The Alpha Threw Me To The Hyenas

Chapter Nine: Four Cuts

The house had a treatment room on the ground floor behind the east stair, because a house full of wolves gets hurt in ways it does not want written up anywhere.

I had been in it twice. Once at eleven when a pan came off a shelf onto my foot, and once at nineteen holding a bowl for somebody. It was white and it smelled of the same disinfectant as the kitchens, and it had a table with a paper cover on it and a light on a jointed arm.

Renner had run it for as long as I could remember. He was about fifty and he had a stoop and a habit of talking to you about something else entirely while he worked on you, and when they brought me in that night he was already washing his hands and he did not turn round.

Halvard came in behind me and stood by the door with his hands behind his back.

"Sit up on the table," Renner said.

I got up on it. The paper crackled.

"Arms."

I put them out. He turned them over and looked at the two raised lines on each forearm, and I watched a man I had known my whole life fail completely to keep his face still.

"How long have they been like that?"

"Since the hall."

"Do they hurt?"

"No."

He put his thumb on one, the way Mira had. He pressed. Then he pressed harder.

"Sir," he said, without looking up, "I would like to use a local."

"The marks are to be taken," Halvard said.

"That is not what I asked."

There was a pause. Halvard did not say yes. He also did not say no, and Renner waited exactly two seconds for him to and then went and got the vial out of the cupboard, and I have thought about that man's two seconds for a very long time.

The needle went in four times, twice on each arm. It stung and then it stopped.

"Look at the wall," Renner said. "Not because it is going to be bad. Because if you watch it you will move."

I looked at the wall. There was a poster on it about handwashing.

He made the first cut.

I felt the pressure of it and nothing else, and I heard the small sound of it, and then I heard him stop.

"Hm," he said.

He did not say anything for a while after that. There was the sound of the swab and the clink of something going down on the tray, and then the pressure came again in the same place and went deeper.

"Sir," Renner said.

"Yes."

"There is nothing here."

"Explain that."

"I have opened the mark to the fascia and there is nothing in the tissue." He straightened up. I could hear him breathing through his nose. "House marks are ink and a carrier. They sit under the dermis and they stay there for life, and I have taken out four hundred of them in thirty years and I have never once had to look for one. I am looking at the underside of this woman's skin and there is nothing in it."

"Go again."

He went again.

I looked at the poster about handwashing. There were five steps and the last one was about your thumbs.

"Nothing," Renner said.

"The other arm."

He did the other arm. Same. I heard the instrument go down on the tray a good deal harder that time.

"They came out in the hall," Renner said. "That is the only thing it can be. Whatever happened in that hall took them out through the skin and what she is carrying now is scar in the shape of them."

"Can you take that."

"Can I take the scar."

"Yes."

"It is her arm, sir. I can take anything you want off it."

"Then take something," Halvard said, "and put it in a dish, because the order says her marks are forfeit and I am not writing a note on the file that says we could not find them."

So he took skin.

That part I felt, not because the local had worn off but because there is a difference between something being cut and something being lifted away, and no injection in the world stops you knowing which one is happening.

It took a while. He was careful. He was more careful than the job required and I understood that this was the only thing he had left to give me, the same two seconds all over again.

When it was done he dressed both arms and taped them, and he put four small pale pieces of me in a steel dish and he set the dish down on the side without covering it.

Halvard came over and looked into it.

He looked for longer than there was anything to see.

"Keep it," he said.

"Sir, the order is destruction."

"The order is forfeit," Halvard said. "Forfeit to the house. Keep it, log it, and send me the number."

Then he turned round and went to the door, and stopped with his hand on it, and said, without any particular weight, "You will want to keep those covered for a few days. They will weep."

And he left.

I sat on that table with my arms out in front of me and thought that of everything that had happened in nine days, the worst of it was that a man who had just cut pieces off me had given me sensible advice about the dressings on his way out of the room.

The courtyard was full.

I had not expected that. It was gone eleven at night and cold enough to see your breath, and there were maybe two hundred people standing on the cobbles between the east door and the gate, in coats over their house clothes, most of them staff. Kitchens, grounds, drivers, the laundry. People I had worked beside for years.

Nobody was doing anything. There was no shouting. They had simply come out to watch me go, the way people come out to watch a car being winched out of a ditch.

The car was at the bottom with the engine running and a man leaning on the roof of it, and I did not have to look twice to know who.

They walked me down through the middle.

I got about thirty feet.

Then somebody at the front went sideways and there was a noise, and Mira came out of that crowd like a bolt out of a wall.

She was still in kitchen whites. That is the thing that took my legs out from under me. Nine days and they had not even given her anything else to wear, and she came at me across those cobbles with her bad knee going and her hands out, and she got hold of my face.

"Look at me," she said. "Look at me, look at me."

"Mira."

"You did it, didn't you." She was crying and furious at the same time and her hands were freezing. "Three times. You said no three times. I told you. I told you, child."

"I know."

"They took me on Saturday."

"I know."

"You have her hands," Mira said, "and you have got her whole stupid, stupid head, God forgive me, and I have known since you were four years old and I never said one word."

"Mira, whose."

Two men had her by then.

They were not rough with her either. I want that recorded, because I have spent years wanting somebody in that courtyard to have been cruel to her, and nobody was. They took her under the arms and lifted her back the way you move an old woman out of a doorway, and she went on talking over the top of them, and I stood there with both arms taped and could not lift them.

"Do not go out past the line," Mira shouted. "Do you hear me? Whatever they tell you out there. Whatever anybody tells you. Do not go past the line."

"Mira."

They got her turned round.

And I stood in the middle of two hundred people in a cold courtyard and watched them walk that woman back towards the east door, away from the gate, away from the road, in towards the house.

The gate was behind me.

There was nowhere in that direction to take her.