Chapter Twenty Two: "Torture"

Alex Mendoza.

"Do we know where she is?"

Beth's words sound so far away...

My gaze vanishes anywhere in particular and my head is only capable of thinking about her; her legs; her hands on my body; her lips kissing my neck. And with a shudder the past two hours appear in my mind. With shame, I remember her cold words, without any type of feeling after joining my hand to hers. I thought that the contact of our bodies would bring Karla back.

But I was wrong.

Like always I am.

"I'm not her."

"Alex" Beth's voice reaches my ears again, making Aradia's black eyes disappear "Do me a favor and focus."

"It doesn't matter where she went." Alice's drunken voice fills the silence.

From what I know she started drinking after Aradia showed up at her house and put on the show of the century.

"No, it does matter," Diana follows. "It is important to know where she is and what she is doing because as we all know, Aradia is powerful and very dangerous. This time she has managed to lower the defenses that Alice and Alex provided her and she will continue to do so if we don't stop her."

I look at my clasped hands thinking, devising some solution to help my loved Karla but nothing comes to mind. It is as if there is only a void in my head and only she can fill it with her voice and her little smile with her red cheeks.

"We have to get him back as soon as possible," Ethan says.

Ethan shifts position and leans his back against the wall, thoughtfully. Everyone in the room, Diana, Alice, Marcos, Beth, and Ethan, think of her but I get the impression that no one can ever feel what I feel about her.

"Where can she be?" Marcos asks.

Silence envelops us and when I look up I see that all the gazes of my companions are directed towards me.

"What?"

"You can tell where she is," Alice says with determination.

I frown but it doesn't take long for my expression to change to one of astonishment. When Karla was just a baby of a few months, her mother had Grandmother Margarett prepare a spell. She ended up breaking the fifth Luggaldimmerankia seal and the seventh Asuruludu; the first to confuse any entity that wanted to take over her great power and the second to protect her.

With astonishing speed, I get up from the sofa and head to the kitchen to get everything I need to do the locating spell.

"I'll need your help, Alice," I say, concentrating on my task. Locate her I doubt that I'll manage to do it — Everyone seemed to sadden —, but —Everyone’s attention returned to me — I can see what she thinks and if by any chance she thinks where she is, we can locate her.

"What if we try to break the Ziku seal?" —Alice joins in the search for the objects and for a moment she disappears down the hall, returning later with a lot of herbs and useful things for her preparation.

"I don't think so," I say shaking my head, "that's a seal to find a great treasure."

"And is she not a walking treasure?" Ethan sneers.

I shrug and continue with what I was doing. I grab all the herbs I need, grab a piece of chalk, and push aside the small table in the center of the room and quickly draw the stamp on the floor. I need to know where she is, to know what she thinks, to know if Karla is still there or if she is totally disconnected. When I finish all the preparations I stand in the center of the stamp closing my eyes in the process.

A deep breath.

Another one.

And one last.

Silence floods everything and for a moment I think I have lost the connection or have not done the spell correctly when a heartbreaking image attacks my mind causing two big tears to fall from my closed eyelids.

The last thing I see through Karla's eyes is her wiping her bloody hands with a rag. Looking at a tray full of strange instruments she picks one up at random and slowly approaches someone. That someone is bloody and blond hair falls down his face without letting me know who he is. He is also chained to a chair and I can hear that person's little sob, which tears my heart out. She mercilessly takes the instrument that she has chosen, the sharpest, and little by little passes it over her cheek full of cuts. That person raises his head and I get to see who he is.

I suddenly open my eyes and everything begins to spin. The urge to vomit begins to grip my body and I manage to lean against a wall long enough to assimilate what I just saw.

Aradia is torturing Adam.