But if he had the amulet, why hadn’t he used it to heal himself? The answer came swiftly on the heels of the question: Barrons had told me the Unseelie King had fashioned it for his concubine, who wasn’t Fae, and that humans had to be epic to invoke its power. Mallucé was part Fae now. Which meant either the Fae part of him prevented him from being able to access the power of the amulet, or, despite his machinations to elevate himself to such ranks, John Johnstone, Jr., just wasn’t epic.
Perhaps I was.
I needed to get my hands on that amulet.
A much grimmer thought followed the first: it had been Mallucé who’d so brutally killed all those people. How had Barrons summed it up? Whoever, whatever killed the guards and staff that night did it with either the detached sadism of a pure sociopath, or immense rage.
So, what was I dealing with? Sociopath or hair trigger? Neither boded well for me. I might be able to manipulate a hair trigger. I wasn’t sure anyone could survive a sociopath.
Mallucé stood, turned, withdrew a delicately embroidered handkerchief from the voluminous folds of his robe, and dabbed at his chin. Then he smiled, baring his fangs.
“How does your wrist feel, bitch?”
It had been feeling better actually, until he broke it again.
I’m going to leave a little to your imagination now.
Although it may not seem like it, this isn’t a story about darkness. It’s about light. Kahlil Gibran says Your joy can fill you only as deeply your sorrow has carved you. If you’ve never tasted bitterness, sweet is just another pleasant flavor on your tongue. One day I’m going to hold a lot of joy.
Bottom line is Mallucé didn’t want me dead. Not yet. He knew many inventive ways to cause pain without doing permanent, debilitating injury. He wanted me to anticipate the horrors he had planned for me, more than he wanted to begin those horrors, so I would feel the same helpless terror he’d endured. All those weeks he’d lain in his lair, fighting the poison in his body, he’d planned my death in exacting detail, and now he meant to take a long time enacting it. Only after he’d hurt me as much as he could without disfiguring me would the maiming begin. For every piece he’d lost, he told me, I would lose a piece. He had a doctor on hand to tidy up after his barbaric surgeries, to keep me alive.
I was going to be as insane as him by the time we died.
He had two Unseelie restraining me at first. Eventually he sent them away, entered my cell, and began a more personal assault. He seemed to feel we had a special, intimate bond. He talked incessantly while he hurt me, told me things that didn’t penetrate my pain-muddied mind, but might later, in clearer waters, resurface, and I realized he really had passed a great deal of time having conversations with me in his head. His words had been rehearsed, and were delivered with impeccable timing for maximum horrific impact. The vampire Mallucé, with his Addams Family Goth mansion, his steampunk clothes, and his seductive, fanged portrayal of Death, had always been a showman and I was his final, captive audience. He was determined that his last show would be his greatest. Before he was done with me, he told me, I would cling to him, seek succor from him, beg him for comfort, even as he destroyed me.
There is torture and there is psychological torture. Mallucé was a master of both.
I was holding up. I wasn’t screaming too much. Yet. I was clinging tenaciously to the side of a tiny lifeboat of optimism in my sea of pain. I was telling myself that everything would be all right, that Mallucé might have taken my cuff, but he would never discard a relic that might prove useful to him somehow, especially not an ancient one, worth money. I assured myself that he’d tossed it in a cave nearby and that Barrons would track it, and find me. The pain would stop. I wouldn’t die here. My life wasn’t over.
Then he dropped the bomb on me.
With a leprous smile, his face so close to mine that the putrid odor of rotting flesh nearly choked me, he sank my lifeboat, drove it straight to the bottom of the sea. He told me to forget about Barrons, if that was my hope, if that was what was keeping me from succumbing to mindless panic, because Barrons was never coming for me. Mallucé had seen to it himself when he’d stripped off my “clever little locator cuff” back in the alley where he’d run me to ground, along with my purse and clothing. He’d left it lying there, amid broken bottles and debris.
Hunters had flown us here; we’d left no trail on the ground to follow. Pure mercenaries that they were, Mallucé had outbid the Lord Master for their temporary services. There was no chance that Jericho Barrons or anyone else would ever find or rescue me. I was forgotten, lost to the world. It was him and me, alone, in the belly of the earth, until the bitter end.
Phrases like “belly of the earth” really get to me. The thought of my cuff lying back there in that alley, useless, got to me even worse. I was hours from Dublin, beneath tons of stone.
Mallucé was right; without the cuff, I would never be found, alive or dead. At least Mom and Dad had gotten a body back with Alina. Mine would never show up. What would it do to them, to lose their second daughter without a trace? I couldn’t bear to think about it.
Barrons was out. I couldn’t count on V’lane. If he was hovering in whatever manner he hovered, he would have stopped this by now. He wouldn’t have let Mallucé do these things to me, which meant he was off somewhere, probably on some errand for his queen, and it could be months in human time before he came around again. That left Rowena and her group of tightly controlled sidhe-seers, and she’d made her sentiments plain: I will never risk ten to save one.
Mallucé was right. No one was coming for me.
I was going to die down here, in this miserable, dark hellhole with a rotting monster. I would never see the sun again. Never feel grass or sand beneath my feet. Never listen to another song, never draw another breath of sweet Georgia blossom-drenched air, never taste my mother’s pecan chicken and peach pie again.
He was going to turn me into a quadriplegic, he told me, by slow, infinitesimal degrees. The suffering he planned to inflict on the remnant of my body was too horrific for my brain to allow my ears to hear. I turned them off. I heard no more.
Hope is a critical thing. Without it, we are nothing. Hope shapes the will. The will shapes the world. I might have been suffering a dearth of hope but I had a few things left: will, desperation in spades, and a chance.
A glittering, gold and silver, encrusted with sapphires and onyx chance.
I’d eaten today, I wasn’t too badly beaten yet, and one of my arms still worked. Who knew what shape I’d be in tomorrow? Or the next day? I couldn’t think about a future in this place. I might never be as strong again as I was right now. Would he really begin torturing me with psychotropic drugs, as he’d said? The thought of having control of my mind stripped from me was worse than the thought of more pain. I wouldn’t even possess the wits to try to fight. I couldn’t let that happen.
It was now or never. I needed to know: Was I epic? I might never have another opportunity to find out. He might chain me up the next time. Or worse.
He was still talking, didn’t seem to care that I’d willed myself deaf and was no longer even responding with flinches to what he was saying. This was the performance he’d been living for. His sickly yellow eyes burned with psychotic zeal.
When he reached for me again, I threw myself forward, as if seeking his embrace. It startled him. I plunged my good hand beneath his robes, groped for the amulet, and locked down tight on it when I found it. It was like closing my hand around dry ice. The metal was so cold it burned, felt like it was eating straight through my flesh to the bone. I pushed through the pain. For a moment nothing happened. Then a dark fire, a blue-black light began to pulse from the folds of his robe, from between my fingers.
I had my answer: MacKayla Lane had potential for greatness!
I’d settle for a little superstrength and a map to get me out of here. I yanked, but the chain was forged of thick links. I couldn’t snap it. I remembered how the old man’s head had been
nearly ripped off. Were the links reinforced by magic? I focused my will, tried to jerk it through his rotting neck. The translucent stone inside the amulet blazed, bathing the grotto with dark radiance.
“You bitch!” The vampire looked incredulous.
I’d been right. He hadn’t been able to make it work. I smirked. “Guess you just don’t have the right stuff.”
“Impossible! You are no one, nothing!”
“This nothing is going to kick your ass, vamp.” Bluff, bluff, bluff. And pray there was some truth in it. When the chain snapped abruptly, I stumbled backward into the wall, clutching the amulet.
For a moment, he stared blankly; his gloved hand went to his neck, and I knew he was wondering how I’d gotten it off him when he’d had to nearly behead the last owner to tear it free, then his face contorted with rage. He fell on me, fangs tearing, fists flying, trying to take the amulet back before I was able to use it.
I curled in on myself, clutching it, protecting it, focusing on it fiercely.
Nothing happened.
I flexed that hot place in my brain and tried to impose my will on it. Destroy him, I commanded it. Rip him apart. Kill him. Save me. Make him die. Let me live. Make him stop hitting me make him stop make him stop make him stop!
Still the blows rained down. I wasn’t impacting reality one bit.
The amulet was colder than death in my hand, seeping up my arm. It radiated dark light, offering me its chilling, immense power. It had some kind of shadowy life, this arctic thing in my hand. I could feel it pulsating, the thud of an impatient dark heartbeat. I could feel that it wanted to be used by me. It was hungry for purpose, but there was something I didn’t understand about it, something I had to do to make it mine. I realized then that I’d not broken the chain; it had snapped of its own dark accord, chosen to come to me because it had sensed I could use it.
But that was where it stopped. I had to figure out how to make it work.
What did I need to do?
Mallucé’s teeth were in my neck, tearing. His stiffly gloved fists were eighty-mile-an-hour hardballs in my sides, trying to force me to uncurl so he could take the amulet back. The pain was rapidly becoming more than I could think past.
The Dark Hallow was useless.
If I’d had time to learn how to make it work for me, I’d have had a chance.
As it was, I’d managed to do just enough to really piss Mallucé off: I’d proven myself epic when he wasn’t.
As he continued to pound me, I had a sudden insight into his character: At the core of it, beneath the monstrous villainy, the vampire was a self-indulgent, spoiled bully. Not a sociopath at all, but an out-of-control, petulant child that couldn’t stand anyone else having better toys, more wealth, or greater power or, in my case, being more epic than him. If he couldn’t own it, do it, or be it, he would destroy it.
My mind revisited the bodies he’d left at the Welshman’s estate. The terrible ways they’d been killed.
No one was coming for me. I couldn’t make the amulet work. Rotted though he may be, I was not and would never be a physical match for Mallucé. There was no way out for me. That was just the truth of it.
When all the control you have over your world gets stripped away, leaving you no choice but to die—the only difference how you do it: quickly or slowly—life distills to a bitter pill. The pain I was in made it easier to swallow.
I would not let him make me a quadriplegic.
I would not let him take my mind away from me. Some things are worse than death.
He was in a blind rage, more intense than I’d felt coming off him yet. He was on the brink of total loss of control. I braced myself to fuel it, to push him over the edge.
I remembered what Barrons had told me about John Johnstone, Jr.’s past. The mysterious “accidental” death of his parents, how rapidly he’d disassociated himself with everything they’d stood for and been. I remembered how Barrons had provoked Mallucé with references to his roots, and the vampire’s instant, livid fury, his irrational hatred of his own name. “How long have you been insane, J.J.?” I gasped out, between blows. “Since before you killed your parents?”
“It’s Mallucé, bitch! Lord Master, to you. And my father deserved to die. He called himself a humanitarian. He was squandering my inheritance. I told him to stop. He didn’t.”
Barrons had provoked Mallucé by calling him Junior. That was my name, bestowed upon me by Alina. I wouldn’t pervert it by using it on him. “You’re the one that deserves to die. Some people are just born wrong, Johnny.”
“Never call me that! You will NEVER call me that!” he screamed.
I’d nailed it, a name the vampire hated even worse than Junior. Was it his mother’s special name for him? Had it been his father’s belittlement? “I’m not the one that made you a monster. You came that way, Johnny.” I was nearly out of my mind with pain. I couldn’t feel one of my arms. My face and neck were dripping blood. “Johnny, Johnny, Johnny,” I chanted. “Johnny, little Johnny. You’ll never be anything but a—”
The next blow turned my cheekbone into a blossom of fire. I dropped to my knees. The amulet slipped from my hand.
“Johnny, Johnny,” I said, at least I think I did. Kill me, I prayed. Kill me now.
His next blow smashed me into the rear wall of the grotto. Bones snapped in my legs. I sank mercifully into oblivion.
SEVENTEEN
I don’t know where dreams come from. Sometimes I wonder if they’re genetic memories, or messages from something divine. Warnings perhaps. Maybe we do come with an instruction booklet but we’re too dense to read it, because we’ve dismissed it as the irrational waste product of the “rational” mind. Sometimes I think all the answers we need are buried in our slumbering subconscious, in the dreaming. The booklet’s right there, and every night when we lay our heads down on the pillow it flips open. The wise read it, heed it. The rest of us try as hard as we can upon awakening to forget any disturbing revelations we might have found there.
I used to have a recurring nightmare when I was a child. A dream of four distinct, subtly varied tastes. Two of them weren’t entirely unpalatable. Two of them were so vile I would wake up choking on my own tongue.
I tasted one of the vile ones now.
It saturated my cheeks and tongue, made my lips draw back from my teeth, and I finally understood why I’d never been able to put a name to it. It wasn’t the taste of a food or drink. It was the taste of an emotion: regret. Profound, exquisite sorrow that bubbles from the wellspring of the soul over the mistakes we’ve made, over the actions we should or shouldn’t have taken, long after it’s too late and nothing can be done or undone.
I was alive.
But that wasn’t my regret.
Barrons was bending over me.
That wasn’t my regret, either.
It was the look on his face that told me more frankly than a doctor’s prognosis that I wasn’t going to make it. I was alive, but not for long. My rescuer was here, my knight-errant had arrived to save the day, but I’d blown it.
It was too late for me.
I could have survived—if only I’d not given up hope.
I wept. I think. I couldn’t feel my face much.
What was it he’d said to me, that night we’d robbed Rocky O’Bannion? I’d listened. I’d even thought it had sounded terribly wise. I just hadn’t understood it. A sidhe-seer without hope, without an unshakable determination to survive, is a dead sidhe-seer. A sidhe-seer who believes herself outgunned, outmanned, may as well point that doubt straight at her temple, pull the trigger, and blow her own brains out with it. There are really only two positions one can take toward anything in life: hope or fear. Hope strengthens, fear kills.
I got it now.
“Are you … r-real?” My mouth had been badly lacerated by my teeth. My tongue was thick with blood and regret. I knew what I was trying to say. I wasn’t sure it was intelligible.
He nodded grimly.
�
��It was … Mallucé … not dead,” I told him.
Nostrils flared, eyes narrowed, he hissed, “I know, I smell him in here, everywhere. This place reeks of him. Don’t talk. Bloody hell, what did he do to you? What did you do? Did you piss him off on purpose?”
Barrons knew me too well. “He t-told me you … weren’t … coming.” I was cold, so cold. Other than that, there was oddly little pain. I wondered if that meant my spinal cord was damaged.
He glanced wildly about as if looking for something, and if he’d been any other man, I would have called his emotional state frantic. “And you believed him? No, don’t answer that. I said don’t talk. Just be still. Fuck. Mac. Fuck.”
He’d called me Mac. My face hurt too bad to smile, but I did inside. “B-Barrons?”
“I said don’t talk,” he snarled.
I put all my energy into getting this out. “D-Don’t let me … die … down here.” Die … down here, echoed weakly back at me. “Please. Take me … to the … sunshine.” Bury me in a bikini, I thought. Lay me next to my sister.
“Fuck,” he exploded again. “I need things!” He was standing, looking around the cavern again, with that frantic air. I wondered what things he thought he might find here. Splints wouldn’t help this time. I tried to tell him that but nothing came out. I also tried to tell him I was sorry. That didn’t come out either.
I must have blinked. His face was close to mine. His hand was in my hair. His breath was warm on my cheek. “There’s nothing here that I can use, Mac,” he said hollowly. “If we were somewhere else, if I had certain things, there are … spells I could do. But you won’t live long enough for me to get you there.”
A long silence ensued, or he was speaking and I just wasn’t hearing him. Time had no relevance. I was floating.
His face was over me again, a dark angel. Basque and Pict, he’d told me. Criminals and barbarians, I’d mocked. A beautiful face, for all that savagery. “You can’t die, Mac.” His voice was flat, implacable. “I won’t let you.”
“So … stop … me,” I managed, although I wasn’t sure the irony I meant carried through in my tone. My voice was weak, reedy. At least my sense of humor wasn’t gone. And at least Mallucé hadn’t gotten to turn me into a monster before I died. That was a silver lining. I hoped my dad would take good care of my mom. I hoped someone would take care of Dani. I’d wanted to get to know her better. Beneath all that bristle I’d sensed a kindred soul.
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