The Butterfly Garden (The Collector #1)(3)

Eddison flushes, tugging the zipper up higher over his shirt.

“You don’t seem all that nervous,” Victor notes.

She shrugs and takes a sip of the water, holding the bottle gingerly in her bandaged hands. “Should I be?”

“Most people are when talking to the FBI.”

“It’s not that different from talking with—” She bites her chapped lower lip, winces at the beads of blood that seep through the cracked skin. She takes another sip.

“With?” he prompts gently.

“Him,” she answers. “The Gardener.”

“The man who held you—you talked with his gardener?”

She shakes her head. “He was the Gardener.”




You have to understand, I didn’t give him that name out of fear or reverence, or some misguided sense of propriety. I didn’t give him that name at all. Like anything else in that place, it was made up out of the whole cloth of our ignorance. What wasn’t known was created, what wasn’t created eventually ceased to matter. It’s a form of pragmatism, I suppose. Warm, loving people who desperately need approval from others fall victim to Stockholm syndrome, while the rest of us fall to pragmatism. Having seen both sides in others, I’m for pragmatism.

I heard the name my first day in the Garden.

I came to with a splitting headache, a hundred times worse than any hangover I’d ever experienced. I couldn’t even open my eyes at first. Pain lanced through my skull with every breath, let alone movement. I must have made a sound because suddenly there was a cool, damp cloth over my forehead and eyes and a voice promising that it was only water.

I wasn’t sure which unnerved me more: the fact that this was obviously a frequent concern for her, or the fact that it was a her at all. There’d been no woman in the pair that kidnapped me, of that much I was sure.

An arm slid behind my shoulders, gently pulling me upright, and a hand pressed a glass against my lips. “Just water, I promise,” she said again.

I drank. It didn’t really matter if it was “just water” or not.

“Can you swallow pills?”

“Yes,” I whispered, and even that much sound drove another nail through my skull.

“Open up, then.” When I obeyed, she placed two flat pills on my tongue and brought the water up again. I swallowed obediently, then tried not to vomit when she gently lowered me back to a cool sheet and a firm mattress. She didn’t say anything else for a long time, not until the colored lights stopped dancing across the backs of my eyelids and I started to move of my own volition. Then she pulled away the cloth across my face, shielding my eyes from the overhead light until I could stop blinking.

“So you’ve done this a few times before,” I croaked.

She handed me the glass of water.

Even folded over on herself, on a stool beside the bed, it was easy to see that she was tall. Tall and sinewy with long legs and lean muscles like an Amazon. Or a lioness, really, because she slumped bonelessly like a cat. Tawny gold hair was piled atop her head in some fancy nonsense, revealing a face with strong architecture and deep brown eyes with flecks of gold. She wore a silky, black dress that tied high around her neck.

She accepted my frank appraisal with something like relief. I suppose it was better than shrieking hysterics, which she’d probably gotten before.

“I’m called Lyonette,” she said when I’d looked my fill and given my attention back to the water. “Don’t bother telling me your name because I won’t be able to use it. Best to forget it, if you can.”

“Where are we?”

“The Garden.”

“The Garden?”

She shrugged, and even that was a fluid gesture, something graceful rather than inelegant. “It’s as good a name for it as any. Do you want to see it?”

“I don’t suppose you know a shortcut to a way out of here?”

She just looked at me.

Right. I swung my legs over the edge of the bed, planted my fists on the mattress, and realized I could see every bit of me there was to see. “Clothing?”

“Here.” She handed me a piece of silky, black something that proved to be a slinky, knee-length dress that came high around the neck and low on the back. Really low. If I’d had dimples on my ass, she’d’ve been seeing them. She helped me tie the ropy sash around my hips, then gave me a gentle push toward the doorway.

The room was plain, severely so, with nothing in it but the bed and a small toilet and sink in one corner. In another corner was what seemed to be a tiny open shower. The walls were made of thick glass, with a doorway in place of a door, and there was a track on either side of the glass.

Lyonette saw me looking at the track marks and scowled. “Solid walls come down to keep us in our rooms and out of sight,” she explained.

“Often?”

“Sometimes.”

The doorway opened into a narrow hallway, running along to my right, but only a short way on my left before it hit a corner. Almost directly across from the doorway was another entryway with more of that tracking—it led into a cave, damp and cool. An open arch on the far side of the cave brought breezes running through the dark stone space, bits of light catching in the waterfall that babbled and churned just outside. Lyonette led me out from behind the curtain of water into a garden so beautiful it nearly hurt to look at it. Brilliant flowers of every conceivable color bloomed in a riotous profusion of leaves and trees, clouds of butterflies drifting through them. A man-made cliff rose above us, more greenery and trees alive on its flat top, and the trees on the edges just brushed the sides of the glass roof that loomed impossibly far away. I could see tall black walls through the lower-level greenery, too tall to see what was beyond, and little pockets of open space surrounded by vines. I thought they might be doorways to halls like the one we’d been in.