Swooped | ✓

Chapter 48: The Cats that Swallowed the Canary

My vision was still elusive and little shaky. My eyes seeming to dart here, there and everywhere without purpose, tried to focus on the owner of the arms, but couldn't seem to look past the large bore cannula being pressed into the fleshy fold of my elbow, above the scar from my once-broken arm. I watched as the sharp metal stabbed into my flesh - once, twice, three times until they got the right spot. A small bead of red swelled from the puncture from the poor insertion technique and my shaking, but I had been through worse.

I've hurt myself worse, I've hurt myself worse. This is nothing. I'm fine, I'm fine.

"What are...  are you doing, you asshole?" I groggily growled, arm balled into a fist in retaliation, which only made my blood seep out of my veins and into the glass collection tube faster. At my words, the cannula was forcefully ripped from my arm without care or tenderness, and I let out a grunt of pain. My captor didn't bother to cover the oozing puncture with cotton or gauze, my blood simply dribbling a trail down the side of my arm and pooling on the ground.

"Trevor!" the female voice yelled, and I drew my head towards the sound. The face was blurry - Harriet's face was blurry - and I didn't know if I wanted my vision to clear. It was her voice, I'd recognise it anywhere, but maybe it was just the drugs working their way through my system, the head ache, or the fact that I had no idea what was going on. 

It couldn't be my Harriet, the Harriet that looked after me when my parents went away, that changed my nappies when I was a baby, that made me vegan food that didn't taste like rubber, that gave me sex education when my mum was too embarrassed to do so by using bird analogies and making me cackle when she showed me how ducks reproduced with their corkscrew cocks. 

It couldn't be the Harriet that was my second mother, the Harriet I trusted. I didn't want it to be. I'd rather it be any one but her.

But it was, that was clear when she pushed Trevor - oh, it's Professor Brakel - out of the way to kneel beside me, pressing a swab of gauze over my bleeding arm and applying pressure. I stared at her, in betrayal and disbelief and maybe a fraction of hope, but the woman I thought I knew couldn't meet my eyes. 

I could barely recognised the expression on her face now, seemingly a mixture of shame and fear, but with other things I couldn't place. Her blonde-grey hair was completely undone and dishevelled, the waves stunted down her back in unkept clumps. She was wearing her lab coat, but underneath she wasn't donning her usual bright attire, instead clad in all black. There was some blood speckled on her white coat - my blood, or maybe someone else's - and instead of my Godmother, she looked more like a deranged scientist.

"Harriet?" I asked, my voice small, the sound of her name raising all of the questions raging in my head. Harriet seemed to pale, pulling the gauze away and checking to see if my wound had stopped bleeding, before getting up. Harriet hobbled, her chronically injured leg almost dragging behind her as she forwent her walking stick, throwing the bloodied cotton into a bin in the corner of the fridge.

"Let me go," I said, staring at Harriet, who still did not look at me. The woman held herself up by gripping tightly onto a chilled shelf. "Please, Harriet. It's... It's me."

"I..." Harriet tried to speak, her voice choked and gritty like she was trying to speak around a mouthful of rocks. "I'm sorry."

That was it. That was all she said, as Professor Brakel moved to stand in front of me, swirling a fistful of glass vials filled with my blood, crimson and thick. 

"Oh, there is no way in Hell we're just going to let you go, Mr Fleet. Not after all of our efforts to find you," the Professor sneered, the lighting above his head casting menacing shadows in the wrinkles of his leathery-skinned face. His glasses gleamed, but no more than his eyes, which were alight with manic obsession and excitement. He smiled like the cat that ate the canary, topped with an edge of insanity.