children) for god knows how long. Everything in this room was designed to cause maximum pain and discomfort without leaving any physical marks. Her head spun as every assumption she’d made about her life before she lost her memory in Lanthae was dashed.
The featureless wooden door on the left wall slid open and Denny entered the room silently. He must have heard the ruckus from shaking her chair.
“Denny!” Lily screamed at him in equal parts disbelief and rage. “What the hell is this? What--Mmmph!?” Without another word, her husband crossed behind her and wrapped a heavy plastic bag over her head. Tightening it until the cinch dug painfully into her neck, he thrashed her violently until she was passing out from oxygen deprivation. But before unconsciousness could take her, he would spared her a single short breath before doing it again.
After her protests had dissolved into haggard sobs, he suddenly ripped the bag off of her head. Turning on the hose, he shot her directly in the face with a harsh jet of stinging frigid water.
“Denny…!” she whimpered, shivering violently in her restraints.
“I’m reminding you of how things work around her,” he said matter-of-factly. From a dark chest he withdrew a sock containing something round and viciously whipped her across the face. The smell of citrus suddenly blended with the scent of musk and blood in her nose. She remembered that beating someone with oranges wouldn’t leave a bruise.
Denny had a few choice lashes for her chest, legs, and crotch before graduating to a broom with a towel wrapped around the end. “You don’t go outside anymore,” he ordered, broadsiding her in the stomach. “You don’t ask questions. You take care of my kids, and you ask for my permission to do anything.”
“Oh god, I remember!” shrieked Lily, eyes dilating with sudden realization. “I remember this! I remember everything!” Her eyes flooded with hot tears and all the fight went out of her posture. “This all makes sense now!”
Denny smiled. “Good. Glad we’re on the same page.” He watched with satisfaction as Lily broke down in front of him. “Now you’re acting how I remember you, too.” Stepping forward, he pet his wife’s face softly. “There, there,” he consoled. “It’s all right. You were a bad wife and an even worse mother, but there’s still time to redeem yourself.”
Lily blinked. She looked up at Denny, eyes pinched with fear. “R-redeem myself?”
Denny nodded. “It’ll take time. But I think you can do it.” His hand traveled down her neck. “You can make up for all these months you abandoned your children…” His hand tremored for a second as he shook his head dizzily. “You can...fulfill your duties as my...wife…”
“Denny, what’s wrong?” asked Lily, as he dropped down to his knees in front of her.
Denny blinked his eyes in an attempt to regain his focus. His hand fell onto her thigh as his head, suddenly too exhausted to stay vertical, dropped into her lap. It was at this point that he suddenly realized something was very wrong.
“Denny…” Lily’s voice had lost all trace of weakness. “That feeling is your red blood cells forgetting to resupply with oxygen. That feeling is your heart shutting down. If you fall asleep, Denny, you're not going to wake up.”
Denny’s eyes flew open. He tried to speak but his mouth couldn’t form the words.
“I don’t want to kill you Denny…” Lily assured him. “Untie me, and then we can be happy together. Forever.”
Denny’s arms suddenly found their energy restored. Urgently he undid the leather straps on Lily’s chair. As soon as he was free, Lily stood up, letting her husband crumple to the ground.
“I’ve been around the city since I left you, Denny…” Lily kneeled over her fallen husband, maintaining a firm grip on his wrist so she could keep draining his energy. “I’ve met a lot of people. Actually I’ve met quite a few who shared the same pastimes as yourself.”
Denny gaped like a fish as his eyes lost their focus and his limbs started twitching of their own accord.
“As a matter of fact, I specialized in letting them torture me.” Her lips were millimeters from his ear. “And you know what I learned from them, Denny? I learned you were a goddamn amateur.”
Her nails dug into his flesh. Denny cried out in agony as every nerve in his body was filled with unimaginable pain. In seconds his bladder overloaded with urine, burst, and then repaired itself. His airway shriveled up from asthma, his lungs collapsed, and then they restored themselves. His tongue swelled with tumors and his eyes burnt from jaundice and dehydration. Pus leaked from his pores and then was reabsorbed in oily bursts.
Lily kept up Denny’s personal cycle of regeneration for hours, until her powers informed her that he was a comatose vegetable. Then she got up and gripped the back of the door. Prying it open, she found her children at the top of the stairs leading down to the basement. Evidently they’d heard Denny’s screams.
“Christian…” she consoled, “Aylin...Hannah...” I could heal them, Lily thought, taking the frightened children into her arms. I could restore their minds, cure the years of developmental damage. But what then? I don’t have time for them, and their lives would be forever stunted by the memories. No, she resolved, watching as one by one they dropped lifelessly to the floor around her. Better to end the pain. They were all going to die someday anyway.
Not even bothering to find clothes, she opened the front door and walked into the cul-de-sac. It was a moonless night, and nobody was around to see her leave.
Except one. From a crack between the venetian blinds in his room, Ejlert North watched as his family’s murderer left the neighborhood the same way she had come.
