by Rhys Ford
Valin’s fingers twitched, and Kenny began to topple forward, the skin around his mouth stretching and moving to cover his lips. The sheath rippled, shifting quickly, and by the time Kenny hit the ground, his mouth was buried beneath a thin layer of skin, his lips forming an obscene bulge beneath the shaped flesh. His nostrils flared and fought to suck in air, and I took a step forward, intending on slicing apart the suffocating skin. But Valin’s hands came up in a sharp warning.
“He can breathe, little brother, and he’s out of the way.” Valin stalked closer, keeping his body angled slightly away from me, minimizing my target. “If he’s really lucky, I’ll still pay him once I’m done breaking you. Or I might just kill him. No sense in paying for something I’ve already gotten my money’s worth from. Now, are you ready to come home with me, Ciméara, or are you going to make this hard on both of us?”
“Probably hard on you, at least,” I conceded, sighting on Valin’s shoulder. “Because I’d rather eat a whole bitter melon pulled out of the devil’s ass after he’s eaten bad Chinese food than hand myself over to you and Tanic. Now, get away from him and call it a day.”
For a brief moment, I thought Valin was considering his options. I should have known better. Instead, the asshole was laughing at me, a chuckle building up inside of his chest, rusty and creaky from lack of use. Shaking his head, my brother finally let a whimper of a chortle escape, breaking the thin set of his lips.
“You don’t want me to hurt this one, because he’s your dead master’s brother, is that it?” Valin spared Kenny a glance, not bothering to mask his disgust. “Does he look like him? Is that why you want him alive? So you can hand your leash over to him?”
“Don’t try that shit with me. We both know the real reason you need to drag me back to Tanic is because you’re afraid he’ll decide it doesn’t matter which brother he has on the slab. What does it matter to him if it’s you or me? We’re all alike in the dark and bloodied.” I returned Valin’s laugh, watching his eyes narrow. “Last chance, Valin. Walk away. Take your daddy issues and find another rock to crawl under so he can’t find you. I don’t want to shoot you, but I’m also not really all that against it. I owe you a hell of a lot of payback.”
“If you were going to shoot me, you would have already. Instead, you—”
I shot him.
Grazed his right upper arm really, but that was on purpose, taking a good chunk of meat off his muscle and drilling it into the rock behind him.
The boom of the Glock seemed to shock Valin the most, but then his face rippled with a blend of anger and pain, a tart sour smoothie of emotion he couldn’t quite swallow. Staggering back, he ended up against a broad jut of rock rising up from the cavern floor, its spire dotted with various peeks of vintage holiday lights on a string poking up out of its surface.
He grunted in Unsidhe, a string of hot molten words I didn’t know, but he sure as hell wasn’t wishing me a happy birthday. Leaving a smear of blood behind on the spire, Valin staggered to the right, using the rock to brace himself.
“Never been shot before?” I bared my teeth, shoving as much contempt as I could into my voice. “Never bring magic to a gunfight, brother. You’ve got to touch me to hurt me now, and if there’s one thing you will never do, it is lay hands on my flesh again.”
“I have other magics, Ciméara.” Valin stumbled again, distancing himself from Kenny’s twitching body. It was getting difficult to keep an eye on them both, so I shifted, drawing closer to Dempsey’s brother while holding my aim steady on Valin. “While you spent your time being skinned and peeled, I had centuries of learning how to craft the ainmhi dubh.”
“Yeah, I’ve seen your black dogs.” Shrugging, I shifted closer still. “They’re crappy pieces of work, brother. Held together by the shittiest of spells and fall apart pretty easily. You wasted your time. Maybe basket weaving is more your style. Or flower arranging. Better yet, maybe you should take those flesh-shaping skills you’re so proud of and become a dentist. Lots of money in braces. Humans like straight teeth.”
I debated drilling a hole into Valin’s other shoulder, mostly to make him stop talking. I didn’t know how this was going to play out, and while the rage in my gut screamed for me to plant a piece of hot lead in between Valin’s eyes, some part of me couldn’t quite squeeze the trigger. Maybe it was because I’d lost so much, or perhaps it was a hard, sour truth that we’d both suffered under Tanic. Both of us were victims in our own way, shaped by Tanic’s cruelties to dance to his tune. I’d been honest when I taunted Valin about returning to our father only to find himself being the one strapped to Tanic’s worktable.
The Lord Master of the Wild Hunt did not tolerate or excuse failure, no matter who it was. There was a reason he was universally feared among the elfin, the stuff of nightmares woven into legends told in whispers with terrified glances at every lurking shadow.
“Oh, my time here in this hellhole hasn’t been without its own rewards. I’ve learned something very important. You’re right. Father’s ways definitely do not suit me.” Valin’s free hand—the one not clutching his wound—sparkled with sickly green threads. A flesh shaper couldn’t heal themselves. Something about the energy being a loop, drawing on its own source nullifying the spell, but that didn’t mean Valin was powerless, and I’d be a fool to think otherwise. “You see, brother, Tanic turns mammals and birds or sometimes warm-blooded reptiles if he can find ones large enough to shape. What you’ve met before, the cats and others I’ve crafted, including the one I sent north with you to scent you out, those were all just toys, experiments to see how far I could push their flesh.”
“Pele wept, you talk a lot.” I got even closer to Kenny, relieved to see his chest moving up and down as he lay facedown on the cavern floor. “Were you always like this? Or did you just get so lonely being yourself that you’ve got to chatter like a demented flamingo?”
Valin took another step back, drawing free from the rock he’d been leaning against. The blood he left behind smeared wide, a muddy brown under the ivy walls’ shimmering blue light. He was bleeding a lot, more than I’d have thought for a grazing wound, and I wondered if I’d misjudged and hit him deeper than I’d thought.
“Oh, that tongue of yours is going to be cut out with a rusty knife, brother.” His smirk flickered, much like the fireflies still weaving about in the main chamber. Then it strengthened, curving up over the echo of my face. “I’ve discovered the cats in this area aren’t to my liking, but oh, the cold-blooded, those have become my favorite creatures to shape. You see, Ciméara, coming here has truly made me stronger, a true Hunt Master in my own right. And I have you to thank for it.”
I smelled its musty scent before I saw it, a powdery medicinal tang slapping me in the face long before I heard the shush-shush-click of its legs skittering over the rock-laden floor. It slithered up, a dark slinky monster before Valin had ever laid hands on it. But infused with Unsidhe magics and my brother’s wicked intent, the creature resonated malice, its carapace bristling with spikes and dotted with dark, oozing lichen.
There was no denying its ancestry, a denizen of the deep caves and a feared predator in its own right, but shaped by Valin’s dark crafting, its long, segmented body clicked and whirred, its mandibles dripping with acid strong enough to leave small craters in the cavern’s rocky floor. I’d faced off a cave centipede before, and in its natural state, the bastards were hard to kill.
It resembled nothing like any ainmhi dubh I’d ever seen, and I’d skinned more than a few in my time. Hell, I’d been skinned by more than a few even before I picked up my blades and guns to take their pelts, and none of the Hunt Masters’ creations I’d encountered were as creepy as this one.
Its chiton was the bog-standard dead blue-gray of any other undead monster dragged up into life by a twisted Unsidhe flesh shaper, but that’s where any similarity ended. Its textured armor portions sucked up any light, tiny spikes clustered like buckshot scattered over its length. The smoother parts of
its chiton were crackled with dark lines, their curves pulsating when the creature moved.
Nearly ten feet long and bristling with legs, the mutated insect’s head wove about, its glowing red eyes dulled under the blue. Its jaws snapped, antenna flexing about, and it seemed to be searching, its airborne talons waving while its rear legs scuttled its massive body forward. It stunk even worse up close, like the bowl of fermented aphids and borscht larvae someone once served me on a run, and my tongue recoiled down my throat, gagging me to avoid getting any of the creature’s rankness in my mouth.
The bug-and-beet bowl was probably one of the worst things I’d ever eaten, and I’d spent a good portion of my life before Dempsey digging through ainmhi dubh shit looking for any scrap of meat or bone they didn’t digest so I could have something in my belly.
This creature looked like that meal tasted.
“What in Dante’s Hells were you thinking, Valin?” I took the Glock off of Valin, aiming for the ainmhi dubh’s head.
The black dog—insect—moved even closer, scenting the air. I couldn’t see Valin. He’d disappeared behind the rocks, but that was probably more to avoid becoming his own monster’s prey than to hide from me. It was blind, driven up to a brighter light than it was used to, or maybe the transformation process stole its sight, but either way, it shifted carefully, hunting me down.
A gunshot rang out just as the creature found me. One of its fore antennae blasted up into shards, steel-hard carapace chunks flying out to pelt my face and shoulders. Throwing myself over Kenny’s slack bulging body, I fired at the ainmhi dubh, and its head careened to the right to find the other shooter. Then I tracked my Glock over to where the bullet came from.
It was enough of a flinch to give the ainmhi dubh the opening it needed to strike at my legs.
Its mandibles snapped down on my left boot, cleaving off a good portion of its heel. I retaliated, kicking it firmly between its sightless eyes. They were milky, and the now-sharpened chunk of leather-covered wood heel struck its mark.
The stench was as acidic as the fluids now gushing from its sliced-open domed eye, splashing over Kenny’s unprotected arms. I backpedaled, shoving his squat, corpulent body back with my shoulders, kicking at the floor to move both of us out of the ainmhi dubh’s next attack. Another shot rang out, clipping its head, and I took the distraction to get Kenny as far behind the rocks as I could. His chest jerked up and down, and a froth began to pour from his nostrils in a foamy spittle clogging his air passages.
“Shit. Shit!” I reached for my knife, leaving the Glock within reach, and tried to slice apart the stretch of skin across his mouth. Yet another shot rang out, and I shouted over the echoing report, “Best be someone on my fucking side of things!”
“Kai?” Cari called out. “I’ll keep the thing pinned down. Let’s get the hell out of here!”
“’Bout time you showed up!” I shoved at Kenny again, getting him under an outcropping, but too much of him remained vulnerable to the creature’s scalding fluids. “What the hell took you so long?”
“Dumbass Malone! That’s who was shooting at us. Or at the asshole we were chasing. Asshole thought he was helping. You need to kick his ass when we get out of here. Boy’s got it bad for you.” She sounded like she was getting closer, but it was hard to tell with the bouncing echoes. “Hold on. Let me see if I can draw that thing off of you.”
The centipede dove down again, its massive head glancing off the rocks, but its wedged forehead was too broad, smashing against the sides of the gap above us. The boulders leaned in on each other, forming a partial arch and blocking off any bites, but its spit still seared down to Kenny’s cheekbone when it splattered over his face. Swearing, I tried to shift the man around, looking for any angle to protect his flesh while working to open up his mouth.
“Get your witchy ass over here!” I yelled over the creature’s furious keening. “He needs help I can’t give.”
The knife edge was sharp enough to pare a single strand of hair, but I didn’t know if opening his mouth with it would help him breathe or start him bleeding to death. Above us, the ainmhi dubh battled the rock, creating a muddy gravel mixed in with its burning saliva. Hunching over Kenny’s body was the best protection I could give him, but my leathers weren’t going to survive much more, and the sting of the damned thing’s dripping eye on my skin hurt more than its spit.
Twisting about, I stopped trying to pry Kenny’s mouth open, leaving the tip of my best knife embedded into the slit I’d made through Valin’s handiwork. The serrated blade’s blood runnel seemed to leave enough of an opening for Kenny to breathe, and the foam pouring from his nostrils seemed to have ebbed down to a trickle. Grabbing at my Glock, I wedged myself into the gap and fired, hitting the ainmhi dubh with as much firepower as I could. A slip of a shadow moved in on my left and I shifted, giving Cari room to get to Kenny. But where the necromanced cave centipede burned me hot, the purring voice in my ear left me cold down to my soul.
“Hello, brother,” Valin whispered as he crouched over me, his hand closing down over mine. “You did say the only way I could hurt you was to touch you.”
Eighteen
I THOUGHT I remembered the pain clearly.
Gods, I was wrong.
The cavern faded, leaving me in the middle of a darkness I couldn’t see out of. I lost Cari’s voice. Even the hiss of the ainmhi dubh’s spittle hitting the hard rocks disappeared. Kenny’s labored breathing became my own, my lungs trapped in an endless cycle of struggling to pull in fresh air, anything untainted by the metallic boil of my blood moving through my veins toward my left hand.
“Do you feel that, brother?” Valin hissed into my ear, intimate and cloying. “Can you feel the iron in your blood coming to my touch? How does it feel? Like you’re on fire?”
He probably could sense everything Dempsey had done to peel our father’s handiwork from my body. All of the rebar taken out from under my skin, the staples pulled out from between my vertebrae, and everything else they’d shoved into my flesh, chaining me to their spells and power. I’d been their vessel, the crucible for their blood magic, and each word hammered into my marrow bound me closer. Dempsey spent the rest of his lifetime pulling out every bit of their evil that he could reach, but he couldn’t get it all.
Not after gods knew how many years of their torture, and certainly not without a fight from me.
The bits and specks left in me were gathering, pulled together into a hot stream of fire through my blood by Valin’s magic. My fingers shook, cramped around the Glock and pinned to the rocky ground while Kenny’s convulsing body twitched under me. I couldn’t get enough air, my lungs pressed flat in my chest, but my heart pounded, a frantic screaming beat echoing in my ears. A splash of heat on my head shocked me only for a brief moment, the ainmhi dubh’s mandibles snapping futilely in the tight gap above me, but the pain was brief, a fleeting ping in the rising ocean of torture splitting my nerves apart.
And my brother—damn his eyes and soul—chuckled a deep rolling laugh between the Unsidhe spell he was crafting to pull the iron particles in my blood toward my hand.
“This will take me longer than if you still had our Clan’s mark under your skin, but I’m willing to wait.” Valin twisted his palm, grinding my fingers together, and something along my hand shifted, splitting open my flesh. “Do you feel that? The poison gathering under my touch? Should I have it go through your heart first, or maybe through the lace of your lungs so you spit blood up every time you exhale?
“Have you forgotten how much power I have over you? Even without Father, I can bend and break you with a few words and my touch. You were created to be nothing more than a repository, a hoard of magic held in flesh and bone until it’s needed. Everything else you think you have is a lie. Your life? That Sidhe Lord? That human family you think you have? None of it is real. Nothing more than a dream from eating ainmhi dubh vomit. Once I get you back to the Clan’s holdings, it’ll be cotton floss whispers through the e
ternity you’ve earned yourself.”
The skin along the sides of my fingers moved, curling outward and splitting apart. Valin pressed down again, shaping my flesh slowly, merging the meat of my hand until my joints grew rigid. This was an old game, one he’d taken a sadistic delight in when I was young and trapped in a cage under our father’s worktable. It was agony, made torturous by the calling of iron to my imprisoned hand. My skin grew hot where the iron gathered into the streams in my blood, long streaks of purpling scarlet forming as the particles thickened and snagged on my arteries’ walls. He would pull together as much iron as he could, poisoning my flesh until it rotted from my bones, then send it back through my body, aimed at an organ or sometimes even my brain, killing my thoughts and sentience until I healed from the cataclysmic destruction he’d created in me.
There was less iron in me now—not enough to do what he wanted and certainly not enough to render me mute and brain-dead, but he could still make me wish he’d killed me.
Pele knew I’d prayed for that fate more than a few times as soon as I’d discovered from watching them kill others that it was an option at all.
My far three fingers were fused, knitted together with pieces of skin and flesh. The Glock was slippery from my seeping blood and sebum. I tried to grip it, to pull out from under Valin’s forceful press, but the moving iron through my body crept a tangle of pain through all of my joints, and I couldn’t get anything to respond properly. My knee jerked when I tried to angle my elbow away, and my hips rolled back against Kenny’s weight, unable to twist my torso away from Valin’s reach.
The pain stole my reason, or maybe that was the iron working its way through the gray pudding in my skull, but the edges of my vision were going black. My hand throbbed, swollen to nearly three times its size. The splits were severe—chasms really—and following the lines of where my fingers used to be. With my index finger and thumb still free, Valin shifted, covering the unaffected digits. His magic followed, bringing with it the iron, pain, and poisoned blood. The pounding in my chest skipped one beat and then another, stuttering and faltering in its fight against the metal filaments pooling in its depths. I was going to lose consciousness soon if I didn’t do something.