Isabel’s hand closed around Meghan’s wrist, staying her hand before she did anything rash. “Meghan.”

  The furious blonde turned to look at her, further incensed that she would step in her way. Isabel’s eyes met with hers, pleading for her to restrain herself. “Look around.”

  Meghan’s gaze moved slowly away from the nurse to scan the rest of the room. The orderlies appeared ready for a fight if it came down to it, but the fear in their eyes was evident. It was even more apparent with other members of staff and patients who cowered at the edges of the room. The tension in Meghan’s arm melted and the fury within her was immediately extinguished.

  It wasn’t justice to torment patients who’d suffered as she had. It wasn’t right to cause staff who actually gave a damn---who’d had no hand in her fate---to fear for their lives. Meghan didn’t want that for them or for anybody.

  “I’m sorry,” the blonde murmured as her strength left her, slowly sinking back into her weakened state. “I just lost control for a moment.”

  Isabel offered her a weak smile. “It’s alright, but we need to get out of here. We’re done here.”

  Hearing this, Fairchild grew a little bolder, twisting at the waist to look for the button he’d been desperately searching for a moment before. As he reached for it, Isabel stepped forward with surprising speed and pinned his arm to the wall by the wrist.

  Surprised by her sudden speed and strength, the doctor froze. Isabel leaned closer, lowering her voice as she spoke through her teeth. “Don’t you fucking dare.”

  Fairchild’s eyes widened as he stared back at her in horror, realizing as Isabel did that perhaps the blonde wasn’t the only one he had to be worried about. “Y-you can’t do this.”

  “Just watch me,” Isabel snarled, roughly tossing the doctor aside.”Don’t move from that spot, you prick.”

  After another tense moment, Isabel stepped back and took hold of Meghan by the arm to guide her through the security doors. “Come on.”

  Within moments, they were in the parking lot under stars that Meghan hardly recognized. There was much more light pollution than st she’d seen as well. She couldn’t help but stand and gawk, letting a gentle breeze run through her hair for what felt like forever.

  “Meghan,” Isabel gently urged. “We have to go.”

  “Sorry,” Meghan apologized, moving to catch up with the other woman. “It’s been so long.”

  Isabel offered her another smile as she pulled a set of keys from her pocket, heading toward a car Meghan assumed was hers. It was a strange-looking vehicle by the standards of her time, but she liked its shape and color. The vibrant, cherry-bomb red had a very nostalgic feeling to it.

  “I’m sorry about everything you went through in there,” Isabel offered with a more somber tone.

  Meghan nodded, though it wasn’t for Isabel to apologize for. She hadn’t been the one responsible for what had happened. It was well before her time. “Now what? I don’t know this pce. Everything is unfamiliar to me.”

  With her senses returning to her, Meghan began picking up scents and sounds that were foreign to her. It was exciting and liberating but terrifying as well. She didn’t know where to go or what to do. She’d grown up in the area but with how much time had passed, she might as well have been on a different pnet.

  “Get in,” Isabel said, motioning with her head to the car’s passenger side. “I wasn’t pnning to leave you in the parking lot.”

  Meghan smiled sheepishly. “Of course, I didn’t mean to imply anything. I’m just a little overwhelmed.”

  Approaching the side of the car, Meghan found herself struggling with the car door until Isabel got in and opened it from the other side. Sliding into the comfortable leather interior, Meghan’s body finally rexed. She was fairly sure she wouldn’t have been able to get up for a while even if she wanted to.

  “Seatbelt,” Isabel said, jamming her key into the ignition and turning. The car roared to life before settling into a steady, low rumble like a purring cat.

  Meghan blinked a few times as she stared back at the woman in confusion. “What?”

  “Put on your seatbelt,” Isabel said, motioning to the strap over Meghan’s shoulder. “They’re required now.”

  Turning to look at the strap, Meghan grabbed it gently and fiddled with it for a moment. Isabel reached back for hers and demonstrated how the device worked. Meghan imitated the visual aid perfectly, jamming the metal piece into the slot until it clicked. “What does it do?”

  “Safety,” Isabel ughed gently as she put the car into drive. “If we get in an accident, it’ll keep you from flying through the windshield or bouncing around the interior.”

  “This?” Meghan asked, jabbing the belt over her chest incredulously. Only then did she realize how much of her was missing there as well. She’d never considered herself to be the vain sort, but preening was almost second nature to her kind. Meghan was keenly aware of how much of her body fat had gone missing and how much of it had come from her breasts. “Oh, no.”

  From there, her gaze drifted down her arms to her gaunt, ragged hands. Then, her eyes shifted down to her thighs and calves, which looked spindly and alien like the poor people they’d recovered from the camps in the second great war. “I look awful.”

  “It’s alright,” Isabel assured her as they turned onto the road heading south. “I have a little experience dealing with the physical and mental aspects of this sort of thing. Vampires go through it after awakening from a particurly long repose.”

  “Vampires?” Meghan echoed, her mind turning the information over for a moment. “You’re a Varlet?”

  “Gnasci, actually,” Isabel crified with a bittersweet smirk. The distinction was subtle to most, but it was important to them based on what Meghan had been told. Varlets were merely enthralled by the power in a Vampire’s blood, but the Gnasci were the product of generations of breeding between prized Varlets, causing the superhuman traits of Varlets to become hereditary. Meghan was surprised by the sudden amount of information that popped into her brain. “Have you known any before?”

  “Just a few,” Meghan admitted, trying and failing to recall their exact features. “Long ago. You knew I was one of the Hidden?”

  “I suspected it,” Isabel acknowledged. “But your Mask is on good and tight so I couldn’t be sure. Even if you weren’t, I don’t think I could have left you in that situation.”

  “Thank you,” Meghan murmured, realizing it might not have been enough to properly express her thanks. The woman had very possibly saved her life. As they passed a rge green sign, Meghan finally received the first indication of where they actually were. “Danvers? We’re all the way in Danvers?”

  “My pce is only about thirty or forty minutes away,” Isabel assured her. “You’re free to nap if you like.”

  “I might,” Meghan answered as she gazed out the window. In truth, she felt like she’d been asleep for too long. There was so much for her to see. There was so much to catch up on. She told herself that she could sleep ter, but her body objected even as she thought it. Whatever she’d been doing for the st few decades, it hadn’t been restful.

  Still, Meghan couldn’t help but marvel at the things just outside the passenger-side window. It was the middle of the night, but everything was lit up so brightly. People were still walking around, many of whom were in some of the strangest clothes she’d ever seen. Even the least modest clothes of her own time paled in comparison to the things people were walking around in. Meghan noted that even after all she’d been through, she still found her eyes lingering on some of the women as they passed.

  Meghan’s eyes glittered in awe at the colors, the screens, the sounds. There were so many more vehicles than she was accustomed to, and from them came the sound of a myriad of radio stations bring types of music that were both familiar and drastically unfamiliar. The variety was staggering, and her enhanced sense of hearing only added to the jumble. It would take time before she could parse it all out like she’d once been able to.

  “It’s so different,” Meghan muttered as her eyes darted around, picking out details imperceptible to the human eye in seconds. She was visually devouring everything she could. “Bigger and brighter than I remember.”

  “What do you remember?” Isabel asked, gncing over at her from behind the wheel. “From before, I mean. You said something about a willow.”

  “Next to the water, I think,” Meghan said, trying to reach back into her memory for specific information. She remembered the way the sunlight came through the boughs of the tree and feeling peaceful and content, but it didn’t feel exactly like somepce she lived. It felt more like a pce that she frequented. “Maybe Boston Common?”

  “That’s a start,” Isabel nodded, offering her a faint, comforting smile. “We can work with that, right?”

  “Everything else is pretty spotty,” Meghan continued, slouching a little in her seat and pulling the gown down around her legs as far as she could. She felt ridiculous in the thing. Why had she been wearing a gown when she’d been there for so long, anyway? She supposed she already knew the answer to that and just didn’t want to think about it.

  “It’ll come back in time,” the other woman assured her. “We’ll get some food in you, some quality rest, and you’ll start to feel like your old self again.”

  “Is that a medical opinion or a Hidden one?” Meghan asked with a slight smirk, tugging at the corner of her mouth. “Have you dealt with many Fae before?”

  Isabel gnced at her, looking slightly surprised. It seemed to answer her question for her, but she didn’t jump to any conclusions. “You’re Fae?”

  “Half,” Meghan crified. “Changeling, Vi Lineage.”

  “That’s a new one for me,” Isabel chuckled. “The Vi part, specifically. I’ve met a few Changelings here and there but never really gotten to know them.”

  “Well now you know one,” Meghan responded with a little smile, shrugging a shoulder as she returned to gazing out the side window. She didn’t have much to say until they were in the city and Isabel parked her car in the lot out back of her apartment building. She fished a jacket out of the backseat and handed it to her so that she wouldn’t have her ass hanging out the whole way up. Fortunately, there didn’t seem to be too many people awake in the building at the time.

  Meghan gnced up and down the street before stepping into the lobby behind Isabel. “Where are we, specifically?”

  “Allston,” Isabel answered, her voice echoing in the rge open space. Every step she took up the stairs echoed as well, drawing Meghan’s attention back to the fact that she wasn’t wearing shoes. She could barely call them slippers with how thin the padding was. Her keys jingled again as they reached a door at the end of a hallway on the second floor.

  Opening the door, Isabel stepped aside to allow Meghan in before her. Meghan shuffled in, slightly winded from the stairs, and took a moment near the door to look around the apartment. It was rger than she might have guessed, but that might have been partially due to how sparsely decorated it was. The pce seemed hardly lived in with only a few exceptions here and there.

  “Apartments were much smaller back in my day,” Meghan remarked as she shuffled through the room. It appeared to be a single-bedroom apartment with far more space than she could imagine one person having to themselves. “We didn’t have our own bathrooms. They packed us in like sardines and the radiators---.”

  Meghan stopped as she noticed just such an old radiator under the far window. “Well, they looked like that, actually. I suppose not that much has changed, then.”

  Isabel ughed a little. “Well, there’s plenty more left to see.”

  The disheveled blonde shuffled over to the window, running her fingers across the top of the radiator which had no reason to be going at that time of year. She gnced outside to sample the view but found that even as unremarkable as it was of the street below, it was absolutely breathtaking for her. She loved it.

  A bck cat jumped up onto the windowsill in front of her, looking like a little bck void with eyes as it rubbed up against her.

  “That’s Creepy. He’s my roommate,” Isabel said, kicking off her shoes before making her way to the bathroom. “Let’s get you washed up first. Do you think you can handle a shower?”

  Meghan nodded as she ran her hand along the cat’s back a few times, setting him to purring immediately. “Yes, I think so.”

  “Good,” Isabel said, turning on the water and testing it with one hand as Meghan shuffled her way over. “I’ve got a bunch of stuff in here for you to use however you like. The conditioner is from Sweden, so it’ll get you nice and silky.”

  “Thank you,” Meghan said, gncing around the bathroom. “This is a wonderful home. You must make a pretty good wage as a nurse, hm?”

  Before Isabel could answer, Meghan dropped the gown around her feet. Being that she regarded Isabel as a professional, she saw no reason to be overly modest, especially if she ended up needing help getting in and out of the shower. She thought twice about it, though, as she caught sight of herself in the mirror. She was almost all skin and bones, with her ribs clearly visible and her frame hunched awkwardly.

  Meghan gnced over her shoulder at Isabel who appeared stuck between averting her eyes to be polite and keeping an eye on her in case a stiff breeze suddenly swept her out the window. The Changeling was tired of looking at her cracked and broken mask. “Do you mind if I...?”

  Isabel stared for a second before realizing what she was asking. “O-oh! Yeah, go ahead. By all means.”

  Looking back into the mirror, Meghan let out a long breath and unclenched muscles that felt like they’d been tightened for decades. The metaphysical Mask that concealed her true form from the prying eyes of the general public crumbled away in pieces, badly damaged as it was. The pieces vanished into ephemeral wisps of magic before hitting the floor.

  Beneath the Mask, Meghan’s skill was more pale than even the sickly appearance of her human guise---white as snow, in fact. Her hair was more feathery while her arms, chest, and chest bore actual feathers that had lost their luster during her incarceration. Eyes bigger than a human’s, resembling that of an owl, peered back at her in the mirror, gncing back at Isabel for her reaction.

  The Gnasci maintained her composure, not revealing her feelings on Meghan’s true form one way or another. The Changeling reached out to the shower door with chipped taloned hands and opened it slowly, allowing the plume of steam to rise from within to greet her.

  “I’ll leave the door open, so if you need anything, just give me a shout, okay?” Isabel said, turning away to give her a little privacy. “I’ll put something together for you to eat while you wash up.”

  Meghan nodded and stepped into the hot water, her skin stinging and compining despite the fact that she knew she’d had much hotter showers in the past. Perhaps it had just been that long since she’d been properly bathed. She adjusted the heat with the knob until it was comfortable and then stood under the spray for several minutes, unmoving. Grime, dirt, and even old blood circled the drain at her bird-like feet, taking the lost years of her life with her in the process.

  Eventually, she gathered her resolve to sift through the various soaps and elixirs the Gnasci kept in a metal rack that hung from the shower head and picked a few out almost entirely at random. Meghan went over her hair a few times to be sure that she got everything, then attended specifically to her feathers. She thanked the heavens for the small favor of being able to wash them with the same products humans used for hair.

  When finished, Meghan was careful when stepping out of the shower. She grabbed a white, fluffy robe off the back of the door and slipped it on. It looked absolutely massive on her diminished frame, but she didn’t mind so long as it was warm. Then, she took a few moments to conjure the Mask once more, allowing the fresh, new magic to settle in across her body before stepping back out into the main room of the apartment.

  There was no divide between the kitchen and the living room beyond a bar where Isabel had put together a sad for her. Meghan resisted the urge to turn her nose up at it. She’d have preferred something a little heavier with some meat, but she understood that Isabel was trying to anticipate her dietary needs from a professional standpoint.

  “I thought I’d start you off slow, give your system a chance to get up and running,” Isabel ughed, seemingly picking up on Meghan’s reticence with the sad. “If we overtax it, you might just end up puking everything back up.”

  “I understand,” Meghan responded, sitting down on a stool at the bar before snatching up the fork that had been left out for her. She started out politely, but within moments, her hunger demanded that she dispose of etiquette and simply get as much food in her as fast as she possibly could, despite Isabel’s repeated warnings.

  Meghan nodded toward a small stack of bnkets and pillows on the couch. “Are those for me?”

  “No,” Isabel answered, shaking her head. “They’re for me. I’m going to let you take my bed tonight so you can sleep as long as you like. I usually sleep pretty te but I’m pretty sure you’ll have me beat tomorrow.”

  “Oh, you don’t have to do that,” Meghan countered a little bashfully. “I should be fine on the couch.”

  “I insist,” the Gnasci replied warmly. “I think it’ll do you a world of good.”

  Meghan stared at her for several moments, wrestling with the emotions welling up inside her. Gratitude and guilt were chief among them. “Alright. I will. Thank you, Isabel.”

  “No problem,” she said, waving it off. “I’m going to get ready for bed. I’ll grab you some pajamas. If you want anything else from the fridge when you’re done, help yourself. There’s not much, but you’re welcome to it.”

  Meghan nodded again as Isabel went into the bedroom and finished off the rest of the sad. The dressing went a long way in holding her interest long enough to get every st leaf of lettuce to the point of practically licking the bowl.

  With her appetite whetted, Meghan went to the fridge to see what else there was to eat. It was an ugly box of a thing with absolutely no style to it, but when she opened it up, she was surprised at all the shelves inside. What Isabel referred to as not much seemed like much more than Meghan had kept on hand when she’d first lived on her own. At least, that was how she remembered it.

  Her eyes settled on a rge pstic bottle filled with brown liquid and a familiar red bel around it, and her face split into a wide grin. It was a particur soda that she’d counted as one of her vices once upon a time.

  Meghan’s rge eyes wandered across the other items in the fridge as she snatched up the bottle. It was a veritable bounty worthy of a Thanksgiving feast to her, and she was just getting started.