Free Sanctum (Guards of the Shadowlands, Book 1) by Sarah Fine

couldn’t hit anything. Streaks of light and dark blazed across my vision. His thick fingers curled into the hair at my scalp as he lurched my head back and bounced it off the wall again. And then I couldn’t see anything at all. Grunts andwhimpers flew from my mouth until I ran out of air. Amid was too close behind me to allow me to draw a breath.
Facedown in the pink sheets, suffocating. No one will hear my screams
.
    Then several things happened at once, and I was only able to sort it out later. The door of the room splintered and fell open. A voice shook the walls with fury as it roared, “
No
.” The weight at my back lifted. The cement of the floor greeted me like a long-lost friend. Metal hit flesh with smacking thuds punctuated by Amid’s grunts of pain. Voices argued in an incomprehensible language. It might have been English, but I was past understanding.
    I was too busy dying. Again.

EIGHT
    SHEETS BENEATH ME. FINGERS touching my face.
    No
, shrieked a voice. My voice.
    I pressed myself to the floor, heart pounding. My face was wet. I wiped at it impatiently and crouched low next to an empty cot. Its rumpled sheet tangled around my naked body.
    From my position on the floor, I could see a table across from me, surrounded by two folding chairs. A gas lantern sitting on the table was the only source of light, battling futilely against the darkness that claimed most of the room. My eyes skimmed along the wall to my left until they found the door. Before I had time to seriously consider bolting, a voice interrupted my escape plans.
    “It’s locked. And you should know better.” It was a male voice, accent clipped and precise, coming from my right, on the other side of the room. I pulled the sheet tighter around my body and raised my head over the edge of the cot.
    He sat on a folding chair several feet away, leaning back so I couldn’t see his features in the shadows. “I guess you’re not thirsty after all,” he commented. With a hollow clunk, he set what must have been a cup on the floor.
    There was something familiar about him.
    “It’s okay with me if you want to stay where you are,” he continued, “but you might be more comfortable if you got back in bed. You’ve been through a lot.”
    “What happened?” I assumed he would know what I meant. Before I’d lost consciousness, I’d been sure I was dying of internal injuries. And my wrist had been shattered. Now—I felt fine. Absolutely fine.
    “Your physical injuries were healed.”
    “You must have a hell of a medical facility here then,” I snapped. “Why did I have any injuries at all? I’m dead, right?”
    He chuckled drily. “We’re all dead. But we breathe. We bleed, too. The body you have here can be hurt just like the one you had before. It can be killed as well. And you never know where you’ll end up if that happens.”
    I nodded cautiously.
    “There’s a clean shirt and pants here for you.” He tossed the garments onto the cot between us, along with a flimsy pair of slippers.
    I reached for them. “Turn your back.”
    He laughed. “You’re joking, right? If you want to put the clothes on, put them on. Or feel free to crouch on the floor, wrapped in a sheet. Either way, we’re going to talk.”
    This time I was the one who laughed, but even to me, it sounded just this side of hysterical. “The last time one of you said that to me, it didn’t go so well.”
    “Ah. I’m sorry about that. Amid has been short-tempered and restless lately. And you humiliated him—
several
times. But what he did was unacceptable. We don’t work like that.”
    “Glad to hear it.” I glared at him as I sat down on the floor and tied the sheet around the back of my neck so it covered the front of my body. I pulled the pants on under it and wrenched the shirt over the top. Unfortunately, the shirt was more like a tent, and the pants hung loosely from my hips, threatening a humiliating slide at the worst moment. “Would a belt be too much