Mightiest of Swords (The Inkwell Trilogy Book 1) by Aaron Buchanan Page B

to be.”
    I heard the room door open and shut rapidly. Cold air blew in with vigor. The temperature seemed as cold as it was last night and now there was wind in addition to it.
    It had been three days since the injury to my eyes. Joy thought that it would take a week to heal, but I hoped it could be as soon as three days. While she was with me, I was content to wait it out. Now that she wasn’t, I was forced to rely upon and be indebted to a stranger who had already proved willing to manipulate us. I needed to see if my eyes progressed in their healing.
    I unwound the bandages around my head at first carefully, but I grew impatient and ended up pulling them off into a pile at my feet. They were likely soiled with the various salves placed on my eyes and likely even dead skin.
    I felt around the room until I reached the bathroom and held my face under the faucet of the sink. I likewise felt for the towel and finally blinked my eyes, waiting to make out the vague shapes. The room was, thankfully, left dark. I kept waiting for my eyes to adjust beyond the darkness I already knew was there. I looked at the white porcelain of where the sink should be and was convinced I could make out a dark gray shape. I was taken aback completely when I caught my own movement in the mirror.
    I could see. Yet there was little happiness; only resolve. In Shakespeare’s King Lear, the character, Gloucester, was blinded. Only when he lost his sight did his perception of the world at hand sharpen into focus: I have no way, and therefore want no eyes; I stumbled when I saw .
    I never came to that epiphany, but I was almost glad for the blindness and the brief lessons it bestowed upon me.
    Gavin returned and before I could tell him not to, turned on the lights in the room.
    “Turn it off!” The light was agonizing and I shut myself within the darkened bathroom.
    “Sorry-sorry-sorry!” The light from under the crack in the door turned dark. He sounded slightly amused. “Good,” I heard from the other side of the door, “I was going to take your bandages off before we left anyway. They were…dirty.” He chose the word dirty carefully.  That left me to believe “covered with blood” might be more accurate. I hitched involuntarily, realizing that it was not my blood on the bandages.
    I opened the door of the bathroom and steadily led myself out, following the gray patterns and dark outlines I saw before me. I made out Gavin’s dark outline moving toward me. He was an ill-defined mass, but at least it was something.
    “Here, I got you these,” he opened my hand and stuck something into my palm. They were sunglasses. “Now you can go Terminator.”
    That was a pop culture reference of which I was familiar. At least it gave me an idea what the sunglasses looked like.
    I put the glasses on and chanced looking at the light emanating from behind the curtains. They weren’t perfect, but they did the job of cutting out a reasonable amount of light. “Thanks.” I worried that it sounded insincere. Trusting him was going to be some work, even if I owed him my life. “We have to go back,” I found myself saying. I thought of the recurring dream I had during my fits of sleep—of being back at the trivium with my father, Joy and her father. How they mercilessly beat her. In my dream, there was writing on the monument. I didn’t notice it in the dream, but now I remembered it, even if it was not a language I recognized.
    “To the trivium? I’m not so sure that’s a good idea.” Gavin was trying to convince me, but he lacked the cold tonality of conviction needed to sell his doubts to someone like me.
    “You know we do. You have some mojo. Between the two of us working some spells, we’ll be able to get in and investigate. Do some recon. We need to work some magic to find and recover Joy’s body. And we need to get the son of a bitch who killed her. Those are priorities one and two.” I had not realized, but the volume of my voice grew