Free Embrace the Twilight by MAGGIE SHAYNE

been gutted. And when he tallied the things he had lost, there was one, foolish, ridiculous item that always topped the list. He’d lost his fantasy. That Gypsy camp in some faraway time and place where he used to escape the pain, and the beautiful woman who had inhabited it. He often found himself wondering about her, just as if she were real. “What ever became of Sarafina?” he would ask himself, before his common sense would kick in to remind him that she was a figment of his imagination, a tool created by his mind to enable him to cope with the torture and imprisonment.
    He’d tried like hell to conjure her image to mind during the physical therapy sessions, but apparently they hadn’t been painful enough to invoke her. He couldn’t find that place in his mind anymore, the one where he used to retreat to be with her. And though he knew she wasn’t real, he worried about her, what had happened to her, how she had adjusted to the change.
    Hell, when he thought about it, maybe there was a reason his mind had conjured the beautiful Gypsy girl and her tragic tale for him. Maybe he’d known, somehow, deep down, how drastically his own life was about to change, and maybe he’d created her so it wouldn’t seem quite as bad in comparison. Sure, he’d lost a lot. Full use of the foot, his career in Special Forces, his entire life’s work. But she’d lost more. She’d lost her lover, her family, her tribe—and then her humanity when she’d been transformed into something else. He wondered how she had dealt with that, if becoming a dark creature had changed who she was inside. Had she become evil just because it was expected of her, or was the change purely physical, like the change in him was?
    He thought of these things as he limped along the quiet hospital corridors at 3:00 a.m. There were only a handful of nurses on duty at that hour, and they tended to cluster in the break room around the TV, sipping coffee and chatting. At the prescribed intervals they would emerge to check on patients and administer meds. One nurse would emerge every half hour or so to prowl the wing, ensuring that all the patients were all right, and of course they came out if the phone rang, or a patient buzzed, or a monitor sounded an alarm.
    He liked the nights. They were the only time he could be alone to walk unassisted and unhindered. The nurses knew how painful it was for him to step on the foot, even now that it was healing. So they tended to cheer for him with every inch he gained, as if he were a toddler taking his first steps. He hated it, though he knew they were only trying to encourage him. He far preferred privacy during torture, he decided.
    The walking cane was hospital issue: stainless steel, with a rubber-coated crook at the top and a tripod with brown rubber tips at the bottom. He would definitely find something better when he got out of here.
    That last night, he was traversing an empty stretch of hallway, where no one was at work. The hospital lab was in this section, but it was all but abandoned at this hour. A few people came and went, but none from his wing and none who questioned him. It was his favorite place for night walking.
    Wearing an expression that said he knew exactly what he was doing was all it took to keep everyone off his back. No patients roomed in this section, so nurses weren’t milling around. His own wouldn’t be in to check on him for an hour yet, and if they did happen to peek through the door in the meantime, they would see the blanket-covered shape of a man lying sound asleep with his back to them. Because that was what Will wanted them to see.
    God, his skills were going to be utterly wasted in retirement.
    There was a sound, a rattling sound, that did not belong. It brought Will’s head up slowly and set his juices flowing. It had not been a loud noise or an alarming one—just an out of place one. And it came from behind the door